The article analyzes the changes in the number of Protestant churchgoers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in the post-Soviet period. The main attention is paid to the three most numerous Protestant denominations of evangelicalism: Pentecostalism, Baptism and Adventism. According to the data of religious centers, the peak of the number of registered Baptists and Adventists in Russia reached in the mid-2000s, in Ukraine and Belarus in 2010, after which the number of church members began to decrease. According to the average results of sociological surveys in 2010-early 2020s, the share of Protestants was 0.6% of the population of Russia, 1.7% – Ukraine, 1.2% – Belarus, most of them are practicing believers. It is concluded that in 1991–2020 the share of Protestants in the population grew 6 times in Russia, 3.5 times in Ukraine and Belarus, in the last decade the growth stopped. In Russia, Protestantism became more widespread in the national republics with the spread of traditional beliefs and in the Far East, where the position of the Russian Orthodox Church was weaker in the early 1990s. The success of Protestantism in the Rivne and Ternopil regions of Ukraine and the Brest region of Belarus is associated with more favorable conditions for the mission during the regions' stay as part of the Polish Republic in 1921–1939. It is concluded that further increase in the proportion of Protestants is unlikely due to secularization. In these conditions, the share of fundamentalist churches will increase due to high birth rates.
Key words: Protestantism, Adventism, Baptism, Pentecostalism, Christianity, secularization, history of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine in the end of the 20th – early 21st centuries
DOI: 10.22250/20728662-2025-4-128-137
About the author
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Nikolai A. Miazin – PhD (History), Assistant Professor of the History Department Kaluga State University; 26 Stepana Razina St., Kaluga, 248023, Russia; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; |