Soviet persecution of the church
The Bolsheviks set out to destroy religion; by the late 1930s tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns had been killed or sent to the camps and almost every church in the Soviet Union was closed.
- The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982 — Dimitry Pospielovsky, St Vladimir's Seminary Press (1984)
- A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy — Nathaniel Davis, Westview Press (1995)
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
- A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 — Orlando Figes, Jonathan Cape (1996)
- Gulag: A History — Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (2003)
On the eve of the revolution the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the largest institutions in the empire, with more than 50,000 churches and an established place beside the tsar. In 1917 a church council restored the patriarchate, abolished by Peter the Great, and elected Patriarch Tikhon, just as the Bolsheviks took power.
- The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982 — Dimitry Pospielovsky, St Vladimir's Seminary Press (1984)
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
War on religion
The Bolsheviks, committed to atheism, moved fast. A January 1918 decree separated church from state and stripped the church of its property and legal standing. During the civil war thousands of clergy were killed. In 1922, using famine relief as a pretext, the regime seized church valuables and staged show trials, executing a number of clergy, among them Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd. Tikhon was arrested and the state backed a breakaway “Renovationist” church to divide believers.
- The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982 — Dimitry Pospielovsky, St Vladimir's Seminary Press (1984)
- A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 — Orlando Figes, Jonathan Cape (1996)
In 1927 Metropolitan Sergii, leading the church after Tikhon’s death, issued a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet state, hoping to save what remained. It did not stop the onslaught. The League of the Militant Godless ran anti-religious propaganda, churches were turned into warehouses, clubs and museums of atheism, and Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was dynamited in 1931. In the Great Terror of 1937–38 clergy and believers were shot in large numbers, at killing grounds like Butovo outside Moscow. By 1939 only a few hundred parish churches remained open across the Soviet Union, and only four bishops of the official church were at liberty.
- The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982 — Dimitry Pospielovsky, St Vladimir's Seminary Press (1984)
- A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy — Nathaniel Davis, Westview Press (1995)
- Gulag: A History — Anne Applebaum, Doubleday (2003)
A wartime revival and new pressure
The Second World War changed course. The church rallied believers for the defence of the country, and in September 1943 Stalin met Sergii and two other metropolitans, allowed a patriarch to be elected and permitted thousands of churches and some seminaries to reopen, under close state control. Under Khrushchev, from 1959 to 1964, a new campaign closed roughly half the working churches again. For the rest of the Soviet period the church survived as a tolerated, watched and infiltrated institution.
- A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy — Nathaniel Davis, Westview Press (1995)
- The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982 — Dimitry Pospielovsky, St Vladimir's Seminary Press (1984)
The same pattern hit Orthodox churches across the Soviet bloc: in Romania and Bulgaria churches survived under communist control with many clergy imprisoned, while Albania in 1967 declared itself the world’s first atheist state and banned all religion outright.
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
- The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture — John Anthony McGuckin, Wiley-Blackwell (2008)
Memory
Faith did not disappear. It was carried by grandmothers, by secret baptisms, by priests in the Gulag and by writers and dissidents. In 2000 the Russian church canonised more than a thousand New Martyrs, including the last tsar and his family. The question of who resisted and who compromised remains painful, and has gained new edge as the church’s leadership has aligned itself closely with the Kremlin.
- A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy — Nathaniel Davis, Westview Press (1995)
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
- The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History — Serhii Plokhy, W. W. Norton (2023)
The twentieth century produced more Orthodox martyrs than any before it. Faith survived because grandmothers kept icons in the corner, baptised children secretly and taught them prayers.
- The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982 — Dimitry Pospielovsky, St Vladimir's Seminary Press (1984)
- The Orthodox Church — Timothy Ware, Penguin (1993)
To survive, the official church after 1927 and especially after 1943 pledged loyalty to the Soviet state, and some bishops worked with the security services. Dissenting priests and the Russian Church Abroad saw this as betrayal, and opened KGB archives later confirmed some of the fears.
- A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy — Nathaniel Davis, Westview Press (1995)
- The Russian Church under the Soviet Regime, 1917–1982 — Dimitry Pospielovsky, St Vladimir's Seminary Press (1984)
Why it matters today
The Russian church canonised more than a thousand "New Martyrs and Confessors" in 2000, and families across Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia remember grandparents who were baptised in secret. The same era left hard questions: about clergy who cooperated with the KGB, and about a church that, after surviving the state's hostility, has grown very close to the state's power.