Due to real-life connections some of my follows on Mastodon are local libs who keep boosting stuff like this into my timeline.
This here is an account with a huge following for Fedi standards and apparently also posts on X. Not much profile info, no banner but very reactionary. Looks to be posting like an authority on all things Russia.
This chain about Stalin is 15 posts long, I have no idea what is going on there as I am definitely not too well in the loop with the Ukraine - Russia thing, but this seems to be both anti-communist and very russophobic. Pretty sus yet the libs eat this up.
So the source on this appears to be the Wikipedia page on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, which surprise surprise has [citation needed] at the end of the paragraph. Even more suspicious though, the paragraph claims that 108,800 clergy were shot dead (not killed in a general sense, all shot) from 1937-1940. However, according to a pro-tsarist site there were roughly 210,000 total clergy in the church at the end of Nicholas the II’s reign. So we’re supposed to buy that after decades of the church dwindling, the Soviets executed more than half of the clergy’s peak number in a three year span.
The Wikipedia article though, does betray a certain reality of the nature of the church and the Soviet position towards it. Because it was the official church of the state, a lot of the nominal high clerical figures in the church were also prominent members of the aristocracy. So their targeting was primarily about them being members of the ruling feudal class under the Tsars than about religion.
If the Orthodox church didn't want to be targeted by a revolution they could have tried not working hand-in-glove with the Tsarist state
So my favorite thing the Bolsheviks did that other revolutionary groups might not have... just never happened?
Oh the Bolsheviks definitely did purge a lot of the clergy. Like I said, a good chunk of the clergy was either closely linked to the Tsars or were straight up nobility/aristocracy themselves, thus the revolution was going to target them. Point is that as with a lot of anti-communist rhetoric, the number is unrealistic and stinks of “pulled out of my arse.”
But, like a lot of the most fun right wing rhetoric; it aged into something completely based and I'm sad it wasn't true.