Although his destruction of pagan idols (e.g., holy birches) earned him the wrath of some Permians, the metropolitan of Kiev, Pimen, created the bishopric of Perm in 1383 and consecrated Stephen as its first bishop.

[12][13] The effect of the new bishopric and the conversion of the Vychegda Perm threatened the control that Novgorod had been enjoying over the region's tribute.

[12] In 1385, Aleksei, the archbishop of Novgorod (r. 1359–1388), sent a Novgorodian army to oust the new establishment, but the new bishopric, with the help of the city of Ustyug, was able to defeat it.

These events had immense repercussions for the future of northern Russia, and formed but one part of a larger trend which saw more and more of the Finnic North and its precious pelts passing from the control of Novgorod to Moscow.

[7][14] The historian Serge Aleksandrovich Zenkovsky wrote that Stephen of Perm, along with Epiphanius the Wise, Sergius of Radonezh, and the great painter Andrei Rublev, signified "the Russian spiritual and cultural revival of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century".