Posted on 08/26/2016 6:07:31 PM PDT by marshmallow
TRUBETSKOYE, Russia — Far from sinister headlines about matters like accusations that Russians hacked the Democratic Party in the United States, a few hundred people milled around the ruins of this village’s once-imposing Orthodox church.
Here was what one might call the other Russia, a local effort to raise funds in pursuit of the somewhat quixotic task of renovating the Church of the Nativity, once the place of worship attached to an aristocratic estate.
Scores of stall holders offered home-baked cakes and discarded books, paintings and handcrafted face scrubs. Eager buyers, mostly vacationers from summer dachas in and around the nearby town of Tarusa, scoured the stalls.
Dappled by sunlight, the redbrick ruins of the partly roofless church hosted singers and musicians. Three men and two women dressed as Cossacks sang and encouraged a few women to dance outside.
The idea for the church renovation came from Elina M. Loginova, 75, a retired engineering professor. She lives in this village of a few dozen homes and has minutely chronicled the lives of peasants, priests and nobility here before 1918.
The tranquil spot belies the violence of 20th-century Russia.
Among other things, “History of Our Church,” written by Ms. Loginova, charts the cruel fate of the priest who served here when the Bolshevik Revolution erupted in 1917.
Father Alexander V. Sokholov, who also ran a parish school and is pictured with his pupils in Ms. Loginova’s brochure, was gradually driven out and in 1930 sentenced to three years’ hard labor. He was eventually reunited afterward with his wife in the distant town of Tambov, only to be rearrested in Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937.
He was shot in 1938, but his name was rehabilitated in 1957, after Nikita S. Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s purges. His granddaughter and great-grandson learned of that decision.........
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
They are doing Gods work. Maybe some Americans should send them some cash. That or the rebuilding of Christian Churches in Egypt.
It’s good to be a Christian in Russia. If you are Orthodox.
They are not very tolerant of other varieties of Christian.
Nope. Best kept secret on FR. I’m reminded of it every time some knucklehead posts that “Putin is the savior of Christendom,” or some such nonsense.
While Fr. Sokholov was in prison and facing his executioner, the New York Times was busy telling the world what a wonderful, progressive place Stalinist Russia was.
I wish the article was in some other paper. I simply will not traffic on the NYT’s website.
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