The Persecution, 1917–1941
The historical narrative of the persecution in which the New Martyrs died: from the first blood of 1917–1922, through the church-valuables campaign and the show trials, to the near-annihilation of the visible Church in the Great Terror of 1937–1938. This section supplies the chronological frame within which the individual martyrs and killing fields of later sections are set.
Tradition: Russian Orthodox
Overview
The Soviet persecution of the Church was not a single event but a sequence of waves, and the New Martyrs died across all of them. This section narrates the two decisive phases before the Second World War, after which Stalin’s wartime concordat of 1943 opened a very different chapter.
The first file, The Revolution and the First Blood, covers 1917–1922: the Bolshevik seizure of power and the decree separating Church from state; the murder of Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev in January 1918, the first hierarch to fall; and the campaign of 1922 to confiscate church valuables under cover of the famine, which produced the clashes at Shuya, Lenin’s secret directive, and the show trials that sent Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd to death.
The second file, The Terror of the 1930s, covers the collectivization assault on rural religion and, above all, the Great Terror of 1937–1938, when the majority of the executions of clergy occurred and the visible Church was brought to the edge of extinction — the years of Butovo and the mass operations of the NKVD.
Contents
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-revolution-and-the-first-blood.md | 1917–1922; Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev, the first hierarch-martyr; the 1922 church-valuables campaign, Shuya, and the trial of Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd |
| the-terror-of-the-1930s.md | Collectivization and the assault on rural religion; the Great Terror of 1937–38; the near-destruction of the visible Church; Butovo and the killing fields |
See Also
- The Scale of the Persecution — the numbers behind the narrative
- The Hierarch-Martyrs — the bishops killed across these years
- Butovo and the Killing Fields — the sites of the Terror
References
- Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
- Shkarovskii, Mikhail V. Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve. Moscow, 1999.