Most people know about the Holocaust, but did you also know that a much worse mass slaughter of human beings occurred a few decades prior when communist Bolsheviks, many of them Jewish, murdered more than 60 million Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Russian Revolution?
It started in 1917 when two revolutions swept through Russia, effectively ending Russia's longtime legacy of imperial rule and ushering in the murderous communist regime known as the Soviet Union.
Before the communist takeover of Russia, the Russian people were largely poor in earthly possessions but rich in Christ Jesus through their Orthodox faith. The Bolsheviks scoffed at this arrangement, thinking it foolish that anyone would follow Christ rather than try to live their best life now.
"... for the peasantry (at the beginning of the 20th century 85% of the peasants were illiterate) the Church remained the only source of understanding about the world," says one historical account.
"At church services priests read the Bible and explained its meaning to the peasants. They also talked about the various events and realities of life, saying for example that monarchy is a form of human rule established by God, and that everyone should know his place and not seek to change it."
For better or for worse, the Church of Russia operated as a bedrock for Russian society pre-Soviet Union. It functioned well beyond just a guardian of spiritual life to become a bureaucratic system and institution integral to the overall functionality of the state.
"The Bolsheviks were especially furious at the fact that the Orthodox Church called to endure suffering in this world, promising a faithful Christian a reward in 'the other world,'" the same historical account explains.
"The Bolsheviks considered this a lie, which kept masses in misery and poverty, while others benefited from their labor and lived in idleness and wealth."
Karl Marx, a Jew, called religion "the opiate of the masses"
Infamous socialist Karl Marx, a Jew, is credited with "inspiring" the Bolsheviks to do what they ultimately did. He led the revolution to eradicate Orthodox Christianity from Russia and ultimately from the world, inspiring Vladimir Lenin and other tyrants to commit mass genocide against Orthodox Christians.
Marx had nothing positive to say about Orthodox Christians, considering them stupid for believing in Jesus Christ and accepting what he saw as exploitation of their goodwill by the Orthodox Church-State of pre-Soviet Union Russia.
Religion, according to Marx, offers people "a cheap justification for their entire exploited existence.
"Religion is the opiate of the masses," he once said.
What started as propaganda inspired by Marx against the Orthodox Church in Russia quickly morphed into action in the form of mass murder. He and other Bolsheviks fueled the mass murder of Orthodox Christians, starting with Ivan Kochurov, a priest of the Catherine the Great Cathedral in Tsarskoye Selo, who was murdered by the Red Army while at his Imperial summer palace.
About a year later, the Bolsheviks issued a decree that they called "On Separation of Church from State and School from Church" that effectively nationalized all Church lands and removed all marriage and family relations from the jurisdiction of the Church.
Remember that before all of this, the Orthodox Church of Russia was in charge of birth and death statistics. It handled all matters related to the institution of marriage, including helping Russian families live godly, moral lives. The Russian Revolution led by the Bolsheviks ended all that.
Between 1918 and 1920, the Bolsheviks launched a massive anti-religion campaign that blasphemously mocked the holy things of God. They desecrated Orthodox Christian shrines and used photos of that desecration to spread propaganda throughout Russian society.
By 1922, the Bolsheviks were ransacking churches and stealing all their valuables under the guise of fighting a mass famine and restoring the domestic economy that had been destroyed after the civil war.
"Church items made of precious metals, icon frames, jewelry crosses, and other things that might contain gold, silver, or gems were plundered from across the country and taken to a specially created government storage," historical accounts indicate about what the Bolsheviks did. "Many of these items were later sold to the West."
"Priests often resisted the barbaric looting of churches, and the Chekists arrested many, accusing them of counterrevolution and anti-Soviet propaganda. They were tortured and repressed. More than a thousand priests suffered in the early 1920s, including the bishops of Moscow and Petrograd."
Jewish Bolsheviks and their war on patriarchy
In recent years, and especially since the arrival of Donald Trump into politics, there has been a lot of political chatter from the left about ending the so-called "patriarchy," this being an anti-male concept promoted within feminism to upend normal society and replace it with perversion.
Believe it or not, this anti-patriarchy agenda has roots in the Bolshevik revolution of Russia. The Bolsheviks deployed a divide-and-conquer strategy that split the Orthodox Church into two parts, one of which was dubbed the "Renovationist" camp for being loyal to the Bolsheviks.
Priests who aligned themselves with the Revolutionist camp rather than the Orthodox camp "opposed the Patriarch," historical accounts explain, which eventually led to his removal from his position, "essentially beheading the Church."
The destruction of the Patriarch and the beheading of the Orthodox Church is symbolic for today, too, as the Bolsheviks in today's world seek to upend the patriarchy and behead the Christian church and ultimately all of its adherents during the coming Time of Jacob's Trouble when left behind Christians will be beheaded for refusing the Mark of the Beast.
Mass mockery, genocide of Christians
The terror and destruction of the Orthodox Church in Russia would continue for years as the Bolsheviks destroyed churches one by one well into the 1930s. Persecution of Christians continued with only a brief reprieve when various Bolshevik factions started fighting one another for power.
By the time the USSR collapsed in 1991, only 7,000 of pre-revolutionary Russia's 54,000 churches remained. All the others were demolished by the Bolsheviks, as were the lives of some 60 million Christians and other religious Russians, i.e., Muslims.
"Without any hesitation the Bolsheviks demolished ancient churches if they interfered with the construction of hydroelectric power plants, driveways, or road extensions," historical accounts reveal. "Many churches were simply closed and used for the needs of the new Soviet regime: anything from a grain storage to a factory could be located in a church, while monasteries were often turned into prisons."
"As if to mock Christianity, the Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism was opened in the Kazansky Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Read more about what the Soviets did with ransacked churches."
Anyone who survived the initial round of persecution when this all started in 1917 was fed into the meat grinder once Joseph Stalin came to power in 1924. Until his death in 1953, Stalin committed what the history books now refer to as the "Great Purge.
"... those clergymen who survived the persecution of the 1920s weren't able to escape this terror," historical accounts explain. "They were arrested, often right during services – and most often for reasons of 'anti-Soviet agitation.' Many Orthodox priests and bishops served their sentences in prisons and in exile, as well as in the Gulag. Many died there or were executed."
"In 1937 and 1938, about 20,000 people were shot dead at Butovo Firing Range near Moscow – and about a thousand were clerics of various confessions. In the 1990s, Patriarch Alexy II called those mass graves the 'Russian Golgotha.' All these people were repressed in an extrajudicial manner, on the verdict of the 'NKVD troika,' a simplified trial procedure. After the collapse of the USSR, 321 priests were canonized as 'Butovo New Martyrs.'"
All in all, more than 1,700 martyrs and confessors of the Church of Russia who suffered persecution at the hands of the Bolsheviks were canonized in the 1990s and 2000s as Russian Orthodox saints. Throughout the entire Soviet period, nearly 100,000 people who served within the Church in some capacity suffered.
In 2006, Jewish publication Ynet News ran an op-ed reminding the world that "some of the greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish."
"We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka (The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage) was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags," wrote Sever Plocker for Ynet News.
"Lenin, Stalin, and their successors could not have carried out their deeds without wide-scale cooperation of disciplined 'terror officials,' cruel interrogators, snitches, executioners, guards, judges, perverts, and many bleeding hearts who were members of the progressive Western Left and were deceived by the Soviet regime of horror and even provided it with a kosher certificate."
It was Genrikh Yagoda, described by Plocker as "the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century," who spearheaded NKVD, the successor group of Cheka, who is credited with single-handedly facilitating the murder of 10 million people, which in and of itself is more people than Adolph Hitler murdered.
"Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people," Plocker wrote. "His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the 'bloodthirsty dwarf.'"
"Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity."
Historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn estimated that as many as 66 million people, most of them Christians, were murdered by the Bolsheviks throughout the Russian revolution. And a great many of these Bolsheviks were Jews who hated the grace-based meekness of Russian Christians whom they despised and wanted out of the way.
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