In 1922, Thousands of Christians Rose Up Against the Bolsheviks, Starting a Wave of Anti-Church Terror

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One hundred years ago, in May of 1922, at the outskirts of a provincial city of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, two priest and a layman, Fr. Paul Svetozarov, Fr. John Rozhdestvensky and Peter Iazykov, were executed by gunshot. Neither the exact place of their death, nor the location of their graves, has ever been disclosed.

In the year 2000, these three joined four others who were killed by gunfire on the Cathedral square of a nearby town Shuia (one of them was a young girl) in the group of New Martyrs of the Communist Era, canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

In the spring of 1922, the Communist authorities announced the expropriation of valuables from Orthodox churches all over Russia, to purchase food for the famine-stricken regions. Patriarch St. Tikhon offered voluntary donations — but that was not in the plans of the vicious rulers of our land. They sought an excuse for an anti-Church terror campaign.

On the day of the expropriation, several thousand faithful Christians gathered at the square before the Cathedral in Shuia. A Red Army detachment dispatched against them opened fire with live ammo. At least four people were put to death, and many more were injured and wounded.

Within three days, the Communist Politburo was apprised of the event. Lenin was elated and responded with the historical memo:

“We will suppress them with such a brutality as to make them remember it for a few generations… The more clergy we could kill in the process, the better.”

From that time on, a wave of organized anti-Christian persecutions spread over Russia. Clergymen and laymen were arrested, put on trial, executed, sent to concentration camps and exile under false accusation of the “resistance to the expropriation of Church valuables”. The era of sorrows for Christianity began in the Russian land.

In the Fall of 2007, the monument to the victims of the anti-Church terror, the first monument to the New Martyrs of Russia, was unveiled in the Cathedral Square of Shuia, on the spot where their blood was spilled one hundred years ago.

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