Over the last decade, the Russian Federation has turned sharply away from the secular foundations of its 1993 constitution and moved toward the model of a confessional state — a model that strikingly resembles the state-sponsored hierarchy of religions in the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. Increasingly, the Russian state actively cooperates with certain favored religious organizations, labeled “traditional,” to achieve its social and political goals. One of the clearest manifestations of this developing relationship between the state and “traditional” religious institutions is the Fundamentals of Religious Cultures and Secular Ethics, a new national program of spiritual and moral education for the public schools. Since September 2012, all pupils in fourth and fifth grades must take a total of 34 hours of the Fundamentals, designed to promote religious tolerance, patriotism and morality. In their current form, the Fundamentals represent a compromise between advocates of confessionalization, who argue for the benefits of greater religious influence on the state, and strict secularists.
