“Representatives of absolutely all religious confessions were subject to persecution,” Medvedev said in his video blog posting on October 30, listing believers as a class that was subject to extermination along with intellectuals, workers, military officers, and peasants.
Medvedev has been seen as reaching out to the leaders of Russia’s major religions, including Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism, over recent months.
The Russian president expressed concern about young people’s knowledge of crimes committed under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Disputes over the role of Stalinism in the Soviet Union’s victory in the Second World War often evoke heated debate in Russia.
“I am convinced that the memory of national tragedies is as sacred as the memory of victories,” said Medvedev who asserted that young people need to know of “one of the greatest tragedies of Russian history.”
Some Russians have noted that Medvedev’s comments appear to differ markedly from more equivocal statements by his predecessor and now prime minister, Vladimir Putin, who has supported a manual for history teachers in which Stalin is described as an “effective manager.”
Calculations of the total number of victims of Soviet repression are also the subject of much discussion. Millions of people were executed or died in prison camps known as the Gulag.
All religions and churches, including the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Baptist churches, Islam, and Judaism were subject to persecution, which began under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, as it sought to crush opposition and enforce atheism. It reached its peak, however, from 1937 to 1938 when Stalin was in power.
The Russian Orthodox Church has canonized several hundred bishops, monks, nuns, and lay people who were victims of Soviet rule as “new martyrs” of the church.
There was an easing in repression of the church during the Second World War, when Stalin sought to rally the nation to the war effort. Condemning
Stalinism, said Medvedev in his message, does not lessen the significance of Russia’s victory in the war.
On the Remembrance Day of Victims of Political Repression, the Rev. Vsevolod Chaplin, chairperson of the Moscow Patriarchate’s section dealing with interrelations of church and society, conducted a memorial service. He said the memory of that period of time “is needed by our people, especially the young who are beginning their lives.”
Memorial, a human rights organization, marks the day by reading out names of Stalin’s victims.
Chaplin conducted another memorial service on November 4 at a small church opposite the Kremlin to commemorate victims of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian civil war that followed, as well as those Russians who had to flee.
He called on Russians to remember both the Reds and Whites who fought on opposite sides of the barricades and said that unity is necessary to avoid collapse and bloodshed in the future. After the revolution, the territory around the church had been turned into a cafeteria at Lenin’s orders.
The Day of National Unity, marked on November 4, is a holiday created by the Kremlin in 2005 to replace Revolution Day on November 7. It coincides with the Russian Orthodox Church’s celebration of the feast day of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God.
