Russia's own church council, the great Sobor of 1917 and 1918, had already resolved to keep the Julian calendar before the calendar question reached Constantinople at all, and before the new Bolshevik government imposed the Gregorian calendar for civil use in February 1918. By 1923 the church itself was not free to decide much of anything: Patriarch Tikhon was under arrest, and the Soviet state was actively backing a rival church structure, the Renovationists, who styled themselves the Living Church and moved toward the new calendar as part of a wider programme of reform the government favoured.
When Tikhon was released in the summer of 1923, one of his acts was to declare every decree the Renovationist body had issued, including its acceptance of the new calendar, without grace, a ruling that effectively erased whatever the Living Church had claimed to establish. The canonical church he led kept the unrevised Julian calendar, and it has never adopted the Revised Julian reckoning since.
That history left a mark on how the calendar itself came to be read inside Russia. Because the push toward a new calendar had arrived bound up with an atheist government and a schismatic church it was propping up, keeping the old calendar became, for many Russian Orthodox believers, less a matter of astronomy than a way of marking which church, and which authority, they had stayed loyal to through the persecution this atlas already records in the church's own twentieth century history.