At present, when the Moscow Patriarchate is slavishly obedient in all things to the Kremlin, it is difficult to remember that at the end of Soviet times and the beginning of the post-Soviet period, many in the Russian Orthodox Church hoped and believed that their denomination could be an independent actor.

But those hopes and beliefs were dashed, Kseniya Luchenko argues by what happened in October 1993 when Yeltsin used force to crush his opponents in the Supreme Soviet despite efforts by the Moscow Patriarchate to mediate between them (

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