The Russian Orthodox Church Today

Orthodoxy came to the eastern Slavs with the baptism of Kiev under Prince Vladimir in 988. The Russian church grew from a metropolitanate under Constantinople into a patriarchate of its own in 1589, endured the Mongol yoke and the reforms of Peter the Great, and restored its patriarchate at the great Moscow Council of 1917-18 on the eve of catastrophe. Under Soviet rule it passed through one of the fiercest persecutions in Christian history, which the Church remembers in its New Martyrs; after 1991 it saw a dramatic revival, rebuilding tens of thousands of churches in a generation.

Statistically it dwarfs the other Orthodox churches: by its own figures the Patriarchate counts roughly three hundred dioceses and well over thirty thousand parishes, and by most external estimates the largest membership in the Orthodox world. It is governed conciliarly — by the Patriarch together with the Holy Synod, the periodic Bishops' Councils, and the broader Local Council — rather than by the Patriarch alone.

The Moscow Patriarchate's canonical territory extends across much of the former Soviet Union and gathers a global flock. In 2007 it was reunited with the Russian Church Outside Russia, the body of émigrés who had governed themselves in exile since the Revolution, healing an eighty-year division. Russian parishes are found on every continent.

Ukraine has historically held a very large share of the Patriarchate's parishes, through the Ukrainian Orthodox Church long linked to Moscow. That fact is central to the strains of the last decade, because the question of who has authority over Orthodox Christians in Ukraine — and who may make a church there independent — is exactly the point on which Moscow and Constantinople have divided.

Two matters put the Russian Church in the news, and the encyclopedia states both without taking a side. The first is the 2018 rupture with Constantinople. After the Ecumenical Patriarchate moved to grant autocephaly to a church in Ukraine, the Holy Synod of the Russian Church broke eucharistic communion with Constantinople, holding that Constantinople had acted uncanonically within Moscow's own territory. Constantinople holds that, as first see, it acted within its rights. The two positions are set out on their own page (the Ukrainian dispute); what is undisputed is that the communion between the two largest Orthodox churches is broken and unhealed.

The second is the close public relationship between the Church's leadership and the Russian state, which has drawn wide comment since the war in Ukraine. Some Orthodox defend such closeness as the traditional "symphony" of church and nation; others, inside and outside Russia, criticize it and warn against the ancient temptation the Church itself condemned as ethnophyletism — the subordination of the Gospel to national interest. This encyclopedia records that the relationship is real and contested, and does not adjudicate it. Beneath these disputes the Russian Church remains, for its faithful, the church of St. Sergius and St. Seraphim, of the New Martyrs, and of an immense living tradition of prayer.