Russian Orthodox Church

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian Orthodox Church traces its origins to a single act of baptism in 988, when Grand Prince Vladimir stepped into the waters at Chersonesus in Crimea and emerged with a new faith for himself and his people. Today, more than 112 million adherents across the former Soviet republics and beyond belong to this institution, making it the largest Eastern Orthodox church in the world and second only to Rome in the entire Christian world.

  How did a church rooted in Constantinople's authority become one of the defining forces in Russian history and politics? How did it survive decades of Soviet atheism, the execution of tens of thousands of its clergy, and the confiscation of its property? And how did the institution that once stood as a voice of conscience under Soviet repression come to bless the soldiers of a war that its own priests condemned in open letters? These are the questions this documentary follows.

• 2. Roots in Kievan Rus

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  Christianity arrived in the lands of Kievan Rus' through a gradual process that long preceded Vladimir's famous conversion. Toward the end of the reign of Igor, Christians were already present among the Varangians. Igor's wife Olga was baptized sometime in the mid-10th century, though scholars dispute whether this happened in Constantinople or Kiev, and whether the year was 946 or closer to 960.

  Vladimir's conversion in 988 was partly geopolitical. He had captured Chersonesus in Crimea and demanded that the sister of Byzantine Emperor Basil II be sent there as his bride. Baptism was the condition of the marriage. Vladimir had lent military support to the Byzantine emperor, though the sources suggest he may also have besieged the city after it sided with the rebellious Bardas Phokas.

  By the early 11th century, Christianity had been established as the state religion. By the early 13th century, some 40 episcopal sees had been created, all of them ultimately answering to Constantinople. The church that would one day claim to speak for all Orthodox Christians on the territory of the former Soviet Union began as a subordinate branch of another patriarchate across the Black Sea.

  The 12th-century Primary Chronicle added a deeper founding myth: the Apostle Andrew, the text claimed, had visited the future site of Kiev and prophesied a great Christian city there, before traveling north to the land of the Slovenians and eventually reaching Rome. Modern church historians in Russia have often incorporated this narrative into their accounts, despite the absence of historical evidence to support it.

• 3. Independence from Constantinople

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  Metropolitan Maximus moved the seat of the Russian church from Kiev to Vladimir in 1299, after the Mongol invasions had stripped Kiev of its former significance. His successor Peter went further, relocating his residence to Moscow in 1325 and becoming a close ally of the Moscow prince. During Peter's time, the foundation for the Dormition Cathedral was laid, and he was buried there. That decision carried lasting symbolic weight: by choosing to reside and be interred in Moscow, Peter made the city the church's future center.

  The formal break from Constantinople was set in motion on the 5th of July 1439, when Metropolitan Isidore, the only Russian prelate at the Council of Florence, signed a union with Rome. He returned to Moscow on the 19th of March 1441, and three days later Grand Prince Vasily II had him arrested and placed under guard in the Chudov Monastery. The chronicles record Vasily II denouncing Isidore as "a wicked and baneful wolf" rather than a pastor.

  For the following seven years, the seat of the metropolitan remained empty. Then on the 15th of December 1448, a council of Russian bishops elected Jonah as metropolitan without seeking the approval of Constantinople. This was the birth of autocephaly. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, Russian clergy interpreted the city's defeat as divine punishment for the union with Rome, which retroactively justified the break.

  The monk Philotheus of Pskov gave this independence its theological frame, calling Moscow alone the place that "shines over all the earth more radiantly than the sun" because of its fidelity to the faith. The marriage of Ivan III to Sophia Palaiologina, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, helped anchor the claim that Moscow had inherited Byzantium's spiritual mantle.

• 4. Patriarchate and Schism

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  In 1589, during the reign of Feodor I and under the direction of Boris Godunov, the metropolitan of Moscow, Job, was consecrated as the first Russian patriarch, with the blessing of Jeremias II of Constantinople. The decree establishing the patriarchate called the Russian tsardom a "third Rome."

  The church's internal life was not always unified. Two movements with opposite visions had already clashed in the early 16th century. Nilus of Sora, who lived from 1433 to 1508, led the non-possessors, who believed monastic communities had no business holding land or involving themselves in state affairs. Joseph of Volotsk, 1439 to 1515, led the opposing camp, pressing for strong church engagement in matters of government. By 1551, the Stoglav Synod was called to address the lack of uniformity in church practices.

  The deepest rupture of the pre-modern period came in the mid-17th century. Patriarch Nikon undertook reforms to bring Russian liturgical practices back into alignment with contemporary Greek Orthodox worship. Archpriest Avvakum accused Nikon of "defiling the faith" and "pouring wrathful fury upon the Russian land." Those who refused the new practices became known as the Old Believers, and the schism that followed divided Russian Christian life for centuries.

  The early 16th century had also seen Archbishop Gennady of Novgorod complete the first full manuscript translation of the Bible into Church Slavonic in 1499, known as Gennady's Bible. Metropolitan Macarius added another monument to the tradition by assembling "all holy books available in the Russian land" and completing the Grand Menaion, an encyclopedic collection that shaped how the stories of Russian Orthodoxy were told and remembered.

• 5. Peter the Great and the Synodal Era

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  Patriarch Adrian died in 1700, and Peter I of Russia decided not to hold an election for a successor. Instead he appointed Stefan Yavorsky, drawn from the Ukrainian clergy, as locum tenens. Peter's ambition was to reshape the Russian state on European models, and he saw no reason to exempt the church from that project.

  In 1721, Peter replaced the patriarchate with a council called the Most Holy Synod, composed of bishops, monks, and priests appointed by the tsar. An ober-procurator, reporting directly to the emperor, watched over the institution. Theophan Prokopovich wrote Peter's Spiritual Regulation, which legally dissolved any separation between church and state. The Synodal period that began then would last until 1917.

  The consequences of Peter's reforms extended to monastic life. Between 1701 and 1805, some 822 monasteries were closed. The large-scale secularization of monastic landholdings was completed under Catherine II in 1764, and monastic communities were placed under tight regulation, supported by state funds.

  The late 18th century produced an unexpected countermovement. Paisiy Velichkovsky and his disciples at the Optina Monastery revived the practice of starchestvo, or spiritual eldership, which became a touchstone of Orthodox interior life. Lay theologians including Aleksey Khomyakov and Ivan Kireevsky, drawing on Slavophile thought, elaborated concepts such as sobornost, a vision of communal spiritual unity. Fyodor Dostoyevsky brought these currents into literature through the figure of Starets Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov.

• 6. Revolution, Terror, and Survival

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  In 1914, Russia held 55,173 Orthodox churches, 29,593 chapels, and 550 monasteries and 475 convents, with 95,259 monks and nuns. Within a decade, all of that would be under assault.

  On the 15th of August 1917, the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church opened in the Moscow Dormition Cathedral in the Kremlin, the first such gathering since the late 17th century. Three days after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government in Petrograd on the 25th of October, the council voted to restore the patriarchate. On the 5th of November, Metropolitan Tikhon of Moscow was chosen as the first Russian patriarch in roughly 200 years.

  In early February 1918, the Bolshevik government passed a decree separating church from state, stripping religious organizations of the right to own property and hold legal standing. On the 1st of February 1918, after a bloody confrontation between Bolsheviks and believers at Petrograd's Alexander Nevsky Lavra, Patriarch Tikhon issued a proclamation anathematizing the perpetrators. In the first five years after the revolution, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were executed.

  Between 1917 and 1935, the Soviet authorities arrested 130,000 Eastern Orthodox priests. Of these, 95,000 were put to death. Many of the victims were later recognized in a special canon of saints called the "new martyrs and confessors of Russia."

  In 1927, Metropolitan Sergius issued a declaration accepting Soviet authority over the church as legitimate. Acting against the wishes of his superior, the imprisoned Metropolitan Peter, Sergius pledged the church's cooperation with the government and condemned political dissent within it. The declaration split the institution: the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia refused to recognize Sergius, and the Russian True Orthodox Church, known informally as the Catacomb Church, operated underground rather than submit.

  The number of functioning Orthodox churches fell from around 22,000 in 1959 to around 8,000 in 1965, during the wave of Khrushchev-era repression. By 1988, according to Metropolitan Vladimir, only 6,893 churches remained functioning across the Soviet Union, and just 21 monasteries and convents.

• 7. KGB Entanglement and Post-Soviet Revival

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  Gleb Yakunin, a critic who briefly accessed the KGB archives in the early 1990s, described the Moscow Patriarchate as "practically a subsidiary, a sister company of the KGB." Konstantin Kharchev, the former chairman of the Soviet Council on Religious Affairs, was more explicit: "Not a single candidate for the office of bishop or any other high-ranking office, much less a member of the Holy Synod, went through without confirmation by the Central Committee of the CPSU and the KGB."

  George Trofimoff, the highest-ranking US military officer ever convicted of espionage by the United States, was sentenced to life imprisonment on the 27th of September 2001. He had been recruited by Igor Susemihl, a bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church who later became ROC Metropolitan Iriney of Vienna and died in July 1999.

  Patriarch Alexy II, who served from 1990 to 2008, publicly acknowledged that bishops of the Moscow Patriarchate, himself included, had made compromises with the Soviet government, and he repented for those compromises. Under his leadership, some 15,000 churches were re-opened or built. By 2016, official figures listed 361 bishops, 34,764 parishes, 39,800 clergy, and 926 monasteries.

  On the 17th of May 2007, the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia signed an Act of Canonical Communion at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, ending a separation that had lasted since the 1920s. The event was marked by the first joint Divine Liturgy celebrated by Patriarch Alexius II and the First Hierarch of ROCOR.

  On the 27th of January 2009, the ROC Local Council elected Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk as patriarch by 508 votes out of 700. He was enthroned on the 1st of February 2009. Kirill would endorse Vladimir Putin's 2012 election, referring to Putin's time in office during the 2000s as "God's miracle."

• 8. War, Schism, and Contested Legitimacy

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  On the 15th of October 2018, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church severed full communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The break came in response to Constantinople's decision to end Moscow's jurisdiction over Ukraine and to grant autocephaly to a new Ukrainian church, formalized on the 5th of January 2019.

  Patriarch Kirill's response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine drew condemnation from inside and outside the church. On the 6th of March 2022, speaking in the Church of Christ the Savior on Forgiveness Sunday, Kirill justified the attack. He claimed there was an ongoing eight-year "genocide" in the Donbas region and that Ukraine wanted to impose gay pride events on the local population. He referred to both Russians and Ukrainians throughout the speech simply as "Holy Russians."

  On the 27th of February 2022, a group of 286 Russian Orthodox priests published an open letter calling for an end to the war. In Kazakhstan, priest Iakov Vorontsov was forced to resign after signing a similar letter. A priest in Moscow's Kostroma Diocese was fined for an anti-war sermon stressing the commandment "Thou shalt not kill."

  On the 10th of April 2022, 200 priests from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate released a request asking the primates of all autocephalous Eastern Orthodox churches to convene a council to try Kirill for heresy. Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, called Kirill's legitimization of the war "a heresy." Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said there was a strong case for expelling the Russian Orthodox Church from the World Council of Churches.

  At the World Russian People's Council of late March 2024, headed by Kirill, a document was approved declaring the Russian invasion of Ukraine a "Holy War." The document stated that the goal was "protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism" and that all of modern Ukraine's territory should come under Russia's exclusive influence. On the 20th of August 2024, Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada banned the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, giving affiliated religious organizations nine months to sever ties with Moscow or face prohibition.