Putin’s Downing of Malaysian Jet Analogous to Bolsheviks’ Murder of Imperial Family, Shiropayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 17 – Today marks the first anniversary of the shooting down of the Malaysian jet by Russian forces under the control of Vladimir Putin and the 97^th anniversary of the murder of the Imperial Family by Soviet forces under the control of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

            These two events, Russian commentator Aleksey Shiropayev suggests, have more in common than many might think: Both represent Moscow’s decisive break not only with the past but with the rest of the world; and in both, Moscow tried to conceal its involvement only to be ultimately exposed (rufabula.com/author/alexey-shiropaev/620).

            But perhaps most important, he argues, both represent the founding crimes of two political systems – the Bolshevik dictatorship and the Putin one -- that condemn each of them to ultimate destruction because such actions are things normal people ultimately will not be willing to accept.

             Shiropayev recalls that in Brezhnev’s times, he and those around him regularly talked about their horror over the fact that the Bolsheviks had killed all the members of the Imperial Family. Many countries have killed their monarchs, but the Bolsheviks went further and killed not only the tsar but his wife and children as well.

            He says that he and his generation recognized that any system built on such an action was not simply unjust but criminal, noting that to a large extent, the murder of the Imperial Family predisposed him to become anti-Soviet.  And he says that he understood that when Glazunov’s picture of the Tsarevich appeared in the Manezh in 1978, “the fall of that system was inevitable.”

            The reason? Russians could not once confronted with the facts accept any system that acted in that way, Shiropayev continues.

            Ninety-six years later, he observes, “the neo-Bolshevik chekist regime unleashed a criminal war” in Ukraine and downed the Malaysian jet. Once again, “innocent people died,” and once again Russians and all other people of good will are horrified.  Consequently, the same processes that the murder of the Imperial Family set in train have begun again.

            It is not Crimea that will sent Putinism to its grave; it is “the truth about ‘the Boeing jet,” Shirpoayev insists because for Russians “the tears of a child” will overwhelm anything else.  “Even in Soviet times, the popular spirit did not accept the obvious evil” that the Communists first tried to hide and then to justify.

            It didn’t work then and it won’t work now, he says, however many Chekist-controlled Orthodox hierarchs suggest otherwise.  The Orthodoxy the Moscow Patriarchate offers is not Christianity but a manifestation of “the anti-Christ,” he says; and Russians intuitively feel just as they did about Bolshevism that a system based on crimes is wrong and must be replaced.