The Russian Orthodox Church's history and development, which established it as an arm of the Tsarist state and an instrument of the perpetuation of Russia's unequal class system and anti-reform policies, made it a necessary object of destruction for the security of the Bolshevik revolution. The myth of the ‘Holy Russian land” was the founding idea of the Muscovite tsardom as it was developed by the Romanovs from the start of the seventeenth century. After …showed first 75 words of 2517 total…

…showed last 75 words of 2517 total…of the Russian Revolution. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996. Freeze, Gregory. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter-Reform. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime. London, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1974 - - - . The Russian Revolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1991. Seton-Watson, Hugh. The Russian Empire, 1801-1917. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Shanin, Theodore. The Awkward Class; Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910-1925. Oxford, 1972