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“You can’t handle the truth!” exclaims Colonel Nathan R. Jessup (USMC) in the legendary Hollywood cinematic drama A Few Good Men. Words of wisdom which will no doubt resonate throughout time despite their fictional origins, it’s also a message for the evangelical community on the Christian Right in light of the proliferation of communist propaganda inside the Western church. Uncomfortable parallels can be drawn between the threat that radical socialism poses to the traditional American values of liberty and freedom and those initially faced by the Russian people in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution; as a real life “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” scenario threatens to undermine our very way of life in the United States today.

“And back in Russia, the communists had to fight for their own survival in a vicious civil war against supporters of the old regime,” explains PBS in the 2000 documentary titled, “Communism: The Promise and The Reality.” Stepping back to the future in order to offer the reader some additional context, “the church was a challenge to the communists.”

Perhaps the understatement of the century considering exactly how the communists planned to overcome that challenge, “for millions of Russians it was still a source of strength and offered the only alternative system of beliefs. But the communists were atheists and sought to remove the challenge by abolishing the church.”

Interestingly, as the MMA Press Room previously reported, “the orthodox church is the only institution in Russia whose hierarchy has survived 'the collapse of Communism' wholly unchanged,” according to a 2019 BBC religion documentary titled, “What is the Russian Orthodox Church?”  

“Throughout the Soviet Union,” the documentary goes on to explain, “priests had to work with the KGB, as not necessarily active collaboration; more of a willingness to play along with the secular authorities.”

“At grassroots levels," according to the report, “some priests turned into spies who were prepared to fabricate denunciations (inform against someone).”

Establishing that the communists sought to “abolish the church” and that the Russian Orthodox Church was ultimately used as a weapon against the people to supplant God by establishing the State as the highest form of authority; the holy war waged against Christians in the former Soviet Union could just as easily be described as “hell on earth” once a close examination of the facts is undertaken.

“Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career – the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges,” explains author Nick Paton Walsh in his January 25, 2003 TheGuardian.com article titled, “Solzhenitsyn breaks last taboo of the revolution.”

According to the report, “Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims. ‘Two Hundred Years Together’ – a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population – contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.”

Among the greatest cover-ups in modern history, “It is January 1923 and the Bolsheviks are now mopping up the last few pockets of resistance after a brutal Russian civil war,” explains the narrator in a July 6, 2020 VertigoPolitix Collection YouTube video titled, “The Genocide of Russia’s Old Believers (Bolshevik Revolution)."

“Certain ethnic blocks are singled out for immediate liquidation; some must wait for their demise in the coming years. While others, still, who fall in between are relocated thousands of miles from their homes – never to see them again.

“One group in particular,” according to the report, “the last of the old Christian holdouts who refused to follow the State-run orthodoxy of the Patriarch Nikon in 1652 had removed themselves into the dark, secluded forests of the Russian North. They were called the ‘Old Believers’ and for 250-years they lived in these vast, remote hinterlands forgotten by time and history until the spring of 1923 when machines on wheels, driven by Soviet Commissars and Red Army soldiers, entered those unremembered places to begin the greatest genocide in human history.

“In the lead-up to these events, the Bolshevik regime had made the persecution of religious groups, particularly Russian Orthodox Christians and the utter destruction of their houses of worship a priority.”

Horrifyingly, the documentary later goes on to explain, “When the massacres were finally over, 120,000 Russian Orthodox priests were shot to death. 30,000 of the world’s most beautiful churches were raised to the ground – 200,000 religious icons and ancient Christian artifacts were destroyed or melted down for their gold and sum 25-million Christians were murdered for their faith; many of whom were either buried alive in family groups or burned on mass within their own churches. In the two decades from the outset of the Russian Civil War until the German liberation of the Ukraine in 1941, the Bolshevik and Stalinist regimes would exterminate over 60-million souls – either by direct execution or deliberately created famine.”

Going on to describe the form of Christianity the “Old Believers” adhered to as “likely the earliest from Slavic Europe,” interestingly, according to the report, “but it was the tradition of their old Slavonic language, and its usage as a defined token against the State, which gave them immunity to modern concepts and cultural subversion. This made them factionally anathema, and therefore, the enemies of communism.” Throwing a proverbial monkey wrench in the idea that Jesus was a socialist; the uncomfortable parallels between the threat radical socialism poses to the traditional American values of liberty and freedom and the deadly consequences of the Bolshevik revolution are all the justification needed in sounding the alarm over the infiltration of communist propaganda inside the Western church, and one of many reasons the evangelical community on the Christian Right simply, “can’t handle the truth.”