Rachel, all 70 million Christians in the Russian Orthodox Church (especially all those spirit-filled born again old ladies who have dedicated their lives to serving Jesus Christ in Russia) are not apostate, unsaved, and on their way to hell and the entire Russian Orthodox church is not a puppet of the Russian state.
Though infiltration and collusion has occurred in their history (with Tsar Peter and the Soviet Union being the worst excesses) and still does occur to a lesser degree today, you have grossly overstated the situation; there appears to be a great deal you don't know (such as historical position of the ROC as the voice of the people in checking the power of the czars into antiquity, etc...); and you have wrongly condemned millions of genuine Christian priests and parishioners in your ignorance and stubborn prejudice.
Since I don't even believe you know much about their history, I'm going to give you guys the dime tour.
The Russians accepted the Christian faith from Constantinople where Greek was still spoken. The first Greek missionaries to the Slavs, Cyril (826–69) and Methodius (c. 815–85), devised the forerunner of the Cyrillic alphabet and presented Russia with Greek translations of biblical and liturgical texts.
For about 700 years from the conversion of Vladimir to the 18th century, the Russian Church had a rich ethical and spiritual life also blessed with a literal wealth of Greek patristic theology in Slavonic translation. Read Ilarion ‘On Law and Grace’ produced in 1051 and see the strong theoretical emphasis on the sufficiency of faith for salvation (which parallels with Lutheranism nicely though it preceded it) while exhorting a very practical insistence on good works for Christian living.
But it's true that Russian theology was hampered by oppression from the Mongols all the way through the Soviet Union and somewhat beyond. As a result, we don't see a lot of great thinkers being produced as occurred in the West with the Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and a host of others.
As Russia emerged from Mongol subjugation in the reign of the Grand Prince of Moscow, Ivan III (1462–1595), Constantinople had fallen to the Turks. Russia, with Moscow as its new power center, assumed the mantle of empire from Constantinople. The Russian Church appropriated more Greek theology at this time from the West but didn't develop it until the Protestant Reformation and the pressure of Catholic expansion in the Counter-Reformation two centuries later.
Ironically, it was at that time tsarist ideology unfortunately began to dominate Russian theology to tsarist ideology, partly explicable because of the fact that Russian theology derives from Constantinople rather than from Rome. Constantinople was never without a Christian emperor (apart from the brief reign of Julian the Apostate, 361–63) from its establishment to its fall in 1453. Consequently the patriarch of Constantinople could never claim to be the head of all Christendom as the pope did, for he always stood in the shadow of the ‘sacred’ emperor and his quasi-divine office. The patriarchy of Moscow was established in 1589, bringing the number of Eastern patriarchs back to the traditional early-church number of five (Rome being no longer counted).
At this time, Rome firmly set the direction for Russian theology for two centuries by attempting to bring the Russian church under its influence, since Russia could no longer look to Turkish-ruled Constantinople. The project was facilitated by the fact that most of what is now western Russia then belonged to Poland, or, more properly, to Lithuania, in the commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. Poland itself was just recovering from an affair with Protestantism, in which the majority of the nobility briefly embraced the Reformation. Having brought most of the Protestants back into its fold, Catholicism turned east, where a few Polish and Lithuanian Catholics lived in the midst of an Orthodox majority. The flood of Catholic propaganda called forth an Orthodox reaction: Prince Konstantin Ostrozhsky (1526–1608) established a printing-house to publish classical Byzantine theological works in translation, and in 1581 it brought out the Ostrog Bible, the first complete Bible in Slavonic.
King Zygmunt (Sigismund) III of Poland convened a church council at Brest in 1596. The resulting Union of Brest established the unity (i.e. churches in communion with Rome but retaining their own language, liturgy, etc.) and, with mixed success, placed the Russians and Ukrainians in Zygmunt’s realm under papal hegemony.
The struggle to preserve a distinctive Orthodox tradition was waged at times in alliance with Protestantism against Roman Catholic influence, at times against Protestantism under Roman Catholic influence, and at times against both.
Then came Peter Mogila (1596-1646) publishing his Confession of Faith with Protestant emphases which was accepted in 1643 as the confession of the Eastern churches and in 1645 a Small Catechism again promoting Protestant tendencies.
Thus the situation prevailing at the end of the 17th century was one in which Russian theology, without changing its officially anti-Roman and anti-Protestant stand, was permeated with Protestant influences.
Following that came Tsar Peter the Great (1682–1721) promoting the Westernization of Russian religion in the context of his efforts to Westernize all of Russian life. The theme was a rejection of the Calvinistic bondage of the will but ‘saved by faith alone’ though faith is never ‘lonely’ but to be accompanied by good works as Ilarion had taught 600 years earlier all codified in a new Russian church constitution named the Ecclesiastical Regulations of 1721.
But tsar Peter overreached because he abolished the patriarchate and created the ‘Holy Synod’ in its stead, a move that placed the Russian Church thoroughly under imperial control.
Later in the 18th century, Platon Levshin (1737–1812) reformed this perpetuating the Protestant tendencies relying heavily on the Lutheran theologian Quenstedt. Although Levshin followed the Orthodox tradition in denouncing ‘popery, Calvinism, and Lutheranism’ as ‘devastating heresies’, in fact he held Lutheran views on the sole authority of Scripture as well as on the church as the company of believers rather than an institution.
In summary, Russian Orthodox theology has been consistently a conservative force, but while it preserved major elements of patristic Greek thought, it treated them as though they were Russian. From its very beginnings it had strongly nationalistic and eschatological overtones, assigning Russia a prominent role in the conversion of the world and in the culmination of salvation-history.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, Russian theology was deeply influenced by Protestantism, first by Lutheran scholasticism, and then by pietism. Throughout the period 1453–1801, it was never original or independent, but always borrowing, first from the Greeks, then from the Germans.
Nevertheless, it has consistently been eager to claim a special destiny for Moscow and the Russian people, whether in terms of the ‘third Rome’ (Filofei of Pskov), of the conversion of Asia (Leibniz), or in the ultimate conflicts of the end times (Jung-Stilling). Not being productive of original ideas, it has also produced very little heresy—which may help to explain the survival of the Russian Church through almost seven decades of communist oppression.
That brings us to the 19th century anyways... lol.
