The Moscow Patriarchate backs up a memorial to victims of repressions

05 June 2008, 12:21

Moscow, June 5, Interfax - The Russian Orthodox Church welcomes the initiative of well-known public and culture figures on establishing a memorial to victims of Stalin repressions.

"It's been already for many years that representative of the Russian Orthodox Church stress the necessity to memorize people who suffered from the machine of the Soviet state under Stalin," acting secretary of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Fr. Georgy Ryabykh told to Interfax-Religion on Thursday.

Thus he reacted on the idea to create a national memorial complex dedicated to the repressed people. Among those who signed the appeal offering to set up the museum were Bella Akhmadulina, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Mikhail Gorbachev, Daniil Granin, Boris Strugatsky, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Yury Shevchuk.

According to the priest, "it's impossible to hush up the truth and not to assess unambiguously the evil, which took place in history of our nation. Otherwise, we become copartners in those crimes."

Fr. Georgy is not surprised that the Western world is inclined to place the entire burden of responsibility for crimes of the Soviet regime on contemporary Russia. The interviewee of the agency believes that today Russia "lacks systematical and worked out concept of memorizing millions of victims suffered from the Communist experiment."

"Russia doesn't deserve such an attitude as its people became the first victim of the Soviet ideology," he stressed and further said that "if we don't want such tragedies to repeat in the future and don't want to spread false image of Russia in the world, we need to give the right accession to the past and covey this accession to new generations of Russians.'

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