Duke

[Will Tanner @Will_Tanner_1]

A good reminder that a quarter of the Union Army sent to destroy Virginia, cradle of the Founders was fresh off the boat from Ireland and Germany, and roughly another quarter was first generation immigrants, namely 48ers

The result if those mercenary armies is Kinzinger being in a position to gloat about his ancestors trying to kill Americans and inflict Reconstruction upon Dixie

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

🇺🇸U.S. House Representative Thomas Massie:
“Last night I received a flash drive containing the complete list of files belonging to Jeffrey Epstein. Everything is there: every billionaire, every campaign donor, every single person. Now let me explain why you haven’t heard anything about this in the media. Because they’re all in there. They will do everything to prevent these documents from being made public. Epstein was far more than just a pedophile; he was an intelligence asset. He was part of a blackmail operation used to control billionaires, politicians, and world leaders. If this list ever sees the light of day, the system as we know it will collapse. The public has the right to know the truth, and I am not afraid to share it.”
It looks like a political earthquake may be coming.

[Islam Invasion 🚨 @IslamInvasion]

The great Christopher Hitchens:

1.5 million Europeans and Americans were enslaved by Barbary pirates between 1530 and 1780.
The U.S. Navy was founded in large part to end the piracy.

The Quran explicitly permits the enslavement of infidels.

[Henrik ⨁ 🇸🇪 🇺🇸 ᛉ ᛏ ᛟ @Henrik_Palmgren]

Self described "half Jewish" Armie Hammer, who is the main protagonist in Uwe Boll's "Citizen Vigilante," flashes his very real Hebrew Aleph tattoo at one point in the movie.

This movie is nothing but a humiliation ritual to cuck you on solutions.

[Humble Flow @HumbleFlow]

In his 1938 work The Great Heresies, Hilaire Belloc devoted a chapter to Islam:

"Millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past."

[mynextchapter @Deeteem1]

Salomon Morel: The War Criminal Who Died Free — and the World That Let Him

On February 14, 2007, Salomon Morel died of natural causes in Tel Aviv, Israel. He was 87 years old. He died in his own bed, in a country that had sheltered him for fifteen years, protected him from two extradition requests, and declared on two separate occasions that there was no legal basis to return him to Poland to face justice for the deaths of nearly two thousand people under his direct command.

He was never tried. He was never convicted. He was never extradited. He spent his final years as an Israeli citizen while Polish prosecutors sat on testimony from over one hundred survivors describing in precise detail what he had done to them and to the people who died around them.

His name appears in almost no history textbook. His face appears in almost no documentary. The system that produced him, protected him, and ultimately buried him without accountability is the same system that insists, to this day, that it holds a unique moral authority on the subject of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the obligations of justice across generations.

This is his story, told plainly, without the fog that has surrounded it for thirty years.

The Camp on the Bones of Auschwitz
The location matters. It always does.

The Zgoda camp in Świętochłowice, Upper Silesia, was built on the infrastructure of an Auschwitz subcamp — the Arbeitslager Eintrachthütte, a Nazi forced labor facility that had been evacuated by the Germans in January 1945 as the Red Army advanced. The barracks were still standing. The fences were still up. The NKVD walked in, disinfected the structures, and handed the facility to Poland's Ministry of Public Security in February 1945.

On March 15, 1945 — ten weeks before the war in Europe officially ended — a 26-year-old communist security officer with no formal training and no administrative experience was placed in command. His name was Salomon Morel.

The camp that had held Jews under Nazi Germany now held Silesians, ethnic Germans, and Polish political prisoners under communist Poland. The barracks were the same. The fences were the same. The suffering, as documented by over a hundred survivors in sworn testimony to Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, was the same in kind if not in ideology.

Morel understood exactly where he was. On the first night the German prisoners arrived, he walked into the barracks and told them directly:

"My name is Morel. I am a Jew. My mother and father, my family — I think they're all dead. And I swore that if I got out alive, I was going to get back at you Nazis. And now you're going to pay for what you did."— Salomon Morel, first night at Świętochłowice, as documented by journalist John Sack in An Eye for an Eye (1993)

That statement was not the expression of grief. It was the announcement of a program. What followed over the next eight months was one of the most extensively documented episodes of systematic torture and mass killing in postwar Polish history — documented not by his enemies, not by antisemites, not by German revanchists, but by Poland's own official state investigative body, the IPN, using testimony from more than 100 witnesses, archival records from the Ministry of Public Security, and Morel's own personnel file.

What He Did: The Documented Record
The Zgoda camp processed at least 5,764 prisoners between February and November 1945. The official recorded death toll, established by IPN investigation, was 1,855 — approximately one in three of every person who passed through the gates. In August 1945 alone, 632 people died in a single month, an average of more than twenty deaths per day, as a typhus epidemic tore through a population that Morel had deliberately overcrowded, deliberately starved, and deliberately deprived of medical care.

The epidemic was not a natural disaster. Morel was informed of the outbreak but did not report it to his superiors until local newspapers published the story. When the local prosecutor was finally notified, he ordered that no new prisoners be sent to the camp. Morel's punishment for allowing nearly 700 people to die of preventable disease while concealing the outbreak from authorities was a three-day house arrest and a temporary 50 percent reduction in pay.

Three days. For 632 dead in a month.

The epidemic was one mechanism of death. The other was Morel himself.

Survivor Dorota Boriczek testified: "I knew Morel in the camp. He was a very brutal man. He would come in at night. We could hear the cries of the men then. They would beat them and throw the bodies out of the window."

IPN archival records and survivor testimony document the following specific practices at Zgoda under Morel's command:

Prisoners were beaten with rubber truncheons, rifle butts, and iron bars. They were subjected to "pyramid" torture — stacked on top of each other in layers up to six high, causing crushing injuries and suffocation. They were forced to stand for hours or days without food, water, or shelter in cold weather. They were ordered to beat each other — fathers forced to beat sons, sons forced to beat fathers — under penalty of execution for refusal. They were forced to sing Nazi-era songs as a form of humiliation; refusal meant death. Care packages sent by families were systematically confiscated, cutting off the only external source of nutrition for starving prisoners.

John Sack, the Jewish-American journalist whose 1993 book An Eye for an Eyefirst brought Morel's story to English-language audiences, documented in interviews with survivors that Morel's preferred personal method of killing was fracturing skulls with a pickaxe and with the leg of a wooden chair. Sack's account, based on direct survivor interviews, was corroborated by the IPN's independent investigation.

Gerhard Gruschka was imprisoned at Zgoda when he was 14 years old. He survived, wrote a book documenting what he witnessed, and lived the rest of his life with what he had seen done to the people around him as a child. He described the camp as a place of systematic, daily atrocity carried out by men who operated without any restraint, oversight, or consequence.

Children were in that camp. Mothers with children aged one to five. Elderly people over sixty. People who had committed no documented crime, sent by administrative decision of communist security authorities who classified anyone of German background or suspected anti-communist sentiment as an enemy of the state. Historians Nicholas Robins and Adam Jones concluded in their academic analysis that Morel "presided over a murderous regime founded on ubiquitous assaults and atrocities against German captives." Keith Lowe documented that survivors flooding into West Germany in late 1945 called Zgoda and facilities like it "hell camps," "death camps," and "extermination camps" — and that their testimony was taken seriously by the West German government and population as examples of Stalinist brutality.

Morel walked away from Zgoda when it closed in November 1945 with a commendation. He was subsequently given command of the Jaworzno concentration camp, where he served from 1949 to 1951. By that point he had already acquired a formal reputation within the Polish communist security apparatus as an "exceptional sadist." He continued running communist prison facilities until 1956. He was promoted to colonel. He received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and the Badge of Exemplary Functionary of Prison Service.

Medals. For this.

The Escape
For thirty years after the war, Morel lived openly in Poland, in the Katowice district housing reserved for former communist security functionaries. He collected his pension. He was not investigated. He was not questioned. The communist state he had served protected him with the same institutional silence it extended to all its operatives.

When communism fell in 1989, that silence began to crack. A letter from a man named Erno Kołodziejczyk describing his father's death at Zgoda reached Polish investigators. Survivor testimonies began to surface in the press. In 1991, Morel was interviewed as a subject of investigation.

In 1992, before formal charges could be filed, Morel left Poland. He applied for political asylum in Sweden. Sweden refused. He then applied for Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return — the Israeli law that grants automatic citizenship to any person of Jewish heritage. Israel granted it.

In 1996, Poland's public prosecutor formally indicted Salomon Morel on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and communist crimes. An arrest warrant was issued. In 1998, Poland filed its first formal extradition request with the State of Israel.

Israel refused.

The Israeli Justice Ministry's response stated that the statute of limitations on the charges had expired under Israeli domestic law, and that extradition was therefore neither possible nor required under the extradition convention between the two countries.

In 2004, Poland filed again — this time with fresh evidence, upgraded charges framed specifically as crimes against the civilian population for which there is no statute of limitations under international law. Over 100 witnesses. Fifty-eight former inmates of Zgoda. Documentary evidence from the Ministry of Public Security's own archives.

In July 2005, Israel refused again. The response rejected the more serious charges as potentially false and characterized the case as potentially part of an antisemitic conspiracy. There was, Israel declared, "no basis whatsoever" to extradite Morel.

Poland gave up. Morel died in Tel Aviv nineteen months later.

The Double Standard That Cannot Be Explained Away
In the same decades that Israel was protecting Salomon Morel from extradition, the same state and its allied institutions were hunting Nazi war criminals to the ends of the earth and to the last breath of their lives.

John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker in Ohio, was stripped of his US citizenship, extradited to Israel, tried, acquitted of one charge, extradited again to Germany, tried again, convicted at the age of 91, and died awaiting appeal. The evidence against him was contested throughout. He was in his nineties. His health was failing. None of these considerations provided him with protection.

Oskar Gröning, the so-called "bookkeeper of Auschwitz," was convicted at 94 years of age in Germany in 2015 and sentenced to four years in prison. He died before serving his sentence. The prosecution proceeded regardless.

Herbert Buchner, a former SS medic, was charged in Germany in 2020 at the age of 95.

Irmgard Furchner, a former secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp, was tried in Germany in 2022 at the age of 97 and convicted.

The principle applied to all of them was explicit and consistent: crimes against humanity have no statute of limitations, age and infirmity are not defenses, and the passage of time does not extinguish the obligation of accountability.

Salomon Morel was 72 when he fled to Israel. He was 76 when Poland first requested his extradition. He was 84 when Poland filed its second request. He died at 87.

Every argument Israel used to protect Morel — statute of limitations, age, health, insufficient evidence — was an argument that the same legal and institutional system explicitly rejected when applied to elderly German war criminals. Polish authorities said so directly at the time. They were right. The double standard is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of documented, parallel, contradictory institutional behavior applied to perpetrators of identical categories of crime based solely on the identity of their victims.

Morel's victims were Silesians, ethnic Germans, and Polish political prisoners. They did not qualify for the protection that other categories of victim command. That is the conclusion the documented record compels.

The Book They Tried to Bury
John Sack was a Jewish-American journalist and author whose 1993 book An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945documented Morel's crimes and the broader network of postwar communist camps in Poland staffed heavily by Jewish officers. Sack was not an antisemite. He was a Jewish man who believed the truth mattered regardless of whose truth it complicated.

The book was published in the United States. It was accepted for publication in Germany by a major German publisher — and then abruptly cancelled, the publisher citing concern that the book could be "cause for some misunderstanding." A German publisher cancelled a factually documented book about postwar atrocities in communist camps because those atrocities had been committed by Jewish officers rather than German ones, and the truth was commercially and politically inconvenient.

The book was suppressed or ignored in multiple European markets. Sack spent the rest of his life defending its sourcing, his methodology, and his right to publish what survivors had told him. He died in 2004, three years before Morel, without seeing the man he had exposed face any legal consequence.

The 2017 Polish film Zgoda, directed by Maciej Sobieszczański, finally brought the story to a Polish-language audience. It received essentially no international distribution.

What Justice Requires
Salomon Morel was, by the documented record established by Poland's own Institute of National Remembrance, a man who commanded a facility where nearly two thousand people died, who personally participated in systematic torture, who concealed a lethal epidemic from his superiors while prisoners died around him at a rate of twenty per day, and who spent decades afterward living comfortably on a communist pension while his victims' families buried them and kept silent out of fear of reprisal.

He was also a Holocaust survivor whose family was killed. That fact is documented and real. The trauma he experienced under Nazi occupation was genuine. None of it — not one gram of it — confers a license to do to other human beings what was done to his family, and then to spend sixty years evading accountability for it.

The logic that personal trauma justifies atrocity is not a principle anyone would accept if applied universally. A Polish survivor of Nazi atrocity who ran a camp that killed two thousand Jews would not be protected by Israeli extradition refusals on statute of limitations grounds. The principle would not hold. Everyone knows it would not hold. The refusal to say so plainly is not sensitivity. It is complicity in a documented institutional double standard.

Justice does not have an ethnicity. Crimes against humanity do not expire based on the identity of the perpetrator. The same accountability demanded — correctly — of elderly German war criminals in their nineties was owed to Salomon Morel. Israel chose not to provide it. The Western press chose not to cover the refusal with anything approaching the attention it deserved. The institutional class that manages collective memory chose to file this case in a drawer marked "complicated."

It is not complicated. Nearly two thousand people died at Zgoda. The man responsible died free in Tel Aviv at 87. The witnesses who survived are dead or dying. The records are preserved in Warsaw. The extradition requests are archived in Jerusalem.

History knows what happened. The question is whether it is permitted to say so. Another jewish criminal slips away...

[Mike Neanderthal MCNationalist @Cointuckeywind1]

An illegal alien is living in the starter home your kid can't afford

[Mads Palsvig @Palsvig]

WWII explained

[Porter Stansberry @porterstansb]

@tynewrc Do any of these people realize that virtually every part of modern civilization depends on hydrocarbons?

[Jay Anderson @TheProjectUnity]

Would you try the Lilliputian mushroom?

It makes you see tiny people everywhere.

Scientists don't even know why it does this because it doesn't contain any known psychoactive compounds.

But, quite reliably, you chow down on this shroom and you're seeing little people.

[Mr. Sausage @MrSausageGet]

I voted for Trump 3 times. I am very, very conservative. I worked with my local Republican precinct and Republican grassroots across the country.

I fought for Trump and Republicans for YEARS. Put in 20-40 hours per week.

I now believe Trump is likely an Antichrist.

[American AF 🇺🇸 @iAnonPatriot]

What Chicago looked like 100 years ago.

The city was 95% White during the 1920s.

[The Assembly @InTheAssembly]

$MSFT this month:

Michael Burry: publicly bullish and buying call options.

Rep. Gottheimer: bought up to $1.5M in options.

Rep. Cisneros: bought up to $100k in shares.

What do they know?

[₿en Wehrman @benwehrman]

Why do so many photos from the 1800s depict gorgeous, fully-built cities packed with incredibly-advanced architecture...but they are completely empty ghost towns with zero people? 🧐

Something is very, VERY off about the official version of history we were taught in school...

[AntisepticMoose @AntisepticMoose]

Don't do the Jewish masonic kaballah pedo symbolism in front of the goyim dear.....

[Trumps Nephew @ForgiatoBlow47]

YOU DO REALIZE THAT THE 8 MILLION PEOPLE "LOSING" MEDICAID, AND THE 3 MILLION "LOSING" SNAP BENEFITS ARE NOT ENTITILED TO THOSE BENEFITS IN THE FIRST PLACE.

[mynextchapter @Deeteem1]

They Came for the Church First: The Bolshevik War on God

When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, they understood immediately that two things could not coexist in the same civilization: their revolution and the Christian Church. Not because the Church had taken up arms against them. Not because priests were organizing counter-revolutionary armies. But because the Church represented something the Bolshevik state could never tolerate — a source of moral authority that did not come from the Party, a loyalty that could not be re-routed through Lenin, and a vision of human life rooted in something higher than the state.

Marx had called religion the opium of the people. The Bolsheviks took that metaphor literally and treated the Church the way a state treats a drug cartel — not as a theological opponent to be debated, but as a criminal organization to be dismantled, its leadership arrested or killed, its property seized, its infrastructure destroyed, and its hold on the population broken by force.

What followed was the most systematic and sustained persecution of Christians in the history of the modern world. It lasted seventy years. It destroyed tens of thousands of churches, silenced over a million bells, stole centuries of sacred treasure, and killed priests, monks, nuns, and bishops in numbers that have never been fully counted. And it began within days of the revolution itself.

The Numbers: What Was There Before, What Was Left After

To understand the scale of what the Bolsheviks destroyed, you first need to understand what they found when they arrived.

On the eve of the 1917 revolution, the Russian Orthodox Church was one of the great institutional civilizations of the world. Russia had 54,000 churches and over 1,000 monasteries. More than a million bronze bells rang across the Russian Empire from church towers — bells that had been cast by master craftsmen over centuries, some weighing thousands of pounds, some bearing the names of tsars, some older than any living institution in the West. The Church ran schools, hospitals, and orphanages. The Patriarchate — the supreme leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had been abolished by Peter the Great two centuries earlier and only restored in 1917 — had just been re-established in a council of bishops meeting in Moscow, weeks before Lenin's coup.

By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the 1980s, six thousand eight hundred and ninety-three churches remained. Fifteen monasteries. The bells were almost entirely gone. The treasure had been stripped, melted, sold abroad, or destroyed. The clergy had been shot, imprisoned, exiled, or broken into collaboration with the state.

From 54,000 churches to 6,893. From over 1,000 monasteries to 15. That is what seventy years of Bolshevik rule did to the Russian Orthodox Church. Not through neglect. Through deliberate, organized, ideologically-driven destruction.

The Decree Came Within Days
The Bolsheviks did not wait. One day after taking power, they issued the Decree on Land — which nationalized all Church property in a single stroke. The Church lost its land, its buildings, its schools, its legal status, and its financial foundation simultaneously. It was rendered, overnight, an illegal squatter in its own properties.

What followed in rapid sequence:

Church marriages and divorces lost all legal recognition. Religious instruction in schools was prohibited. Priests were formally disenfranchised — stripped of the right to vote, to hold property, to access state services — and classified as members of a parasitic class, alongside former nobles and merchants. Their children were required to hide their parentage to avoid being classified as "enemies of the people." In 1921, group religious instruction of anyone under 18 was banned entirely. The sacraments could be administered only in secret or not at all.

The Patriarch of Moscow, Tikhon, responded in 1918 with a pastoral letter anathematizing the Bolshevik leadership for their violence against the Church. He declared the Orthodox Church to be under existential threat. He was correct. He was subsequently arrested multiple times, tried, and died in 1925 under circumstances that many historians regard as suspicious.

Shoot the Priests
Between June 1918 and January 1919 — in just seven months — official Church records documented the execution of one metropolitan, eighteen bishops, and hundreds of priests. And those were only the cases the Church itself was able to record, in a period of chaos and terror when record-keeping was itself dangerous.

The broader figures are staggering. In the first five years of Bolshevik rule alone, 28 bishops and over 1,200 priests were executed. By the end of 1923, Soviet forces had killed approximately 2,700 Orthodox priests, 3,400 nuns, and 2,000 monks in clashes over church property and active suppression campaigns. Between 1917 and 1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested. Of those, 95,000 were shot by execution squads.

A secret police report from 1930 — not intended for public consumption — recorded an additional 42,800 Orthodox clergy who had died in prison camps. Over 12,000 clergy were murdered outright: shot, beaten to death, hanged, or drowned.

The methods of killing were, in documented cases, deliberately chosen for maximum humiliation and terror. Archbishop Andronik of Perm was forced to dig his own grave before being shot. Bishop Germogen of Tobolsk was lashed to the paddle wheel of a steamboat and twisted to death as the wheel turned. Priests were drowned in rivers — a specific echo of forced baptism, inverted into a death rite. Some were buried alive. Some were subjected to mock crucifixions. The desecration was not incidental. It was the message.

"The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and the reactionary bourgeoisie that we succeed in shooting on this occasion, the better."— Vladimir Lenin, written instruction during the 1922 church valuables campaign

Lenin wrote those words not in the heat of revolution but four years after seizing power, during what the Bolsheviks presented to the world as a humanitarian operation — the confiscation of Church gold to feed famine victims. The private instruction said the quiet part out loud: the famine was an opportunity, and the opportunity was to kill priests.

The Theft of the Treasure
In 1921 and 1922, famine swept across Russia. The Bolsheviks had contributed substantially to it through the forced grain requisitioning policies of War Communism — taking food from the peasantry to feed the cities and the Red Army, leaving the countryside to starve. When the famine arrived, Lenin saw in it not primarily a humanitarian crisis but a political opportunity.

The campaign to confiscate Church valuables was announced as famine relief. All gold and silver objects and precious stones were to be taken from every church in Russia — icon frames, ceremonial crosses, chalices, reliquaries, candlesticks, the accumulated sacred treasure of a thousand years of Orthodox devotion. It would be melted down, the public was told, and used to buy food for the starving.

Priests often refused. When they did, the Cheka arrested them for counter-revolutionary activity. In the town of Shuya in the Ivanovo Region, parishioners physically resisted the confiscation of their church's sacred items. Red Army soldiers opened fire on the crowd of worshippers. Several people were killed. The local priests were subsequently arrested and executed.

The treasure was not primarily used to feed the starving. Church items made of precious metals were taken to a specially created government storage facility. Many were later sold to the West — to collectors, museums, and dealers in Europe and America who were happy to purchase ancient Orthodox treasures at distressed prices from a revolutionary government that needed hard currency. The Danilov Monastery's bells were sold to Harvard University in the United States. The unique bells of the Sretensky Monastery were sold to England. Centuries of Russian sacred heritage left the country in crates, turned into foreign exchange for the Bolshevik state.

In 1922 alone, recently released evidence indicates over 8,000 people were killed during conflicts over the church valuables campaign. Eight thousand people, in a single year, over the theft of church property presented to the world as charity.
The Bells

Before the revolution, more than one million bronze bells rang across the Russian Empire. They had been ringing for centuries. The bells of Russia were not merely instruments of religious observance — they were the acoustic identity of Russian civilization, the sound that marked the hours, announced the seasons, called the faithful, mourned the dead, and warned of approaching enemies. Each bell was cast individually, often bearing inscriptions recording the date, the craftsman, the patron, and sometimes the tsar in whose reign it was made. The master bellfounder was among the most honored craftsmen in Russian society.

The Bolsheviks understood what the bells meant. That is why they destroyed them.

Bell ringing was systematically restricted through the 1920s. By 1926, ringing could only be authorized by local Soviet authorities, not by the Church. On December 6, 1929, the Soviet government issued Decree No. 118 — forbidding all bell ringing in the Soviet state and ordering all bells removed from church towers and melted down.

The decree was implemented with industrial thoroughness. In 1933, a secret meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee established a quarterly quota system — each republic and region was given a target for the procurement of bell bronze. The bells were taken down, transported, and smelted. In 1920, authorities in Kostroma melted bells down to produce cauldrons for public dining rooms. Many bells were turned into tractors. In 1932, 100 tons of Moscow church bells were melted down and cast into bronze high-relief panels for the construction of the Lenin Library. The bells of ancient monasteries — the Solovetsky, the Valaam, the Simonov, the Savvino-Storozhevsky — were destroyed. The bells of the Ivan the Great Bell Tower in Moscow, of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, of St. Isaac's in Leningrad, all fell to the furnace.

The 20 specialized bell foundries that had preserved centuries of casting knowledge were forced to close. The ancient craft of Russian bell-making — the specific metallurgical knowledge of how to achieve the precise tone of a great Orthodox bell, handed down through generations of master founders — was lost. When the limited revival of the Church that Stalin permitted during World War II arrived, there were no bells to ring and no one left who knew how to cast them properly.

Prior to 1917, over one million bells. By the 1950s, nearly none.

What They Did to the Churches Themselves
The churches that were not destroyed outright were repurposed with a deliberateness that felt — and was intended to feel — like desecration.

Monasteries became concentration camps. The Solovki Islands, home to one of the oldest and most revered Orthodox monasteries in Russia, became the first major Soviet concentration camp in 1922 — the Solovki Camp of Special Purpose. The Bolsheviks chose that location deliberately. The message was explicit: the place where Russia had prayed would become the place where Russia was imprisoned.

Churches became warehouses for grain, sugar, and industrial supplies. They became bakeries. They became fire stations, bus depots, furniture stores, and factories. They became "houses of culture" — state-run entertainment venues designed to provide a secular replacement for the communal gathering the Church had previously organized. Some became stables. The Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Suzdal was used as a bakery. The Church of the Annunciation in Kostroma became a bread-making facility. A church in Vladimir was converted into a planetarium — a dome installed where the altar had stood, so that Soviet citizens could learn that the universe was governed by physics, not God.

Domes were torn off. Crosses were pulled down. Frescoes were plastered over. The relics of saints — the physical remains that Orthodox Christianity treats with profound veneration — were publicly exhumed and exhibited in anti-religious museums to demonstrate that there was nothing miraculous about them. In 1923, the Soviet government publicly dug up the remains of canonized saints in villages across the country as theatrical propaganda events — showing peasants that the bones of their saints were merely bones.

Entire church archives — the baptismal records, marriage records, and burial records of generations of Russian families going back centuries — were destroyed or confiscated. The Bolsheviks understood that severing a people from the documented record of their ancestors was itself a form of cultural annihilation.

The Anti-Religion Five-Year Plan
What is perhaps least known about the Bolshevik war on the Church is that it was not improvised. It was planned, formally, with targets and timelines, in the same bureaucratic language the Soviets used for industrial production.

The Soviet government introduced an Anti-Religious Five-Year Plan with explicit annual objectives:

By 1933: all churches shut down. By 1934: all religious traditions and holidays eliminated. By 1935: all clergy prohibited from working. By 1937: the Soviet government would celebrate final victory in the war against religion.

The League of Militant Godless — a mass organization founded in 1925 and active throughout the 1930s — organized lectures, theatrical events, publications, and public demonstrations against religion. An anti-religious newspaper, Bezbozhnik ("The Godless"), was published for mass circulation. Anti-religion was not merely state policy. It was a cultural campaign, with organizers, propaganda, and performance.

The 1937 Soviet census was suppressed when it came back — partly because it showed an unacceptably large number of people still identifying as Christian believers, despite twenty years of systematic persecution, legal prohibition, murder of clergy, and destruction of churches. The Soviet state had killed the priests, burned the churches, melted the bells, seized the treasure, imprisoned the monks, banned religious education for children, and exhumed the saints. And the people still believed.

The Final Toll
One estimate, compiled from Soviet-era records and post-1991 archival releases, puts the total number of Church people killed across the full Soviet period at 600 bishops, 40,000 priests, and 120,000 monks and nuns. Many died in the inhuman conditions of the Gulag labor camps. Many were executed and buried in unmarked mass graves. In 1937 and 1938 alone, approximately 20,000 people were shot at the Butovo Firing Range near Moscow — of whom about a thousand were clergy. In the 1990s, Patriarch Alexy II called those mass graves "the Russian Golgotha."

The Russian Orthodox Church formally recognizes over 1,500 bishops, priests, monks, nuns, and deacons who died under Soviet persecution as New Martyrs and Confessors — saints of the modern Church, canonized for dying for their faith in the 20th century. That number, 1,500 formally canonized, represents only those whose cases have been individually documented and reviewed. The full count of those who died for their faith under Bolshevik rule will never be known.

In 1992, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation recognized the Red Terror as unlawful. The Russian government began the slow process of returning churches to the Orthodox community. Some bells have been recast. Some frescoes restored. The Danilov Monastery bells that had been sold to Harvard were eventually returned to Russia in 2008, replaced by replicas that now hang in Cambridge.

The craft of bell-casting has been partially revived. Communities across Russia collect money — fifteen dollars per kilogram of bronze on average — to commission new bells for churches that have stood silent for generations.

But a thousand-year tradition of bell-founding was broken in a decade. Centuries of sacred treasure were melted or sold. Ninety-five thousand priests were shot. And the civilization that the Bolsheviks tried to silence — the one they understood well enough to know that as long as the Church stood, the revolution was incomplete — kept praying anyway, in kitchens and forests and whispers, through seventy years of organized atheist terror.

That is the part they never mention in the history books—not the killing, but the survival. And they left Jewish temples alone and made antisemitism a capital offense punishable by death.

[The Founders on BTC @FoundersOnBTC]

@porterstansb Fantastic summary, just added your book to the Amazon cart. To anyone that wants a deeper read on your post “The Real Lincoln” is a must.