On the last Sunday of January, the Russian Orthodox Church commemorates all those who died for their faith under the Soviet regime. These accounts of courage, strength and steadfastness emerged out of a period of intense tragedy. Hundreds upon thousands of people were harassed, tortured and killed for their beliefs, from bishops to laypeople, and though the Communist government sought to eradicate the Church, in the end it could not. Today, the title “martyr”—from the Greek μάρτυς—is tinged by images of suicide bombers, but the nonviolent new martyrs of Russia, who gave up their lives rather than their faith, recall the original meaning of the word—“witness”.
The Russian Orthodox Church has existed for over one thousand years, originating with the efforts of Byzantine missionaries. In the late 900s, Prince Vladimir of Kiev baptized his family and people, declaring Orthodox Christianity the official religion of Russia. Over the years the Church flourished, producing many saints and becoming ingrained in Russian culture. Churches and monasteries sprang up everywhere, adorned with icons in the well-known Russian style. The sacred traditions and holidays were beloved and respected; the national anthem was a hymn sung to celebrate the cross of Christ (“O Lord, save Thy people…”). The Orthodox faith provided not only strength and comfort to believers, but a common ground for the Russian people.
However, this was all to change with the Russian Revolution of 1917, which was caused by the people’s dissatisfaction with the government. Peasants had been oppressed for centuries by the nobility, who took the benefit from their hard work, and Communism provided an attractive alternative. Russia’s catastrophic performance in World War I led to the widespread unpopularity of Tsar Nicholas II. Some were also dissatisfied with the fact that the Church itself had always been tied closely with affairs of state. In 1917, the Bolsheviks, or Russian Communists, seized power from the Tsar and set up their own government led by Vladimir Lenin, first holding the imperial family hostage and then brutally murdering them and their servants with guns and bayonets. They viewed the Church as the enemy—it was the faith of the Tsar and of Old Russia, recalling all that they were fighting to change. Russia became the Soviet Union, an atheist state which tolerated no Christianity.
The first years of Soviet power were the most brutal with regard to the Church. The fervent new Communist government was the first with an ideological priority to eliminate religion. Nearly all seminaries were closed, and religious publications were banned. In 1922 some church leaders, like Metropolitan Veniamin in Petrograd, refused to surrender valuable church property so that the government could sell it and redistribute the money, and this was enough to render the regime ruthless. Thousands of clergy were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps located in the remote regions of Russia wherein they were left to perish, while many more were subjected to psychological torture designed to remove their religious convictions and often also destroyed their personalities. The means of their executions were diverse and inconceivably cruel. Some were drowned, like Bishop Hermogenes, who in 1918 along with several other believers was thrown off the steamboat Petrograd into the river Tura with a stone tied around his neck. Others were burned alive, as was the priest Joachim Frolov in 1918 in the province of Amur. In 1918, a group of members of the Russian royal family and their servants, among them the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorevna and nun Barbara who are now commemorated as saints, were thrown alive along with grenades into a mine shaft in Alapaevsk. The Archbishop Joachim was crucified upside down before the altar in the cathedral in Sebastopol in 1920. Monasteries were ransacked—the great monastery of Solovki on the White Sea became a concentration camp—and hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns were murdered. Churches were systematically closed and destroyed, or turned into museums or warehouses. Within the first five years of the Soviet regime, 28 bishops and over 1,200 priests were dead. By the beginning of World War II, less than 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 prior to the Revolution.
During World War II, the Church experienced a brief resurgence under Stalin, who allowed churches to operate legally once again in order to garner patriotism and national morale, as he saw that the Church inspired people in a way that the party could not. However, Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-religions campaigns in the ‘60s, continued by Leonid Brezhnev in the ‘70s and ‘80s, tightened the strict laws that had been in existence before, intensifying atheist education in schools and replacing clergy members with government intelligence agents. It is estimated that 50,000 clergy were killed by the end of the Khrushchev era, in addition to an untold number of laity. In the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a new attitude of religious acceptance, partly due to the government’s failure to eliminate religion by then and partly because of the millennial anniversary in 1988 of Russia’s conversion to Christianity.
Despite all the exertions of Soviet power, nothing could extinguish the Russian Orthodox faith. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the government embraced the Church, and the numbers of faithful in Russia grew to surpass their previous numbers by far—the practicing Orthodox Christians in Russia are currently estimated at between 21 and 28 million. Churches were and are being rebuilt from nearly ruined states: by 1996, the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, which had been demolished in 1931, was fully restored to its former glory. Though Marxist doctrine predicted that in a Communist state, religious faith would eventually die out, every action and redoubled effort of the government proved futile. Even through massive levels of prolonged suffering, the stories of the martyred only testify to the endurance of their faith, which has persisted throughout all.
The Russian Orthodox Church has existed for over one thousand years, originating with the efforts of Byzantine missionaries. In the late 900s, Prince Vladimir of Kiev baptized his family and people, declaring Orthodox Christianity the official religion of Russia. Over the years the Church flourished, producing many saints and becoming ingrained in Russian culture. Churches and monasteries sprang up everywhere, adorned with icons in the well-known Russian style. The sacred traditions and holidays were beloved and respected; the national anthem was a hymn sung to celebrate the cross of Christ (“O Lord, save Thy people…”). The Orthodox faith provided not only strength and comfort to believers, but a common ground for the Russian people.
However, this was all to change with the Russian Revolution of 1917, which was caused by the people’s dissatisfaction with the government. Peasants had been oppressed for centuries by the nobility, who took the benefit from their hard work, and Communism provided an attractive alternative. Russia’s catastrophic performance in World War I led to the widespread unpopularity of Tsar Nicholas II. Some were also dissatisfied with the fact that the Church itself had always been tied closely with affairs of state. In 1917, the Bolsheviks, or Russian Communists, seized power from the Tsar and set up their own government led by Vladimir Lenin, first holding the imperial family hostage and then brutally murdering them and their servants with guns and bayonets. They viewed the Church as the enemy—it was the faith of the Tsar and of Old Russia, recalling all that they were fighting to change. Russia became the Soviet Union, an atheist state which tolerated no Christianity.
The first years of Soviet power were the most brutal with regard to the Church. The fervent new Communist government was the first with an ideological priority to eliminate religion. Nearly all seminaries were closed, and religious publications were banned. In 1922 some church leaders, like Metropolitan Veniamin in Petrograd, refused to surrender valuable church property so that the government could sell it and redistribute the money, and this was enough to render the regime ruthless. Thousands of clergy were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps located in the remote regions of Russia wherein they were left to perish, while many more were subjected to psychological torture designed to remove their religious convictions and often also destroyed their personalities. The means of their executions were diverse and inconceivably cruel. Some were drowned, like Bishop Hermogenes, who in 1918 along with several other believers was thrown off the steamboat Petrograd into the river Tura with a stone tied around his neck. Others were burned alive, as was the priest Joachim Frolov in 1918 in the province of Amur. In 1918, a group of members of the Russian royal family and their servants, among them the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorevna and nun Barbara who are now commemorated as saints, were thrown alive along with grenades into a mine shaft in Alapaevsk. The Archbishop Joachim was crucified upside down before the altar in the cathedral in Sebastopol in 1920. Monasteries were ransacked—the great monastery of Solovki on the White Sea became a concentration camp—and hundreds of thousands of monks and nuns were murdered. Churches were systematically closed and destroyed, or turned into museums or warehouses. Within the first five years of the Soviet regime, 28 bishops and over 1,200 priests were dead. By the beginning of World War II, less than 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 prior to the Revolution.
During World War II, the Church experienced a brief resurgence under Stalin, who allowed churches to operate legally once again in order to garner patriotism and national morale, as he saw that the Church inspired people in a way that the party could not. However, Nikita Khrushchev’s anti-religions campaigns in the ‘60s, continued by Leonid Brezhnev in the ‘70s and ‘80s, tightened the strict laws that had been in existence before, intensifying atheist education in schools and replacing clergy members with government intelligence agents. It is estimated that 50,000 clergy were killed by the end of the Khrushchev era, in addition to an untold number of laity. In the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced a new attitude of religious acceptance, partly due to the government’s failure to eliminate religion by then and partly because of the millennial anniversary in 1988 of Russia’s conversion to Christianity.
Despite all the exertions of Soviet power, nothing could extinguish the Russian Orthodox faith. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the government embraced the Church, and the numbers of faithful in Russia grew to surpass their previous numbers by far—the practicing Orthodox Christians in Russia are currently estimated at between 21 and 28 million. Churches were and are being rebuilt from nearly ruined states: by 1996, the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, which had been demolished in 1931, was fully restored to its former glory. Though Marxist doctrine predicted that in a Communist state, religious faith would eventually die out, every action and redoubled effort of the government proved futile. Even through massive levels of prolonged suffering, the stories of the martyred only testify to the endurance of their faith, which has persisted throughout all.
Resources Cited:
Russian Orthodox Church Wikipedia article (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Orthodox_Church).
Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union Wikipedia article (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union).
History of the Russian Orthodox Church (russian-crafts.com/customs/russian-church-history.html).
All Saints of North America Orthodox Church website (allsaintsofamerica.org/martyrs/nmruss.html).
Various individual testimonies.
