Quakers have been called to “speak Truth to power” in Russia since the 1600s.

In 1697 Tsar Peter the Great was counseled by Friends about the condition of the serfs and the need for public education. He attended several meetings for worship while in England.

A Quaker doctor was asked by Catherine the Great to come to Russia and inoculate her and her grandsons against smallpox. When Catherine’s grandson Alexander was the Tsar, he attended meetings for worship in England, discussed the peace testimony with Friends, and “fully assented” to it.

In 1817 Alexander requested a Quaker engineer be sent to supervise work near St. Petersburg. Daniel Wheeler and his family answered this call and lived near St. Petersburg for 30 years, draining the bogs and modeling land reform and farming techniques. Jane Wheeler died there in 1832, and her daughter in 1837.

In 1854 a deputation of Friends called on Tsar Nicholas I in attempts to prevent the Crimean war.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, Friends from Britain and America worked with refugees and other victims of the famines, wars, and relocations to create feeding centers, hospitals, orphanages, schools, and cottage industries. Perhaps the best-known example of Quaker relief work in Russia was Friends’ participation in the international response to the famine of 1921. In the year 1921 alone, British and American Friends were feeding about 212,000 people.

Two British Quaker women maintained until 1931 the last presence of any western religious organization in Moscow until close to the end of the Soviet era.

During the Soviet period many Friends visited the USSR in an effort to reduce the tensions between east and west. British and American Friends service agencies cooperated with a Soviet friendship organization in an annual “Tripartite” exchange of young adults, many of whom remained involved in citizen diplomacy.

American Friends from the pastoral and evangelical traditions were among those Christians who participated in the CoMission consortium in and after 1992, responding to the Russian government's invitation to Christian teachers to help teach ethics in Russian schools. A few years later, Alaska Yearly Meeting Friends began pastoral visits to their ethnic brothers and sisters in eastern Siberia. The American Friends Service Committee and several local Friends meetings and churches in the western USA participated in the material aid program of the Alaskan Friends of Chukotka, an ecumenical organization providing winter clothing, school supplies, sewing and fishing equipment, toys and medical supplies to that economically hard-hit region of Arctic Russia.

In 1983, Russian historian Tatiana Pavlova came into contact with British Friends. Over the next few years, occasional visits and meetings for worship gradually resulted in a Friends worship group initially hosted in Tatiana Pavlova’s apartment. As the meeting outgrew her home, it moved to the basement of a Russian Orthodox church; later it moved again to a school, to the premises of Friends House Moscow, eventually to larger and more public quarters. It is now the largest and most stable of the small groups in several parts of Russia who gather to learn about and worship in the manner of Friends.

Friends House Moscow is at least a partial fulfillment of a long-standing dream of many Friends to establish a center for spiritual and ethical collaboration in Moscow. After much preliminary work by the East-West Relations Committee of Pacific Yearly Meeting of Friends, Friends House Moscow was established in November 1994 and moved into its first premises in January 1996.