Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union
[23][24][25][26] Many Orthodox (along with peoples of other faiths) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them to give up their religious convictions (see Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union).
[30] 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.
The Archbishop of Ekaterinburg organized protest demonstrations when he learned of the Romanov family's execution in July 1918, and he held a victory celebration when Admiral Kolchak took the city in February 1919.
[38] This widespread violence by members of the Red Army against the church was not openly supported by Lenin, though in later years high-ranking Soviet officials including Emelian Yaroslavsky claimed central responsibility for these killings.
[47] The church allegedly tried to set up free theo-philosophical academies, study circles and periodicals in the 1920s, which Lenin met by arresting and expelling all the organizers abroad and shutting down these efforts with force.
[48] Despite the August 1921 instruction, the state took a very hard line against the Orthodox Church on the pretext that it was a legacy of the Tsarist past (the difference in practice and policy may have reflected internal disagreement among the party leadership).
In August 1921, Patriarch Tikhon issued a message to the Russian people calling them to help famine victims and he gave his blessing for voluntary donations of church valuables that were not directly used in liturgical services.
[53] The sixth sector of the OGPU, led by Yevgeny Tuchkov, began aggressively arresting and executing bishops, priests, and devout worshipers, such as Metropolitan Veniamin in Petrograd in 1922 for refusing to accede to the demand to hand in church valuables (including sacred relics).
This attitude of loyalty, however, provoked more divisions in the church itself: inside Russia, a number of faithful opposed Sergius, and abroad, the Russian metropolitans of America and western Europe severed their relations with Moscow.
[70] The church's successful competition with the ongoing and widespread atheistic propaganda, prompted new laws to be adopted in 1929 on 'Religious Associations' as well as amendments to the constitution, which forbade all forms of public, social, communal, educational, publishing or missionary activities for religious believers.
However, the anti-religious campaign of the past decade and the terror tactics of the militantly atheist regime, had effectively eliminated all public expressions of religion and communal gatherings of believers outside of the walls of the few churches that still held services.
Stalin ended the anti-religious campaign in order to rally the country and prevent a large base of Nazi support (which existed in some areas in the early stages of the invasion).
[81] Emelian Yaroslavsky, the leader and founder of the LMG, who had led the entire national anti-religious campaign in the 1930s, found himself writing an article in praise of Orthodox Christian Fyodor Dostoyevsky for his alleged hatred of the Germans.
[7] On September 4, 1943, Metropolitans Sergius (Stragorodsky), Alexius (Simansky) and Nicholas (Yarushevich) were officially received by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin who proposed to create the Moscow Patriarchate.
The spiritual father of the group, Fr Seraphim (Batiukov), had died in 1942, but his body was dug up and disposed of elsewhere in order to prevent pilgrimages to his grave by people who believed him to be a saint.
[90] They were given the option of becoming western-rite Catholics, but the absence of functioning churches in that rite except in large cities and dedication to the Byzantine ritual stopped many from doing so; many who resisted the official measure were imprisoned.
[32] In 1945 Soviet authorities arrested, deported and sentenced to forced labor camps in Siberia and elsewhere the church's metropolitan Josyf Slipyj and nine bishops, as well as hundreds of clergy and leading lay activists.
[92] The exception was metropolitan Josyf Slipyj who, after 18 years of imprisonment and persecution, was released thanks to the intervention of Pope John XXIII, arrived in Rome, where he received the title of Major Archbishop of Lviv, and became cardinal in 1965.
For example, in 1945, Bishop Manuil was made head of the Orenburg Diocese in the Southern Urals where he reopened dozens of new parishes, re-lit the fires of faith in many lukewarm people and sparked a religious revival in the area.
There was little physical attack on the church for the remainder of Stalin's lifetime; however, the persecution escalated in 1947, at which point it was again declared that membership in the Komsomol or holding of a teaching position was incompatible with religious belief.
In 1947 the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, Znanie ('knowledge'), for short, was established and it effectively inherited the role that had been left behind by the LMG as an anti-religious propaganda organ.
On November 10, 1954, the Committee issued a contrary resolution (there was a lack of political unity after Stalin's death) that criticized arbitrariness in the anti-religious campaign, as well as the use of slander, libel and insults against believers.
One of the early signs of the change in policy were articles in the official press reported that there were millions of believers who supported communism, including particularly leftist religious movements in the west and third world (e.g. Liberation theology in Latin America), and that all religion should not be attacked.
[118] In December 1971, the 'Philosophic Society of the USSR' was founded with the aim (rather than pursuing truth) of, 'an untiring atheistic propaganda of scientific materialism and... struggle against the revisionist tolerant tendencies towards religion, against all concessions to the religious Weltanschauung.
[132] In the Roman Catholic Church, a particularly damaging espionage breach involved former Russicum seminarian Alexander Kurtna, a convert to the Byzantine Rite Catholicism from Estonian Orthodoxy.
During those same years, Kurtna covertly spied for the Soviet NKVD, with devastating results for fellow Russicum alumni Walter Ciszek, Pietro Leoni, Ján Kellner, and many other underground priests and faithful.
Dąbrowski's sources, the council had been called at the urging of anti-Communist Catholic clergy in West Germany, with the intentions of both strengthening the Church internally and going upon the offense in response to the global rise of both Marxism and Communism.
Dąbrowski's reports on the council were considered so important that Yuri Andropov was briefed upon them immediately after taking command of the KGB in 1967 and cited them as grounds to order a mass offensive against the Catholic Church beginning in 1969.
Even though the Second Vatican Council had allegedly been called to strengthen the Church as an ally of the Free World in the ongoing Cold War, after its completion, according to Koehler, the KGB was easily able to recruit moles inside every Department of the Roman Curia.
[135] During the early 1970s, Koehler alleges that a highly placed mole inside the Vatican's diplomatic service was secretly recording conversations between Pope Paul VI and foreign dignitaries.
