In this paper I would like to explore how certain historical and political events were reflected in the printed liturgical texts and especially hymnographic poetry and to illustrate how the Church and the State used printed liturgical texts as information technologies to exert their political and social control over people, and they way this information was encoded and distributed. I will includ examples from the beginning of the printing era in Russia in the 16th century throughout the Synodal period, with the main focus on the hymnographic material from the 17th and 18th centuries.
