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Good morning. This weekend saw some of the biggest anti-corruption protests in Russia for years. The government responded with arrests. It feels as if we are very far from the heady days of Perestroika and the end of the Cold War. By coincidence this year is the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The Royal Academy of Arts in London is staging an exhibition of revolutionary art to mark the occasion. One of the most striking paintings, created by Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin in 1925, is of a man riding a red horse that is flying into the communist future. The rider looks not forwards but backwards, with uncertainty on the world left behind. Religion was one of those things that the new communist man was supposed to abandon. In 1931, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was dynamited. The demolition was filmed and you can watch the movie at the exhibition. It’s hard to believe that iconoclasm could be celebrated. But the communists believed that the church was a tool of oppression. Religion, in the words of Karl Marx, was the “opium of the people”. End the pain of poverty, and the people would kick the habit of believing in gods. But as the exhibition shows, that’s not what happened. Some artists retained an obvious longing for the past, like the rider on the red horse. Others turned from one religion to another. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, who, before the revolution had studied Russian icons and fresco painting, helped create a new communist iconography. Perhaps his greatest painting depicts a mother and child in Petrograd in 1918. This was a year of hunger and disillusionment. Yet the woman, who is calmly breastfeeding her child, looks stoical, free of doubt. She is unmistakably an imitation of the Virgin Mary. Just as Lenin became painted as if he was an old testament prophet and Stalin as God. Ultimately, the communists failed to destroy religion. As a Christian, I’m inclined to put the resilience of faith down to it containing certain divine truths. But the practical appeal of religion was probably that it offered a source of moral authority that was separate from the state – something that stubbornly refused to conform to the brave new world. Of course, religion can easily become a tool of the powerful. In modern Russia, the Orthodox Church is sometimes accused of being hand-in-glove with the Kremlin just as it was under the tsars. History shows that faith is at its best when it stands with those on the margins of society. That’s where we see it at its most courageous and humane. As Marx himself said: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”