Hide Me Within Thy Wounds: The Persecution of the Catholic Church in the USSR - Softcover
On coming to power in 1917, the Bolsheviks condemned religion as the 'opium of the people', and persecution of the Church became an integral part of domestic policy in the Soviet Union. In January 1918 they issued a decree for separation of Church and state, depriving all religious groups of judicial rights and declaring their possessions property of the nation. These decrees justified mass seizure and destruction of churches, punitive measures against clergy and hounding of believers for religious convictions. While 2,429 priests were arrested in 1923-1924, the figure grew to 19,812 in 1931-1932. Communist ideological purity made no distinctions. All groups suffered: Orthodox and Catholic, Lutherans, Baptists and other Protestants, Mennonites, Moslems, and Buddhists. This book describing Soviet persecution of priests and believers of various persuasions is devoted to the Catholics, its history of persecution in Russia from 1918 to almost complete annihilation in 1939, when only two functional Catholic churches remained. It uses previously inaccessible material from central and regional archives of the Russian Federal Security Service and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, The Ukrainian Central State Archives of Public Administration, and security service archives in republics of the former USSR. This account of the fate of Catholic clergy and laity caught up and crushed in the machine of repression draws on material from investigation records and personal files of prisoners, aggregate returns of general Soviet camp administration (GULAG), and instructions and coded telegrams of the secret police. Thousands of religious leaders, men and women of every denomination, were put in prisons. Interrogated at length, sent to labor camps or executed. One stands in admiration as we see from actual archival documents the cruel treatment of the Russian, German and Polish victims whose only crime was to be faithful to their beliefs. A chilling study of a country without God.
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- PublisherGermans From Russia Heritage Collection
- Publication date2003
- ISBN 10 1891193384
- ISBN 13 9781891193385
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages219
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