Functional state of the Orthodox Church in the early twentieth century. was depicted in historical literature, usually in gloomy tones. Soviet historians in the contradictions of church life saw manifestations of the "crisis of the church in the conditions of capitalism," and various forms of church and community activity of the clergy endowed epithets with "reactionary" and "Black-Hundred monarchical". As a relic of the cultural past, which slowly died together with its guardian - autocracy, they considered the Orthodox Church and many foreign researchers. A number of Ukrainian historians depicted in the Orthodox Church all the Statehood and Russified, also holding the idea of ​​its complete decline.