Trains from Moscow to Petersburg with the golden Byzantine eagle proudly on them as they must have had in the days when Tolstoy imagined Anna or Vronsky on such a train.

The priceless icons at the monastery of Holy Sergius glowing in candlelight.

The giant mall in the heart of Moscow which was so hopeful in its trendiness that it made shopping in Newport look stuffy and staid by comparison.

Poverty obvious out of any bus window the minute one leaves the cities.

Empty thrones, newly gilded, seemingly waiting for a Tsar in a rebuilt cathedral.

Ads for Indiana Jones and Prince Caspian dominate the advertising space.

Russia in the early 21st Century is a series of contradictions wrapped in ideological confusion.

The obvious evils were in plain view: conspicuous and soulless consumerism and Statism. The Church hierarchy, trained and infiltrated by decades of Communist masters, is sometimes too subservient to the desires of the Putin regime. Too many young adults, with no real memory of Communism have embraced a Stalinist chic. Racism and anti-Semitism are shockingly apparent.

All this in a nation with a cultural heritage so rich even the Communists could not destroy it. Russia is beautiful, her arts stunning, and her promise amazing. The images of that heritage, mixed with the legacy of the horror of godless Communism, were easy to see in Russia.

Where is that proud nation going?

I don’t know, but was left with nagging doubts and worries about the future of a land I love.

If atheism and Communism were the gods who failed, the new gods are becoming the softer secularism of greed. Dialectical materialism may be replaced by the conspicuous consumption of materialism.

The new ideology of consumerism, while less deadly to the body, is no less deadly to the soul. Consumerist ideas are failing to satisfy people in Russia, as they are in the rest of the world, because they leave the soul barren. When bad ideas fail, as they must, the failure tempts people to embrace some apocalyptic visions and revolutionary desires for change.

The danger for Russia is that when the god of consumerism fails, in some future economic downturn, they will be radicalized by such a failure. If the Church has not spoken out against it strongly enough, then perversely they will be associated with it.

Did bleeding Russia suffer the satanic Stalin, clownish Khrushchev, banal evil of Brezhnev, and the grossly inept Gorbachev to become a chief source of prostitutes for global libertines and be governed by a brown-shirt group of mobsters? If democracy and free markets become confused with a loss of ethical standards and greed, then it is no wonder that people will reject them.

Russia still is looking for roots, but it will be hard pressed to find them. A nation cannot be wholesome with still hidden roots in Stalinism, but it cannot just return to 1917 as if nothing happened. Too many current Russian leaders are the products of an evil regime that has not yet been purged from their minds and hearts.

A thoughtless return to the distant past is no answer. The lost eighty years make it hard to connect organically with a pre-Soviet past. While Russia must reconnect with her pre-Revolutionary past, it can only do so sensibly if it acknowledges changes in the world since that time and the shortcomings of the old regime that helped bring on the greater horrors of the Revolution.

It is possible that a restoration of a constitutional monarchy, as happened in Spain at the end of the Franco regime, would help the process, but not if it came in a form that learned nothing from the last eighty years.

Russia needs a Juan Carlos of Spain and not a Charles X of France.

Politics is not, however, central to the problems of any nation. Good people can exist in any regime, however imperfect, that will leave them alone and protect them from evil people. No society, even with a constitution as great as the American constitution of 1789, can exist without good men. Good men need roots.

This search for roots explained much of what I saw in Russia.

Rootless people who get money often demonstrate conspicuous consumption. They often become reactionary or overly romantic about the past. Russia is a nation whose soul has been hollowed out by decades of official communism, Statism, and secularism, but that has yet to come to grips with that fact. She has no clear path forward since most of the people running the nation are products of the old Soviet regime.

Russia desperately needs the same sort of “de-Stalinization” for the Russian culture that became policy in Germany with the Nazi past. This historical accounting must not end with Stalin. Stalin’s gruesome evil, numerically staggering, makes those that followed him look “not so bad.”

John Keep’s A History of the Soviet Union is a good, readable guide to what happened during the period after World War II. It was bad enough.

Everybody sensible now condemns Stalin, but in the West there is a strange hesitation in some circles to condemn the butcher Lenin who fathered Stalin or the monstrous immorality of Stalin’s political children.

This hesitation is matched in too much of Russia. When tourist kiosks openly sell pro-Lenin t-shirts to Americans and Russians, something is wrong. One cannot imagine openly buying a pro-Hitler shirt in Berlin, thank God, but it is easy to do in Putin’s Russia with Lenin.

One contributing factor to all of this is in the inability of much of the Western elite to clearly condemn extremist forms of secularism. If we wish Russia to repent and break from past evils, then we must be clear that they were evil. This is one way the West can help modern Russia.

Militant secularism must be condemned as forcefully as we condemn religiously motivated terrorism and violence. This is not just a matter of history. Some of the worst regimes on the planet today rule in the name of secularism and atheism.

Of course not all atheists are Stalinists anymore than all Christians are inquisitors or Moslems terrorists. American secularists have a long and proud history as a sometimes unjustly persecuted minority for embracing free speech and the rule of law.

The strange quiet about the horrors committed in the name of extreme secularism from our secular elite is disturbing. It still dominates and oppresses large parts of the world, including most of historic China.

Liberal blog sites hunt out the faintest whiffs of theocracy in Western nations, but say nothing of the daily horrors in North Korea and China . . . unless they impact trendy Tibet. Red China imprisons Christians for preaching daily and sends them to horrific prisons, but too many American secularists are more concerned that a loud speaker prayer in some Alabama school will cause a local atheist discomfort.

While we worry endlessly of the improbable rise of an American theocracy, we must not allow extreme secularism to grow up in our midst. In that sense, Russia had much to teach us.

Lately, the tone from Western secularists has grown more strident. Disagreement is not intolerance, but some Western secularists have become intolerant in their disagreement. All their opponents are fools or knaves. There is a dangerous triumphalism and an inability to recognize good arguments from their foes in Hitchens (if he is serious), Dawkins, and the denizens of some of Internet secularism.

They seem to forget that the death of God in a society does not always lead to a flourishing culture.

Millions died when God died in Russia. Official commitment to “science,” “reason,” “culture,” and “liberty” served as no protection against bad men. Lack of religion turned out not to produce a paradise, unless Albania, the world’s first officially atheistic regime, was heaven on earth.

Too much of the “free world”, as the greatest living Russian Solzhenitsyn rightly warns, embraced the softer secularism that knows no god other than personal comfort and no heaven other than mall. It has grave dangers as it too begins to hollow out the aspirations and desires of the people.

There are, of course, better versions of secularism, but those that embrace those more liberal creeds should begin by roundly and routinely condemning horrors done in their name. Otherwise our just condemnation of religious harassment of minority religious groups in Putin’s Russia will be lost in the hypocrisy of our relative silence about the brutal persecution of religious in China.

The West has much to give Russia and Russia has much to give the West.

My last day in Russia, I stood before an old copy of the great icon of Our Lady of Kazan. It is a stunning image of the humility of Mary at the great gift of God to man. In emulation of this humility, there is hope for us all.

The very ability of the long line of Russians to pray before that icon was a sign of hope that together the Russian and Western peoples can restore much that has been lost and place it in a new context.

Our Lady of Kazan was one of the most treasured icons of pre-Revolutionary Russia. The original icon had been stolen right before the horrors of the Revolution and most of the older copies had been destroyed or sold off by the Communists. This particular old and venerable copy had been kept by John Paul the Great in his personal study for years. Eventually, he saw that it was returned to Russian hands and now it resides in a gloriously new context.

Now I stood before a great treasure, made by Russians, sold by Russians, returned by the Western church. It is a sign of hope.

Much that has been lost can be recovered if all of us, secularists and Christians, are honest about the abuses done in our name. The way forward will begin with repentance and restitution.

John Paul the Great saw this clearly. For Christians especially it should not be so hard to pray with the greatest Russian saints, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.”