Moscow

Moscow's religious standing was built deliberately. The metropolitan of Kyiv and all Rus moved his residence to the town in the early fourteenth century, which gave a minor principality the senior churchman of the Rus lands, and the monastery Sergius of Radonezh founded to the north supplied both a school of monastic renewal and a saint attached to Moscow's military fortunes. When Constantinople accepted union with Rome at Florence and then fell to the Ottomans, Moscow rejected the union, appointed its own metropolitan without Constantinople's consent, and began to think of itself as the surviving centre of Orthodoxy. The monk Filofei of Pskov put the claim in a form that has been quoted ever since: two Romes have fallen, a third stands, and a fourth there will not be. A patriarchate followed in 1589.

The most damaging quarrel in Russian church history was about ritual. Patriarch Nikon revised the service books and the manner of crossing oneself to match contemporary Greek usage, and in 1666 and 1667 councils anathematised those who refused. The Old Believers who refused included whole communities, and their leader Avvakum was burned in 1682; the movement survives to this day and its priestless branches developed forms of worship without clergy at all.

Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate in 1721 and replaced it with a Holy Synod of appointed members under a lay official, which left the church without a head for nearly two hundred years and moved its administration to the new capital on the Baltic.

A council meeting in Moscow in 1917 restored the patriarchate and elected Tikhon days after the Bolsheviks took power, so the office was recovered at the worst possible moment. What followed was the most sustained state campaign against religion anywhere in the twentieth century: separation of church and state on terms that stripped parishes of legal personality, confiscation of church valuables during the famine of 1922, show trials of clergy, and a League of the Militant Godless with millions of nominal members. Thousands of churches in and around the city were closed and used as workshops and warehouses.

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, raised over decades in thanksgiving for the defeat of Napoleon, was dynamited in 1931 to clear a site for a Palace of Soviets crowned with a colossal statue of Lenin. The palace was never built; the flooded foundations became an open air swimming pool. In 1943, needing the church's support in the war, Stalin permitted the election of a patriarch again. The cathedral was rebuilt in the 1990s on the same site and reconsecrated in 2000, and it is now where patriarchs are enthroned and buried.

The city holds the Moscow Patriarchate's administration and its principal seminaries, and its religious life extends well beyond Orthodoxy: a Choral Synagogue reopened after the Soviet period, a Cathedral Mosque rebuilt on a far larger scale in 2015 for a Muslim population of migrants and long resident Tatars, and minority religious bodies whose registration has repeatedly been litigated, including a case brought by a Scientology congregation in the city that reached the European Court of Human Rights.