Persecution Of The Orthodox Church In The 19th Century

Persecution of Religions
The Orthodox Church has a very rich past in Russia dating back to the 10th century when numerous churches were constructed. In the 11th century, monasteries began to flourish. Besides being devoted to spiritual work, these played also an important role in providing more formal education.

In the 13th century, the Russian Orthodox church shielded the population from the Tatar great invasion that could have engulfed the Christian faith throughout Russia. Similarly, in the 14th century, outstanding bishops helped to unite divided principalities, progressively strengthening an emerging Imperial Russia.

By the end of the 19th century, they were more than 80,000 churches or chapels, over 1,000 monasteries or convents
The Soviets equally feared the overwhelming influence on the population belief system. Clearly the Bolsheviks wanted to reign on all ideological fronts.

Very soon after the October 1917 revolution, the Soviets declared the Orthodox church was no longer part of with the State institutions and declared the state free from religious propaganda. For the first time in its history, the Orthodox church that had received numerous privileges (including large tracts of land) had no political backing.

The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to declare liquidation of religions as an ideological goal. Toward that end, the Communist regime confiscated church property, ridiculed religion, harassed believers, and propagated atheism in schools and in party institutions (to become a party member, a person had to declare himself/herself “Atheist”).

Furthermore the Soviets initiated an aggressive campaign to destroy the Orthodox church through mass arrests and executions of priests and believers, closure of churches and other religious institutions and bans on all activity except for church services. Churches, monasteries and convents were either destroyed or converted to storage houses, cinemas, and even swimming
Lenin moved very rapidly to annihilate two political groups. First in January 1918, he dissolved the freely-elected Constituent Assembly headed by Kerensky. Second in March 1918; he similarly push the Left Social Revolutionary party to withdraw from the new political assembly. Members of these two groups were labelled “Enemies of the People” and crushing repression started against them.

Cheka, the Bolshevik police was particularly active to silence intellectual criticism expressed in opposition newspapers. Printing of these were suspended temporarily, a decision that became soon irreversible.

In 1919, Lenin started to arrest scientists and professors and deported them to Siberia. The ultimate end goal of the Bolsheviks was to create a clean springboard to institute a new Soviet country based on hard core principles of Marxism-Leninism.

Academics and Artists felt betrayed as at the onset, they had supported the revolution, thinking that it would bring a free society to Russia. Lenin was not surprised namely by the opposition of artists as he believed that they were merely belonging to the bourgeois