A very perceptive article. My degree is in Political Science, with heavy concentrations of Soviet and East European studies (during the 1970's). The prof that I had for Soviet Politics and Soviet Foreign Policy painted a picture of Stalin that leads one to conclude that he was either psychotic or demonically possessed. After leaving seminary, he gets involved with the Bolsheviks, and begins holding up banks to finance party operations! Upon taking power as leader of the CP, he purges all those around him (Kamenev, Zinoviev, Trotsky, etc.), and has them all executed. Anybody who left Soviet territory during WWII, and then returned, would be shot because they had been "contaminated". Solzhenitsyn tells a story in the Gulag Archipelago about an annual meeting of the party where, everytime that Stalin's name was mentioned, everybody would rise and begin applauding. The applause went on for hours, with nobody sitting. Finally, one tired old man finally sat down in exhaustion, and was immediately hauled off and shot. In spite of all of this, when things were going badly in the war, he resuscitated the Orthodox Church, as a means of rallying the people to the war effort. Of course the church was totally controlled by the party, and riddled with NKVD operatives. One could argue that Lenin or Trotsky would never have made such concessions to religion (perhaps Lenin would, in a cunning, demonic way). Who is to say that Stalin wasn't motivated by the "spark" of Orthodoxy which may have remained within him?
I have a friend who is a professor of Church History at St. John's University in NYC. He tells the story of one of Josef Stalin's sidekick in the CPSU,(memory fails, but I think it was Georgi Malenkov, who later succeeded Stalin as Party Chairman). Every time Malenkov would get on an airplane, he would cross himself. When he, a militant atheist, was confronted about this, he would simply answer "after all, I am a Russian"....
The story which you attached, talking about the solicitude of Stalin toward his former seminarian priest-friends, tends to fall in line with what my St. John's professor friend once said about what all of the Bolshevik leaders under Stalin would do when they got together to socialize-they would get together, drink, and sing old Tsarist army drinking songs!
Dn. Robert
