“The persecution of the Church began in January, 1918, and has been increasing since then. The Bolsheviks issued a decree on the disestablishment of the Church, although never had the Russian Church been so firmly in the grip of the secular authorities as in Soviet Russia. The Church has not only been robbed but treated with contumely. Every commissary has the right of prohibiting a service if he suspects the priest or his congregation of counter-revolutionary tendencies. Practically whenever he chooses he can close a church, turn it into a cinema, mock at the ancient sacred relics, and in general insult people’s religious feelings.
“But it is strange that the greater the persecution of the Russian Church the nearer and dearer does it become to the tortured Russian people. Indeed, the priests of the Russian Church boldly denounce the Bolsheviks. Not one of the secular rulers has accused them so openly as Tikhon, the All-Russian Patriarch, over whom the Damocles sword of the Bolsheviks is always hanging. But the sword can only kill the body, and not the spirit.
“As early as last February, Patriarch Tikhon excommunicated the Bolsheviks, the excommunication being read in the churches. At that time the persecution of the clergy had already commenced, but the Patriarch had not been arrested. It was only later, in the autumn of 1918, during the universal Terror, that he was placed under domiciliary arrest in his apartments in the Kremlin, with a guard of Chinese, Letts and Red Army men, and deprived of his rations. But even as a prisoner the Patriarch issued declarations against the Bolsheviks, in which he severely denounced them.
“It is not enough,” writes the Patriarch, “that you have stained the hands of the Russian people with the blood of their brethren. You have instigated the people to open, shameless robbery. You have befogged their consciences and stifled their conviction of sin, but under whatever name you disguise an evil deed, murder, violence and robbery will always remain crimes and deeds of evil that clamor to Heaven for vengeance. Yes, we are going through a dreadful time under your dominion, and it will be long before it fades from the hearts of the nation, where it has dimmed the image of God and impressed that of the beast.
“But as yet the Bolsheviks have not dared to raise their hand against the aged Patriarch. Apparently he is alive.”
A faint idea of what the Bolsheviks are doing to the Russian Church may be gathered from the following:
“According to information received from A. Kartashov, former Minister of Cults, by December, 1918, the Bolsheviks had killed ten archbishops and bishops; it is difficult to ascertain the number of priests killed. It reaches several hundreds. The Patriarch is a prisoner in his own house. According to the (later) message from the Archbishop of Omsk, President of the Supreme Administration of the Orthodox Church, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Metropolitan of Kiev, twenty bishops and hundreds of priests have been assassinated. Some were buried alive. ‘Wherever the Bolsheviks are in power,’ says the Archbishop of Omsk, ‘the Christian Church is persecuted with even greater ferocity than in the first three centuries of the Christian era.’
“When, in January, 1919, the town of Yuriev (Dorpat) was taken by the Bolsheviks, Bishop Platon was arrested. The Reval papers thus describe the Bishop’s last moments. The Bolsheviks burst into his house at night, dragged him from his bed. Barefoot and clad only in his under-linen, the Bishop, with 17 other persons, was dragged down to the cellars of the house they had been arrested in. Here the Red executioners rushed at them with their axes and killed them.
“Near Kotlas, all the ten monks of the monastery, with the prior at their head, were shot for agitation against the Soviet authorities.”