History will probably remember 2020 as the year of the Coronavirus. It is also the 300th anniversary of a relatively forgotten but still influential Church synod.

At that time, what is today Ukraine was divided between Russia and Poland-Lithuania. Having defeated the Kozaks’ last bid for freedom at Poltava in 1709, Peter I’s autocratic, expansionist Russian empire was on the rise. Sweden was on the wane. The Polish-Lithuanian “nobles’ republic,” with its Saxon king and parliamentary system, was weak and disorganized, gradually becoming a virtual Russian protectorate. The Patriarchate of Moscow, having illegally annexed the Kyivan Orthodox Metropoli­tanate in 1685-1686, would be abolished in 1721 under Tsar Peter’s reforms, which made the Church practically an arm of the state.