Russia's Orthodox Church spent most of the Soviet era under open suppression: priests harassed by the state, churches shuttered or converted into halls for secular communal use, and believers treated as holdouts for a superstition the party wanted gone. The film traces how that history gave way, within less than three decades, to something almost unrecognizable, a Russian premier exchanging public expressions of solidarity and goodwill with the head of the Orthodox Church. It lays out the mechanics of that reversal: an institution built for decades around resistance and survival suddenly finding itself welcomed into public life by the same state apparatus that once tried to dismantle it. The film treats this as a genuine puzzle rather than a simple redemption story, asking what each side gains from the alliance and what it costs an institution that once defined itself by opposition to state power. It stays close to that central tension rather than offering a full history of Russian Orthodoxy, using the Soviet-to-post-Soviet contrast as its main evidence.