|
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, died of heart failure at 79 on December 5, 2008 at his residence at the fashionable Moscow suburb of Peredelkino.
 During his 18-year long patriarchy, which coincided with the collapse of the USSR and the difficulties of the post communist transition, the Russian Orthodox church was transformed from the persecuted and tightly controlled “legal counterrevolutionary force” as defined by Soviet authorities to a symbol of Russia and an integral and important part of its ruling structure.
Alexy’s legacy reflects tragic history of the Russian people and their church and his official image of defender of faith and savior of the Russian soul is tarnished by allegations of being a KGB agent and the Soviet government’s assistant in destruction of the church.
Alexy was born Alexei Ridiger on February 23, 1929 in then-independent Estonia, where his religious parents took refuge from the murderous Bolshevik regime established in neighboring Petrograd in 1917. His grandfather, a Colonel in the Tsar’s Army, was shot by Bolsheviks in 1918.
To be religious in Soviet Russia often meant a death sentence. Missionaries of Marxist utopia, Bolsheviks could not tolerate any competition for the minds of their captives. Their goal was to establish the absolute monopoly of the State over the thought process by their secular religion of communism.
The Soviet Union was the first state to have as an ideological and practical objective the elimination of religion by physical extermination of religious people.
Not even for a single year would Soviet authorities give believers a break from repressions. With the Lenin’s decree of separation of church and State of January 20, 1918, nationalization (i.e. daylight robbery) of the Church’s property was begun: cathedrals and churches, church grounds, and all buildings owned by churches were looted and vandalized while valuables (gold, silver, platinum, paintings, icons, historical artifacts) were either stolen by Communist atheists or sold to the West via their Western sympathizers, agents or fellow travelers like industrialist Armand Hammer who first visited Soviet Union and met Lenin in 1921. Hammer claimed that he went to Russia to collect some $150,000 in debts for drugs he shipped there, but ended up bartering wheat to Bolshevik commissars in exchange for stolen gold and other valuables.
The time of his visit coincided with the first wave of church persecutions: 11,000 priests, monks and nuns were arrested. The arrests were followed by 9,000 executions. Almost all arrests on religious grounds would end up with executions.
In the beginning of 1922, Lenin sent confidential instructions to Leo Trotsky ordering him to head the extermination program of clerics and other religious people. The same year the Bolsheviks organized show trials of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Tikhon and Metropolitan Benjamin; 2,000 church hierarchs including Benjamin were shot as a result.Tikhon’s life was spared but he died shortly afterward of “natural causes."
During 1922-25 strange bedfellows emerged. Some leading Bolsheviks and church leaders formed an alliance with the goal of the former’s aspiration to break the Church from within and the latter’s hope to save what could be saved of the remnants of the Church. They established a Renovated Church presenting Jesus as a militant proletarian resentful of capitalist exploitation. Unsurprisingly, the Renovated churches sat empty as people rejected the intellectual garbage of the commissars. This further incited communist rage against people of faith.
There is no consensus about the true scale of communist crimes against the people of faith. According to some, the number of Orthodox Churches in Russia fell from 29,584 to less than 500 between 1927 and 1940. Between 1917 and 1935, 130,000 Orthodox priests were arrested. Of these, 95,000 were put to death. According to some Russian sources the number of victims of communist atheism is close to one million.
By the beginning of the Second World War almost all clergy, and millions of believers of all religions and denominations, were shot or sent to labor camps. Theological schools were closed, and religious publications prohibited.
In this “cultural” environment Alexy, ordained as a priest in 1950, rose in the Orthodox hierarchy, becoming Bishop of his native Tallinn in 1961 and Metropolitan of Novgorod and Leningrad in 1986.
The sad truth is that in 1957 Alexy was recruited by the KGB. The Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, His Holiness, the Right Reverend Alexy II was a KGB agent "Ouzel" who was a wholesale trader of his friends and his church to the godless communist Devil.
The church itself became a department of the Soviet secret police and could not choose anyone for any leadership position without the KGB approval. It is a paradox that many faithful men and women were serving the Devil to see their church preserved. Felix Corley, a British scholar on eastern European religious affairs, insists that there is evidence that Alexy saved some churches during Khrushchev’s onslaught on religious buildings in the early 1960s, including Tallinn's Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. Mr. Corley’s opinion is widely shared in the West.
God bless Alexy. I wouldn’t!
Biographies of many church hierarchs in all socialist countries under communism are so freakish, that they dwarf the wildest Orwellian imagination! Alexy’s breath-taking career, for instance, was engineered by the KGB. Just three years of his “conversion” to the Devil as a village priest, he was made the Bishop of Tallinn (he was 32, and married – not very helpful for the Orthodox Church’s hopefuls). In the next three years he was already an Archbishop, and then Metropolitan. In seven years under the most militantly atheistic Nikita Khrushchev regime he de facto became in charge of the whole Russian church with unlimited foreign travel privileges. By comparison, for an ordinary priest westbound travel was much less likely than odysseys in space.
Sure enough “Ouzel” was praised by another KGB operative, Vladimir Putin, who called Alexy's death a great tragedy: "He was a luminous man. His death is a great loss," said Putin. Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, said that Alexy was "a man of moral principles who never made compromises on key issues of faith." Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who was on an official visit to India when the news broke, called Alexy a "great citizen" who "suffered all the critical tests the country experienced during the 20th century." He definitely did and failed all of them.
Alexy was a vocal supporter of Chechen wars and Russian state television showed priests blessing tanks and other heavy weaponry of mass murder almost every day.
In an outrageous act of blasphemy, Alexy opened and blessed Moscow's Church of St. Sofia of God's Wisdom, as the official church of the KGB, a.k.a. the Federal Security Service, which murdered more faithful than all mass murderers of human history combined!
Alexy’s Western liberal friends and sympathizers, especially in the Episcopal Church, which praised Alexy on numerous occasions, should be aware that he was not one of them. In October 2007 he told the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly that homosexuality "is an illness, a distortion of a human being." He compared it with kleptomania which is the condition of not being able to resist the urge to steal things.
Alexy demanded that Moscow’s mayor Luzhkov should prohibit gay parades in the capital and arrest their participants. Mr. Luzhkov complied with great pleasure. His police went further and beat many of the local and foreign participants almost to death (including some visiting members of the European Parliament) in an event that caused the first serious negative reaction of the European Union towards the Putin regime. Whatever one thinks of the morality of homosexuality, people should not be summarily arrested and beaten.
Alexy had a full life and outlived many of his flock. No surprise! He devoted his life to keep his sheep treated as sheep and succeeded. R.I.P!
Professor Yuri Maltsev is professor of economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Before coming to the United States, Dr. Maltsev was a member of a senior team of Soviet economists that worked on President Gorbachev's reforms package of perestroika. Professor Maltsev has taught at the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, Moscow State University, Russia, Lithuania International University in Klaipeda and Baltic Management Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania, University of Caen in Cherbourg, France and University of San Diego, California. He is on the advisory boards of Foundation for Economic Education in New York; Heartland Institute in Chicago; and the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.
Trackback(0)
 |
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
