Seeing the multitudes, Vlad went up into Moscow: and when he was set, his Ministers and the multitudes came upon him: And Vlad opened his mouth and taught them, saying…
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, that communist ideology is evil, but I say unto you: “Communist ideology, it’s really much akin to Christianity: liberty, equality, fraternity – all this is based on Holy Scripture, it’s all there.”
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, that Lenin hated Christianity, but I say unto you: “Look, Lenin was put into the Mausoleum. How’s that any different from the relics of Orthodox saints or simply other Christians? When I’m told that no, there’s no such tradition in Christianity – what does it mean, no? Go to Mount Athos, have a look, they have holy relics there, and we too have our holy relics here.”
I’m sorry about prefacing Vlad’s gibberish with phrases from Matthew, but that’s really the spirit in which it was meant. Vlad delivered his lines with nothing short of gospel gravitas.
The Ministers and the multitudes were represented by editors of top Russian publications, who came together at the Mount, or rather the offices of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a paper so proud of its Soviet heritage that it has kept its name, Komsomol Truth.
Now, Putin’s ‘conservative’ British fans, otherwise known as ‘useful idiots’, regard Vlad as the last stronghold of Christianity, mainly because he ‘supports the Orthodox church’ and doesn’t support homosexual marriage.
As to the latter merit, it’s commendable but rather insufficient. After all, ISIS aren’t great fans of the new Western institution either, but few will insist that this redeems their other sins.
As to Vlad’s take on Christianity, he that hath ears to hear, let him hear the two passages quoted above. Such an aural effort should suffice to put paid to the frankly idiotic and refreshingly ignorant view of Vlad as the latter-day Fidei Defensor.
However, here are a few comments for those of them who are hard of hearing and plagued with learning difficulties – and of course also for normal people who suffer from none of those disabilities and therefore understand what Putin is about.
First, “liberty, equality, fraternity” has nothing whatsoever to do with Scripture. It was a Masonic slogan adopted by the French Revolution, the first massive violent revolt against Christianity. Anyone who has the remotest idea of Christianity would instantly know how un-, or rather anti-Christian that slogan is.
Jesus repeatedly disavowed any association with any revolutionary or liberation movement, to wit: “My kingdom is not of this world”, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” and so forth. He was talking about gaining spiritual freedom through the truth – hardly a demand for political liberty.
Second, equality and fraternity, as used in the secular French slogan, don’t appear – nor could have ever appeared – in Scripture. We’re all brothers because we have the same divine Father, and we’re equal only before Him – not because some blood-thirsty chaps murder all aristocrats.
Third, Vlad’s statement is both ignorant and blasphemous. However, compared to the second statement quoted above, the one equating Lenin with Christian saints, it’s an exemplar of piety and erudition.
Christian saints were different people living in different places and at different times. However, they all had at least one thing in common: they were Christians. I hate to break the news to Vlad, but that’s not quite the same as being anti-Christian.
Lenin, whose relics are as saintly as, say, St Sebastian’s, hated Christianity with every fibre of what passed for his soul. Is Vlad aware of this? He has to be – he did go to a Soviet school after all. Why, he even went to university, where he had to take a course in ‘scientific atheism’, as did we all.
One could quote any number of statements to that effect from a whole library of Lenin’s works. For example, he wrote to Gorky in 1913:
“Any god is necrophilia… any religious idea, any idea of any god, even only flirting with god is unimaginable filth, which is tolerated and even well received particularly by the democratic bourgeoisie – and precisely because of that it’s the most dangerous filth, the most disgusting, the most revolting contagion. A million sins, failings, violent acts, physical infections… are much less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual, clad in luxurious vestments idea of god.”
Lenin’s visceral hatred of Christ and his church couldn’t co-exist with the sight of church valuables, all those icons in enamel frames studded with jewels, heavy gold crosses, precious books in jewelled covers, silver vessels.
Those had to be plundered, along with all other riches amassed throughout Russian history. However, for the first couple of years the saint-to-be had to wait: when the peasants were still too strong to resist, there could be undesirable consequences.
Finally the time came in 1922, during the first murderous famine caused by the Bolsheviks. Lenin wrote a secret circular, saying church valuables could now be plundered, what with the peasants “swelling from starvation… reduced to cannibalism” and therefore too weak to resist.
But it was not all about money. Lenin continued that: “…removal of valuables… must be carried out with merciless resolve and in the shortest possible time. The more representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and clergy we shall manage to shoot in the process, the better. It is now that we must teach that scum a lesson so that they will not even dare think of any kind of resistance for several decades.”
That task was accomplished. During Lenin’s tenure (November, 1917 – April, 1924), 200,000 church people, 40,000 of them priests, were slaughtered. As to the number of lay parishioners, massacred out of hand, say by spraying a procession with machine gun bullets, their deaths were too numerous to count.
Lenin was turned into a relic immediately after his death, when, before the current Red Square ziggurat was built, his mummy was placed into a temporary wooden structure. Alas, the builders carelessly punctured the sewer underneath, flooding the sacred remains and giving Patriarch Tikhon, then under house arrest, an opening for a witticism: “The incense fits the relics.”
The Orthodox church was stamped into a puddle of blood under Lenin. However, it came back under Stalin, when the Germans were overrunning Russia in 1941.
With 4,000,000 soldiers taken prisoner in the first three months of the war, many of them without any resistance, Stalin realised that the people wouldn’t fight under the banners of their communist murderers and slave masters.
The Russians had become immune to Marxism, communism and all other Bolshevik poisons. As a matter of fact, Stalin himself had had enough of them, which had been evident for several years before the war. Mussolini observed perceptively that, under Stalin, “communism became a Slavic version of fascism”.
Yet an idea for which people would fight was urgently needed – and it was at that time that the church came back, albeit in a different incarnation.
Ever since Peter I the Orthodox church had been an extension of the state. Peter abolished the patriarchate and had the church run by a lay Synod.
Stalin embellished that arrangement by placing the church under the aegis of the secret police. Coming in from the cold was not only the church, but all other demonstrably un-Bolshevik, nationalist ideas: Mother Russia, Third Rome, Holy Russia – all packaged with the idea of imperial expansion.
When Vlad took over, he looked at that state of affairs and saw it was good. He too needed to rally the populace, and Marxist ideas could no longer work even as window dressing.
The traditional Russian imperial idea based on the delusion of the country’s holy mission was the only available option, the only way in which the criminal KGB colonel could legitimise the rule of his kleptofascist junta.
The church had been house-trained long ago, to the point that all the post-war patriarchs were career KGB agents. Not only the present patriarch Gundiaev (aka Kirill, aka ‘agent Mikhailov’), but also the other two candidates for his post at election time are KGB men, every bit as servile and corrupt as all other members of the ruling KGB elite.
They serve Putin with the same ardour as they served Stalin. It was thanks to their support that the murderous, thoroughly corrupt KGB colonel has acquired the status of the last Christian standing.
Vlad knows that, without mouthing imperial slogans, he’d never stay in power, which is to say alive. That’s why he’s busily reviving every scrap of Russia’s expansionist history – regardless of who was at the helm.
He’ll take something from Ivan the Terrible, something from Peter I, something from Nicholas I, something from Lenin – and a lot from Stalin, whose statues are going up all over Russia.
Now, I’m well aware that I can’t make our ‘useful idiots’ change their minds – if it were possible, they wouldn’t be idiots. But I can feel pity for them: it must be hard going through life spouting ignorant, ideologically inspired shibboleths.