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It has long been an unchallenged assumption in Russian historiography—prerevolutionary, Soviet, western—that the Orthodox church was an instrument of the state. It is generally held that this subservience, if muted in medieval Muscovy, became overt in the early eighteenth century, when the church reforms of Peter the Great transformed the church into a state bureau and its clergy into ideological policemen. Contemporary accounts by foreigners, in particular, stressed the apparent servility of the church and its exploitation by the secular state. Secular elites in Russia held essentially the same view; even laymen whose sentiments put them close to the church felt defenseless before such foreign criticism. The intelligentsia, whether of liberal or radical persuasion, generally tended to dismiss the church and clergy as little more than ordained gendarmes, particularly in the prereform era. The church endeavored, to be sure, to rebut such criticism, especially after 1855, when a less stringent censorship, the proliferation of ecclesiastical journals, and heightened concern for social issues triggered a flurry of articles about the church and its social conscience. Once the storm over emancipation had subsided, the issue lost its immediate relevance and elicited only marginal, superficial studies for the duration of the ancien regime.

The eighteenth century marked a crucial new period in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. In Muscovy the church had been an institution of paramount importance: it possessed enormous wealth, exercised considerable influence on the theocratic politics of Muscovy, and held a virtual monopoly over culture and art. During the eighteenth century, however, this awesome power and wealth all but vanished. The secularized state wrought fundamental changes in the church: it replaced the patriarch with a more tractable Synod, gradually exploited and finally sequestered the church's lands and peasants, and in general transformed the church into an "integral part of the Russian state structure and administration." The church's ascendancy was correspondingly weakened in both society and culture. The ecclesiastical leadership made little headway against the abiding problems of superstition and paganism, and it failed to stem the spread of the Old Belief and of secular culture throughout the population.