Number of active churches in the Russian Empire/USSR/post-Soviet space from 1900 to 2000 via the blogger genby.

One element of Stalinist propaganda is that he presided over the rebirth of the Russian church. However, one graph is worth thousands of words, and we can immediately see that there was no such thing – there were far fewer active churches even after the Soviet regime’s war-mandated “reconciliation” with religion than there were during the NEP.

There were 29,500 active churches by 2010, and genby estimates there might be 35,000 today.