The other day, Patriarch Kirill, known in the KGB archives as ‘Agent Mikhailov’, indulged in historical revisionism. His servile cynicism turned my mind to history, specifically one episode.
Before the Bolsheviks built that ziggurat eyesore in Red Square, Lenin’s mummy was kept in a jerrybuilt wooden structure. Upholding the fine tradition of Russian workmanship, one builder accidentally punctured a sewer, flooding the place with foul muck.
Patriarch Tikhon, then under house arrest, quipped: “The incense fits the relics.” A few months later he was dead.
That was the last gasp of the Russian Church, annihilated or at least driven underground by the advent of universal justice and liberty. At least 40,000 priests were murdered under Lenin, who told his hit squads that “we must teach that scum a lesson so that they will not even dare think of any kind of resistance for several decades.”
In general, Lenin didn’t pull punches when pronouncing on matters religious: “Any god is necrophilia… any religious idea, any idea of any god, even only flirting with god is unimaginable filth.” He also opined that, of all the disgusting notions mankind had concocted, the idea of God was by far the most revolting.
Stalin, who used to be a seminary student, agreed in principle, but not in every detail. Unlike Lenin, he was a practical man who realised that an ersatz Church could be useful.
Under him the Church vindicated the Resurrection by first dying and then rising from the dead in a new body. Already in 1922, as Stalin was taking over, the Soviets created a house-trained ‘Living Church’ operating under the aegis of the CheKa.
That sinister organisation has undergone seven name changes on the way to its current role of running the country. So has the Living Church, until it became known as simply the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Or rather that was its official name. Unofficially, it was a department of the KGB – not de jure but de facto.
When Stalin realised in 1941 that the Russians were reluctant to die for communism, he reinstated some traditional bric-a-brac, including the Church. Since then its hierarchs have been under KGB control as its full-time agents.
Thus all three candidates for the office of patriarch in 2009 were run by the KGB. Vladimir Gundyayev, ‘Agent Mikhailov’, won and assumed the name of Kirill.
His KGB dossier, first published in The Mitrokhin Archives, was impeccable. Whatever Gundyayev’s mission, his case officer invariably concluded that “the assignment was fulfilled successfully”.
According to Gen. Kalugin, head of the KGB department that ran Agent Mikhailov, piety wasn’t deemed an essential qualification for Gundyayev’s job. Kalugin, who has been living in the US since 1995, recalls once asking Gundyayev if he actually believed in God.
Between you and me, Volodya, tell your old friend, that sort of thing. Gundyayev could only manage a vague reply: “Well, you know, that depends on how you look at it…” Kalugin laughed in his face.
His Holiness’s current assignment is glorifying and blessing Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine. That too is being successfully fulfilled.
The other day, Agent Mikhailov declared that “Never in her history has Russia ever attacked anybody. She has only ever defended her borders.”
That was almost verbatim what Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, said on the same subject: “Let me remind you that throughout her history Russia has never attacked anybody. And Russia, which has suffered so many wars, is the last country in Europe that wants even to utter the word ‘war’.”
The words ‘special operation’, on the other hand, are perfectly utterable. Yet Peskov isn’t known as His Holiness. Gundyayev is, which makes his blanket statement particularly impressive.
Now, Agent Mikhailov is an educated man whose family features several generations of priestly theologians. He has no excuse of ignorance, which failing wouldn’t necessarily disqualify him as a man of God. Gundyayev is simply lying to vindicate mass murder. That does disqualify him not only as a priest but even as a half-decent man.
Any educated Russian, and certainly he, knows that Russia has been pouncing on her neighbours ever since the 16th century, when various principalities united under the auspices of Moscow.
Livonian wars pitted Russia against Lithuania first, then also Poland and Sweden. The last two remained off-and-on targets for 150 years, with Russia usually the aggressor.
Since then the country fought several offensive wars with Turkey, conquering the Crimea under Catherine the Great. At roughly the same time, Russia initiated three partitions of Poland, with the fourth one to come later, under Stalin.
Under Alexander I (d. 1825), Russia grabbed Finland, which managed to gain her independence only after Versailles. Also, every Russian schoolboy and certainly Gundyayev, knows the story of Gen. Suvorov’s exploits in the early Napoleonic wars. His army crossed the Alps to engage the French in Italy, doubtless trying to defend Russian borders there.
What every Russian schoolboy also knows is that throughout the 19th century Russia fought the Caucuses Wars, grabbing the territory traditionally occupied by the Chechens and other local peoples.
This gets us to the 20th century, when the Bolsheviks outdid the tsars with room to spare. In 1920 the Red Army attacked Poland, specifying that reconquering that land was only the first stop on the road to Paris and Berlin.
That didn’t quite work out at the time, and the Soviets hastily turned all of Russia into a combination of two camps: army and concentration. Stalin embarked on a massive militarisation effort, swapping millions of Russian lives for tanks and planes. Those were put to good use following the 1939 Pact with Hitler.
Red hordes occupied the bigger part of Poland (which Molotov called “an ugly creature of the Versailles Treaty”), helping the Nazis win the rest. They then grabbed Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and a large chunk of Romania. An attack on Finland followed, presaging the current war in the Ukraine. The Reds got a bloody nose and had to settle for just Karelia, rather than the whole country they had planned to occupy.
After the war, the Soviets defended their borders by sending tanks to quash popular uprisings in East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Then came Afghanistan, where the Soviets killed a million locals for purely defensive purposes. And let’s not forget the two Chechen wars, in which those infidels paid a high price for wanting independence.
Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014 also threatened Russia’s territorial integrity so much that troops had to be sent to annex large tracts of those lands. And of course only a timely thrust on 24 February, 2022, prevented those Judaeo-Banderite Ukie Nazis from marching all the way to Moscow.
But who am I to take issue with His Holiness? His reading of history must be divinely inspired, and God’s truth trumps man’s version every time.
All the holy father had to do was to accept Putin as God, Lubianka as His temple, and then repudiate all other Gods. Including the one he doesn’t believe in.
P.S. Congratulations to President Biden on his creativity. By appointing a black lesbian as his new press secretary, he ticked two vital boxes with one stroke. Or, if you will, killed two birds with one… bird.
“Stalin, who used to be a seminary student, agreed in principle, but not in every detail. Unlike Lenin, he was a practical man who realised that an ersatz Church could be useful.”
JESUS was the first COMMUNIST. Did Alex ever hear that one in the Soviet Union? Rich man, needle, camel, etc.
I have read for many years of the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church under Putin. When I feel up to it, I will enter a comment exposing Patriarch Kirill’s past.
As to the question under the photograph, I doubt the man on the left has any more supernatural belief than the man on the right. Unfortunately, that man could also be replaced by many in the Catholic hierarchy.
Finally, on President Biden’s new press secretary: is she also Muslim and lefthanded? (Granted, the first two boxes checked are the most important.)
People who write about religious resurgence in Russia are indulging in wishful thinking. In fact, regular church attendance in Russia is at about 1% of the population — even lower than in Britain. And many people shun Orthodox churches for fundamentalist sects, like the Seventh-Day Adventists. American evangelists used to fill stadiums there back in the ’90s, and they claimed many converts. On the other subject, I didn’t realise the left-handed people are also an oppressed minority. But I’m not surprised. I must watch her closely to find out, and I’ll also see if she ends the press conferences will ‘Allahu akbar!’
Are left-handed people an oppressed minority? Probably not at first glance. However, the whole point in today’s world of labelling things is to get people into groups where oppression can be claimed – except white males who prefer sex with biological women. (Having to add “biological” there hurts my eyes and fingers! What a world!)
The whole left-handed lament goes back to my teenage years when my brother came home from university complaining about his general education (required) classes and teachers. One object of his derision was “a left-handed black woman”.
There is a lesser selection of good golf clubs for left-handers. The horror.
By your own admittance, church addendance in Russia is even lower than in Britain. So why this clerical charade? Is it solely to dupe paleo-cons in the States? In the hope that one day a man (or woman) so inclined will occupy the Oval Office, and refuse to interfere with Russia’s business out of respect for such a pious, Christian nation?
The question (useless I know) I keep is asking is that of a child; why? What exactly is the point of world (or at least Eurasian) conquest? Is it all some collossal act of sublimation on the part of Putin? An attemp to join the ranks of Alexander, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Stalin or even Hitler, as an ‘immortal’ personage? The only form of immortality a KGB Col. can possibly believe in….Or maybe this Orthodox lark is a grotesque manifestation of Pascal’s Wager.
Lenin created his Third International to create a coalition of resentful haters of Western traditions. Communism was the flypaper to which all those insects were expected to fly — and many did. By the same token, Putin is creating a fascisoid International of those who hate Western traditions from another angle. Hatred is the real motive. Give us the haters, we’ll find the cause. The cause is in this case the loathing of globalism, liberalism, decadence and the urge to replace them with their opposites: jingoism, religion, ‘traditional values’, muscular supremacism and so on.
Putin is serving up what many such people see as a valid alternative. Most don’t realise that his offer is larcenous, but even many of those who do don’t mind. The magnetic force of fascism is too strong to resist. Putin and his clique don’t believe in God any more than did those SS thugs screaming ‘Gott mitt uns’. They believe in sacralised power because they feel, correctly, that this is the only power they can keep, in a country where 20 per cent of the population still don’t have proper plumbing. They also know that the Russians are perhaps more susceptible than most to fascisoid propaganda.