Russian Empire

When the patriarch of Moscow died in 1700, Peter I left the office vacant, and in 1721 abolished it. In its place he created the Most Holy Governing Synod, a committee of bishops operating under a chief procurator who was a layman appointed by the tsar, an arrangement borrowed in part from Lutheran state church practice and one that lasted almost two hundred years. The clergy became, in effect, civil servants: they kept the registers of birth, marriage and death, read state decrees from the pulpit, and were required to report seditious matter disclosed in confession.

The church had already been split before this. The liturgical reforms imposed by Patriarch Nikon in the 1650s, correcting Russian books and gestures against Greek usage, were rejected by a large body of clergy and laity who became the Old Believers, and who were anathematised, taxed, exiled and in some communities driven to mass self-immolation rather than submit. They were not granted legal toleration until 1905.

Catherine II secularised the monastic estates in 1764, transferring vast lands and their peasants to the state and closing more than half the monasteries. Kallistos Ware's history notes the paradox of the period: an institutionally subordinated church that nonetheless produced the eighteenth and nineteenth century revival of hesychast spirituality, the Philokalia in Slavonic, the elders of Optina, and Seraphim of Sarov.

Most of the empire's subjects were not Orthodox. Catherine II abandoned forced conversion in the 1770s and in 1788 established at Orenburg a Muslim Spiritual Assembly with a state-appointed mufti, examining and licensing prayer leaders and adjudicating family disputes. Robert Crews argues that this made the tsarist state a participant in Islamic religious life, and that Muslim subjects used it: litigants brought their internal disputes to imperial officials and asked the state to enforce the sharia as they understood it, so that the empire became an arbiter of Muslim orthodoxy rather than merely its supervisor.

Other communities were handled more harshly. The Greek Catholic churches of the western provinces, in communion with Rome, were absorbed into Orthodoxy by decree in 1839 and again in 1875, with resistance broken by force. Jews, some five million by the end of the century, were confined to the Pale of Settlement, restricted in schooling and occupation, and left unprotected in the pogroms of 1881 and 1882 and again in 1903 to 1906, which drove mass emigration and gave Zionism much of its early impetus.

The edict of toleration of April 1905 finally allowed subjects to leave Orthodoxy legally. In August 1917 a council of the Russian church met for the first time since the seventeenth century and restored the patriarchate, electing Tikhon in November, weeks after the Bolshevik seizure of power that would place the whole institution under a state committed to atheism.