The Great Lesson: Statue of Stalin Consecrated in Russia – The American Spectator

Aug. 15, 2023 — Another day, another cosmic horror courtesy of the so-called “Russian world.” The setting this time is Velikiye Luki, the second-largest town in Pskov Oblast, where a solemn ceremony is being held on the sprawling grounds of the Mikron experimental factory. In attendance are representatives of the Russian Knights Cultural Heritage Preservation Foundation, as well as the nationalist politician Sergey Baburin, the television presenter and Honored Artist of Russia Maria Shukshina, a centenarian veteran by the name of Boris Kravtsov, and numerous members of the general public, all of whom have gathered together this bright, fine summer’s morning beneath an eight-meter-tall monument still wrapped in white unveiling cloth. The ceremony proceeds with all the pomp and circumstance that can be mustered in this provincial Russian town, and the fabric is duly lowered to reveal a uniformed, mustachioed figure, cast in bronze, standing atop a plinth that has been engraved with the words:

Генералиссимус
И. В. Сталин

Even without the caption, there can be no mistaking the identity of the metallic individual surmounting the polished granite platform. It is Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, better known by the name inscribed on the plinth, “Generalissimus I. V. Stalin.” (READ MORE: Prigozhin Dead in a Plane Crash — How Russian, How Putin)

A series of pompous speeches accompany the statue’s unveiling. Maria Shukshina refers to the genocidal dictator, paranoid maniac, and pedophilic sexual predator as a “God-given leader.” Sergey Baburin delivers remarks, ostensibly on behalf of the veteran Kravtsov, that refer to the “battle against Nazism” being waged against democratic Ukraine. A choir sings period-appropriate anthems, bouquets of red and white roses are laid at the feet of the tyrant, and then, most shockingly of all, an Orthodox priest, a certain Father Anatoly, aspergillum in hand, proceeds to consecrate the occasion, sprinkling holy water on the audience and on the memorial to one of history’s most accomplished mass murderers. Father Anatoly is self-aware enough to concede, in his brief address, that “if we’re being honest, the church suffered in the years of Iosif Vissarionovich’s rule,” but he heroically overcomes the temptation to say something remotely sane during these demented proceedings, adding that “thanks to that we have lots of Russian new martyrs and confessors.” The farce is over, the dignitaries depart, and the people of Velikiye Luki can go back to their daily lives, now under the watchful gaze of the pockmarked butcher of the Kremlin.

The Theology of Pro-Stalinism in Russia

News of the ceremony soon spread all over the world, propelled in no small part by the transparent absurdity of the priest’s behavior. An embarrassed Russian Orthodox Church promptly declared that Father Anatoly spoke only for himself and that an investigation would be launched into his actions. Meanwhile, Russian priests continued blessing military equipment, missiles, and military formations being dispatched to carry out war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine after the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Putin’s ardent ally Patriarch Kirill, declared that all Russian soldiers who perish during the illegal war will be cleansed of all their sins, going so far as to compare their sacrifice to that of Christ the Redeemer. Father Anatoly, for his part, merely sprinkled holy water on inanimate chunks of metal alloy and stone while uttering some nonsensical remarks. Which, dear reader, do you think the greater profanity?

It remains worthwhile, as an intellectual exercise, to adopt Father Anatoly’s perspective. Surely he was aware that Patriarch Sergius of Moscow (d.1944) issued an encyclical, dated July 29, 1927, which pledged unswerving fealty to the Soviet regime, no matter how many priests it had murdered or cathedrals it had desecrated, on the grounds that “we want to be Orthodox and at the same time recognize the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, whose joys and successes are our joys and successes and whose failures are our failures.” (This heretical posture of Orthodox submission to the Kremlin would later come to be known as Sergianstvo or Sergianism.) And during a May 9, 2010 sermon delivered at the Church of Christ the Savior, it was Patriarch Kirill — himself a former KGB agent, according to material from Soviet archives — who asserted that no matter “how many lies, how much evil and human suffering there was” during the Soviet period, God had “washed away these lies and this evil with our blood, with the blood of our fathers, as has happened more than once in human history.” Later, he even urged Russians not to “turn a blind eye” to the economic and political achievements of Stalin, even if the dictator was notorious for “committing evil.” Father Anatoly’s comments may have been clumsy, but they were nevertheless entirely in keeping with the stated position of the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church himself. (READ MORE: The Specter of the Far Right and Its Hidden Asymmetry)

As evidenced by the monument unveiling in Velikiye Luki, Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin’s popularity is on the rise, as memories of the Red Terror, the Gulags, the failed collectivization campaigns, the state-sponsored famines, the forced population transfers, the mass killings, the purges, and the show trials gradually fade from the collective consciousness. Peter Akopov, writing for the state-run news agency RIA Novosti in March 2023, exulted in the ongoing rehabilitation of Stalin, who is increasingly seen as:

Not only the winner in the Great War, but also a thunderstorm against internal enemies, a scourge for corrupt officials and traitors, a punishing sword for rotten elites, a builder of a fair system. It is this image of Stalin that has finally been finally entrenched in the people’s mind — and that is why almost all polls now put him in the first place in popularity among all historical figures in our history. Fighting this is not only pointless, but also dangerous, almost suicidal, because thereby you will have to involuntarily side with the myth of “Black Stalin” — a myth no longer anti-Soviet, but Russophobic, aimed at splitting and defeating Russia. And Stalin must work for Russia, help us in the victory — he would like it himself.

This descent into abject moral squalor has had real-world consequences, from the collective bloodlust towards Ukraine and the acceptance of growing internal repression to the forced dissolution of human rights organizations and travesties like the ludicrous statue unveiling in Velikiye Luki.

It is difficult to imagine the appeal of a personality cult around a figure as odious as Stalin, but there are still millions of Russians who insist that the genocidal dictator was the velichayshiy geniy vsekh vremen i narodov, the “Greatest Genius of All Times and Nations.” Psychiatrists have long understood that “the cult experience weakens healthy ego functioning in such a way that much of the puzzling and self-destructive behavior exhibited by cult members is the result of primitive defensive operations.” We see those defense mechanisms at work in the Russian Federation on a massive scale. Adam Hochschild, in his 1994 travelogue Unquiet Ghosts: Russians Remember Stalin, found that his pro-Stalin interlocutors,

wanted to believe that the camps, the deaths, the collectivization, the famine, the privation and shortages, like the suffering of a noble war, were for some reason necessary. That it was for the sake of progress, of industrialization, of a better future. That the nation was a family writ large and Stalin its stern but benevolent patriarch. And the worse the suffering, the more fervently the believers believed. For the greater was the potential abyss of despair if those terrible hardships were all for nothing.

The refusal on the part of the Russian state and Russian society to grapple with Stalin’s murderous legacy has all but ensured that the horrors of the past will continue to manifest themselves, with terrible consequences for the country and its beleaguered neighbors. We can perhaps begin to understand, even if we can’t condone, the rehabilitation of Stalin being attempted before our eyes, but it is more difficult to understand why representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, from the primate in Moscow down to a parish priest in Pskov, would participate in such a project, given how grievously the church suffered at the hands of the Bolsheviks. 

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