A Statement from ROCOR on the Death of Joseph Stalin, the Executioner of the Russian People

Russian source: Церковная Жизнь, Nos. 3–4, March–April 1953, pp. 63–65.

 

 

The death of Stalin is the death of the greatest persecutor of the Christian Faith in history. The crimes of Nero, Diocletian, Julian the Apostate, and other impious men pale before his terrible deeds. No one can compare with him either in the number of his victims, in his cruelty toward them, or in the cunning with which he attained his aims. All satanic malice seemed to have become incarnate in this man, who, to an even greater degree than the Pharisees, deserves to be called a son of the devil.

An Orthodox Christian is especially horrified by his truly satanic, cruel, and deceitful policy toward the Church.

At first, there was the attempt to destroy her, both through the murder of outstanding pastors and believers and through her internal disintegration by means of artificially created schisms. Then came the coercion of her handpicked leaders to bow down before him and before the entire godless system directed by him. And not merely to bow down, but also to praise the persecutor of the Church as though he were her benefactor, calling black white and the satanic divine before the whole world.

When this most wicked persecutor of the Church was praised during his lifetime by archpastors and pastors who had fallen under the weight of the persecutions, this was a sign of the Church’s greatest humiliation. We could take consolation in the fact that this lie was put to shame by the struggle of countless fearless martyrs and secret Christians who rejected all the temptations of Satan.

The ancient persecutions likewise caused the fall of both hierarchs and laymen. In those times as well, there were people who, being unable to endure torments for Christ, either openly renounced Him or pretended to offer sacrifice to the idols, obtaining by indirect means a certificate attesting that they had offered a sacrifice which, in fact, they had not offered—the libellatici. The Church condemned not only the former, but also the latter for their deceitful cowardice and their denial of Christ—if not in their hearts, then before men.

But the history of the Church knows no other example of the creation of an entire ecclesiastical organization, headed by a Patriarch and a Council, founded upon bending the knee before an open enemy of God and glorifying him as though he were a benefactor. The blood of millions of believers cries out to God, yet the hierarch who calls himself Patriarch of All Rus’ seems not to hear it. He humbly thanks their murderer and the defiler of countless churches.

Stalin’s death brought this temptation to its highest blasphemous manifestation. The newspapers reported not only that Patriarch Alexy had venerated the remains of the godless enemy of Christ, but also that memorial services had been celebrated for him.

Can anything more blasphemous be imagined than a memorial service for Stalin? Can one pray without hypocrisy that the Lord would place the greatest persecutor of the Faith from ages past and enemy of God “in Paradise, where the choirs of the saints and the righteous shine as luminaries”? Truly, this prayer is sin and iniquity not only in essence, but also formally, for Stalin, together with the other People’s Commissars, had been excommunicated from the Church by His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon, and Patriarch Alexy himself, however much he bowed before Stalin, never dared to declare that this anathema had been lifted from him.

Prayer for the repose with the saints of an unrepentant sinner excommunicated from the Church is a blasphemous heresy, for it constitutes a confession that one can supposedly obtain the Kingdom of God in heaven by persecuting and exterminating His sons on earth in the name of destroying faith in God itself. This is a mingling of the Kingdom of God with the kingdom of darkness. It is no lesser a sin than an open denial of Christ, faith in Whom is thus professed to be unnecessary for participation in His Kingdom.

In this act of the Moscow ecclesiastical authority, the sin underlying it—which our confessors in Russia have so convincingly identified since 1927 and which our Church Abroad continues to denounce to this day—found its most striking manifestation.

 

Online: https://sinod.ruschurchabroad.org/Arh%20Synod%201953ianv_O%20Staline.htm