The Moscow Patriarchate urges to abandon black and white evaluation of Stalin’s personality

05 March 2008, 17:11

Moscow, March 5, Interfax – The Russian Orthodox Church considers “black and white categories” inapplicable when evaluating Stalin’s personality.

“Some consider him a murderer and a monster while for others he is almost a secret Orthodox zealot,” deputy head of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin writes in his Scraps essays.

He believes “much was mixed” in Stalin. He bears personal indisputable responsibility for persecuting the Church, for destroying its shrines, for murder and sufferings of martyrs,” the priest said. “Stalin didn’t have a whisper of repentance for it.”

However, it was he who extended the Russian Church’s freedoms and even helped strengthening its international influence when it became politically profitable.

“I don’t think it means that he was a secret Christian and even “a builder of the third Rome.” As a former seminarian and a person with knowledge of history he should have envisaged that state always profits from strong religious centers with less foreign influence and its own weight in the world,” the priest writes.

According to him, tsars and imperial ministers realized it, why the Soviet head shouldn’t? Fr. Vsevolod repeated that “most likely it was pragmatic policy free from Marxist prejudices rather than “a secret Christian mission.”

“Stalin and other historical personages had both good and bad features. It is applicable to every person. Even to saints who also made mistakes and committed sins. It doesn’t diminish their achievements in fighting these sins. It makes the truth of it even more convincing than retouching history and substituting a real person with a polished image,” the priest writes in his essays.

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