The Soviet Persecution and the New Martyrs

The numbers are hard to take in. On the eve of the Revolution the Russian Church had tens of thousands of parishes and some 51,000 priests, along with hundreds of monasteries. By 1939, after two decades of repression, only a few hundred churches were still open across the whole vast country — well under one percent of what had existed in 1917 — and only a few hundred priests remained free to serve. The seminaries were shut, the monasteries dissolved, church schools abolished, religious teaching to children forbidden by law.

The human cost was staggering. Bishops, priests, monks, nuns, and lay believers were arrested, imprisoned, sent to the labor camps of the Gulag, or shot. The persecution came in waves — the terror of the civil war years, the confiscations of the 1920s, the crushing anti-religious campaign of the 1930s that reached its height in the Great Terror of 1937–38, when clergy were executed in enormous numbers. Estimates of the total killed run into the tens of thousands of clergy and religious alone; Patriarch Alexei II later put the figure at around 80,000 clergy, monks, and nuns. Whatever the precise count, it is why the Soviet persecution is so often called the greatest in Christian history.

Behind the statistics stand faces. There were bishops who blessed their executioners, priests who went on serving the Liturgy in secret until they were taken, nuns who prayed openly on the way to the firing squad, and ordinary believers — grandmothers, workers, whole families — who would not deny Christ though it cost them everything. Among the most widely known are the imperial family, shot at Yekaterinburg in 1918, and countless clergy and laity whose only crime was faithfulness. Many kept the faith alive in hidden ways, in what came to be called the Catacomb Church, worshiping in forests, apartments, and prison cells.

The tradition calls such witnesses confessors when they suffered for Christ and survived, and martyrs when they were put to death. Together they are remembered as the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia — "new" because they suffered not in the age of the pagan Roman emperors but in living memory, under a modern state. The Church saw in them the proof that the blood of martyrs had not dried up, and that Christ's promise held even when almost every visible sign of the Church had been swept away.

Survival forced anguished choices. In 1927 Metropolitan Sergius, then leading the Church under intense pressure, issued a declaration pledging the loyalty of the Church to the Soviet state, hoping to spare it from outright destruction. Some Orthodox accepted this as a tragic necessity that kept a legal Church in existence; others, within Russia and in the emigration, rejected it as a compromise with an atheist power that persecuted their brethren, and broke communion. The Church has since carried this division as one of the deep wounds of the persecution — a place to be described with grief, not scored as a debating point.

When the persecution finally lifted, the Church honored its witnesses. In August 2000, at its Jubilee Council in Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church glorified the Synaxis of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia — more than a thousand named saints, standing for a multitude known only to God. They are commemorated together on a Sunday near the end of January. Their icon shows ranks of bishops, priests, monastics, and lay people gathered before a white church, a whole people who chose Christ over life, and whom the Church now asks to pray for those who remain.