What Was the Holy Synod?
The Holy Synod was the governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church from 25 January 1721 (5 February new style) to 5 November 1917 (18 November new style), when it was abolished by the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church and the patriarchate was restored. The Synod was established by the Spiritual Regulation of 25 January 1721, drafted by Peter the Great’s adviser Feofan Prokopovich, as a replacement for the Moscow patriarchate. The Synod was modelled on the State Colleges of the civil administration; its presiding officer was the senior metropolitan, but the real power lay with the lay official, the Chief Procurator, who was appointed by the tsar (see Freeze, Russian Levites, 1977).
The abolishing of the patriarchate
The Russian patriarchate had been established in 1589, in the reign of Fyodor I, and the first patriarch, Job, had been installed in 1589. The patriarchate was the central institution of the Russian Church, and the patriarchs had been powerful figures throughout the seventeenth century. Patriarch Nikon’s reforms of 1653-1666, which had attempted to bring the Russian liturgical practices into line with the Greek Orthodox tradition, had produced the great Raskol schism of the Russian Old Believers. The conflict between Nikon and Tsar Alexis had demonstrated the political dangers of a powerful patriarchate, and Peter’s reform of 1700-1721 was the long-delayed resolution of the seventeenth-century Russian Church-state conflict.
The patriarchate had been vacant since the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700. Peter did not appoint a successor; he appointed Stefan Yavorsky, the metropolitan of Ryazan, as “Guardian of the Patriarchal Throne.” The Spiritual Regulation of 25 January 1721 formally abolished the patriarchate and established the Holy Synod as a college of bishops. The reform was, in effect, the subordination of the Russian Church to the Russian state (Freeze, 1977).
The Synod’s structure and powers
The Holy Synod was a college of 10-12 members, all of them bishops, who met in the Synod Building in St Petersburg. The members were appointed and dismissed by the tsar on the recommendation of the Synod itself, and they were required to take an oath of loyalty to the tsar. The Synod had the authority of a patriarch in matters of doctrine, discipline, and church administration. It supervised the bishops, the monasteries, the parish clergy, the religious schools, and the church’s charitable and missionary activities.
The Synod’s work was supervised by the Chief Procurator, a lay official appointed by the tsar. The Chief Procurator was the Synod’s executive officer, and he had the right to be present at all Synod meetings and to see all documents. In practice, the Chief Procurator was the actual head of the Russian Church, and the Synod’s decisions were usually prepared in the Chief Procurator’s office. The office was, accordingly, one of the most powerful in the Russian state. The most important Chief Procurators of the nineteenth century were Alexander Golitsyn (1803-1817), Nikolai Protasov (1836-1855), and Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1880-1905) (Freeze, 1977).
The Synod’s main activities
The Synod was the centre of the Russian Orthodox religious life. It supervised the parish clergy, the bishops, the monasteries, and the church’s charitable and educational institutions. It was also the chief censorship body for religious publications, and it played an important role in the development of the Russian educational system. The Synod’s seminaries, founded in the eighteenth century, were the principal institutions for the training of the Russian Orthodox parish clergy; the St Petersburg Theological Academy, founded in 1809, was the centre of the Russian Orthodox theological tradition.
The Synod also supervised the Russian Orthodox missionary movement. The Russian Orthodox mission to Alaska, established in 1794, was a Synod project; the missions to Siberia, to the Caucasus, to Japan, and to the Korean peninsula were also Synod projects. The most famous Russian Orthodox missionary, John of Kronstadt (1829-1908), was a Synod priest; the most famous Russian Orthodox bishop of the late imperial period, Nicholas of Japan (1836-1912), was a Synod appointee (Batalden, Russian Bible Wars, 2013).
The Synod and the religious minorities
The Holy Synod was the official representative of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the religious life of the other confessions of the empire was administered separately by the Department of Religious Affairs of Foreign Confessions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Russian Orthodox Church retained the position of the dominant confession, and the Synod’s role included the defence of the privileged position of Orthodoxy. The Uniate Church in the Russian-ruled parts of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the most sensitive case: it was suppressed in 1839, when its members were forcibly converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, as part of the post-1831 Russification of the Western Provinces (Batalden, 2013).
The abolition of the Synod
The Holy Synod was abolished in 1917, when the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church restored the patriarchate. The Council, which met in Moscow in 1917-1918, elected Tikhon, the metropolitan of Moscow, as the new patriarch. The restoration of the patriarchate came too late to save the imperial system, but it laid the foundation for the survival of the Russian Orthodox Church through the Soviet period. The Synod as an institution ceased to exist; its powers were returned to the patriarch. The post-1991 Russian Orthodox Church continues to be governed by a patriarch, although the Synod is still the central administrative organ of the Church (Freeze, 1977).