Big negative on that one. I lived there for quite a while, in multiple cities, have studied the region and history all my life since my family is from Finland.
Russia is basically a medieval knightdom that had intermittent and limited exposure to the stages of the industrial revolution because it’s land-locked and frozen almost year-round. It’s a very gloomy, depressed place after being ruled by regional warlords, invaded by everyone from Genghis Kahn to Hitler, and subverted by secular statists with the Czars, demonic apostates under a communism dictatorship, with a hybrid black market/centrally-planned economy trying to hold it all together. Now it’s under rule by former KGB oligarchs who confiscated all the most lucrative industries that survived the collapse, namely the oil, natural gas, and mining enterprises.
They used to have large families pre-Soviet times in the peasant farming villages, but with industrialization under Soviet Socialism, millions were aggregated in the cities under the Czarist attempts at industrialization, then the apartment complexes in the Krushchev era, and those apartments are still standing to this day, utter eyesores if you’ve ever seen one. They were only supposed to last 5 years until better solutions could be hatched by "glorious people’s revolution” in the wake of purging the system of talented designers, construction professionals, brokers, and other “bourgeois” class who ended up dead or in gulags.
When they did have traditional farming families and the dominance of the Russian Orthodox Church since 1721, it was still a depressed society with no real vigor or piety in them, just the reservation to living a simple life condemned to the long winters and hope that a strong leader would navigate them through the border troubles with rival empires.
Under Peter the Great, the Russian Orthodox Church was made subordinate to the Czarist state as a functionary for managing the populace, much as was done with Roman Catholicism in Central Europe hundreds of years prior to that.
When the Godless apostate communists were financed by Germans and international banks to get Russian empire troops out of Central Europe during The Great War, the Czars even contributed to their own demise by penetrating the Bolsheviks in attempts to co-opt them to get control of the various revolutionary movements that had sprung up in the late 1890s. If you study the history of Okhrana (Czarist-era secret police), they were agent provocateurs inside the Bolsheviks well before 1917.
The Bolsheviks targeted the Russian Orthodox Church and initiated a campaign of mass executions, extrajudicial killings of priests and clergy. Lenin spoke out against Okhrana’s tactics, then embodied their exact same methods when they became the Communist Cheka, MVD, and NKVD secret police during and after the Russian Civil War. Survivors of the purges and murders of Russian Orthodox Church were subverted as collaborators with the Bolshevik revolution to act as spies and hubs to keep track of the citizenry, after the Bolsheviks accused the ROC of supporting the White Nationalist Russians who wanted to retain the Czars.
The upper class had some more traditional values in the autocracy, while the peasant slavs were subsistence farmers transitioning into labor factories. One of the main calls to action and agitation by the revolutionaries was labor conditions, but there was a lot of propaganda with this messaging at the time that drove public perceptions not only in Russia, but in Europe and the US as well.
If you’re trying to find a puritan-style farming family life in Russia, it’s just not a reality I’ve been able to find historically, and is uniquely a US thing. One exception would be in Ukraine under
Prussian-born Czar Katherine II, when Mennonite farmers moved into Western Ukraine to harvest the land and live there, after being subjected to religious persecution in Prussia and Poland in the mid 1700s. Katherine II invited them in with incentive decree from 1763-1764. These are from the Anabaptist movement who were persecuted by the major church-states at the time, who were utterly corrupt.
During the Soviet Times, the ROC became an arm of the state, similar to how it had under Peter and the Czars, but now under communist rule. Once Yeltsin announced Putin was surprise, the new President on Dec 31, 1999, Putin worked to create an image of being aligned with the ROC, but it was business as-usual.
When I lived with Cossacks for a week, who are their devout warrior class with their own monastery-like communities, they were watching Russian gangster movies in the communal eating room with all of its old metallic icons on the walls, reminiscent of medieval times pre-Renaissance from an art perspective. We went to mass at a local ROC church building in the town early one frozen morning and did the sign of the cross for 2 hours like a PT session, with a few older babushkas and people that still went to church, filed through past the priest at the end to kiss a giant golden cross, before heading back to the monastery. It was an interesting experience and I didn’t fully appreciate who I was even living with, not being as familiar with the Cossack traditions as I should have been.
The head Cossack running the place was some type of intel guy and a local police officer as well for his day job. They relied on food donations from the local community, so chow was pretty sparse but enough to sustain you. I actually would have like to stay with them longer just to get more familiar with them.
But I didn’t see any evidence of devout Christians as we would recognize them in the US. Catholics would be more able to relate with them and see a common apathy at best, with minimal mass attendance/lack of interest. I’m not judging anyone, just pointing out exactly what I experienced to the best of my ability.
If you see propaganda talking about Putin as some type of Christian crusader against globalists, it doesn’t pass the sniff test.