Read Hanne’s The Herland Report.
The communist leader of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin (1878-1953), was a central figure in the 20th century’s unprecedented violence against Christians. He has been called the “architect of death” due to his socialist tyranny in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His atheist impact on Russia and active persecution of the contemporary Christian Church was a horrifying example of totalitarian tyranny. His reign is seen as a spiritual catastrophe, emblematic of atheism’s destructive power when communist intolerance of Christianity becomes mainstream.
Father Josiah Trentham takes the time to explain who socialist Josef Stalin really was, since there seems to be – ironically enough – a communist trend among young, conservative Americans such as Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes to admire Stalin. This trend is explainable, as Westerners have been deprived of knowledge about what actually went on behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union since the media were completely state controlled. Also, many Americans who are excellent at explaining contemporary domestic issues completely lack knowledge about what is happening in the rest of the world. They turn to secondhand sources for information that often are politically compromised to fit the current liberal-socialist mainstream, Western narrative. So, young people are often duped into believing what Western communist sources tell them. And to communists and many socialists, Stalin is a hero.
Presumably, conservative young Americans would not admire Stalin had they known how he operated in the USSR at the time. The massive campaigns by the communist atheists to eradicate the Christian Church in Russia led to large-scale confiscation of properties, closure of churches and seminaries, persecution and execution of the clergy, Father Trentham, who recently was interviewed by Tucker Carlson explains. From 1914 to 1939, churches in Russia went from 54,000 to a few hundred, priests and deacons from 51,000 to a few hundred. Monasteries went from over 1,000 to zero, monks and nuns from around 100,000 to none officially recorded. Christian seminaries and learning centers went from 61 to zero and parish schools from 37,000 to none.
The Church existed under siege from 1917 until 1988, explains Trentham. Tens of thousands of priests were murdered; many martyred, marking the bloodiest period for Christians in 20 centuries. State atheism was brutally enforced in schools and all public life. The spoken goal was to eradicate religion and historic traditions all together.
It was apostasy from the Christian faith that led to Stalin’s hardened heart. Born in 1878, he was baptized Orthodox Christian and raised by the Georgian Orthodox Church and its priests. It was later that he abandoned his religious faith and embraced atheism and Marxism. He adopted the pseudonym “Stalin,” meaning “steel,” reflecting his hardened heart, says Father Trentham. Stalin began engaging in socialist agitation, strikes and illegal activities such as robberies and kidnappings. While twisting the law to fit the socialist agenda, the communists denounced the traditional system of justice. Justice was, in effect, reinvented to be “that which socialists believe in,” regardless of whether they engaged in illegal activities. A new definition of “justice” thus began overtaking the Christian principles of justice that guarded Russia before communist Vladimir Lenin took power in 1917.
Josef Stalin played a significant role in the 1917 Communist Revolution. He became general secretary of the Communist Party in 1922, transforming the party into a dictatorship based on revolutionary violence, state propaganda and censorship of personal freedoms.
The brutal campaigns targeting hardworking peasants, not elites, began in 1930. After confiscating private land – a well-known communist goal is to remove all private property rights – forced collectivization was introduced. By 1936, 90% of farms were seized, causing famine and millions of deaths – especially in Ukraine.
As many Soviet citizens discovered, the atheist narrative did not produce the socialist utopian society it professed to. For many, atheism drove them back to traditional, conservative faith in God and hope for eternity, as told by Yuri Mashkov. Christian dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, author of “Gulag Archipelago,” explains that Soviet secularization became an atheist tyranny that canceled the traditional sense of morality. He famously said: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
Another Soviet dissident, Chris Banescu, writes about America: “As a survivor of the communist Holocaust, I am horrified to witness how my beloved America, my adopted country, is gradually being transformed into a secularist and atheistic utopia, where communist ideals are glorified, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are ridiculed and increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness.”
One may assume that the young conservative Americans who admire Stalin may find that they need to recheck their sources.
