Every Hitler needs his Goebbels. Performing this function for Putin is Dmitry Kisilyov, head of the government news agency and the host of a popular talk show on Rossiya 1, Russia’s equivalent of BBC One.
Kisilyov is more than just Putin’s chief propagandist. He’s the dummy to Putin’s ventriloquist, lip-synching things that Putin enunciates through Kisilyov, who obligingly opens and closes his mouth.
It was Kisilyov who explained a few months ago that Russia is capable of “turning America into radioactive dust”, which was an expansion on Putin’s reminder to a forgetful West that “Russia is a nuclear power”.
This time around Kisilyov delivered another revelation: Lenin, whose mummy still adorns Red Square, is being increasingly seen in Putin’s Russia in the same light as he was seen in the Soviet Union.
Russian school textbooks are already describing Stalin as a strict but fair manager who “took Russia with the plough and left her with the nuclear bomb”. Now it’s Lenin’s turn to make a comeback.
For anybody endowed with some knowledge of history and elementary moral sense, Lenin takes pride of place on the short list of the most evil, sadistic tyrants of modernity, sharing the roster with Stalin, Hitler and Mao.
Kisilyov doubtless knows enough history, but his deficit of moral sense made him deliver this panegyric on his talk show, for the delectation of millions:
“The scale of his effort and the nobility of purpose that Lenin set for himself to rearrange life on this planet are unheard of! There was nothing like it either before or after him. His romanticism, his courage alone are worth a lot. And if, while reassessing Lenin’s role, our society manages to take out Lenin’s positives and Lenin’s scale, then Lenin’s energy will work for us the way Mao’s energy is working for the Chinese. Putin too is beginning to ‘dissect’ Lenin, carefully, from afar. Even Lenin’s massacres of priests… are but a detail.”
Yes, but the detail is the place where the devil lives. This particular diabolical detail, though paling into insignificance compared to the 15 million murdered on Lenin’s watch, involves the brutal murder of at least 40,000 priests in the roughly six years that Lenin was in power.
The official version is that they were shot, but few were so lucky. Priests were crucified, flayed alive, cut to ribbons, eviscerated, turned to ice by having cold water poured over them in minus 20 weather – and I’ll spare you the more graphic stuff.
What particularly frustrated Lenin’s ‘nobility of purpose’ was the clergy’s reluctance to relinquish its sacramental valuables, lovingly assembled by believers over centuries. Gold chalices and crosses, gospels and other sacred books bound in gem-encrusted covers, precious icons – all those things had to be plundered when the right moment came.
That, in the eyes of the great romantic, happened in 1922, when the countryside was devastated by the worst famine in Russia’s history. Being a man blessed, in addition to the nobility of his spirit, with no mean intellect, Lenin calculated that people dying of hunger would be too weak to resist. This is how he put it, in that especially noble way of his:
“It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds of thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy, not stopping at crushing any resistance. It is precisely now and only now that the enormous majority of the peasant mass will be… in no condition to support in any decisive way that handful of Black Hundred clergy… who can and want to attempt a policy of violent resistance to the Soviet decree.”
I could comment on this text, but won’t, for no commentary is necessary. Instead I’ll cite another passage from the same letter:
“At this meeting, pass a secret resolution… that the confiscation of valuables, in particular of the richest abbeys, monasteries and churches, should be conducted with merciless determination, unconditionally stopping at nothing… The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach this lot a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.”
Again, there’s no need for commentary, especially since we know how efficiently Lenin’s directives were carried out. The ‘scale of the effort’ was indeed impressive – as was the ‘nobility of purpose’.
This, I hope you realise, is a full equivalent of today’s Chancellor of Germany making, through her mouthpiece, a statement about positively reassessing Hitler’s role in the country’s history.
Say what you will about Frau Merkel, and God knows I’ve said enough about her, but she’s unlikely to do so in any immediate future. But then Germany still retains a modicum of sanity.
Now, aren’t you sorry you can’t follow Russia’s propaganda meant for internal consumption? An eye opener, that.