This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Rediscovery of Politics, given by Geoffrey Hosking, was originally broadcast in 1988.

As I was leaving Tbilisi, capital of Soviet Georgia at the end of April, I witnessed from the taxi an extraordinary event.

On the Mejati church, high up on the crags which

overlooked the River Coorah, two men were clambering over the roof, using an arrangement of ropes and

pulleys to haul a golden cross onto the pinnacle. Inside, a service of dedication was being held.

A church which had not seen divine worship for nearly 70 years was being returned

to the faithful. The day before in Moscow, Gorbachev had received Patriarch Piemann and five

senior bishops. Believers, he told them, are Soviet working people and patriots, and they have

every right to express their convictions in a fitting manner.

This uncharacteristic statement was just the prelude to a series of festive occasions by which the leaders of state and church celebrated a millennium of Christianity.

One of the high points was the restoration to the church of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves,

on the site where the first baptism of the Russian peoples was reputed to the church of the Kiev Monastery of the Caves, on the site where the first baptism of the Russian peoples

was reputed to have taken place a thousand years before.

It's not just the happy chance of the calendar

which has brought church and state together.

Many of the social problems Gorbachev is tackling today,

corruption, alcoholism, slovenly work discipline, unstable family life, are moral rather than political in character.

They have not responded to repeated campaigns of ideological exhortation mounted by the party's zealots.

On the other hand, many of the country's best writers have been saying

for years, even in the teeth of the censorship, that religious faith was a potential antidote

to demoralisation. The party seems to have decided in the end, doubtless reluctantly, that it

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