TABOR - Tradition and Contemporaneity in the Romanian Orthodox Church
< Back Links
Search
“The God-given ruler”. Stalin’s rehabilitation in the rhetoric of the Russian Orthodox Church
Paradoxically, Joseph Visarionovich Stalin, an exponential figure in a universal mythology of evil, himself the absolute leader of a country he would turn into an “empire of evil,” as it was once called, continues to hold a positive image in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church. Stalin’s “rehabilitation” from the perspective of the Russian Orthodox Church seems to have begun with the memorable night of September 3-4th, 1943, about which people would find out in detail from the memoirs of Colonel G. Karpov, an eyewitness. Since then until the dictator’s death (in March 1953), the pages of the “Jurnal Moskovskoj Patriarchii” would record the “medical bulletin” of a metastatic disease, that of the praising rhetoric in which Stalin was “ecclesiastically” glorified in a fierce “so- cialist competition” of praise. At the end of last year, the independent Credo-Press Agency of Russia recollected the September 1943 event and its immediate consequences, through an article signed by Professor Mikhail Babkin. The dispute over Stalin’s “rehabilitation” is ongoing.
 

BORIS BUZILĂ