The Shepherd, January 2009
STALIN!
A POLL was recently conducted in Russia, similar to one held earlier in this country, to find their greatest countryman. A lot of silly comment has been generated by the fact that, in the event, Stalin (although he was a native Georgian) came third. Not so much has been made of the fact that an Orthodox Saint, Prince Alexander Nevsky, came top! However, in amongst all this silliness, a few more serious points have surfaced. On 27th December, Richard Galpin of BBC News, Moscow, reported that: “The fact that Stalin has been doing so well comes as no surprise to members of the Communist Party, which remains one of the biggest political parties in the country.” He continues: “Earlier this month, riot police raided the St Petersburg office of one of Russia’s best-known human rights organisations, Memorial. Claiming a possible link with an ‘extremist’ article published in a local newspaper, the police took away 12 computer hard-drives containing the entire digital archive of the atrocities committed under Stalin. Memorial’s St Petersburg office specializes in researching the crimes committed by the Soviet regime. ‘It’s a huge blow to our organization,’ says Irina Flige, the office director. ‘This was 20 years’ work. We’d been making a universally accessible database with hundreds of thousands of names. Maybe this was a warning to scare us?’ Irina Flige believes they were targeted because they are now on the wrong side of a new ideological divide. The new ideology is ‘Putinism’ which, she says, has evolved over the past two years and is based on a strident form of nationalism.” … ‘The official line now is that Stalin and the Soviet regime were successful in creating a great country,’ says Irina Flige. ‘And if the terror of Stalin is justified, then the government today can do what it wants to achieve its aims.’ The outrage at what has happened to the Memorial archive spreads beyond Russia’s borders. The British historian Orlando Figes worked with Memorial when he was researching his latest book The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia. ‘By conservative estimates 25 million people were repressed in the Soviet Union [under Stalin] between 1928 and 1953,’ he says. ‘That means people executed, arrested and sent to prison camps or turned into slave labourers or deported. Virtually every family was affected by repression. What we have now [in Russia] effectively is the KGB in power,’ he adds. ‘Opposition forces and awkward historians reminding the Russian population of what the KGB did 50 years ago is inconvenient for these people.’”
Included in the silly stuff were reports of people venerating Stalin as a saint, and even of a priest having an icon of the tyrant. However, in all fairness, it must be pointed out that the Moscow Patriarchal Church authorities do not countenance the veneration of the mass murderer as a saint and have taken measures against this folly.
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