The Catacomb Church and the Holodomor

 
 
The largest stronghold of the CPI (The Catacomb Church) was the peasantry, the least amenable to Soviet propaganda and traditionally keeping Christian foundations and loyalty to Orthodoxy.

The Holodomor (also known as the Terror-Famine) of 1932-1933 was specifically organized in order to finally crush the Orthodox peasantry who had put up a resistance to collectivization, and the violent transformation of the Orthodox people into a faceless mass of so called "collective farmers" and homo sovieticus. All those who resisted were subjected to "dispossession" and forced eviction to Siberia, arrests, exile and executions. The rest were forcibly turned into "collective farmers", having regenerated, and in fact destroyed the peasantry as such. However, even these measures did not give the desired results. As long as the spirit of the Orthodox peasantry itself was preserved, invisibly passed on from generation to generation, as long as its bearers were alive, the successes of the Soviets in the countryside were ephemeral. The Sergian-Renovationist schisms generated by the Soviets could not have had any success among such peasants. Orthodox grain growers in many regions remained predominantly faithful to the True Orthodox Church.

As noted in the investigative files of the OGPU regarding the activities of the CPC in Ukraine, "the core of anti-Soviet work was transferred by the counter-revolutionary organization to the countryside and the main focus of the leaders was turned to disrupting collectivization."

The position of the CPI was especially strong in such centers of the "kulaks" as the Central Black Earth Region of Russia, Ukraine, Kuban and Don. It was in these agricultural regions in 1932-33 the Bolsheviks provoked an artificial famine, as a result of which more than 10 million people died. In Ukraine, the campaign for the mass destruction of the Orthodox peasantry was centrally carried out by the apparatus of the Central Committee of the CP (B) U under the leadership of L.M. Kaganovich. The blow was purposefully applied to the primordial centers of Orthodox culture and tradition among the people. As a result of the genocide, entire villages and districts died out en masse, people died of hunger right on the streets, cases of cannibalism became more frequent. Village Orthodox priests died along with the peasants.

As a former catacomb priest later recalled, and later, in exile, Archbishop of Chile (ROCOR) Leonty (Fillipovich): “Many starving people were unable to reach the city and fell dead or in torment on the roads and unknown paths ... I myself have seen more than once similar terrible images, when a man dying of starvation in his death throes, grass or tree bark came out of his mouth with foam, which he greedily chewed a few minutes before his death, hoping to get to the city ... And how many people died during this famine, who were not only eaten by strangers, but even close people... During the Nativity Lent, I visited the homes of my parishioners on one of the outskirts of Kiev. In a rare house they did not starve. Some of the images I will remember forever. Cold winter day. Walked in the room. In the middle is a circle of human excrement. On the stove sits an old mother swollen with hunger, wrapped in some kind of rags. In one corner lies a young man who looks like a skeleton - a son who died of exhaustion two days ago, in another corner - the youngest son is dying. How many such pictures have I seen, only the Lord knows. I wonder how my heart could take it and not burst."
 

 
The cruelty and fanaticism of the communist regime towards the Orthodox peasantry knew no boundaries. Those fleeing from death and trying to flee to other regions not subject to the famine were caught by the Chekists and returned either back, or exiled or shot. Stalin's special Directive of January 22, 1933 categorically prohibited the departure of peasants from the famine-stricken territories of Ukraine and the Kuban to other territories of the USSR. Peasants were no longer selling tickets for rail and water transport. Roads to cities were blocked. Those who managed to leave were arrested and returned back. In the first month and a half of this resolution, more than 220 thousand Ukrainian peasants were arrested. More than 168 thousand of them are forcibly returned back to Ukrainian villages, where they were dying of hunger. As a result of the mass famine and the destruction of the Orthodox peasantry, the influence of the TOC in Ukraine, in the Kuban, Don and in the Central Black Earth Region of Russia was significantly weakened. Simultaneously with the Holodomor in the villages, repressions against the followers of the CPI in the cities did not stop... As Mendel Markovich Khatayevich, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Part (bolsheviks) U, said frankly, "It took hunger to show them who is the boss here. It cost millions of lives, but we won".

Rest, O Lord, the souls of your faithful servants, those who died innocently from famines and tortures of the godless government. Amen.