The Scale of the Persecution

The statistical conscience of the collection. The Soviet persecution of the Church was, by absolute numbers, the largest in Christian history — but its exact scale is genuinely disputed, and the popular literature routinely inflates it by conflating three different quantities. This file gives the casualty figures as named scholarly ranges, keeps sharp the difference between those repressed, those executed, and those canonized, and names the principal sources: the PSTGU database, the Memorial data, Yakovlev’s Rehabilitation-Commission figures, and the lower-bound estimates of Nathaniel Davis.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

Three Numbers, Not One

The single commonest error in writing about the New Martyrs is to treat one number as if it answered every question. In fact there are at least three distinct quantities, each much larger or much smaller than the others, and honesty requires keeping them apart:

  1. The repressed — all those arrested, imprisoned, exiled, sent to the camps, or otherwise persecuted for their connection to the Church, whether or not they were killed. This is the largest number.
  2. The executed — those actually shot or worked to death for their faith. A subset of the repressed, but still very large.
  3. The canonized — those the Russian Orthodox Church has formally glorified as New Martyrs and Confessors. This is by far the smallest number, in the low thousands, and it is a deliberate, evidence-bound subset, not an estimate of the total.

Because these three are routinely blurred, a figure like “a hundred thousand martyrs” can be simultaneously defensible (as an estimate of clergy executed in the worst years) and grossly misleading (if read as the number canonized, which is under two thousand). Every figure below is labelled with which quantity it measures and which source gives it.

The Executed and Repressed: Named Ranges

The scale is disputed because the primary evidence — the NKVD’s own archives — was sealed for most of the Soviet period, partially opened in the 1990s, and re-restricted thereafter (see The Documentary Record), so that scholars work from incomplete and unevenly accessible files. The result is a genuine range, and the honest course is to report it as one.

[Disputed: the number of Orthodox clergy and church people arrested and executed in the Soviet persecution is given in a wide range by different methods and sources. (a) The highest, most-cited figures come from Alexander Yakovlev, chairman of the post-Soviet Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, who reported the Commission’s data that in 1937 some 136,900 Orthodox clergy were arrested and 85,300 shot, and in 1938 some 28,300 arrested and 21,500 shot — on the order of 165,000 arrested and 106,800 executed in those two years alone (Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Yale University Press, 2002, ch. 9). These figures are widely repeated, but critics note that they depend on how broadly “clergy” and “church people” are defined and on extrapolation from incomplete data, and may conflate ordained clergy with a wider class of religious persons. (b) A markedly lower estimate is given by Nathaniel Davis, who, counting clergy and monastics together, put the number killed by the end of the 1930s at roughly 80,000 (Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 2nd ed., Westview, 2003, on the demographic collapse of the clergy). (c) The documented count — actual named individuals whose repression for the faith is established from archival records — stands, in the PSTGU database “За Христа пострадавшие,” at over 36,000 biographical records (PSTGU, pstgu.ru; database directed by N. E. Emelyanov), a figure that is a floor, not a ceiling, since it counts only cases so far documented. No single number is certain; this collection reports the range and its methods and inflates nothing.]

Several structural facts about the scale are, however, firmly attested and less disputable than the aggregate body-count:

  • The near-total destruction of the visible Church. On the eve of the revolution the Russian Church had on the order of 54,000–55,000 parishes and tens of thousands of clergy; by 1939, after two decades of closures and the Great Terror, the number of functioning churches in the whole USSR had fallen to a few hundred, and the number of bishops at liberty and able to function to a mere handful — commonly given as about four ruling hierarchs still at their posts (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, SVS Press, 1984, vol. 1, on the collapse of the institutional Church by 1939; Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 2003). Whatever the exact number killed, the institution was brought to the edge of visible extinction.
  • The two great waves. The killing was not evenly spread but concentrated in identifiable waves: the Civil War and the church-valuables campaign of 1917–1922, and above all the Great Terror of 1937–1938, when the bulk of the executions of clergy occurred (Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve, Moscow, 1999; see The Terror of the 1930s). The Butovo firing range outside Moscow, where over 20,000 people were shot in fourteen months of 1937–38, is the emblem of this concentration (see The Butovo Firing Range).

The Memorial and PSTGU Data

Two documentation projects underlie the more careful figures, and they represent two complementary approaches.

The Memorial society, the independent Russian human-rights and historical organization founded in the late 1980s, compiled and published the largest general databases of victims of Soviet political repression, drawing on regional NKVD/KGB archives and rehabilitation records; its data are not specific to the Church but provide the base population of the repressed from which church-specific counts are drawn (Memorial’s databases of the repressed, base.memo.ru; Memorial was liquidated as an organization by Russian court order in December 2021, a fact itself part of the contested memory — see Memory and Controversy).

The PSTGU database “За Христа пострадавшие” (“For Christ the Suffering”), maintained by St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University for the Humanities in Moscow, is the church-specific counterpart: a biographical database, with data collection begun in 1990 and online since 1996, of those who suffered for the Orthodox faith in the twentieth century, now holding over 36,000 records compiled from archival files, publications, and family testimony, under the long direction of Professor N. E. Emelyanov (1939–2010) (PSTGU, “База данных ‘За Христа пострадавшие,’” pstgu.ru). It is the single most important scholarly instrument for the category, and it is deliberately conservative: it records documented persons, not statistical extrapolations, which is why its total is far below Yakovlev’s and why it should be read as a floor.

The Canonized: A Small, Deliberate Subset

Against these large and uncertain numbers stands the small and precise number of the canonized. The Moscow Patriarchate’s Jubilee Bishops’ Council of August 2000 glorified a Sobor of more than a thousand named New Martyrs and Confessors, alongside a general glorification of the many more whose names are known to God; and the Synodal Canonization Commission continued to add names case by case, so that by 1 January 2011 the number of individually canonized New Martyrs and Confessors had reached 1,774 (running total reported in the Russian Church’s canonization records; see The Glorifications: Methodology and The Feast and the Cult). After 2011 the pace of new canonizations slowed sharply, in part because of the re-restriction of the archives and the exacting evidentiary criteria the Commission applied (Christensen, The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia, Routledge, 2018, chs. 4–5; see The Criteria and the Contested Cases).

The gap between this figure — under two thousand canonized — and the tens or hundreds of thousands repressed is not a scandal but a category difference. Canonization is not a body-count. The Church does not glorify everyone who died; it glorifies those whose martyrdom or confession is established by evidence and untainted by betrayal, as a representative and liturgically venerable body standing for the whole persecuted Church. That even this stringently defined number already exceeds, by the Russian Church’s own reckoning, the total of all the martyrs of the first three Christian centuries is the measure of the persecution’s scale — but the figure to hold in mind for the canonized is the low thousands, not the hundred thousand (Christensen, 2018, on the relation of the canonized number to the total repressed).

The Discipline

Three rules follow, and this collection keeps them throughout. First, never quote a single number as the death toll; give the range and name the source and the method. Second, always say which quantity a figure measures — repressed, executed, or canonized — because they differ by orders of magnitude. Third, treat the documented count as a floor and the extrapolated count as a contested ceiling, and let the reader see the distance between them. The persecution was vast enough that it needs no inflation; inflating it only makes the true and terrible figures easier to dismiss (METHODOLOGY §4).

See Also

References

  • Yakovlev, Alexander N. A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Trans. Anthony Austin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. (The Rehabilitation Commission’s figures for clergy arrested and shot in 1937–38.)
  • Davis, Nathaniel. A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003. (The lower-bound estimate of clergy and monastics killed; the collapse of the institutional Church by 1939.)
  • Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (Pre-revolutionary parish numbers; the reduction to a handful of functioning churches and bishops by 1939.)
  • Shkarovskii, Mikhail V. Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve. Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee Podvor’e, 1999. (The concentration of executions in the Great Terror.)
  • PSTGU database “За Христа пострадавшие,” St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University, Moscow, dir. N. E. Emelyanov. pstgu.ru. (Over 36,000 documented biographical records; data from 1990, online since 1996.)
  • Memorial society, databases of victims of Soviet political repression. base.memo.ru. (The general base population of the repressed.)
  • Christensen, Karin Hyldal. The Making of the New Martyrs of Russia: Soviet Repression in Orthodox Memory. London: Routledge, 2018. (The relation between the canonized number and the total repressed; the running total and the post-2011 slowdown.)