John 15:18
"If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you."
Page 1 - The History of Christian Persecution
The Roman Empire and Nero
The Persecution of Christians stretches back nearly two thousand years. One of the earliest and most brutal examples was under the Roman Emperor Nero in 64 AD. The devastating Great Fire of Rome which destroyed a significant portion of the city was used to deflect blame for the fire. Nero Accused Christians of starting the fire leading to wide spread and brutal persecution. This was a turning point for Christians in Rome who had previously been tolerated by the Roman Empire. What followed was a wave of violence unlike anything the early church has ever seen. Christians were arrested, tortured, and executed in the most public and humiliating ways imaginable. They were thrown to dogs, crucified, or set on fire to light Neros garden at night. The Apostles Peter and Paul are both believed to have been martyred during this time period. It was the first time that a government had deliberately targeted Christians as a group, and it would not be the last.
The Holodomor-Starving the faith
Two thousand years after Nero was crucifying and burning Christians for light in his gardens Soviet leader Joseph Stalin engineered a man made famine in Ukraine that killed millions of Christians. This event is known as Holodomor, a Ukrainian word that means "death inflicted by starvation". The main victims were rural Orthodox Christian farmers and villagers who made up around 80 percent of Ukraine's population at the time. While the precise numbers will most likely never be known, most scholarly estimates range from around 3.5 million to 7 million Christians were starved to death.
But the Holodomor was not just a attack on the Ukrainian people as a ethnic group, but it was a direct attack on their faith. Ralph Lemkin, the legal scholar who coined the term "genocide," identified the Holodomor as a classic example of Soviet genocide and outlined multiple components of the genocidal process in Ukraine. One of them was the deliberate destruction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Tens of thousands of Christian families were starved because their faith in Jesus Christ threatened an atheistic government.
Stalin set unrealistically high grain procurement quotas and severe measures intended to wipe out a significant part of the Ukrainian population. Farmers that resisted were labled as enemies of the state. Villages that had failed to meet quotas were placed on blacklists, surrounded by troops, and cut of from any supplies sentencing them to death. At the height of Holodomor in June 1933, Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 28,000 people per day.
What made the Holodomor particularly devastating was that it was deliberate, and it was denied by the Soviets and swept under the rug by Western media due to pro-Soviet sympathies. While Ukrainians were dying, the Soviet state extracted 4.27 million tons of grain from Ukraine in 1932, which is more than enough to feed 12 million people for an entire year. Moscow rejected foreign aid, concealed the death toll, and for years had suppressed any public discussion of what had happened. The deliberate suppresion of the truth has left the world almost completely unaware of the largest Christian genocide the world has ever seen.