It should be said, though, that Putin didn't create a resurgence (if you can fairly call it that) of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in Russia – rather, he saw it happening and latched on to it for his own purposes.
It's probably impossible to understate the depths of despair felt by many or most Russian people after the fall of the Soviet Union. Not only was their national pride and sense of identity demolished, but the fall was instigated by economic collapse that made their lives very very hard. A small minority of people became insanely wealthy, but the majority struggled to feed themselves and stay warm in the winter. People, even children, sold their bodies openly on the street, including famously at the Leningrad train station in Moscow. Rule of law became almost nonexistent for a few years as Russian society struggled to regain some kind of equilibrium.
Soviet Communism had worked analogously to religion for several generations in Russia. People went to youth events and adult Party events like westerners go to church. Many Russians clung to the altruistic ideals of Leninism, believing in a future of world global peace and prosperity.
The collapse of the Soviet Union shattered not only the relative comfort of their lives, but their belief in something bigger than themselves. Into that void, and in a time of great need, stepped the Orthodox Church, offering a renewed sense of patriotism, national identity, idealism, and community.
The romantic idea of the faith surviving like a flickering candle through all the decades of official communist suppression inspired people. The reality that the Church was there to give succor to suffering people gave that romantic idea staying power.
A new Russian national identity formed from about the mid to late 90s up to today, an identity centered around patriotism and shared history that includes the history of Russian Orthodox Church. (which Slavic speakers even owe their alphabet to, by the way. The first common, written Slavic language is called Church Slavonic, and was a phenomenon of the Greek Orthodox Church working together with early medieval Slavic clerics.)
Even Russians who don't go to church and wouldn't identify as Christians sometimes express national pride in the Russian Orthodox Church. With trust in government low, and business leaders seen as largely rapacious, the church gives people something positive to identify with.
Clearly, Putin is using this, but he didn't create it. I think the new Russian identity with the Orthodox Church is largely organic and probably an inevitable historical development.
What's crazy, is that U.S. Evangelical Christians are somehow identifying with and approving of the rise of Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia, apparently largely because the Russian Orthodox Church is fiercely anti-LGBTQ.
Whatever happened to the idea that Russia is the Gog and Magog of Evangelical end-time beliefs? Guess that's out the window, huh?
Totally weird. Just goes to show that people believe what they want to believe, when it suits them.
