Moscow Patriarchate: No Soviet Achievements Can Justify Stalin

MOSCOW - According to a report of the Kyiv Post of May 6, 2010, no Soviet Union achievement, including victory over Nazi Germany, can justify Joseph Stalin's crimes, a Moscow Patriarchate spokesperson said.

"Stalin established an inhuman system, and nothing can justify it – neither industrialization, nor the nuclear bomb, or the preservation of the borders, or even the victory in the Great Patriotic War, because not Stalin but our multiethnic people accomplished all of this," Father Hi, a deputy head of the Moscow Patriarchate's External Church Relations Department, said in a letter on behalf of Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the department's head, to Alexander Prokhanov, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Zavtra.

Prokhanov had earlier asked Metropolitan Hilarion to explain his position on Stalin's role in history, which he expressed in one of his articles.

Stalin's regime "was based on terror, violence, suppression of personality, lies, and snitching. This regime devoured itself when the executioners themselves were turned into victims, and its success was temporary," Father Philipp said.

"The glorification of atheists and their governance methods cannot serve as a consolidating factor for the peoples of a historical Russia. On the contrary, this dissociates our societies," he said.

As for the victory in WWII, it was won "by our people not thanks to Stalin's guidance," Father Philipp said. "Authoritative historians are of the view that it is through his fault that we suffered countless victims and laid millions of lives of our compatriots on the victory altar because of ill-conceived prewar domestic policy," he said.

In commenting on Prokhanov's words that Stalin had reconstructed "the great Russian expanse," Father Philipp said Stalin in fact planted "a time bomb" by arbitrarily re-carving "the great Russian expanse" and setting up artificial borders between former Soviet republics.

"As a result of Stalin's policy, we are currently reaping the harvest of extremism, nationalism, and xenophobia. The only still existing binding factor on the historical Russian territory, which is currently the territories of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and some other independent states, is the Russian Orthodox Church. If not for the experiment with the former Russian Empire's ethnic-territorial division, the division of a unified country and its death in the early 1990s would not have been relevant at all," he said.