What happens with a soul after one's death according to Eastern Orthodox doctrine? Inspired by this question and answers for it: what happens with a soul after one's death according to Eastern Orthodox doctrine? I'm interested in all variants.
OK I'm finally getting around to answering this question. Unfortunately I'm limited on time so this is a summary of the Orthodox position. First of all, Orthodoxy's entire anthropology differs from Western Christianity (no original guilt/concupiscence). As such, their soteriology doesn't begin in the same place as Western Christianity and thus concludes differently. Many Western Protestants emphasize "getting saved" so that you don't go to hell when you die. The emphasis often has more to do with avoiding hell than going to heaven. But even heaven is not the goal nor focal point of Orthodoxy.

The point is to become "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4), being united with Christ and thus escaping corruption and death. As 1 Corinthians 15:22-28 says,


  For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive.
  But each in his own order: Christ, the firstfruits; then when Christ
  comes, those who belong to him. Then comes the end, when he hands over
  the kingdom to God the Father, when he has brought to an end all rule
  and all authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all
  his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be eliminated is
  death. For he has put everything in subjection under his feet. But
  when it says “everything” has been put in subjection, it is clear that
  this does not include the one who put everything in subjection to him.
  And when all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will be
  subjected to the one who subjected everything to him, so that God
  may be all in all.


And so our emphasis is on Christ's defeat of sin, death, and Satan - and that this victory means that one day "God will be all in all." In other words, there will be no way to escape from God's presence. "Heaven" is not some place up in the sky that hides us from the underworld. "Hell" is not a place and it is not the absence of God. This also means that dying and going to heaven isn't the end of the story nor is it the focus. Eastern Orthodox Christianity is about "life after life after death" (to borrow a phrase coined by N.T. Wright), i.e. life after the final judgment, after the bodily resurrection (the notion of a disembodied eternal existence in a purely spiritual heaven or becoming angels are Gnostic concepts). This is important because Orthodox do not think of hell as a "place," it's more of a metaphor or concept. Everyone will be in God's loving presence when they die, but for some that will be paradise and for others it will be torment. Much of the Western concepts of heaven and hell are derived more from pagan cultures than from the scriptures, which only used these existing cultural terms to hint at transcendent mysteries.

As to what happens after physical death (other than being in God's presence), no one really knows (this is freely admitted by most Orthodox scholars). The best we have is speculation and the "hints" we get in the Bible. As such, there are a variety of "theories" in Orthodoxy (but this speculation is often not helpful). But where everyone agrees is that we go to be in God's unfiltered presence.

A note about praying for the dead. Presently, when we die, we all go to be in God's presence until we await the final judgment and bodily resurrection. We believe that it may be possible for individuals to change their disposition towards God's love after death. This is not dogma, but we hold out hope for this. Since death is a defeated foe (it's just not annihilated yet), we also ask deceased saints to pray for us since they are now in God's presence and also mystically present with us in worship. After the final judgment, it will likely be too late to change one's disposition, but we hold out hope that all might come to know God's love as a wonderful thing for all eternity (see more on this here). I don't have time to elaborate on this much more here, and it wouldn't be entirely on topic anyways.

If you'd like to read more in depth about this, check out this article.