Anti-religious campaign during the Russian Civil War

The anti-religious campaign during the Russian Civil War describes the promotion of state atheism and persecution of the religious that accompanied the rise of the former Soviet Union from the earliest days after the revolution in 1917.

Tikhon refused to take sides in the civil war,[8] although the official Bolshevik propaganda presented him, as well as the Church, as supporting the whites.

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 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.

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.

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.

Priest Alexander Podolsky was tortured and killed for giving a Te Deum service for a Cossack regiment before it attacked the Bolsheviks.

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.

As a result of the unusual situation in which the local residents gave the Cheka popular support for these actions, they followed up Adronik's murder with mass killings of Perm's clergy including vicar-bishop Feofan of Solikamsk.

[19] 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.

[18] In the town of Chorny Yar on the Volga, a lay missionary named Lev Z. Kunsevich, proclaimed the Patriarch's encyclical to a crowd of people.

[21] Bishop Nikodim (Kononov) (ru) of Belgorod, condemned acts of violence, plunder and murder in his sermons and he was arrested by the local Cheka commandant, Saenko, at Christmas 1918.

[11] Bishop Leontius (von Wimpffen) was murdered along with most of the diocesan clergy in 1919 after he made a sermon that quoted Jesus' words "I was naked and you have clothed me, I was ill and you looked after me" and this quotation was interpreted as an attack against the Bolsheviks.

[citation needed] The pretexts for these killings was usually alleged support for the enemy, criticism of the Bolsheviks and/or their ideology, or for liberal and/or bourgeois sympathies.

[26] 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.

[9] The state initially showed a friendly attitude towards Protestant evangelicals and Muslims,[28] while maintaining some pretense that they were only fighting against the Orthodox hierarchy for its relationship with the Tsar and not against religion generally.

[28] The Muslim Socialist Committee of Kazan (MSK; Russian: Мусульманский социалистический комитет) was established following the February Revolution.

[citation needed] Despite their hard anti-religious stance, the Bolsheviks in the years following the revolution and during the civil war, were in a very poor position to fight against Islam in Central Asia.

Shortly afterward a religious procession in Petrograd with Metropolitan Veniamin at its head marched through the city with several hundred thousand participants.

Shooting down of religious processions are well documented in Voronezh, Shatsk (Tambov province), and Tula (where thirteen were killed and many wounded, including Bishop Kornilii).

[40] High ranking Orthodox bishops issued reports that called for the church to focus more on combatting atheism among the Russian populace in 1918–1919.

[27] The body of St Sergius of Radonezh was exposed as fraudulent and the Soviet media eagerly spread this news that there was nothing but rotten bones and dust in his shrine.

A similar event occurred in the city of Vladimir when the relics of two saints were exposed and the doctor who had acted as medical state witness reconfirmed his faith according to his own testimony.

Bishop Alexii of Novgorod later declared, however, that the church did not teach that the saints must necessarily be immune to decay or that non-corruption of the body was proof of sainthood.

[44] Stories of supernatural manifestations in the families of fanatical communists where some members were practicing Christian were allegedly common in the early post-1917 years.

The local communist newspaper then printed two articles, one of them signed by members of the Academy of Sciences, which stated that the phenomenon was caused by a rare air wave containing a peculiar electric discharge.

The people who had gathered there that day were later depicted as drunkards, fools and scum, and it was claimed that the kissing of the Crucifix had resulted in an outbreak of syphilis as well as mass robberies.

[48] In November 1917, within weeks of the revolution, the People's Commissariat for Enlightenment was established, which a month later created the All-Russian Union of Teachers-Internationalists for the purpose of removing religious instruction from school curricula.

In order to intensify the anti-religious propaganda in the school system, the Chief Administration for Political Enlightenment (Glavpolitprosvet) was established in November 1920.

[52] Yaroslavsky in later years recalled an episode wherein an old party member wrote on the top of a questionnaire: 'In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.