They Boiled Seven Nuns Alive. Your History Teacher Never Mentioned It. Seven nuns. A cauldron of boiling tar. Voronezh, Russia, 1919. This is not a rumor. It is not anti-Soviet propaganda. It is documented in the testimony compiled by Alexander Yakovlev — the man Boris Yeltsin appointed to head Russia's own Presidential Commission for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, with full access to Soviet state archives. Yakovlev published his findings in a book titled A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, released by Yale University Press. He was reviewing his own government's own files. Seven women who had dedicated their lives to God were immersed in boiling tar by agents of the Bolshevik state. This happened. It is in the archives. And if you went through the American education system, there is almost no chance anyone told you about it. I didn't know either. Not until I went down a research rabbit hole trying to understand the lead-up to World War II — and kept finding a story that nobody in my education had ever mentioned. A story of systematic, deliberate, documented mass murder of Christian clergy, nuns, monks, and believers across Russia between 1917 and the 1930s. A campaign so vast, so methodical, and so thoroughly buried in Western public consciousness that most people living in the freest societies on earth have no idea it happened. This is that story. And I am going to tell it the way it actually happened — starting with what they did to the men and women of God. January 1, 1918: The First Nine Weeks The Bolsheviks had been in power for nine weeks when they photographed Bishop Platon of Reval and eighteen other clergy standing together in winter coats at Yuriev. The caption on that photograph, published in Sergei Melgunov's 1924 documentary account, reads simply: "before their removal to the anatomical theatre at Yuriev University." They were shot. Then they were carried to a medical dissection facility. Nine weeks into the new world the Bolsheviks were building, nineteen priests and a bishop had been executed and delivered to an anatomy theatre on New Year's Day. The revolution was just getting started. What They Did — Documented, City by City Melgunov spent five years inside Soviet Russia after the revolution, was arrested eight times, sentenced to death, reprieved, and finally expelled in 1922. He spent the rest of his life in Paris writing down what he had witnessed and what eyewitnesses had told him, cross-referencing everything against the Bolsheviks' own published documents — their weekly newspapers, their official communiqués, their lists of the executed. His book The Red Terror in Russia was published in Berlin in 1924 and in English in London in 1925. It then largely disappeared from public view for decades. What it documents, city by city, reads like a catalogue of hell. At Kharkov, Cheka commandant Saenko — whose photograph appears in Melgunov's book — ran a torture chamber on Lomonosov Street. Prisoners' hands were submerged in boiling water until the skin blistered and could be peeled away in a single intact piece. Melgunov's book contains a photograph of these — human "gloves," the complete flayed skin of human hands, found in the torture chamber when the Bolsheviks withdrew. That photograph was published by a respected London publisher in 1925. At Voronezh, naked prisoners were forced inside barrels whose interior walls had been studded with inward-pointing nails and rolled along the ground. At Kremenchuk, clergy were impaled. In winter across multiple cities, naked prisoners were drenched with water and left outside in freezing temperatures until they died standing — witnesses called them "living ice statues." At Piatigorsk, 59 hostages including a priest were condemned by formal published Cheka decree. Melgunov documents what actually happened to them: they were not shot. They were hacked to pieces with swords. At Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments used a rat torture that was so widely documented that George Orwell used it as the central horror of Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The method — a sealed tube containing a rat pressed against a prisoner's torso, with the tube then heated — appears in multiple independent witness accounts from the Kiev Cheka operations. None of this was improvised battlefield violence. The Cheka published a weekly newspaper. It listed executions by name and category. It telegraphed Moscow's quotas to regional offices. Melgunov documents directly that the number shot in Saratov was calculated to meet a quota telegraphed from Lenin's office. A quota. Priests died to fill a quota. Lenin personally managed executions by telegram. On January 29, 1920, writing to the Ural region: "I am surprised that you are putting up with this and do not punish sabotage with shooting." On August 11, 1918, to the Penza Soviet about a peasant uprising: "Hang — hang without fail, so the people see — no fewer than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers." The paper trail from the Kremlin to the Cheka basement is documented in Melgunov's pages, in Lenin's own collected telegrams, and in the Soviet archives that Russia opened after 1991. What They Did to the Church Specifically The campaign against Christianity was not a side effect of the revolution. It was a stated objective. Yakovlev's Presidential Commission findings, drawn from Soviet state archives, document the specific methods used against clergy: priests, monks, and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, forced to receive what the Cheka called "Communion" — with molten lead poured into their mouths — and drowned through holes cut in frozen rivers. In May 1920, Lenin personally ordered the mass execution of all clergy who opposed communism. Between 14,000 and 20,000 priests were killed in the operations that followed, according to estimates drawn from Soviet archive records reviewed by Yakovlev. Professor Charles Saroléa attempted a count of identifiable clerical dead in the Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman in November 1923. His tally, cited by Melgunov: 28 bishops. 1,219 documented priests. These were only the cases where names could be confirmed. The true total across the provincial Cheka basements, the frozen riverbanks, and the cauldrons of Voronezh was never fully recorded because the Bolsheviks stopped recording what was inconvenient, and because the regime that succeeded them classified the evidence for decades. Churches were looted systematically. Gold chalices, silver icons, liturgical candlesticks — all confiscated in organized operations throughout 1921 and 1922, officially framed as famine relief but in practice stripping the Church of its material existence. Monasteries were converted to prisons. Seminaries were shuttered. Religious instruction of children was made a criminal offense. The Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour — built to commemorate Russia's victory over Napoleon — was dynamited by Stalin in 1931. Why You Never Heard This I want to be direct about this because it matters. The Holocaust — the Nazi extermination of six million Jews and millions of others — is taught in American schools, documented in museums, commemorated in film, and embedded in the cultural memory of the Western world. It should be. It was one of the greatest crimes in human history and the obligation to remember it is permanent and non-negotiable. But it doesn't make any sense why such an extreme thing happened out of thin air for no reason at all until you learn about the Jewish bolshevik terror before. But the Bolshevik terror against Christians — which by credible scholarly estimates killed tens of millions across the Soviet period, with tens of thousands of clergy executed specifically for their faith in the first decade alone — is not in the American curriculum. It is not in the museums. It is not in the films. The man who personally signed the execution order for Russia's Christian leadership, whose embalmed body still lies in a mausoleum in Red Square visited by tourists every year, is treated in Western public discourse as a historical figure of academic interest rather than the architect of a documented campaign of mass murder against people of faith. The reason is not ignorance. It is politics. The Western academic and media establishment that shapes public memory spent a generation giving the Soviet experiment the benefit of the doubt. The journalists who reported from Moscow in the 1930s — some of whom knew what was happening and chose not to report it — had ideological commitments that made the truth inconvenient. By the time the Cold War ended and the archives opened, the habit of silence was established. Melgunov knew this would happen. He wrote in 1924, from a Paris café, knowing that the people with the power to tell the world what he knew had decided not to. He documented everything anyway. He cited the Bolsheviks' own newspapers against them. He preserved the photographs. He named the commanders of the torture chambers and described their methods in clinical detail because he understood that without specificity, without names and places and dates, the scale of what had happened would be dismissed as exaggeration. He was right to be careful. He was right to be specific. The seven nuns in the boiling tar at Voronezh. Bishop Platon photographed before being taken to the anatomy theatre at Yuriev on New Year's Day 1918. The priest on the list of 59 hostages at Piatigorsk who was hacked to pieces with swords rather than shot because there was no decree specifying the method of killing. These things happened. They are documented. They are in books you can read for free online right now. Your history teacher never mentioned them. I am mentioning them now. Read It Yourself — Primary Sources Sergei Melgunov — The Red Terror in Russia (1924/1925) The foundational eyewitness account. Full text, free, public domain: gutenberg.org/files/77104/77… Internet Archive version: archive.org/details/RedTerro… Alexander Yakovlev — A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia Yale University Press, 2002. Drawn from full access to Soviet state archives. George Leggett — The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police Oxford University Press, 1986. The definitive English-language scholarly account.