Before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Russia was a bastion for Orthodox Christian traditionalism. Orthodoxy thrived as the divine unifying force that united the various peoples of the Russian Empire. Towards the end of the empire, elites flirted with Western European ideas which had abandoned God in favor of occultism & humanism. Eventually, the ideals of Liberal Democracy and the “enlightened West” would open the door for the bloody Bolshevik revolution, which dethroned the Tsars, slaughtered faithful Orthodox Clergy & monastics, and suppressed the Orthodox Church as Russia turned towards roughly 70 years of Atheism under the USSR.