The Russian Church: A Thousand Years

A thousand years in outline. The Church of Rus was born at Kiev in 988 under a metropolitan sent from Constantinople, and survived the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth, St Sergius of Radonezh and his disciples filled the northern forests with monasteries. When the Greeks accepted union with Rome at Florence, Moscow refused it and in 1448 chose its own metropolitan, and in 1589 the Patriarch of Constantinople made Moscow a patriarchate. Patriarch Nikon’s reform of the books to the Greek model split off the Old Believers in the 1660s; in 1721 Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate and put the Church under a Holy Synod and a lay procurator. The great council of 1917 restored the patriarchate and elected St Tikhon in the same weeks the Bolsheviks took power, and the Church then went through the worst persecution in its history. Freed in 1988, it rebuilt at a speed no one foresaw, and it is by far the largest of the Orthodox Churches.