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Article: God and man in Russia. (Orthodox Church)
- Article from:
- U.S. News & World Report
- Article date:
- March 2, 1992
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1992 All rights reserved. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Set on the banks of the Volga River, the Tolgskoy Convent looks much as it did six centuries ago, when it was built to mark a miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary. But the electrified barbed wire on top of the cloister wall tells of other times During most of communism's reign in Russia, Tolgskoy was a prison.
Reclaiming this holy place has not been easy. Tolgskoy was the first monastery returned to the Russian Orthodox Church four years ago, when Mikhail Gorbachev called off communism's war against religion and the church. The Bolsheviks had not treated it kindly. At first, the church deliberately accepted young, able-bodied women to meet the challenge: "To ...