The history of the Russian Church may be treated under the four periods of its foundation, consolidation, transition, and reformation. Its foundation period extends from the end of the tenth century to the beginning of the fourteenth. In the year 957 a Russian princess, named Olga, visited Constantinople, was baptized, and returned with the Christian name of Helena. About thirty years afterwards there came to her grandson, Vladimir, envoys from the different religious communities of the known world,—from the Mussulmans, the Pope, the Jews, the Greeks,—inviting him to adopt their respective creeds. To these he replied by sending elders and nobles to examine their various religions; and shortly afterwards, in 988, he was baptized and joined the Greek Church. Vladimir then gave orders for a wholesale baptism of his docile subjects at Kieff. A church was built there, and the work of conversion advanced rapidly. The Holy Scriptures had been translated into Sclavonic a century before for the nations on the Danube; so that the Greek priests, on going to Russia, had this powerful lever ready to hand in the language of the people.

The period of the consolidation of the Russian Church dates from the beginning of the fourteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, during which time the local centre of ecclesiastical history was transferred from Kieff to Moscow, and three great powers came prominently forward—the Tsars, the Metropolitans, and the Monks. The Tsar, in his ecclesiastical position, represented the laity of the Church, and received the unbounded veneration of the people; and the Metropolitans, second only to the Tsar, almost without exception supported the authority of the Sovereign. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Metropolitans became independent of the See of Constantinople; and in 1589, Job, the Metropolitan of Moscow, was elevated to the dignity of a patriarch. Again, the hermits and monks acquired an immense influence. In 1338 was founded the famous Troitza monastery—a seminary, cathedral, church, and fortress all in one—the monks and clergy of which have more than once taken an active part in the deliverance of their country from the Tatars and Poles.

The transition period of the Russian Church extends from the middle of the seventeenth to the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, during which time lived Nikon, the famous Patriarch of Moscow. He has been called a Russian Chrysostom, a Russian Luther, a Russian Wolsey. Ivan the Terrible, in his own savage way, had done something towards rectifying the abuses of the Church. The Patriarch did more; he took in hand the Russian hierarchy, whom he found idle and drunken. He set them a good example, on one hand, by founding hospitals, feeding the hungry, visiting prisons, and, above all, after the silence of many centuries, by preaching; but, on the other hand, he administered clerical discipline with uncommon severity. He was perpetually sending his officers round the city, with orders that, if they found priest or monk in a state of intoxication, they were to imprison, strip, and scourge him; and numbers of dissolute clergy he banished to Siberia. His name, however, is chiefly remembered by reason of his innovations, or perhaps resuscitation of forgotten details in ritual. Finding that copyists’ errors had crept into the service books, which were in manuscript, he sent deputations to Mount Athos, and throughout the Eastern Churches, for correct copies, put the printing press to work to circulate new rubrics, and set on foot a work of revision, which met with frantic opposition on the part of the ignorant among the people, and was ultimately made the occasion of the secession of a large part of what are now known as the Russian raskolniks, or dissenters.

The fourth period, which has been called—though, alas! in only a very limited sense—the reformation of the Russian Church, extends from the time of Peter the Great to our own day. The patriarchate had attained to a position of great power, and the great Peter was not the man to brook such a rival as Nikon had been to his father Alexis; accordingly, on the death of the Patriarch Adrian, in 1700, his chair was allowed to remain vacant for twenty years, at the end of which time Peter abolished the patriarchate and appointed a synod. He also carried out many reforms and improvements, which he had the good sense to see were sorely needed. He established schools for the children of the clergy, abolished anchorites, reformed the monasteries, and issued regulations enjoining bishops to read the Scriptures carefully, and not to be absent from their dioceses without permission of the synod. Many of his changes, however, excited great dissatisfaction. The measures of Nikon had sadly perturbed the orthodox Russians; those of Peter drove them to desperation and to further schism. Among the charges brought against the Tsar were such as these: that he had introduced into the churches pictures by Western artists; and this was said to be a mortal sin. Besides this, at the opening of the eighteenth century, Peter changed the calendar, gave his people the 1st of January for their New Year’s Day, and began to reckon the year from the birth of Christ instead of from the creation of the world. This, among other like things, was regarded as the very sign of Antichrist, inasmuch as he was “to change times and laws”; and Peter the Great is still designated Antichrist by a large proportion of the Russian dissenters. Since the time of the great reformer the Russian Church has gone on very much as he left it, the few minor reforms introduced by the Emperors Alexander the First and Second being in the right direction.