In 1570, Ivan the Terrible attacked Novgorod, which had been for centuries a successful Russian Republic on the Baltic Sea.
Ivan’s first command was to subjugate the church.
He stripped cathedrals and monasteries of their valuables; put priests and deacons in shackles and flogged them til they paid a ransom; and he ordered some 500 clergymen beaten to death.
Ivan laid waste to 90 percent of the farmland surrounding Novgorod.
Ivan’s 6,000 secret police, called Oprichniki, pillaged, burned, arrested and terrorized with cruel violence.
Men, women and children were roasted over fires; tied to sleds and dragged through town; trapped under ice in the Volkhov River and if they managed to surface they were shoved back under.
According to The First Pskov Chronicle, 60,000 people were senselessly slaughtered by Ivan the Terrible.
This horrible chapter of history was repeated 1000 times worse in Russia during the Soviet era.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn described what happened:
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened…’
…Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution;
in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies…
But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat:
‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.'”