What Soviets Did to Religion Far More Offensive than Actions Kremlin Punishes Now, Inozemtsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 1 – The current Russian government has turned into a virtual cottage industry legal charges against those who supposedly offend believers in that country, but the Putin regime says little or nothing about the far more offensive attacks on Orthodoxy by the Soviet authorities in the past, Vladislav Inozemtsev says.

            Despite Moscow’s efforts to play up the cases of today, the Russian commentator says, there hasn’t been any serious manifestation of anger among believers to what the authorities seem so concerned about, perhaps because the regime almost never talks about the far more offensive actions of the Soviets against religion (t.me/kremlebezBashennik/24887).

            In Soviet times, officials destroyed more than 50,000 churches, mosques and synagogues and regularly engaged in highly offensive actions against religious leaders and believers. No fewer than 17,000 clergy were shot by the Soviets, not to speak of the tens of thousands more who were sent to the GULAG and never returned home.

            Tragically and unforgivably, no one has been held criminally responsible for these actions, “neither in the USSR nor in post-Soviet Russia,” Inozemtsev continues. Instead, more than 100 statues have been put up to Stalin, one of the worst offenders in this regard, since 2005 alone. And Lenin, the author of this anti-religious policy, remains in his mausoleum.

            There is thus a fundamental contradiction between the Putin regime’s portrayal of itself as a defender of the faith by lashing out at immodest photographs or other behavior and its utter failure to speak out about this more obvious attack on religion and morality, the Moscow commentator says.