12/12/2025
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, established a communist regime in Russia that aimed to dismantle the imperial order, including the Russian Orthodox Church’s influence. Many early Bolshevik leaders, such as Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein), had Jewish heritage, attracted to revolutionary movements due to Tsarist persecution, which confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement and incited pogroms. This involvement spurred narratives portraying the revolution as a Jewish-led effort to overthrow Christian society, with policies secularizing the state and suppressing religion. Under Lenin, Bolsheviks confiscated church properties, closed monasteries, and executed clergy, seeing Christianity as bourgeois oppression to eliminate for a socialist utopia.
As the Soviet Union consolidated under Bolshevik rule, policies caused massive deaths via famines, purges, and gulags, especially during 1930s collectivization and Stalin’s Great Terror. Death estimates range from 20 million via executions, starvation, and camps, to 60 million per sources like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with many Christian victims targeted for faith or resistance to atheism. The Cheka and NKVD, with diverse ethnicities but notable early Jewish roles, enforced this through arrests, trials, and deportations. Religious persecution escalated, executing or imprisoning thousands of priests and believers, promoting militant atheism, and demolishing churches to crush spiritual opposition to communism.
Narratives blaming “Bolshevik Jews” for these deaths arose in anti-communist and nationalist circles, stressing ethnic backgrounds of leaders and agents to depict atrocities as targeted against Christians. This view spread among exiles and Western propaganda interwar, tying violence to claims of Jewish conspiracy against Russian values. Though Soviet brutality hit all groups, including Jews in Stalin’s later antisemitic purges, these accounts emphasize disproportionate harm to Christian communities, whose suppression was key to Bolshevik’s classless, godless society.