This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In early 1918, Vladimir Lenin's government issued a decree stripping the Russian Orthodox Church of its legal standing and its property, opening seventy years of Soviet persecution. Twenty eight bishops and more than 1,200 priests were executed in the first five years alone.
The scale only grew from there. Roughly 130,000 priests were arrested between 1917 and 1935, some 95,000 of them shot, and the purges of 1937 and 1938 alone recorded 168,300 clergy arrested and 106,300 shot. The number of open churches fell from nearly 30,000 in 1927 to fewer than 500 by 1940.
The persecution eased briefly during the war years from 1941, then resumed under Nikita Khrushchev, whose campaign from 1959 to 1964 closed some 12,000 more churches. Only under Mikhail Gorbachev did the pressure finally lift, and a later account carries the story to his 1988 public celebration of the millennium of Russian Christianity as the point the long suppression ended.
What seventy years of persecution changed for the Russian Orthodox Church's spread was near total institutional destruction followed by survival against long odds. A church that had opened nearly 30,000 buildings in 1927 emerged from Soviet rule with a fraction of that number, its clergy decimated by arrest and execution, yet still standing when the state that had tried to erase it gave way to a new era.