After the Russian Civil War erupted in 1917, the opposition to the Russian Orthodox Church and its institutions strengthened in territories held by the former Russian Empire. The initial anti-religious campaign of Bolsheviks after the fall of the Tsarist regime and the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 focused on targeting Eastern Orthodox Church, seizing its assets, and depriving the church of its capacity to function through antireligious legislation.
Background
Religious situation before the October Revolution Since 1721, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) had been the established church of the Russian Empire. The church reforms introduced by Peter I introduced a period of Caesaropapism to the ROC. This meant that while the ROC enjoyed substantial privileges, it was nevertheless subordinated to the state. As the intelligentsia became more critical of the Tsarist regime, this was often accompanied by a rejection of the ROC, and sometimes by a rejection of religion in general. Others, such as Leo Tolstoy retained a strong Christian belief but rejected the autocracy. He was excommunicated by the ROC. Some Bolsheviks, such as Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich became involved with the religious minorities collectively called the sectarians. Bonch-Bruyevich joined Tolstoy and Vladimir Chertkov in supporting the Dukhobors, even sailing with a group of them when they migrated to Canada.O.A. Golinenko (О.А. ГОЛИНЕНКО) "Leo Tolstoy's questions to a Doukhobor" (ВОПРОСЫ Л.Н. ТОЛСТОГО ДУХОБОРУ)
In 1914, there were 55,173 Russian Orthodox churches and 29,593 chapels, 112,629 priests and deacons, 550 monasteries and 475 convents with a total of 95,259 monks and nuns in Russia.
Following the Bolshevik seizure of power Eleven days following the storming of the Winter Palace a council of the Russian Orthodox church reestablished the patriarchate (it had been abolished under Peter the Great in 1721) and elected Metropolitan Tikhon of Moscow (Vassily I. Bellavin) as patriarch. Tikhon refused to take sides in the civil war, although the official Bolshevik propaganda presented him, as well as the Church, as supporting the whites. The Bolsheviks used the alleged support of the Russian Orthodox Church for the Whites as their justification for killing clergy in massive numbers. Following the Bolshevik seizure of power, one issue they faced was the removal of the privileged position of the ROC. The Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia (November 2/15, 1917) removed special privileges based on faith or nationality. This was soon followed by a decision by Sovnarkom to confiscate all the ROC's monasteries and educational establishments. When the Bolsheviks seized the Holy Synod's printing house, relations between them and the ROC became further strained.
Persecution of the Church during the Civil War
During the Russian Civil War, the Red Army massacred large numbers of clergy and believers often on grounds of alleged support for the Whites; much of these killings were not officially instigated from the top, but were done on the initiative of local units of soldiers. In later years, the church would declare that the excommunication was a misunderstanding based on the belief that these killings were officially instigated (however, they were never officially repudiated either).
Many monasteries were attacked. Holy Mountain Monastery near Kharkov was plundered very early in the civil war. In a nearby skete in the village of Gorokhova a monk named Izrail was murdered for refusing to hand over the keys to the skete cellars. In the same area, a religious procession was attacked on its way as it rested the night, and two priests, a deacon, the owner of the cottage where they were staying at as well as his daughter were all killed.
Metropolitan Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky) of Kiev was the first bishop killed by the Bolsheviks on January 25, 1918. He had consistently opposed the revolution, and he was severely beaten as well as tortured before being shot outside the Monastery of the Caves. Before being shot he prayed to God for his killers to be forgiven.
Yakov Sverdlov ("president" of Soviet Russia) ordered in June 1918 to take hostages from the ranks of industrial entrepreneurs, members of the Liberal and Menshevik parties as well as the clergy. Few of these hostages would survive.
Between June 1918 and January 1919, in Russia (but not including the Volga, Kama and several other regions) there were killed 1 metropolitan, 18 bishops, 102 priests, 154 deacons, 94 monks and nuns, and there were imprisoned four bishops, and 211 priests. The state sequestered 718 parishes and 15 monasteries, it closed 94 churches and 26 monasteries, it desecrated 14 churches and 9 chapels, it forbade 18 religious processions, it dispersed by force 41 religious processions, and it interrupted church services with insults to religious feelings in 22 cities and 96 villages.
The orthodox church must have thought that the Bolsheviks would lose power, because after Tikhon's election it declared that the Russian Orthodox Church was the national church of Russia, that the state needed church approval to legislate on church matters, that blasphemy should remain illegal, that church schools should be recognized and that the head of the state as well as the top appointees in education as well as religious affairs should be Orthodox.
The Orthodox were the primary target due to their association with the old regime, although other religions were attacked as well. A Polish priest named Krapiwnicki in 1918 was arrested on the feast of Corpus Christi and scheduled for execution, but the execution was called off after intervention from the Polish government. After the papal protest against the persecution of the Orthodox church, the regime retaliated by arresting Archbishop de Ropp of the Roman Catholic diocese of Mogilev in April 1919, but he was later released to Poland in exchange for a Polish communist named Radek who had been arrested in Poland. Despite the fact that non-Orthodox religions had been persecuted under Tsarist Russia, leaders of other faith communities (Christians, Muslims and Jews) gave messages of sympathy to the Orthodox church during this time. Many of these sects that had been persecuted by the Orthodox state found themselves better prepared for the situation post-1917 than the Orthodox church.
The state initially showed a friendly attitude towards Protestant evangelicals and Muslims, while maintaining some pretense that they were only fighting against the Orthodox hierarchy for its relationship with the Tsar and not against religion generally. The leader of Russia's Protestant evangelicals, Ivan Prokhanov, joined the Bolsheviks in denouncing the Orthodox church as reactionary.
The Mennonite community numbered 110,000 in 1917, and it would emigrate from Russia in massive numbers in the following decade.
There were 1.6 million Roman Catholics on the territory of the new state in 1917. There had been over 15 million prior to the war, but after Poland and the western territories were lost, this number shrunk greatly.
Christians outside of orthodoxy would actually have some benefit of increasing membership in the succeeding years even while the Orthodox church declined in membership. In 1900 about 11 percent of the population were Christians belonging to non-Orthodox groupings (not including Roman Catholics) and by 1970 this number had become 31 percent.
Examples
In the Don region in February 1918, the Reds were killing every priest they could find. An 80-year-old monk-priest named Amvrosi was beaten with rifle butts before being killed. A priest named Dimitri was brought to a cemetery and undressed, but when he tried to cross himself before being killed, a soldier chopped off his right arm. An old priest who tried to stop the execution of a peasant was beaten and cut to pieces with swords. In the Holy Saviour Monastery, Red soldiers arrested and killed the 75-year-old abbot by scalping him and beheading him. In the Kherson province a priest was crucified. In a Kuban Cossack village an eighty-year-old priest was forced to wear women's clothing, brought to the village square and ordered to dance; when he refused, he was hanged.
In the Kuban Cossack village of Plotavy, Fr Yakov Vladimirov was targeted by the Cheka for his popularity. They executed him along with wife and one of his sons (he had two sons, but they killed a different child in place of that son by mistake).
Bishop Hermogenes (Dolganyov) of Tobolsk, was killed along with other detainees on 16 June 1918 by drowning. He had organized a religious procession the day after the Tsar had come through Tobolsk on their way to Ekaterinburg (April 28), in which he blessed the royal family. He was arrested the following week and the Soviets promised to release him for 10,000 roubles, and later 100,000 roubles. When the ransom was collected and submitted, the delegation of notables and clergy that had delivered it were arrested as well (and later executed). Germogen was reportedly taken on a river steamer, rocks were attached to his head and he was thrown into the water.
Archbishop Joachim of Nizhni Novgorod was murdered by red forces who hanged him head down on the iconostasis above the central 'Royal Doors'. The clergy in the Crimea suffered terribly: one priest named Ugliansky was killed by Red forces on grounds that he used green ribbons instead of red ribbons on the church icon lamps. Churches in Simferopol, Feodosia and other parts of the Crimea were desecrated and their clergy were brutally murdered.
Filosof Ornatsky, a priest in Petrograd, was arrested in the spring of 1918 after giving a public requiem for victims of the Bolsheviks. He and thirty-two others were driven to a cliff overlooking the Gulf of Finland, where the priest was allowed to perform a brief funeral service and bless the victims, before they were all shot and dropped into the sea. Archpriest John Vostorgov in Moscow, a famous Orthodox missionary and church activist, preached against the Bolsheviks and as a result he was black-mailed by the Bolsheviks, arrested and executed. He was executed along with Roman Catholic priest Lutoslawski and his brother, two tsarist ministers (N. Maklakov and Alexei Khvostov), an Orthodox bishop Efren, former State Council Chairman Ivan Shcheglovitov and Senator S. Beletsky. Fr Vostorgov conducted a short funeral service and preached to his victims to face death as a sacrifice of atonement, after which each victim came forward to be blessed by Fr Vostorgov and the Bishop; then they were shot.
During the Red occupation of Stavropol diocese in 1918, the Bolsheviks killed at least 52 Orthodox priests, four deacons and four lectors. Priest Alexander Podolsky was tortured and killed for giving a Te Deum service for a Cossack regiment before it attacked the Bolsheviks. When a peasant came to collect his body, the peasant was shot dead on the spot. Fr Alexei Miliutinsky was tortured, scalped and killed for preaching to Red army soldiers that they were leading Russia to disaster and for offering prayers for the Cossacks. Even left-wing priests could be killed, such as Ivan Prigorsky who was taken out of church on Holy Saturday into the street, where Red soldiers cursed him, mutilated his face and then killed him.