@Arella Mae,
Without claiming any expertise, i can tell you that it is no more like the Catholic Church than is any other branch of the Orthodox Church. In the 17th century, there was a crisis in the Russian church which was brought on by attempts to reform the church. To resolve the issues, the Russian Patriarch called on the Partiarch at Constantinople to appoint scholars to review the reformation of the Russian liturgy. Metropolitans (church officers) from the Greek church in Constantinople and in Greece and from the Syriac church in Damascus and Jerusalem either attended or sent representatives, and those representatives came to the conclusion that their liturgy should be modeled on the Greek liturgy, rather than their own ancient liturgy. Orthodox scholars from Kiev came to the same conclusion.
This lead to the great schism in the Russian Church, which divided it into Old Believers and "New Believers." (Except that nobody call the new believers new beleivers except the Old Believers; everybody called the Old Believers the Old Believers, including the Old Believers.) Thousands, perhaps millions of Old Believers took to the hills, either fleeing into the forests of the north, or the relative freedom of the Ukranian steppes. This all took place before Peter, who would be called Peter the Great, become Tsar. When he did become Tsar, he had the Old Believers in the northern forests rounded up. He didn't care what they believed, but he did care that they were evading imperial
ukases--laws based on the Tsar's autocratic power--which required them to provide labor service. Some of the communities barricaded themselves in their churches, and burned themselves up rather than submit to the "New Believers", like David Koresh and his idiot followers down in Texas--which was nonsense, of course, because the soldiers didn't care what they believed. When the priests of the Old Believers began to get old and die in the early 18th century, they asked the established Russian Orthodox church to educate their young men for the priesthood, which was agreed, so they were reconciled to that extent. I don't know if you recall the member Nimh, but he once told me that he had met Old Believers in the Ukraine, so they're alive and well.
Peter's father fought with Nikon over the control of the church, and as one could expect with a Tsar, he won. His son Peter made the church a bureaucratic organ of the empire, paying for the churches, monasteries and nunneries, and paying the members of the church a salary. The Bolshevik revolution did not so much actively destroy the church (they mostly ignored it, except for those church members who actively rebelled against their rule and joined the White Russians), as they simply jerked the rug out from under them. With no salaries being paid, and nobody paying for the maintenance of chuches and monasteries, they quickly fell into disrepair. Many of the monateries were later taken over for collective farms.
Once again, there is, or there should be, no real difference between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Greek Orothodox Church, nor the Orthodox Maronites and the Orthodox Syriacs. To learn about the schism in the Russian church, you could do a web search for Nikita Minin, who became the Patriarch Nikon. You'll probably find it easiest to search for "Patriarch Nikon."
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