I think that many Orthodox today are so (rightly) horrified by the Soviet atrocities that they gloss over the state of Russia before the Soviets took over.
Clergy education was abysmal, and the clergy often functioned like a sort of priestly class. Clericalism ran amok. The hoped-for reforms initiated by Czar Alexander II died with him when he was assassinated, leaving the people to face his tyrannous successors' reactionary wrath. The church was under the thumb of a Lutheran-inspired caesaropapist authority, and did not respond to the needs of the people. The Patriarch of Moscow had not existed for centuries, having been abolished under Peter the Great.
A return to that sort of Russian Orthodox Church and that sort of Russia, or something like it, would be a return to the very Russia that produced the Soviets: An exchange of wrath for another vessel of wrath waiting to burst forth anew.