We westerners have trouble with Russians. Watching the wealthy elite acquiring voraciously over here we assume that theirs is a country clamouring to ape what passes for our capitalist prosperity.
But this leaves out millions of other Russians trying to cope with the collapse of a Communist belief system that had been in place for three quarters of a century.
Two Russophiles who have travelled the length and breadth of Russia told the Edinburgh International Book Festival this week how many Russians have turned to spirituality as a replacement for failed ideology.
Susan Richards' book Lost and Found in Russia, just published by I.B. Tauris, chronicles 17 years of visits to follow the lives of six individuals she befriended. Their experiences and ordeals reveal a people largely forgotten today. Many Russians, she said, turned to faith for comfort and explanation as society and many of its values were dismantled around them.
Colin Thubron's In Siberia (Penguin 1999), a sequel to Among the Russians (Heinemann 1983), took him to the far north and east of Russia to communities of Old Believers, and other deeply conservative breakaway sects from the Orthodox church. Among bizarre new recruits to these faiths have been former members of the KGB, the Soviet secret police.
Anna, a journalist and one of Richard's Russian contacts, took to Christianity after years of disillusion and danger trying to uncover dark periods of the Soviet Union's Stalinist past.
Thubron said that the deep sense of mystery that characterises religion in Russia provided a surety for many at a time for deep political and social uncertainty.
Although confounded by the present and the future Russians, he said, refused to confront their past. The vast Gulag camps for political prisoners and exiles were left to rot and their camp guards retired with medals on comfortable pensions.
To delve into the injustices and horrors of the Stalinist era was not welcomed by Russians who preferred to forget, he said. By contrast in the west the Holocaust has become part of the past that must be expressed.
Susan Richards and Colin Thubron were the featured speakers in the Anna Politkovskaya Event at the Book Festival, named after the journalist and staunch opponent of Russia's war in Chechyna who was assassinated in 2007.
Time: 19 August 2009