The Terror of the 1930s

The second and by far the deadliest wave: the collectivization assault on rural religion at the decade’s turn, and the Great Terror of 1937–1938, when the mass operations of the NKVD carried out the majority of the executions of clergy and brought the visible Church to the edge of extinction. This file narrates the years of Butovo and the killing fields, and fixes the scale of 1937–38 as the hinge of the whole persecution.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox

The Assault on Rural Religion, 1929–1932

After the relative lull of the mid-1920s — the New Economic Policy years, during which the state’s principal weapon against the Church had been the sponsored Renovationist schism rather than mass killing — the persecution resumed with force at the turn of the 1930s, bound up with Stalin’s campaign of forced collectivization. The countryside was where the Church was strongest, and the “dekulakization” that accompanied collectivization fell heavily on rural clergy, who were classed among the “kulaks” and “class enemies” to be liquidated as a group. Churches were closed in their thousands, bells were confiscated and melted, and rural priests were arrested, exiled, and shot alongside the peasants whose faith they served (Pospielovsky, The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982, SVS Press, 1984, vol. 1, on collectivization and the closure of rural churches; Shkarovskii, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve, Moscow, 1999). The legal framework was tightened by the law on religious associations of 8 April 1929, which confined religious activity to registered congregations and forbade almost every form of church life outside the walls of a functioning building — catechesis, charity, youth work — leaving the Church juridically caged (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1, on the 1929 law). The anti-religious propaganda apparatus, above all the League of the Militant Godless, drove a public campaign for the extinction of religion, with 1937 even proclaimed in some quarters a target year for its disappearance (Shkarovskii, 1999).

By the mid-1930s the visible Church was already gravely reduced. But the catastrophe that all but destroyed it came in 1937.

The Great Terror, 1937–1938

The Great Terror — the Yezhovshchina, named for NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov — was the vast wave of arrests, sham trials, and executions that swept the whole Soviet population in 1937 and 1938. It was driven by centrally issued quotas: NKVD Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 launched a “mass operation” against “former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements,” setting numerical targets for those to be shot (category one) and imprisoned (category two), broken down by region — a bureaucratic machinery of murder in which the clergy were an explicitly named target group (on Order 00447 and the mass operations, Shkarovskii, 1999; the operational history is treated in the general scholarship of the Terror). For the Church, 1937–38 was the killing time above all others. The majority of the executions of Orthodox clergy across the entire Soviet period fell in these two years (Shkarovskii, 1999; see The Scale of the Persecution).

The figures for these years are the ones most often cited for the whole persecution, and they must be handled with the discipline of ranges. [Disputed: for 1937–38 specifically, Alexander Yakovlev, reporting the data of the post-Soviet Rehabilitation Commission, gives some 136,900 Orthodox clergy arrested and 85,300 shot in 1937, and some 28,300 arrested and 21,500 shot in 1938 — on the order of 106,800 executions of “clergy/church people” in the two years (Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, Yale University Press, 2002, ch. 9). These are the highest figures in general circulation; critics observe that the totals depend on a broad definition of “clergy” and on extrapolation, and that Nathaniel Davis’s independent estimate of clergy and monastics killed by the end of the 1930s is far lower, on the order of 80,000 all told (Davis, A Long Walk to Church, 2nd ed., Westview, 2003). The documented, named count in the PSTGU database remains a floor beneath both. See The Scale of the Persecution.]

Whatever the exact aggregate, the structural outcome is firm and staggering: by the end of 1938, the Russian Orthodox Church had been reduced from tens of thousands of parishes to a few hundred functioning churches across the whole USSR, and from a full episcopate to a mere handful of bishops still at liberty and able to serve — commonly given as about four ruling hierarchs (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 1; Davis, 2003). The institution had, to outward appearance, been all but annihilated. Among the highest victims of these years were the very hierarchs who held the Church’s canonical succession: the patriarchal locum tenens Metropolitan Peter (Polyansky), shot near Magnitogorsk on 10 October 1937, and Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov) of Kazan, Patriarch Tikhon’s designated first candidate for the locum tenens, shot near Chimkent on 20 November 1937 (see The Martyred Bishops).

The Killing Fields

The Terror’s method produced the mass graves that are now the physical memorials of the New Martyrs. Around the major cities the NKVD established shooting grounds where the condemned were brought by night, shot, and buried in pits. The Butovo firing range on the southern edge of Moscow is the emblem: over the fourteen months from August 1937 to October 1938, 20,761 people were shot and buried there (documented from the NKVD’s own execution records), among them several hundred put to death on church-related charges, of whom more than three hundred have since been glorified as New Martyrs — so that Butovo is called by some the “Russian Golgotha” (see The Butovo Firing Range). Comparable killing grounds ringed other cities — Levashovo near Leningrad, the Lisiy (Fox) Ravine near Chimkent where Metropolitan Kirill was shot, and many more — and the northern camp system, above all the Solovetsky camp on the White Sea, consumed clergy and bishops by exile and forced labour as the shooting grounds did by the bullet (see The Solovki Camp).

The End of the Wave and the Wartime Turn

The Yezhovshchina was halted at the end of 1938 — Yezhov was himself removed and later shot — not out of any mercy toward the Church but because the terror had reached a scale that threatened the functioning of the state and the army. The persecution did not end; it entered a lull. Then the German invasion of June 1941 changed everything. Facing the fight for national survival, and confronted with the revival of open religious life in the German-occupied territories, Stalin reversed course: in September 1943 he received the three surviving senior metropolitans in the Kremlin and permitted the election of a patriarch (Metropolitan Sergius) and a limited restoration of church structures, in exchange for the Church’s full loyalty and its usefulness to the war effort and to Soviet foreign policy (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 2, on the 1943 concordat; Shkarovskii, 1999). The concordat of 1943 opens a wholly different chapter — one of a controlled, surveilled, but no longer physically annihilated Church — and lies beyond this collection’s focus on the martyrdom itself. What matters here is that the great killing was essentially the work of the two decades before it, and its heart was the Terror of 1937–38. The bishops received in the Kremlin in 1943 were the survivors of a Church most of whose clergy of a decade earlier were dead (Pospielovsky, 1984, vol. 2).

References

Pospielovsky, Dimitry. The Russian Church Under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982. 2 vols. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (Collectivization and rural church closures; the 1929 law; the reduction to a handful of churches and bishops by 1938; the 1943 concordat, vol. 2.)
Shkarovskii, Mikhail V. Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khrushcheve. Moscow: Krutitskoe Patriarshee Podvor’e, 1999. (The Militant Godless campaign; NKVD Order 00447 and the mass operations; the concentration of executions in 1937–38; the 1943 turn.)
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 and 1938.)
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 by the end of the 1930s.)