> So 'Murica is really it, the last bastion of freedom anywhere? You can probably get away with more in rural Siberia, than most other places - by virtue of sheer scale and logistics. But they’re not afraid of coming down hard on dissidents that they find out in the wilds. In the Soviet Union, there are stories that the authorities were willing to shoot Catacombniks on sight, or worse. They’d scour the countryside for unauthorized religious observance, and make gruesome public examples of them. It seems as though *most* of them got away with it, and they’re typically left alone nowadays from what I’ve heard. I mean like little monastic communities of either sex, and/or religious villages built around house churches with clergy the State Church accuses of being “schismatic” - though the only “crime” they committed was refusal to cooperate fully with the Soviets. Extremely interesting stories from these groups abound. I’d be willing to learn Russian *just for this history alone*.