Any church invoked as helping Russia become a great power should voice objections for as a great power Russia persecuted all Christians, and then used the Orthodox church to persecute other churches.
And now,
Russia’s Orthodox Church, despite decades of brutal repression under Soviet rule, is putting its trust in the KGB to ensure that a remarkable religious revival does not fade with the departure of President Vladimir Putin.
In an unusual move, Alexei II, the Church’s patriarch, has endorsed deputy prime minister Dmitry Medvedev ahead of next week’s presidential election.
The influence of his support on Russia’s estimated 100 million Orthodox worshippers is immense.
It also illustrates the unholy alliance the Church has forged with the Kremlin since Mr Putin came to power eight years ago....
Although he has never confirmed it, the patriarch, like the president, is a former KGB agent codenamed Drozdov, according to Soviet archives opened to experts in the 1990s.
Many in the Orthodox hierarchy are also accused of working as KGB informers, a fact that critics say the Church has never fully acknowledged.
“Essentially, the Orthodox Church is one of the only Soviet institutions that has never been reformed,” said one priest, who declined to be identified for fear that he could be defrocked. That fate already befell another colleague, Gleb Yakunin, in the 1990s when he called on Church leaders with KGB links to repent.
Yet it is not just the KGB that binds the Church and the Kremlin. In the Tsarist era, the Church was a committed supporter of the imperial rallying cry “orthodoxy, autocracy and nationhood.”...
Priests are regularly seen on television sprinkling holy water on bombers and even nuclear missiles, a blessing that reinforces Mr Putin’s own militaristic philosophy.
The Church has even supported Mr Putin’s repression of democracy, with a senior bishop last year comparing human rights activists to traitors.
When a prison chaplain suggested that the jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a personal enemy of the president, was a political prisoner, he was promptly defrocked.
Late last year, Sergei Taratukhin - who served five years in a Soviet gulag for defying the authorities - recanted, falling to his knees in front of television cameras and won a partial reprieve. He is now employed as a rubbish collector at the cathedral in the far-eastern city of Chita, near where Khodorkovsky is jailed.-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1579638/Orthodox-Church-unholy-alliance-with-Putin.html
Religious non-conformists were viewed as dangerous to the state and treated as such. The closer they were to Orthodoxy theologically, (often) the worse the treatment. Read up on the treatment of the "Old Believers" and the Byzantine Catholics under tsarism.