Acton Institute, MI
Aug 10 2007
The New Martyrs
Friday, August 10. 2007
`Martyrdom means a great deal to Orthodox people,’ writes historian
James Billington in `The Orthodox Frontier of Faith,’ an essay
collected in `Orthodoxy and Western Culture,’ a volume of essays
published in honor of Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 2005).
The 20th Century’s first genocide, the Armenian genocide, began with
terror and massacres in the late 19th century and culminated in the
great destruction of Christian minorities at the hands of Ottoman
Turks in 1915-1918. Some 1.5 million Armenian Christians perished,
according to Armenian sources. With the Russian Revolution and the
rise of totalitarian communism, the martrydom of Christians took on
unprecedented proportions in the gulags, killing fields and the
famines that resulted from forced collectivization of farming.
Billington, the Librarian of Congress and a historian who has written
several books on Russian culture, cites figures showing that
`something like 70 percent of all Christian martyrs were created in
the twentieth century, and the largest number of those were in
Russia. Religious persecution was quite ecumenical; all religions
suffered. However, since Orthodoxy was the main religion of the USSR,
it suffered specially. The same Russian expanses that saw amazing
frontier missionary activity in the early modern period suffered
enormous devastation in the twentieth century when millions of people
disappeared in the frozen wastes of the North and the East. The
concentration camps were spread across almost exactly the same places
– often using the monasteries for prisons.’
The world will never know all of the names of the millions of New
Martyrs, as they are known to the Church, who perished under
Communism, an oppression that lasted for most of the 20th Century.
But their martyria, their witness, will be forever known to God.
In Russia this week, according to AP, `Russian Orthodox priests
consecrated a wooden cross Wednesday at a site south of Moscow where
firing squads executed thousands of people 70 years ago at the height
of Josef Stalin’s political purges. Created at a monastery that
housed one of the first Soviet labor camps and brought by barge to
Moscow along a canal built on the bones of gulag inmates, the 40-foot
cross has been embraced as memorial to the mass suffering under
Stalin.’
Noticeably absent, the article said, were representatives of
President Vladimir Putin’s government. `This is in keeping with
efforts by … Putin, a former KGB officer, to restore Russians’
pride in their Soviet-era history by softening the public perception
of Stalin’s rule,’ wrote reporter Bagila Bukharbayeva. Nostalgia for
the Soviet era? Read remarks on the subject by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
in his recent Der Spiegel interview.
The site consecrated to the Russian martyrs this week marked the 70th
anniversary of Stalin’s Great Purge, when millions were labeled
`enemies of the state’ and executed without trial or sent to labor
camps. The Butovo range was used for executions in the 1930s and
until after Stalin’s death in 1953. Some 20,000 people, including
priests and artists, were killed there in 1937-38 alone. `We have
been ordered to be proud of our past,’ said Yan Rachinsky from
Memorial, a non-governmental group dedicated to investigating
Stalin’s repression. `I know no other example in history when 700,000
people were killed within 1 1/2 years only for political reasons.’
Follow the link below to read the entire report on the memorial to
victims of Stalin’s Purge.
Cross commemorates Stalin purge victims
By BAGILA BUKHARBAYEVA – Associated Press Writer
August 8, 2007
Russian Orthodox priests consecrated a wooden cross Wednesday at a
site south of Moscow where firing squads executed thousands of people
70 years ago at the height of Josef Stalin’s political purges.
Created at a monastery that housed one of the first Soviet labor
camps and brought by barge to Moscow along a canal built on the bones
of gulag inmates, the 40-foot cross has been embraced as memorial to
the mass suffering under Stalin.
The ceremony at the Church of New Martyrs and Confessors, built
recently at the Butovo site, is one of a series of events planned
throughout this year to mark the 70th anniversary of the Great Purge
of 1937, when millions were labeled `enemies of the state’ and
executed without trial or sent to labor camps.
Hundreds of people, most of them women wearing colorful headscarves,
laid flowers and lit candles under the cross. The crowd, led by
priests carrying icons, continued to the execution and burial site
for a service. Some of the women were crying.
There were no representatives of the government, which has shown
little interest in the anniversary of the Great Purge. This is in
keeping with efforts by President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB
officer, to restore Russians’ pride in their Soviet-era history by
softening the public perception of Stalin’s rule.
`We have been ordered to be proud of our past,’ said Yan Rachinsky
from Memorial, a non-governmental group dedicated to investigating
Stalin’s repression.
`I know no other example in history when 700,000 people were killed
within 1 1/2 years only for political reasons,’ he said in an
interview.
The wooden cross was carved at a monastery on the Solovki Islands in
the White Sea, one of the earliest and most notorious camps in the
gulag.
It arrived in Moscow on Monday after a 13-day journey that took it
down the Belomorkanal, a 141-mile waterway linking the White Sea with
Lake Onega. The canal was built between 1931 and 1933 entirely by
gulag inmates.
An estimated 100,000 people, many of them victims of political
repression, died as they built the canal using only wheelbarrows,
sledgehammers and axes. The construction was supervised by the NKVD,
the predecessor of the KGB.
The Butovo range was used for executions in the 1930s and until after
Stalin’s death in 1953. Some 20,000 people, including priests and
artists, were killed there in 1937-38 alone.
Putin said in June that although the 1937 purge was one of the most
notorious episodes of the Stalin era, no one should try to make
Russia feel guilty about it because `in other countries even worse
things happened.’
The president, who was speaking to a gathering of history teachers,
suggested the United States’ use of atomic weapons against Japan at
the end of World War II was among those things.
Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the liberal Yabloko party, said the
Kremlin was `almost completely ignoring’ the anniversary of the Great
Purge, which he said was `one of the most convincing pieces of
evidence that Russian authorities sympathize with Stalin’s regime.’
Features of Stalin’s rule such as `the physical removal of political
opponents, … spy mania, defamation of government critics and rights
activists, equating any dissent with anti-government activity’ remain
Russia’s political reality, Yavlinsky said in a statement Sunday.
Political arrests on dubious charges were common throughout Stalin’s
rule, resulting in the execution of hundreds of thousands. Millions
more became inmates of the gulag, the system of thousands of slave
labor camps.
Large-scale arrests of Communist Party members began in 1934 and
reached a peak in 1936-37, when a series of show trials was held in
Moscow featuring dramatic courtroom confessions.
Russia has never sought to bring to justice KGB officials implicated
in human rights abuses committed during the Communist era.