On the heels of the growing success of the wider revolutionary movement, the Bolshevik party—which had been the most radical faction in a broader movement that had initially included groups such as the Mensheviks, Social-Revolutionaries and others—executed a coup in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), capturing the city and hijacking the revolution.

A bloody civil war followed, pitting the revolutionary Red Army against the various disjointed opposition groups fighting under the banner of the White Army.

The Jews were victims of murder and mayhem each time their hometowns changed hands. Jews suffered vicious, brutal pogroms at the hands of the White Army and White Army-aligned Cossack bands, as well as from Ukrainian nationalist militias. While there were rare instances of Red Army-led pogroms, their relative infrequency further gave hope to the Jews that the revolution would herald a new era of peace and tolerance for all.

By 1920, the Bolshevik Party was the clear victor and Communism Russia’s future. Rabbi Sholom Dovber, who had left the village of Lubavitch during World War I and was by then living in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, warned his son that “dark times are upon us.” Rabbi Sholom Dovber passed away in 1920, leaving it to his son and successor Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak to lead the battle against this new force of evil.

The Bolsheviks completed their takeover of the world’s largest country within their first years of rule and turned their sight towards stamping out religion. “Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions … are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of a [G‑d] … ,” their leader, Vladimir Lenin, had written. Absolute standards of ethics, rooted in the belief in G‑d, were incompatible with Lenin’s definition of morality as “that which serves to destroy the old exploiting class.”

As such, rabbis were hounded out of their positions and existing Jewish communal structures dismantled and destroyed. The Jewish sections of the Bolshevik Party, the Yevsektzia (Yevreiskaya Sektzia, literally “Jewish Sections”), took a front-line role in the destruction of traditional modes of Jewish life.

Utilizing their power as an organ of the ruling Bolshevik Party, the Yevsektzia waged a multifaceted war on traditional Judaism. In the name of the man-made utopia of tomorrow, they destroyed the social fabric of Jewish communal and family life. They instigated youth to turn on their elders, and children on their parents. The Yevsektzia could play on pre-existing, internal rifts within Jewish communities, or purposefully sow discord to create communal arguments that they would then brutally exploit. They often forced votes that would decide the future of Jewish communal property, thereby transforming synagogues and yeshivahs into atheist club houses (Dom Bezbozhny), Jewish workers’ clubs, and the like.

“The danger is that the masses may think that Judaism is exempt from anti-religious propaganda … ,” explained the Yevsektzia leader Esther Frumkina. “[T]herefore, it rests with the Jewish Communists to be even more ruthless with rabbis than non-Jewish Communists are with priests.”

As one non-Jewish Communist admiringly remarked: “It would be nice to see the Russian Communists tear into the monasteries and holy days as the Jewish Communists do to Yom Kippur.”

A particularly grotesque example of the Yevsektzia’s Dark Age practices was the 1921 Trial of the Cheder in Vitebsk, Belarus. Although valiantly defended by the city’s long-time rabbi, Shmarya Leib Medalia, a Lubavitcher Chassid, the show trial culminated with the closure of all of the city’s official and unofficial cheders. Medalia later became the chief rabbi of Moscow; he was arrested and executed by Stalin in 1938.

Similar “trials,” reminiscent of the medieval disputations with which Jews had contended for centuries, targeted the Jewish religion at large in Kiev in 1921, the institution of the yeshivah in Rostov later that year, and, as late as 1928, circumcision in Kharkov.

Following Rabbi Sholom Dovber’s passing in 1920, he was succeeded by his son, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, who became the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak quickly became the undisputed spiritual leader of Jewry in the new Soviet Union.

To monitor him more closely, in 1924 the authorities forced Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak to leave Rostov-on-Don, and relocate to Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg). That year he called a gathering in Moscow where he and nine of his Chassidim formed a minyan (a prayer quorum) and swore to uphold Judaism in the country, “until the last drop of blood.”

Establishing as his mission nothing less than saving Russian Jewry from spiritual destruction, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak began opening cheders and yeshivahs and sending his followers—mostly graduates of the famed Tomchei Temimim Lubavitcher yeshivah—to cities, towns and villages, from Russia to Ukraine to Georgia to Uzbekistan, to serve as shochetim, rabbis and teachers.

It was his father Rabbi Sholom Dovber who had established Chabad’s central yeshivah, Tomchei Temimim, in 1896 in the village of Lubavitch. Prior to World War I it had affiliated branches in seven cities. In 1918, with the onset of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the central yeshivah was relocated to Kremenchug, Ukraine, where it remained until 1930.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, this would be an era of expansion for the yeshivah. In the early 1920s, just as the Bolsheviks began their anti-religious campaigns, the yeshivah began opening underground branches throughout the Soviet Union. A 1927 report on Tomchei Temimim’s status listed branches in 18 cities, with 428 registered students. This did not include the estimated 15,000 children studying in cheders or Talmud Torahs, and adults who took part in other forms of organized Torah study.

These small, illegal yeshivahs—there were at least 64 branches—regularly opened and closed in cities and villages throughout the country, operating until local authorities got wind of their existence and shut them down (often arresting the students and especially targeting their teachers).

The Tomchei Temimim Rabbinical Academy in the town of Nevel sent its graduates to serve as rabbis and shochetim throughout the country, and it was specially targeted by the central government. (In 1927, graduates from Nevel were serving in 48 different cities and guiding 156 communities; it was formally shut down by Soviet authorities in late 1929.)

“Nevel, where the famous rabbinical seminary was liquidated last year, is still the center of illegal Jewish religious activities, complains the Jewish Communist daily ‘Emes,’” reported the JTA on March 12, 1930. “The spirit of the Lubawitscher Rebbe still prevails there, the paper says, relating that the local rabbi still heads a rabbinical seminary, that funds are collected to which Jewish workers and even Communists contribute.”

In those early years the main physical danger came from the Yevsektzia, which was backed by local and central authorities and instigated the secret police into action at a whim. At times their methods were even less sophisticated. In 1922 in the Ukrainian city of Konotop, for example, the head of the local Yevsektzia and his accomplices badly beat 20 suspected students of Tomchei Temimim. The perpetrators attacked the students with sticks and pistol-whipped them, leaving the students at the brink of death. All of them were hospitalized with life-threatening injuries, where one of the students suffered a mental breakdown.

Another project of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s was the establishment of Tiferes Bachurim, an evening yeshivah where young working men could study Torah. Tiferes Bachurim proved very popular, operating in cities large and small, from Leningrad to Kiev to Derbent, Dagestan.

At its height, Tiferes Bachurim had 14 branches and 845 students. In the next decade, its organizers suffered greatly at the hands of the Soviet secret police, known by its various names: Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, NKGB, MGB and finally KGB.

Working on behalf of all Russian Jewry, in 1922, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak established the Vaad Rabbonei USSR (Rabbinical Board of the USSR, or Committee of Rabbis in the USSR), an umbrella organization that oversaw Jewish activity in the country and corresponded with Jewish organizations abroad, for a time receiving significant funding from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), among other foreign Jewish organizations.

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s reinvigoration of Jewish life in the Soviet Union was palpable, including in his new base Leningrad. In May 1927 an indignant Leningradskaya Pravda reported that the growing interest in Judaism instigated by Schneersohn could be felt “not only among Jewish bourgeois elements, but in more or less broad circles of the Jewish working class.”

That same year the GPU sought to organize a rabbinical conference under its jurisdiction in Leningrad. Seeing it as the regime’s attempt to co-opt the entire structure of Jewish life in the Soviet Union, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak fought against it, instead supporting a counter gathering in the town of Korosten.

The Yevsektzia and the GPU could no longer stand by and allow Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak to continue his work. Shortly before midnight on June 15, 1927, armed officers burst into Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s Leningrad apartment and arrested him.

This was a particularly dangerous moment in time in the Soviet Union. The United Kingdom had stunned Stalin a few weeks earlier, when it cut off relations with the USSR after discovering its trade delegation was engaged in espionage. On June 7, a White Russian emigre terror cell successfully detonated a bomb in Leningrad, wounding 25 and killing one. That same day, the Soviet minister to Poland, Pyotr Voikov, was assassinated on a train platform in Warsaw.

Stalin, the paranoid head of a paranoid political movement, assumed the Western capitalist powers were encircling the Soviet Union in order to crush the Revolution. On June 8 he granted the Soviet secret police additional extrajudicial powers, including the reintroduction of “Troikas”—commissions of three “judges” made up of secret policemen to expedite cases—and arrests and executions followed on a scale unseen since the Civil War’s Red Terror.

The Rebbe’s June 15 arrest took place during this heated moment, and while in custody he was interrogated, beaten, and sentenced to death.

Due to the intercession of influential people, primarily Yekaterina Peshkova of the Political Red Cross in Russia, the ex-wife of celebrated Russian writer Maxim Gorky, the Rebbe’s sentence was commuted from death, to 10 years of hard labor on the distant Solovki Island, and then finally to three years of internal exile in the city of Kostrama.

By this time news of the Rebbe’s arrest had leaked out of the USSR and caused an international furor. Protests came from, among others, U.S. Senator William Borah of Idaho, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a leading proponent of American rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Less than 10 days after reaching Kostrama, 12-13 Tammuz on the Jewish calendar, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak was informed that he was free to go. This date, which also coincided with his birthday, is marked as a festival of liberation to this day.

The Yevsektzia and Soviet security organs were livid and bent on revenge. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak did not entertain leaving the USSR until it became clear that he could no longer remain in the country and be effective. Over the next months people like Dr. Oscar Cohn, a Jewish former member of the Reichstag, and, pivotally, Mordechai Dubin of Riga, a Chabad Chassid serving in Latvia’s Saeima (parliament), worked to convince the Soviet government to allow Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak to leave the country.

Dubin in particular utilized a pending Soviet-Latvian trade agreement to pressure the Russians, threatening to withhold his support for the bill in the Saiema unless the Rebbe was freed. During a September 28, 1927, meeting held at the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and attended by Commissar of Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin, deputy Commissar Maxim Litvinov and others, it was decided to allow the Rebbe to leave Russia together with his family—including his future son-in-law, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson—and take his vast, priceless library with him.

On October 20, 1927, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak and his family left the Soviet Union for the last time, leaving a network of rabbis, Jewish communal functionaries and dedicated Chassidim to continue his work. Physically distant from his Chassidim and the Jews of the Soviet Union he cared so deeply about, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak would continue working on their behalf for the rest of his life.

Vladimir Lenin had appointed Joseph Stalin to the powerful position of general secretary of the Communist Party back in April 1922, suffering a debilitating stroke a month later. By the time Lenin died two years later, Stalin was in position to seize control. He skillfully played his opponents off of each other, with his complete political triumph coming in December 1927.

From that point, in the name of his Marxist ideals and while pursuing a personal dictatorship, he would order the murder of millions of people and change the course of history.

Yet the Jewish religious underground would endure.