I'm interpreting your question's phrasing to mean Orthodox as in Orthodox Christian, so I apologize if I've made an initial category error that renders the rest of this answer irrelevant. Working under the assumption that I've correctly interpreted your question though, I think the answer is actually one that is quite interesting.

In short, yes there were significant witch hunts in seventeenth century Russia (as well as earlier on) that historians outside the region weren't overly aware of before the late seventies. This was a pretty revisionist position at the time when it appeared because most of western European thought vis-a-vis the Orthodox Christian world had been something along the lines of Hugh Trevor-Roper's assessment that the 1054 Great Schism had mostly insulated the Slavic countries from the more abject terrors of the sixteenth and seventeenth century witch hunting hysteria. [1] Just another quick note here, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and other East Slavic countries have a pretty long and dark history of pogroms against Jews. While not 'officially' done under the auspices of hunting ved'ma (witches) or vedun (warlocks) the alleged crimes pocha (roughly, wrecking or ruination) were often the same so I think it bears keeping in mind when discussing this question. Enumerating the various pogroms and their underlying causes is probably a bit outside the intended scope of your question, so I'll just leave it at that acknowledgement.

The discovery of the source material that historians looking at these stories use dates back to the turn of the twentieth century when a Russian historian called Nikolai Novembergskii was researching pre-Petrine (as in, before Pyotr the Great) medicine in the archives of the Ministry of Justice in Moscow and came across a whole bunch of documents detailing the aforementioned witch hunts. He published his surprise findings (i.e. they surprised him, because they weren't what he was looking for per se) in a 1906 volume called Kholdovstvo v Moskovskoi Rusi XVII Stoletiia (Witchcraft in Moskovy Rus' in the 17th Century) showing that inside the country, awareness of the witch craze predated its western acknowledgement by about 70 years, which I think one can attribute to the generally low level of quality English-language scholarship of Mother Rus' which persists to this day.

Likewise, the go-to source for Medieval Russian study, Nestor's Primary Chronicle describes some isolated incidents of witch-centric persecution occurring as far back as 1024 and 1071, the former being outside the range of your question but the latter just barely making it in. Both of these incidents were one-off type events where a group of elderly people and then exclusively women (of all ages) were blamed for localized food shortages, sent to trial for pocha and subsequently put to death. [2] There's also mention of incidental witch trials by the twelfth century missionary and traveler Abu Hamid al-Gharnati who notes (translation not mine):

Every twenty years the old women of this country become guilty [sic] of witchcraft, which causes great concern among the people. Then they seize all those [women] they find in this area and throw them feet and hands tied [together] into a big river that passes through there. [3]

Furthermore, but again, isolated: in the thirteenth century there lived an Archimandrite and Bishop (the former title denoting someone who is sort of like a manager of several monasteries) called Serapion of Vladimir who mentioned witchcraft by name during a cycle of sermons he issued during a similar famine. So we can see a pattern starting to emerge here: when famine strikes (a not completely uncommon event on the territory of Rus', the Moscovy Tsardom, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, or any of Russia's other pre-modern incarnations), the torches come out against supposed witches. Serapion is more famous for proselytizing on the Mongol conquest of Kiev from 1237 to 1242 as divine punishment from God for the peoples' sin and unbelief, and his mention of witchcraft was surprisingly in defense of the accused, famously challenging the people of Rus' to:

Pray to these sorcerers, and worship them, and make sacrifices to them-- let them rule the community, and call down rain, and bring warmth, and command the earth to bear fruit! [4]

Essentially mocking the idea that man in the form of magician (as opposed to God alone) would have the power to cause famine and misfortune.

So that's all occurred and we're still not even at the big show-- the seventeenth century witch trials, so without any further adieu let's dive in.

First of all, why did the seventeenth century see a more systematic approach to the persecution of suspected witches? The answer is partially found by examining the role of the church in Rus' (by then the Moscovy Tsardom of course), specifically, the mid-seventeenth century raskol (schism) whereby the reforming Patriarch of Russia, Nikon, began to move to consciously re-associate the Russian Orthodox Church with the Greek Orthodox Church. After the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the aforementioned conquest of Rus' by the Mongols, significant physical barriers caused these two nominally ecumenical churches to grow not insignificantly apart. Thus, you had a Russian church which had some undeniably Slavic pagan influence upon it which Nikon sought to stamp out. There was a movement in Rus' that resisted these reforms and embraced the Russo-centric form of Christianity that came to be known as staraya vera (old belief). This is the impetus of the raskol and one which resulted in ramped-up persecution of non-believers, and specifically, Old Believers. There were a number of changes to the church which may seem trivial to us now, such as making the sign of the cross with two instead of three fingers, but in the world of Orthodoxy, these changes were quite serious and therefore the defiance of the Old Believers was a serious affront. Orthodoxy (as a concept not a specific group) places tremendous importance on the accepted canon based on specific authority. Perhaps you'd challenge such persecution as fundamentally different from quote-unquote witch-hunting, but I'd argue that (besides the fact that there was also actual hunting of witches and warlocks during this period) the persecution of the Old Believers bears a lot of similarity to, say, the Catholic persecution of the Cathars during the Dominican Inquisition.

Two additional similarities with the western European witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth century also jump out at us from the source material immediately: the method of trial, and the form of punishment. The typical method of determining whether or not the accused was a witch was the so-called judicium aquae frigidae or trial by cold water-- colloquially called swimming the witch. So basically you had this poor person stripped down to their skivvies, bound, and tossed into a nearby body of water. If they sank, they were innocent and (attempted to be) pulled ashore to safety (I don't think I need to explain why issues such as risk tolerance played a large role in ensuring that plenty of people eventually deemed innocent drowned as their judges looked on), if they floated they were supposed to have spurned the sacrament of baptism and found guilty and sentenced to death. The most common method of dispatch-- burning at the stake-- again conjures up the same type of images as we know from western Europe.

Another factor to consider is the political one, during the Time of Troubles (1598-1613) whereby various Russian noble families battled with each other for control of the Moscovy throne, rival clans would often level accusations of witchcraft at their opponents-- the Romanovs, who would go on to succeed to the throne at the end of the period were called usurpers and bewitchers more than once for commanding the confidence of at least a plurality of the Moscovy boyar-electors who sought to bring them to power.

Thus, from the isolated incidents of witch persecution which occurred in the lead-up to the sixteenth century, the formalized persecution of pagan and pagan-ish worshipers during the seventeenth century, and the overall parallels one can draw between the substantive practices themselves-- we can see that not only were there notable witch hunts at the behest of the Orthodox church, they resembled a lot the analogous persecutions that occurred in the western part of the continent around the same time and for around about the same reasons.

Sources and Further Reading

Nestor; The Russian Primary Chronicle; ca. 1110 [2] (see pp. 69)

Roper-Trevor, Hugh; The European Witch Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; 1969 [1]

Zguta, Russell; Witchcraft Trials in Seventeenth Century Russia; 1977 [3]