“Within months, repeated denunciations, brutal handcuffing and beatings, reduced Lu Hong’en, then in his 40s, to a graying & balding shadow of himself.”
“He also experienced bouts of madness during which he screamed in terror that “the witch”—Mao’s wife—had come for him.”
“He developed a conditioned reflex to the color red and would rush to smash or bite anything that color, he would also bite inanimate objects that had the syllable MAO in their names, be it a towel (maojin) or sweater (maoyi).” — Blood Letters #CCPChina#Mao#communism
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In Voronezh, seven nuns were boiled in a cauldron of tar. The bishop of Voronezh was boiled alive in a big pot; after which the monks, with revolvers aimed at their heads, were forced to drink this soup.
Priests were stripped naked, blasphemously married to sows, then nailed to the crucifix over the altar.
In Perm, the Cheka cut out the cheeks and eyes of a priest who was then paraded through the streets and was buried alive. The eyes of monks were poked out, their tongues were cut off, and they were buried alive or crucified.
Yemelyan Yaroslavsky was an Old #Bolshevik who, in 1901, had written for Iskra (The Spark), Lenin’s first revolutionary magazine. Yaroslavsky headed up the Society for the Friends of the Newspaper Bezbozhnik, later called The League of Militant Godless.
The League was a state–sanctioned vehicle: after churches were plundered, they were turned into warehouses or workshops, or sometimes bulldozed by members of the League.
Members of the Militant Godless League under Bolshevism destroyed icons and precious religious books, and conducted parades with mocking effigies of Christ and with actors blasphemously portraying God embracing a naked woman: the Virgin Mary.
Victor & his little sister, Anastasia, were asleep in the living room when the mob shattered the windows of their home. The Komsomol members swarmed into their homes & began pulling family portraits off the walls & breaking furniture, as they yelled “you filthy Kulaks!”
As the stunned family surveyed the damage after the mob left, one of their lifelong friends rushed in & shouted, “The church is burning!” The Ivanov family raced down the street to the village church where flames were shooting out of the broken windows.
In front of the burning church, communists were laughing & cheering at the bonfire they had made out of prayer books they had seized. The peasants dropped to their knees crying & begging them to stop. Wailing grew louder when communists grabbed a wooden cross & set it aflame.