I asked to see a functioning church and was taken both to the extravagantly decorative, red, green and white church of St Nicholas in Moscow and to the Novodevichy Monastery on the outskirts. Despite the wailing chants and the mumbling icon-kissing of the elderly devotees, neither place could convey the essence of holiness with the power of the two decommissioned, empty little churches which stood abandoned outside our window, dwarfed by the bulk of the hotel. One was brick-built, topped by a gold cross; the other was little more than a golden dome. It seemed that in banning organized religion, the Communist regime had actually encouraged the growth of an inner spirituality, which was ever present for those who were receptive to it and alien to those who were not.
— Travelling to Infinity (Jane Hawking), Loc. 2699–704