Russians Betraying Both Christianity and the Russian Tradition by Failing to Condemn Stalinism, Tsipko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 15 – There are many reasons why the Russian Orthodox Church is failing to defend the principles of Christianity and refusing to condemn the crimes of the Soviet past, Aleksandr Tsipko says, including the sense that as Russia now does not have an image of the future, it must be proud of its past.

            But there are other even more serious causes for this shortcoming, the senior Russian commentator says, including talk by religious leaders and Kremlin-linked commentators that denigrates the importance of living by Christian principles here and now by elevating the heavenly above all else (mk.ru/social/2024/08/15/o-bozhestvennom-i-zemnom-pochemu-rpc-otkazyvaetsya-ot-osuzhdeniya-prestupleniy-stalinizma.html).

            According to Tsipko, “the opposition of the heavenly to the earthly, the avoidance of decommunization, and the failure to condemn the crimes of Bolshevism is also caused by a fear of facing up to the truth about Russian history,” something that is used to justify a turning away from Christian principles like “thou shalt not kill” in the here and now.

            “There is a kind of paradox here,” Tsipko argues, pointing to the fact that “Khrushchev in order to continue his condemnation of Stalin’s crimes … came up with the Moral Code of the Builders of Communism which as we know embodied the basic commandments of Christ” more than anything else.

            Now, “having let communism behind, we to the contrary are doing everything possible and impossible to get away from the divine which man caries within himself and which protects the commandments of Christ,” a “humiliation of the earthly” which “deamages the oral health of the modern Russian nation.”

            And Tsipko concludes by declaring that “by refusing to condemn the crimes of Bolshevism, we are actually abandoning the spiritual heritage of all Russian culture and above all the Russian religious philosophy of the early 20^th century, a philosophy which defended human life and included the fundamental idea that ‘thou shalt not kill.’”