Religious Sites
We often think of Russia - pre-Soviet Russia, that is - as a relatively religious place. And so it was. Russian Orthodoxy was the majority religion and a major force shaping both spiritual and secular life. The map above shows the location of monasteries, villages with Orthodox churches, and Protestant church parishes. Russian space here looks dense with places of worship, rich in spiritual life.
The map, however accurate a visualization of the information contained in the atlas, is nevertheless a potentially misleading visualization of religious space, let alone religious life.
Why?
It uses the administrative status of two particular kinds of village as an indicator of the presence of churches (Orthodox and Protestant). This is not a wildly irresponsible interpretive leap, but it certainly was not the intention of Piadyshev and company to map churches. Their intention was to map the various kinds of rural settlement, including those that, by definition anyway, included churches in their own diminuitive spatial profiles.
The map of religious sites formally attested on the atlas looks like this:
It is a dramatically different landscape, for all sorts of interesting reasons.