The project began in 1813, when the newly founded Russian Bible Society, working with Tsar Alexander I's support, took up a Russian translation to stand alongside the church's Old Church Slavonic Bible rather than replace it. A New Testament followed within a few years. Conservative churchmen saw a vernacular Russian Bible as a threat to the authority of the Slavonic text, and in 1826 Nicholas I closed the Society down and stopped the work for three decades.
Translation resumed only under Alexander II. In 1858 the Holy Synod authorized a new Russian version and gave the work to the theological academies of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan and Kyiv, with Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow as its guiding and final editor. The New Testament, translated from the Greek printed text known as the Textus Receptus, appeared in 1862. The Old Testament was the harder argument to settle: Filaret pressed for going behind the Slavonic Bible to the Hebrew itself, which churchmen loyal to the Slavonic's own Greek-based text resisted, and the Synod did not grant formal permission to translate from the Masoretic Hebrew until that same year, 1862, by which point most of the Old Testament had already been done on that basis anyway.
The complete Bible — Old and New Testaments bound together in this new Russian rather than in Church Slavonic — appeared in 1876, from the Synodal Printing House, which is where the translation's common name comes from. Its Old Testament did not come out purely Hebrew: where the Septuagint the Slavonic tradition carried disagreed with the Masoretic Text, the Greek reading was often kept too, generally set as an alternative in brackets, so the finished book still carries a real debt to the Greek Bible standing behind the older Slavonic one.
It has had no serious rival since. Russian Orthodox, Catholic, Baptist and other Protestant readers all reach for some form of this same text, and its register has marked literary Russian the way the King James Version marked English. In this corpus it holds 66 books, the Protestant canon rather than the fuller Orthodox one, and it is the only Russian Bible here, so a Russian interface opens on it.