Rothmus 🏴 (@Rothmus) “The Bolsheviks declared war on the Russian Orthodox Church as soon as they seize” — TopicDigg

The Bolsheviks declared war on the Russian Orthodox Church as soon as they seized power. They stripped it of legal status and property, then executed thousands of priests, monks, and believers in the Red Terror. Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev was dragged from the Monastery of the Caves, tortured, and shot in January 1918. Patriarch Tikhon publicly excommunicated the Bolshevik leadership and spent his remaining years under arrest until his death in 1925. In 1922, while the country starved, the Soviets seized church gold and jewels under the pretext of famine relief. When believers in Shuya tried to stop them, troops opened fire on the crowd. Lenin then issued a secret memo ordering the most merciless suppression of the clergy possible, arguing conditions would never again be so favorable for crushing the Church’s influence for decades. By year’s end thousands of clergy had been shot and a 1000 year old institution was driven underground by the regime that claimed to liberate the peasants who built it.