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. 

Russian Secularism Forced Russian Orthodox Church to Turn to Putin

Anton Barbashin, the editorial director of the online magazine Riddle Russia, reacted to Father Anatoly’s bizarre encomium by supposing that the Russian Orthodox Church “liked it the way it was done in Byzantium where the church was part of state institutions.” This intermingling of Church and State is obvious enough, but the role of the Orthodox Church in Putin’s Russia could not be more different than its role in the Byzantine Empire, as the Ukrainian commentator Kateryna Shchotkina explained in her Dzerkalo Tyzhnia article, “Patriarkh i Lykhodiystvo [Patriarch and Villain].” Like Barbashin, Shchotkina acknowledges the confluence of Putin’s and Kirill’s interests, noting that “neither the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church nor the patriarch Kirill himself can go into opposition simply because they have become used to power and to enormous wealth.” Yet Shchotkina is more sensitive to the parlous position Kirill and his church occupy:

However, one should give one’s due to Patriarch Kirill: what he is doing now by blessing all the whims of power, including giving indirect positive reviews of Stalin, he does so not only to save his own skin. He is also doing it in the interest of the church, which means little in Russia in itself aside from its connection to the “state project,” which is rapidly drifting into the virtual reality of “great victories” and corruption. I was recently asked under what conditions would the Patriarch Kirill be able to refuse to glorify Stalin to his KGB handlers. I found only one answer — if he were the patriarch of Kyiv. Not because we are so admirable and free. But because 25% of the population attends Easter services in Ukraine compared to 2% in Russia. The absence of tangible support “from below” or of any real authority in society means the guaranteed inability to say “sorry, no” to authorities or all the more so to present any opposition at all. It means being doomed to carry out state orders even in small things. You can imagine that Putin simply reminded the patriarch — as well as everyone — that the head of the Russian Orthodox Church is on a short leash.

Certain profoundly naive pro-Russian commentators in the West have fallen prey to the facile delusion of a “based” and “trad” Russkiy-integralist Putinist regime when it is, in fact, the profoundly irreligious nature of the Russian people (easily measurable by a variety of social metrics) that has forced the Russian Orthodox Church into Putin’s cynical embrace, and has left the patriarch, as Shchotkina put it, with “no other choice than to play along with the sentiments of the majority,” even if that means whitewashing first the bloody crimes perpetrated by the Soviet authorities, and now the misdeeds of the present-day kleptocracy. (READ MORE: The War in Ukraine Is No Game of Drones)

Kateryna Shchotkina’s comparison between Russia and Ukraine is instructive. A recent study conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that “in 2012 in Ukraine and Russia, approximately the same share of the population had a positive attitude towards Stalin, then later in Ukraine, in general, there were fewer sympathizers of the Soviet dictator, and in Russia, on the contrary, affection for him grew rapidly and now the majority of the population has a positive attitude.” The KIIS researchers determined that “in Russia, between 2012 and 2023, the share of those who perceive Stalin positively increased from 28% to 63%,” while in Ukraine that number plummeted from 23 percent to 4 percent. While Russians were erecting hideous memorials to Stalin, Ukrainians were busy removing the Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle symbol from the shield of the 62-meter-tall Mother Ukraine monument overlooking Kyiv, replacing it with the tryzub national coat of arms in advance of the Aug. 24 Ukrainian Independence Day observances. If attitudes towards Stalin’s genocidal legacy represent a societal litmus test, it should be readily apparent who is passing and who is failing miserably. 

The Russian philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, in his 1836 Philosophical Letters, lamented his country’s “dull and gloomy existence, lacking in force and energy, with nothing to brighten it but crime, nothing to mitigate it but servitude.” That tendency towards servitude persists to this day, with a solid majority of Russians willing not just to prostrate themselves before Vladimir Putin but to look back upon Iosif Stalin’s savage misrule with warmth and devotion. Chaadayev wearily concluded that “we are an exception among people. We belong to those who are not an integral part of humanity but exist only to teach the world some type of great lesson.” He was then declared legally insane and placed under medical supervision, the first instance — though far from the last — of psychiatry being abused to suppress dissent in Russia. Nearly two centuries later, Chaadayev’s critique has lost none of its force.

#Russia History takes its unexpected turn. An 8-meter-high Stalin monument was installed in the middle of Velikie Luki in the Pskov region. The priest of the Russian Orthodox Church consecrated the statue.

Yes, the priest blessed the statue of Stalin. pic.twitter.com/WMwPKfKAMl

— Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) August 18, 2023

Watch the footage from the bizarre ceremony in Velikiye Luki, with its obnoxious propaganda, its ersatz historicism, and its grotesquely misguided theology, and you will find yourself in a masterclass taught by some of the most accomplished instructors, however unwitting, of that great lesson on the depths to which a nation consumed by ressentiment and revanchism can sink. If only that lesson could be absorbed by the Russian populace, perhaps then priests and laymen alike could admit, as Pyotr Chaadayev wrote in a Sept. 8, 1831 letter to Aleksandr Pushkin, “Net, moy drug, puti krovi ne sut’ puti Provideniya” — “No, my dear friend, the paths of blood are not the paths of Providence.”