3. The Christianization of Kievan Rus' commenced in 988 with
the baptism of the Rus' Grand Prince of Kiev — Vladimir the
Great — and his people by the clergy of the Ecumenical
Patriarch of Constantinople. The ecclesiastical title
of Metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus' remained in the jurisdiction of
the Ecumenical Patriarchate until 1686.
4. • The ROC currently claims exclusive jurisdiction over the Eastern
Orthodox Christians, irrespective of their ethnic background, who
reside in the former member republics of the Soviet Union,
excluding Georgia. The ROC also created the autonomous Church
of Japan and Chinese Orthodox Church. The
ROC eparchies in Belarus and Latvia, since the fall of the Soviet
Union in the 1990s, enjoy various degrees of self-government, albeit
short of the status of formal ecclesiastical autonomy.
• The ROC should also not be confused with the Russian Orthodox
Church Outside of Russia (or ROCOR, also known as the Russian
Orthodox Church Abroad), headquartered in the United States. The
ROCOR was instituted in the 1920s by Russian communities outside
the Soviet Union, which had refused to recognise the authority of the
Moscow Patriarchate that was de facto headed
by Metropolitan Sergius Stragorodsky. The two churches reconciled
on 17 May 2007; the ROCOR is now a self-governing part of the
Russian Orthodox Church.
5. • The apparent 'symphonia' of church-state cooperation in Russia is a matter of
• debate and concern in the West. By some accounts the war in Ukraine kicked
• that collusion into another gear entirely, with the Russian Orthodox Church now
• a fully assimilated part of the Kremlin’s domestic and foreign policy machine. We
• argue that, though such claims may prove hyperbolic, the rise in political
• authoritarianism in Russia and its neighbourhood is being matched by significant
• restrictions in Russia’s religious playfield, and that both the Kremlin and the
• Russian Orthodox Church benefit from the policies and practices of the other
6. • Religious pluralism was always going to be a tenuous
pro_x0002_position in post-Soviet Russia. The church-state models of
• the Tsarist and Communist eras were not particularly
• encouraging antecedents. Furthermore, pluralism of any kind
• does not have a rich history in Russia (Grigoriadis, 2016).
Pre_x0002_Soviet experiments in various social domains were
infrequent,
• short-lived and often inconsequential.
