Since the end of the Soviet Union, Christian Orthodoxy has regained importance in Russian society. Considering the religious dynamics in the decades after 1990, scholars working in the field have been debating about a reliable measuring tool for religiosity. The present study provides a validation of two short forms of the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS), the CRS-5, and CRSi-7 in Russia, as well as its corresponding translated items. Therefore, data from two large-scale sociological surveys from 2008 (N = 894) and 2019 (N = 1768) were used. A multigroup confirmatory factor analysis with restrictions on the variance and covariance structure of the model shows good results in terms of absolute, parsimony, and relative model fit for the CRS-5 and CRSi-7. Moreover, the models indicate time-invariance, which is a consistent psychometric characteristic of both short forms. The time-invariance is accompanied by the good internal consistency of the scales: The CRS-5 with $\alpha =0.85$ and the CRSi-7 with $\alpha =0.84$. The results of the analysis encourage the use of the CRS-5 and the CRSi-7 for research on religiosity in Russia. While the CRS-5 is especially suitable for the Orthodox-dominated religious landscape, the CRSi-7 should be used if non-monotheistic private religious practice and religious experience are the focus of the scientific investigation.

Cross-country comparative studies of religion (e.g. the Religion Monitor) do not cover some important issues regarding the religious situation in Russia. The problem of contemporary Russian religiosity is beyond individual religiosity or religiosity as a spiritual phenomenon. In Russia—one of the countries which experienced Communism as a period of enforced secularization, there are very few people who have had any religious socialization or who have the experience of belonging to the Christian Church or to any religion. The main point of this article is that what is happening with religion in post-Soviet Russia cannot be adequately explained by the concept of ‘public religion’ and the dichotomy of public vs. private religion, due to the practices of private religion manifesting at a very low level among the Russian population, despite the fact that a large number of Russians consider themselves to be Orthodox Christians. However, the representation of the Church in the public sphere has little to do with what concerns Russians who are in some way involved in parishes. As an alternative tool we propose to describe the religiosity of Russians through the methods of network analysis. Results of a content analysis of contemporary Russian and Soviet media, survey data of the Russian population, and data obtained in a network analysis of parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church are used for substantiating this conclusion.

Авторы настоящей статьи развивают веберовский подход, в котором этика играет центральную роль в анализе избирательного сродства между религией и экономикой. Работа М. Вебера «Протестантская этика и дух капитализма» является одним из классических социологических исследований. В ней Вебер сформулировал вопрос о соотношении религии и экономики в том смысле, что определенные типы протестантских деноминаций способствовали развитию рационального капитализма. Одним из главных факторов, на который обратил внимание Вебер, была сформулированная в этике протестантов концепция призвания. Авторы данной статьи показывают, что вторым значением этической переменной, используемой Вебером в его социологии религии, является «смирение». Такой подход делает веберовскую теорию хозяйственной этики актуальной для изучения всех основных христианских конфессий — не только католицизма и протестантизма, но и, например, православия. Целью настоящей статьи является разработка методики эмпирического исследования, основанной на данной теории. В статье разрабатывается шкала измерения этики призвания и смирения, которая может быть использована в количественных опросах. Шкала была предварительно протестирована в октябре — ноябре 2017 года в четырех странах (233 респондента в России, Швейцарии, Грузии и Румынии). После корректировки по результатам предварительного тестирования шкала была применена в опросе прихожан четырех христианских конфессий в России (1262 респондента) в 2017–2018 гг.: православных, католиков, «традиционных» протестантов (лютеран, баптистов и др.) и «новых» протестантов (пятидесятников).

This article presents a discussion of the economic ethics of contemporary Russian Orthodoxy, manifested in the practices of economic actors, and Orthodox economic ideology, drawing on the approach formulated by Max Weber in The Pro-testant Ethic. Orthodox ideology and economic ethics are analyzed using popular Orthodox literature (1990–2004), doctrinal texts on social and economic issues, as well as materials gathered in ethnographic expeditions between 1999–2004 to eight monasteries in various regions of the Russian Federation. Key aspects of the economic ideology include love for one’s neighbor and work as a means for self-sufficiency; the result of work is considered to be the gift of God. Key ca-tegories of economic ethics are obedience and humility. This article concludes in the framework of Weber’s approach, that such ethics of obedience and humility determine the attitude towards economic activities, which the Russian Orthodox Church generates among its followers.

The article, within the framework of the logic proposed by M. Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, attempts to identify the core ethical category of the Russian Orthodox Church that could function in the same way as Beruf (profession/vocation) does for the analysis of Protestantism and its potential impact on the formation of the economy. The attempt to apprehend this category relies on Weber’s works that analyze the economic ethics of world religions. In particular, an effort is made to interpret the Weberian categorization of Russian Orthodoxy as a “specific mysticism”. The texts of F. Nietzsche and M. Scheler are used to decipher Weber’s thesis. The analysis of the texts of Weber, Nietzsche, and Scheler leads to the assumption that “humility” could be the category in question. In his works on the sociology of religion, Weber used “humility” to describe “mysticism” in the same vein as is “vocation” for “asceticism”. At the same time, Weber reinterprets Nietzsche’s doctrine of ressentiment to construct the typology of economic ethics of world religions. For Nietzsche, humility is often synonymous to ressentiment. In the Weberian interpretation, the thesis on ressentiment becomes a “theodicy of suffering”. In the typology of suffering, humility was associated with contemplation, or the withdrawal from the world, that is, with everything specific for mysticism as it was understood by Weber. M. Scheler also took notice of this and criticized the thesis on ressentiment, contrasting it with humility as the basic Christian virtue. An analysis of the texts of F. Nietzsche, M. Weber and M. Scheler on the ressentiment and ethics of Christianity made it possible to propose a typology of ethics that seems to be suitable for constructing hypotheses about the (potential) influence of Orthodoxy on Russian economic life.