Peter the Great abolished the Patriarchate in 1721, replacing it with a Holy Synod of bishops under a lay Ober-Procurator answerable to the Tsar, a reorganization modeled on Protestant church-state arrangements and intended to fold ecclesiastical authority firmly into the imperial bureaucracy. This synodal period lasted almost two centuries, ending only in 1917, when a church council restored the Patriarchate in the same year revolution swept away the monarchy that had suppressed it.
The Soviet state that followed treated organized religion as an enemy to be broken rather than merely subordinated. Clergy were executed or sent to labor camps, churches were closed, converted to secular use or demolished, and the state sponsored rival, more compliant church structures such as the Renovationist Living Church movement in an effort to split and control the remaining faithful. Membership in the church survived chiefly underground and among the diaspora that fled after 1917, which organized itself abroad as the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, a body that remained formally separate from the Moscow Patriarchate for eighty five years over disputes about the Moscow church's accommodation with Soviet authority.
Restrictions eased briefly during the Second World War, when Stalin permitted a measure of church revival to bolster wartime morale, then tightened again under Khrushchev. Since the Soviet collapse the church has rebuilt rapidly, reconsecrating thousands of churches and monasteries, and in 2007 the Moscow Patriarchate and the Church Outside Russia signed an Act of Canonical Communion, formally healing the emigre schism.