Posted on 02/25/2022 8:05:37 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
It’s important to remember that “dear Iosif Vissarionovich” was among those who carried out the anti-Church repressions. As priest Job (Gumerov) noted commenting on the legend of Stalin ordering an icon to be flown over Moscow, “Any attempt to present the cruel persecutor as a faithful Christian is dangerous and can cause only harm.” Indeed, Stalin wasn’t Christian, so why did he change his policy towards Orthodoxy?
Stalin, a cynical and clever leader, didn’t experience any epiphany but simply knew that taking it easy on the Orthodox Church was important for winning the war. First, many Soviet citizens remained secretly religious (which was not directly forbidden), so the “legalization” of Orthodoxy helped to keep the nation at war united – quite a crucial thing. Second, the Allies were pushing Stalin towards loosening his grip on the religious: the oppression of the faithful was bad publicity, internationally speaking. Third, in 1943 the Red Army was regaining the Soviet lands previously occupied by Germans. The occupants, trying to gain public support, had reopened churches closed by the Bolsheviks – and it would have been strange indeed had the liberators reclosed them.
Stalin understood all of that and acted accordingly. His biographer, historian Oleg Khlevniuk, wrote: “Moving from the iconoclast approach of the 1920s – 1930s, from mass repressions against priests and believers to a reconciliation was a demonstrative, practical move. Such a shift in the Soviet policy towards religion is to be viewed within the context of encouraging Russian patriotism.”
(Excerpt) Read more at rbth.com ...
The Church was necessary to keep the proles minds occupied with hope and not on revolution................
Stalin was a seminary student in his younger days.
And yet communism is an atheistic ideology, so there’s that contrast.
It’s amazing how many evil people have a background in the humanities. A lot of people who were in the healthcare profession were cold blooded killers.
Although he liked to say that he was kicked out of the seminary for distributing Marxist literature, he was really kicked out because he refused to sit for his exams at the end of a semester.
Note to self: maybe a cautionary tale for our times.
Render unto Caesar.....................
You appoint a State Religion that espouses “render unto Caesar” and suppress all other religions. It’s good for the ruling class.
That’s smarter than trying to ban religion. Such suppressions never work.
And he was afraid for his soul
Many, if not all of the re-created Church of Russia (Orthodox) priests, prelate and patriarchs— well.. they were payrolled in essence by Stalin.
For all the paranoid reasons— a “religious” spy network. Turned in a lot of “counter revolutionaries” whose testimony was their confessionals.
There is a great book written on this appalling cynical Stalin actions, under cover of the WWII. The new found “religion” did not stop Stalin insisting the Ukrainian White Russians who fought with German Nazis against Soviet “ally” troops- be returned to Soviets— where all of them were either imprisoned, tortured and/or slaughtered, including the leaders of the Don Cossacks who long fought the Soviets in the Russian Communist Revolution. Cossacks from the Don, Kuban, and Terek, and a number of groups from the Caucasus fought the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War & had been persecuted under Joseph Stalin. In Ukraine these Cossacks joined the Germans to fight Soviets in WWII. It was at Yalta that Stalin got them returned for execution.
Nikolai Tolstoy has written eloquently on this in “Victims of Yalta” discussion here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Yalta
Russian culture is rotten and drunk. Putin knows this and knows his population is dwindling. Faith brings hope to a hopeless people.
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