The Russian Origins of the So-Called Post-Secular Moment: Some Preliminary Observations Christopher Stroop - Senior Lecturer at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow, Russia), cstroop@gmail.com This article is revised from a lecture given by the author at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria on April 29, 2013 as part of the series Colloquia on Secularism. It argues that there are a number of paths through which we might investigate Russian connections to the emergence of post-secularity, the collapse of the USSR and the post-Soviet revival of Russian Orthodoxy representing only the most obvious. A thus far less developed but important approach involves unraveling an intellectual-historical trajectory focusing on the influence of anti-Bolshevik Russian religious thought in the West. The article shows that after the founding of the Soviet Union, the anti-Bolshevik Russian emigration emerged as a significant vehicle for the transmission of Russian ideas in the West, contributing to the development of an anti-secular discourse with roots in the nineteenth Lecture delivered on April 29, 2013 at the Institute of Human Sciences (Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) in Vienna (Austria) as part of the lecture series "Conversations on Secularism" (Colloquia on Secularism) with the support of the Austrian Science Foundation. page 9century that was able to achieve some prominence thanks to the Cold War. This discourse associated religiosity with freedom and atheism with unfreedom. The author argues that this discourse, in the development of which Russian intellectuals played an important role, emerged in reaction against the perceived cultural threat of nihilism, and suggests that it is a similar concern over the possible consequences nihilism that has led to the emergence of the post-secular moment. The post-secular, then, might be defined as an intense confrontation with the problem of nihilism. Keywords ... Read more