Brandon9000 wrote:You need to learn a little history:
Quote:After the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian czar in 1917, 300 bishops and 40,000 priests were killed for practicing their Orthodox faith, said Leonid Mickle, protodeacon at St. John the Baptist. The Soviet government persecuted Christians, destroyed thousands of churches and imposed control over the administration of the church.
Within 10 months, 20,000 members of the clergy were executed, causing many Russians to flee the country and establish the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, whose parishes now are scattered worldwide, Father Mickle said.
Soviet persecution of church mourned
Your source is statements of members of the Russian Orthodox clergy, who are not necessarily to be considered unbiased sources. I've read these charges before, and they proceed from a disingenuous description of events after the Revolution. Between the time of the Russian Revolution in March, 1917, and the Bolshevik Revolution in November, 1917, General Kornilov, believing he had the support of the Moscow Soviet (soviet simply means committee, and soviets had been established in most major cities of Russia, long before the Bolsheviks took over; what we call St. Petersburg, then known as Petrograd, was originally governed by the Soldiers and Sailors Soviet), lead an uprising against the government of Kerensky. It was one of many events which helped to undermine Kerensky--but the troops Kornilov thought he would bring to Petrograd were diverted by railway officials, as the Bolsheviks had control of the railway unions. Kornilov was arrested, but many local community leaders, including Russian Orthodox clergy, supported a return to Tsarist government, even though the Tsar had abdicated shortly after the Russian Revolution.
When the Bolshevik Revolution took place in November (October by the Julian Calendar, which Russia was still using, and hence, the frequent Soviet use of the term "Red October"), there were two members of the Bolsheviks in Petrograd: a newspaper editor and former Bolshevik bank robber named Joseph Dugashvili who used the alias Stalin, and a Bolshevik organizer named Lev Bronshtein, who used the alias Leon Trotsky. Trotsky had broken with Lenin after the 1903 international, but had "returned to fold" in time for the Russian Revolution. They were castigated by Lenin when he arrived in Petrograd, but Lenin was a careful manipulator of men as well as of ideas, and he used them both. They rose to power during the civil war which ensued.
When Kornilov had threatened Petrograd, more than 25,000 Russians, many of them practicioners of Russian Orthodoxy, had volunteered to defend the city. Trotsky succeeded in taking control of these troops, and soon took command of the entire Red Army. Stalin, working with Felix Dzershinky, a Pole who commanded the first state security apparatus, the Cheka (ancestor of the NKVD and the KGB), set out to eliminate the ideologically "impure" from the local soviets in Russia. All three men looked for counter-revolutionaries among the Russian Orthodox clergy as well as among aristocrats and army and navy officers. A civil war raged in Russia until well into the 1920s. Many members of the Russian Orthodox clergy joined the counter-revolutionaries, because the church had formerly been an agency of the imperial government which paid their salaries and maintained chruch property--with government support withdrawn, the church was collapsing.
Admiral Alexandr Kolchak organized a counter-revolutionary group to fight the civil war against the Bolsheviks. His slogan was "For Faith and Fatherland," and under his command, the "White Russians" (not the usual ethnic designation, this referred to counter-revolutionaries as opposed to the "Red Russians") fought a civil war against Trotsky's Red Army. Kolchak intentionally appealed to the Russian Orthodox clergy for support, and pinned most of his hope on popular support to the idea of defense of the church. Therefore, thanks to Kolchak and his lieutenants, many members of the clergy raised funds, harbored fugitives, stored weapons and munitions in churchs, and otherwise acted in a manner which was considered insurrectionary by the Bolshevik government.
You may argue that the actions of the Orthodox clergy in support of Kolchank and the White Russians was laudable, and that the Bolsheviks were basically evil. However, you cannot escape the fact that the Orthodox clergy were condemned and executed exactly as and for the same reason as anyone else seen as insurrectionary were. The civil war dragged on after Kornilov's execution in 1920, lasting the longest in Chechnya, Ingusetia and Azerbaijan. Do you allege that the Red Army were attempting to exterminate Muslims because they fought in those regions? Orthodox clergy who were killed, and churchs which were destroyed fell victim to the error of the clergy in backing the wrong side in the civil war. After the collapse of the White Russian insurgency, there was no active government program to exterminate Orthodox clergy. They no longer received a government salary, and their churchs and monestaries were no longer maintained by the state. Their church collapsed because of the withdrawl of state support, and many of them fled Russia because of their previous support for the White Russians.
It remains true that the Soviet state never sought to impose atheism on anyone, and did not kill people because they were christian or muslim. The member "real life" is making **** up, as he has done many times before.
You need to learn more than a little history.
yeah i guess they did take things somewhat seriously. I like the story about Lenin and comrades having a furious marxist row on a walk in the mountains outside Geneva. It started to rain, but Lenin's mood lightened and he started to smile. He was the only one who had brought an umbrella...
