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Some facts about the history of the Church under the Communist persecution...

* Every single bishop who attended the Great Synof of 1917 was either murdered outright or died in a Communist concentration camp/prison.

* Patriarch Tikhon excommunicated the Communist leadership on Jan 18 1918 (OC). In retaliation dozens of bishops were summarily shot or murdered by other means. Tikhon would later die in prison.

* Between June 1918 and January 1919, official figures (which did not include the Volga, Kama and several other regions in Russia) claimed that one metropolitan, eighteen bishops, one hundred and two priests, one hundred and fifty-four deacons, and ninety-four monks/nuns had been killed. The numbers of laity murdered in this period is not known.

* In 1921 529 monasteries and convents were “liquidated.” The monks and nuns were mostly killed. Those who were not, died in concentration camps.

* In 1914 there were 55,173 Russian Orthodox churches and 29,593 chapels, 112,629 priests and deacons, 550 monasteries and 475 convents with a total of 95,259 monks and nuns in Russia. By 1940 there were less than 500 churches in the entire country, and only one monastery and seminary.

* Beginning in the 1930’s the persecution reached a level where the faithful laity and clergy were simply being exterminated without even a pretense to legality. The total estimate is upwards of ten million by 1939.

* By the time of the German invasion of the USSR in 1941 the ROC had been all but annihilated. The “official” church with its handful of bishops and priests were almost entirely a front for the Soviet Secret Police. What was left of the church was operating almost completely underground. During this period the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad ceased to recognize the Communist backed church and broke communion.