The New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia

The Russian Church lost more people to the twentieth century than the whole Roman Empire took in three hundred years. Bishops, priests, monastics and laity were shot or worked to death from 1918 onward, with the peaks in 1922, 1929 and above all 1937, when more than a hundred thousand were arrested on religious charges and tens of thousands shot; at Butovo outside Moscow alone the firing lists name over a thousand killed for the faith. In 2000 the Council of Bishops in Moscow glorified the Synaxis of the New Martyrs and Confessors, naming over a thousand and leaving the rest known to God. The imperial family was glorified in the same act as passion-bearers, a distinct Russian category for those killed without resistance, having been glorified as martyrs by the Church Abroad in 1981.