Yes, of course, society in the Muscovite state was extremely differentiated in its duties to the state and the tsar; however, in relation to the Church and its requirements, it was unified. In such conditions, the pastoral work of the Church was a relatively simple task. Unfortunately, this seeming problemlessness was fraught with grave negative consequences. The church hierarchy was inclined to completely overlook the fact that behind the statics of outwardly established traditions, perceived, so to speak, instinctively, there were many problems of a religious and moral nature that still had no satisfactory solution. This led to the fact that urgent issues, such as the school issue, were neglected or completely removed from the agenda. The view of traditional religious and ethical norms was optimistic, even with a degree of pride, for which we will find a lot of evidence, for example, in such a bright personality of the 17th century as Archpriest Avvakum. This circumstance played an important role in the history of the emergence of the Old Believer movement.

The main value was the liturgical nature of Russian Orthodoxy, which seemed unshakable and eternal. This peculiar character was preserved even in the Synodal period, when in many strata of society the signs of the disintegration of the former foundations were already making themselves felt. Here we should also look for the reasons for the contradictions that led to the schism in the second half of the 17th century. Throughout the entire synodal period, the followers of the schism zealously preserved the most important elements of the old Moscow tradition. However, the disintegration of church unity in no way meant that those who remained with the Church, unwilling to go into schism, were ready to sacrifice this liturgical character of their faith. On the contrary, it can be argued that the existence of the schism precisely strengthened the liturgical character of the Church itself, making it almost impossible to make any further improvements (for example, in divine services), although they were very desirable. And yet, for the next two centuries, the schism weighed heavily on the life of the Church, which soon after its emergence underwent a new and severe shock [20].

The reforms of Peter I, having dealt a blow to traditional ideas as a whole, thereby struck the Church. All the reforms of the tsar were imbued with the spirit of secularization, which shook the entire set of habitual norms of people's life. The contrast between old Moscow conservatism and secularizing Europeanization was particularly acute. For that part of Russian society that voluntarily or under compulsion accepted Europeanization, the old traditional order, rooted in the ecclesiastical worldview, very soon began to mean no more than the remnants of the past that had been overcome. The other part of the people tried to preserve their traditions in new living conditions. With each decade, the consequences of Europeanization became more and more sharply outlined, the spiritual division of the people and the lack of mutual understanding between its two parts deepened. It is also necessary to take into account the reorganization of society undertaken by Peter on the basis of new estates, each of which was specially influenced by European views and concepts. Under Catherine II, the process of legal and social division of the people into separate estates was finally completed. At the same time, the pace and degree of actual Europeanization for each of the estates could be different. Speaking of a worldview, it is important to know whether and to what extent new views found recognition and to what extent they determined the external behavior of people and their internal position. Here the radicalism and maximalism of the Russian character revealed themselves: just as fanatically as the Old Believers defended the "old faith", the other part of Russian society renounced its past, unconditionally following the new Western models. The influence of the latter was felt in Moscow as early as the 17th century, but at that time the religious-ecclesiastical criteria according to which these innovations were evaluated were still in full force, but now they were lost [21]. [

The different legal status of the isolated estates, first of all, the uneven and unfair distribution of the state burden between them, for example, taxes and military service, with each decade less and less corresponded to the ancient Russian moral ideas of justice and "truth". The Russian Church did not have the courage to draw the attention of the government to these facts. From the time of Peter I, the right of metropolitans or patriarchs to express their warnings and anxieties to the tsar, the right to grieve, which was an important factor in the relations between the Church and the tsar in the old Moscow period, was finally lost. The state now acted according to the will of the absolute autocrat, the emperor, and the Church helped him in this, unconditionally transferring her support for the church-rooted Moscow autocracy to the autocracy of the St. Petersburg emperors, who in the eyes of the Church remained the bearers of the royal title. The fact that the foundations of the old and new forms of government were different was not taken into account.

The social structure of Muscovite Rus included three main estates: service people, posad people and peasants. In their worldview, these estates constituted a unity, preserving the integrity of the people, since their position in relation to the state power and to each other was determined by their duties [22]. If the tsar was aware of and publicly proclaimed his attitude to the "Orthodox people entrusted to him by God" as a duty, then the estates viewed their attitude to state power from the same point of view. As a matter of fact, it was not so much about the attitude to abstract state power as to the personality of the tsar himself. Only Peter I brought to the fore the concept of the state as such and the idea of public service. Later it will be shown that Peter's church reform followed the same course. From now on, the Church was also obliged to state service. This, in essence, was the meaning of the inclusion of its collegial elite, the Holy Synod, in the state apparatus of administration. The Church, which had served the Kingdom of Heaven up to that time, was now supposed to serve the earthly kingdom as well, according to Peter. The salvation of the soul was what the Russian man strove for. Everything earthly was transitory, relative, had no value for him, and at best seemed to be a stepping stone to heaven. Peter, under the influence of Western ideas, gave the earthly an independent value, which was unknown to Muscovite Russia. The Church had to build this earthly life by educating good citizens, or, more precisely, good subjects of the tsar. The Church was, in a way, the inner side of the social system, it was entrusted with the task of creating a person oriented towards the interests of the state. The Church had to see to it that the Russian people voluntarily submitted to the new demands. In carrying out his reforms, Peter wanted the people to see in him, as in previous sovereigns, the executor of God's will, responsible for his actions before God.

Such a task presented great difficulties for the Church: it had to deal with a completely different flock than before. Peter the Great's reforms overthrew all traditional concepts and ideas. The process of transformation captured the entire structure of society [23]. The fate of the peasantry in this process is especially characteristic. Peter completed the enslavement of the peasants, the beginning of which was laid by the Code of 1649 (Chapter 11), which legally attached the peasants to their places of residence. The introduction of the poll tax created the prerequisites for the transformation of landowners-landlords into masters and owners of "souls" [24]. The dependence of the peasants on their landlords acquired its final forms under Empress Anna Ioannovna, when in 1731 she transferred the collection of the poll tax to the landlords, and in 1739 she issued a decree according to which only landlords, church institutions and factories had the right to own peasants. Later, the legislation and practice of the era of Catherine II led to the complete enslavement of the peasants [25]. [

While the peasants remained subordinate to the landlords and continued to perform duties in their favor, the landlords and the nobility as a whole were exempted from the duties of service that were imposed on them by Peter I. According to the decree of Peter the Great of March 23, 1714 on the inheritance of estates, the nobles who owned lands on the terms of service turned into unconditional owners of estates. This created a legal basis for the transfer of both land and the peasants living on these lands to their ownership. Under the successors of Peter the Great, a number of decrees followed, expanding the rights of landlords, although at first they still retained some duties of public service. But on February 18, 1762, Peter III issued a manifesto "On the Granting of Liberty and Freedom to the All Russian Nobility", which completely abolished these duties. Freed from the need for public service, the mass of nobles rushed to the provinces, where they settled on their estates. Catherine II completed this process with her decree of April 21, 1785 "On the Rights, Liberties and Privileges of the Russian Nobility", according to which the nobility became a privileged estate. Then, by a series of further decrees, the peasantry was finally transferred to his disposal, which remained in this position until the manifesto of Alexander II on the emancipation of the peasants of February 19, 1861 [26]

The deprivation of rights of a large part of the peasantry (around 1870 peasants made up approximately 76.6% of the total population of the country) undermined the moral foundations of the social structure, because it contradicted the very basis of the moral and legal consciousness of the Russian people, their idea of "truth". If the "noble nobility" considered their right to own serfs as a right of estates and a privilege of "support of the throne", then the concepts of the Russian peasant, despite the reforms of Peter the Great, were still rooted in the old Moscow soil. He looked at serfdom not from a legal, but exclusively from a religious and moral point of view, as a condition that contradicted the commandments of the Lord. Thus, serfdom further deepened the crack that had passed through the body of Peter's estate empire as a result of Europeanization.

However, it would be unfair to assert that the entire nobility considered serfdom to be a normal and just phenomenon. Already in the XVIII century we find among some representatives of the nobility (Radishchev and others) a clear understanding of its negative aspects and indignation at the trampling of the moral and legal foundations of the social order. In the first half of the 19th century, this protest became even stronger, it already captured not only the nobility, but also representatives of other strata of the population, especially the gradually emerging intelligentsia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal-minded circles of society tried, as far as censorship conditions permitted, to stigmatize serfdom as a vice of the autocratic system in fiction, journalism, correspondence, etc. Up to 1861, this protest – being, of course, only one of the components of the liberal aspirations as a whole – stimulated the so-called liberation movement, which in turn formed the fertile ground for the revolutionary movement. The silence of the Church made it and its representatives (bishops and parish clergy) in the eyes of liberal circles responsible, along with the state power, for the shortcomings of both the social and political structure. The Church was considered not only a conservative, but also a politically reactionary force, a support and henchman of state absolutism. Due to a certain short-sightedness, which has always been inherent in Russian liberals and revolutionaries, conservatism was considered by them as a sign of a lack of culture and education. It was precisely this kind of reproach that was constantly addressed to the clergy, remaining an invariable part of the criticism directed against the Church and its representatives by liberal circles. On the other hand, since liberal sentiments were nourished by the philosophical teachings of the West, Russian liberalism and the radicalism resulting from it very easily passed from a strictly socio-political criticism to a positivist and materialist worldview, which eventually led them to atheism or even to anti-religious convictions.

Thus arose that numerous social stratum, whose representatives were formally listed as Orthodox, although in fact did not maintain any relations with the Church. The secularization of society was especially strong in the cities, while village priests usually had closer contact with their flock.

Now the Church was dealing with a split society. The methods of pastoral care in the city and in the countryside, in relation to ordinary parishioners, on the one hand, and to the indifferent or hostile masses, on the other, had to be completely different. Meanwhile, the clergy was not at all prepared to solve such a problem, and did not receive any instructions from the bishops on this matter. The work of preaching became especially difficult. It was necessary that it be perceived by secularized groups of the population, and at the same time be comprehensible to much larger strata of the people who continued to remain faithful to traditions and the Church, primarily to the peasants, as well as to the bourgeoisie and workers. Despite the fact that these strata remained closely connected with the Church throughout the synodal period up to the 20th century, sects also made themselves felt among them, in relation to which, as well as to the schismatics, well-organized missionary work was required. Now the Church had to conduct it within the framework of new relations with the government, within the framework of the state church. Here she faced great difficulties and complications. Exactly how these relations between the Church and the state developed during the synodal period, we shall see [27].

d) Let us return once again to the Muscovite period. The new relations between the Church and the state were conditioned not only by the state church. Certain prerequisites for them had already been formed in the Muscovite period, and they were rooted both in historical reality and in the psychology of church politics at that time. The specific structure of the Old Russian worldview and the psychological attitudes associated with it sometimes had a strong impact on the course of historical events, but not vice versa. The resonance that certain specific events caused among the people was often also the result of religiously conditioned views on the nature of royal power and earthly authorities in general.

In the relations between the state and the Church in Muscovite Russia, two trends crossed: the political growth of the state led to the gradual formation of the idea of tsarist power; at the same time, after the Eastern Roman Empire ceased to exist with the fall of Constantinople, state thinking became more and more imbued with the idea of the Byzantine heritage. The idea of the tsar as the heir to the rights and duties of the Byzantine emperors determined the thinking not only of the sovereigns themselves, but also of the church hierarchy, monasticism, and the entire people. The scope and content of monarchical power in the person of the tsar who represented it changed primarily under the influence of the rapid growth of the Muscovite state. In the second half of the 15th and early 16th centuries, a new Moscow state was formed in place of the fragmented principalities, this change in its main features occurred during the reign of Ivan III (1462–1505) [28]. In the eyes of the Church and the people, the Grand Duke of Moscow was the absolute head of the nation [29]. During the decades of Ivan III's reign, which were so important from a political point of view, the question of the essence of the tsarist autocracy was lively discussed in Moscow. The Moscow scribes could discuss this problem only from the point of view of those ideas about the sovereign's power and its relation to the Church, which penetrated into Russia from Byzantium along with Christianity. When Christianity came to Kiev at the end of the tenth century, the concepts of empire (imperium) and priesthood (sacerdotium) in Byzantium were already well developed and legally defined [30]. The novels of Justinian (527–565), concerning the relations between the state and the Church, were included in the Slavonic Book of the Helmsman as early as the eleventh and twelfth centuries [31]. The Byzantine Eclogue (circa 750) contained definitions on the duty of the sovereign to serve justice, as well as on the Divine origin of imperial (royal) power [32]. In Moscow, the basis for the interpretation of relations between the state and the Church was mainly the Epanagoge (between 879 and 886) [33]. At the same time, the Muscovite scribes were much less interested in historical reality than in the system of concepts set forth in the Byzantine texts. Other sources on the question of the relationship between the state and the Church were the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers. Of all this, Moscow assimilated mainly two theories, or two teachings: that the tsar's power is affirmed in the word of God, and that the diarchy, or symphony of spiritual and temporal powers.

The processing of these borrowed ideas in Moscow was influenced by special political prerequisites. First of all, the Moscow scribes were based on the ancient Kievan tradition, according to which princes and grand princes were considered as Christian sovereigns who had certain rights and duties in relation to the Church [35]. This legacy served as the foundation for the subsequent ideological evolution, after the Grand Duke refused to recognize the Union of Florence (1439). Thus, in the eyes of his contemporaries, the Grand Duke acted as a defender of the Orthodox faith, pushing into the shadows Byzantium, which had united with the "Latin heresy" [36]. The fall of Constantinople and the collapse of the empire destroyed the diarchy and symphony of secular and spiritual powers required by theory. From that time on, the election of Russian metropolitans was carried out by the Assembly of Russian Bishops (consecrated by the Council) without the approval of the candidate by the Patriarch of Constantinople, and it was stipulated that the election took place "by the Duma of my son, the Grand Duke Vasily Vasilyevich" [38]. Ten years later, at the Local Council in Moscow, it was established that the election of the Metropolitans of Moscow would henceforth take place "by the election of the Holy Spirit and according to the holy rule of the Holy Apostles and Holy Fathers," as well as "by order of our lord, the Grand Duke Vasily Vasilyevich, the Russian autocrat" [39]. The marriage of Grand Duke Ivan III to Sophia (Zoya), niece of the last Byzantine emperor, emphasized this continuity. In 1480, the dependence of the Muscovite state on the Tatars was finally destroyed, even if it was already purely formal.