MOSCOW - The tour guide looked at her watch. It was late Friday afternoon and she knew she had to keep the tour moving along before the Kremlin closed for the day.

The guide, Larissa, imparted lots of information to the Friendship Force group from the U.S. and Canada. As she described the frescoes and icons in one of the historic Kremlin cathedrals, her voice started quavering. She then took time to share a personal story.

Larissa described how her grandmother, a member of the Russian Orthodox Church, never wavered from her faith, even during the most rigidly anti-religious years of the Communist era.

In Stalinist times, Larissa said, her grandmother had to practice her faith in secret, and kept a small icon.

"Her icon was hidden," she said. "She used to pray before the icon."

Now 45, Larissa said she was secretly baptized by her grandmother at age 1.

During Stalin's rule, the Kremlin cathedrals were used for storage, Larissa said. Other places weren't so fortunate. More than 600 churches in the Moscow area were destroyed.

When Mikhail Gorbachev ushered in the era of perestroika in the 1980s, things changed, Larissa said.

People didn't have to go into hiding to study the Bible. Cathedrals that had closed reopened.

The cathedrals at the Kremlin, one dating back to the 1400s, have been opened for special religious services since the late 1980s, Larissa said.

Not far from the Kremlin, the huge Christ the Saviour Church, which had been destroyed, was rebuilt, much to the delight of the faithful. It reopened in 2000.

"I'm really happy that we now have freedom of religion," Larissa said. "It took time. You feel like you're in another country."

It's not just the Russian Orthodox Church that's thriving today.

Kseniya Egorova, 16, of Moscow is attending the Russian-American Christian University in Moscow. She is studying linguistics and English. (Kseniya visited Albany in 2004 and again last April when she was still a student at Moscow School 1256.)

"I'm a Christian and I want to be in a university that is associated with Christ," she said. "Their English program is excellent."

The school's mission statement reads:

"This university offers to Russian students an educational program that trains them to be productive citizens in the Russian Federation, in their neighborhoods, in their churches, and in the marketplace."

Kseniya attends a Protestant charismatic church founded five years ago by an American, Rick Roner, who plans to remain a Moscow resident.

The church now has 3,000 members and meets in two different buildings.

Kseniya's mother, Stella, and grandparents, Yuri and Kate, also attend the church.

Kseniya is involved with the church's youth ministries and leads a dance group.

"We do dancing to get kids involved," said Kseniya, who doesn't smoke or drink in a country where people do a lot of each.

"Jesus died for me," she said. "I love him with all my heart."

A few days after the Kremlin tour, the Friendship Force group toured St. Petersburg. The tour guide there, Ludmilla Dyatchenko, took the group to another place where faith has endured in big way over the years.

Ludmilla showed the ornate St. Petersburg Synagogue, the second-largest synagogue in Europe. St. Petersburg, a city of 4.7 million, has an estimated 90,000 Jewish residents. Russia has the world's fourth-largest Jewish community.

The St. Petersburg Synagogue and its members have endured plenty of bad stuff, including the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Russia since the end of Soviet repression.

Just last week, a St. Petersburg Jewish cemetery was vandalized, according to an Internet report.

A member of the synagogue proudly told the Friendship Force group some of the history of the 112-year-old synagogue.

The synagogue survived and stood as a symbol of hope during the 900-day siege of World War II, when the Germans surrounded and bombarded the city. One million people died during the siege that ended in January 1944.

The St. Petersburg Synagogue helped people keep the faith during those terrible times. Its doors remained open every day then, just as they do now.

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Next Friday: The Trinity Monastery of St. Sergius north of Moscow is one of Russia's most important religious centers.