During the Great Purge and the radical state atheist policies in the late 1930s, the cathedral was a "besieged institution as the campaign was underway to eradicate religion." The repressions climaxed in 1938 when Catholicos Khoren I was murdered in April by the NKVD. In August of that year, the Armenian Communist Party decided to close down the cathedral, but the central Soviet government seemingly did not approve of such a measure. Isolated from the outside world, the cathedral barely continued to function and its administrators were reduced to some twenty people. It was reportedly the only church in Soviet Armenia not to have been seized by the Communist government. The dissident anti-Soviet Armenian diocese in the US wrote that "the great cathedral became a hollow monument."