Only a few people know that the first Bible in Russian appeared only in 1876.
Unfortunately, official historiography tends to conceal many inconvenient facts, including the fact that the Church itself opposed the translation of the Bible into Russian.
For many centuries, most of the higher church authorities believed that the Bible should be exclusively in the hands of the clergy.
And people should not be given any opportunity to read, let alone study it on their own.
The ideas of translating the Holy Scripture into their native language were generally considered heretical (it is not known how they dealt with the initiative translators in Russia, but in Europe they did not burn a fire for such a thing).
However, Peter I believed that the Russian people definitely needed a Bible in their native language and entrusted this difficult task to the German theologian Johann Ernst Gluck in 1707.
It is difficult to say why Peter set a similar task for a Lutheran pastor and not for an Orthodox priest. But there is a version according to which Peter did not trust the Russian clergy after the church reforms he had undertaken.
Promotional video:
But Gluck dies just two years after the start of work, and all his developments mysteriously disappear.
They returned to the translation of the Bible only in 1813, after the creation of the Russian Bible Society and the personal permission of Emperor Alexander I.
The full version of the New Testament in Russian was published already in 1820.
In just a few years, the book has sold more than 40,000 copies.
But by the time the Old Testament was practically translated, all work on the project was stopped, and the Bible Society itself was closed.
The decision to close it was taken in April 1826 by Nicholas I personally with the active assistance of Metropolitan Seraphim, who insisted on public relations with some mystical and blasphemous false teachings.
Metropolitan Seraphim. One of the main initiators of the struggle against the Russian Bible in the 19th century.
After that, the entire circulation of the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) was burned in the furnaces of the brick factories of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
But the struggle with the Russian Bible did not end there.
At the end of 1824, the Catechism, compiled by Saint Philaret (the most prominent Orthodox theologian of the 19th century), was withdrawn from sale.
Metropolitan Filaret.
For the reason (just think about it) that the prayers and the texts of the Holy Scriptures were written in Russian.
After that, all work on the translation of the Bible was interrupted for almost 50 years.
In the 1870s, when the complete work on the Russian Bible (known as the Synodal) was being completed, the linguistic norms of the Russian language itself had already changed compared to what it was at the beginning of the 19th century, when most of the translation work was completed.
However, previous translations have remained largely unchanged due to the significant amount of work involved.
The synodal version becomes a kind of linguistic phenomenon that helped to form some of the distinctive Slavic features used both in the Russian language and in Russian literature to this day.