Almost 40 years ago, an aging Anglican clergyman told me a story about his first trip to Paris as a boy—perhaps in the 1920s. His grandfather had called him in, told him that he had a gift to be used in the French capital, and then gave my friend a small pocket mirror. The boy, puzzled, asked his grandfather what the mirror might be for. The following dialogue ensued:
“You are going to Paris, I understand?”
“Yes, Grandfather.”
“I suppose they’ll take you to see where they’ve buried the little monster” (meaning Napoleon, in Les Invalides).
“Well, when you get there, you’ll see that things have been arranged so that Englishmen must bow their heads when looking down at him” (Napoleon is buried in a huge red quartzite sarcophagus on which one does, in fact, look down when entering Les Invalides).
“Yes, Grandfather.”
“Well, my boy, you are to stand with your back to him and, if you must see his tomb, hold the mirror over your head and look at the tomb through it.”
“Yes, Grandfather.”
I hadn’t thought of this story in decades—until I read this past summer that the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate of Moscow was urging caution in the face of pressures to remove Lenin’s mummified corpse from its granite mausoleum in Red Square and bury the remains. “It is obvious that the condition of Lenin’s body does not fit into Russia’s cultural tradition … but we should take into account the opinions of various social groups and avoid making decisions that entail social upheavals,” said the Russian Orthodox spokesman for “relations between Church and society,” Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin.
Really?
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known for over a century now by his Bolshevik nom-de-guerre, Lenin, was one of history’s greatest mass murderers. In the course of his ruthless efforts to impose communism on Russia and its neighbors through brutal force, terror, and extra-judicial homicides in the millions, he became one of the greatest persecutors of the Christian Church in two millennia. Lenin’s minions killed more Christians in a slow week than the last of the great Roman persecutors, Diocletian, did in years. All this is thoroughly documented—to the point where Russian Orthodoxy considers many of Lenin’s victims as martyrs and saints and celebrates their feasts in its liturgical calendar.
And yet today’s Russian Orthodox leadership cannot bring itself to say that this monster’s mummified corpse should cease, immediately, being an object of curiosity or veneration?
It is true that there are “various social groups” in Russia who would object to shutting down Lenin’s mausoleum and burying his corpse, because they still regard Lenin as a hero. In the face of such moral imbecility, however, surely the role of Russian Orthodoxy, as one guardian of the truth of Russia’s history, is to explain in detail why no morally sane person would want to honor Lenin. As for those 30 percent of Russians who are said to want to keep Lenin’s mummy just where it is, because it’s a major tourist attraction and thus a source of income, the Church might well explain that some things are not worth making money from, and that tourists should not be encouraged in their disordered desires.
A senior Catholic official deeply involved in ecumenical affairs once said, of Russian Orthodoxy, that “they don’t know how to be anything other than chaplain to the czar—whoever the czar is.” The martyrs of Orthodoxy under communism belie that wholesale dismissal, although the centuries-long entanglement of the Moscow Patriarchate has created very few models for a Russian Orthodox Church capable of speaking truth to power in twenty-first century Russia—a country where authoritarianism of an increasingly brutal sort has quickly followed a brief flirtation with genuine democracy. But surely a minimum of self-respect—and respect for its martyrs—ought to compel the Russian Orthodox Church to lead, not oppose or hinder, any move to demythologize Lenin and put an end to his obscene tomb, home to a mummified mass murderer and maniacal persecutor of the Church of Christ.
George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
Comments:
From the tone of Galuta's comment, though, I doubt this example will matter. (I await indignant reference to the invasion of Russia by that trope-ical Polish Jesuit, the First False Dmitrii). Come on, Nevskii is a national hero because he defeated the Teutonic Knights, not because he lost.
18 And men shall go into the caves of the rocks, and into the holes of the earth, from before the terror of Jehovah, and from the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake mightily the earth.
19 In that day men shall cast away their idols of silver, and their idols of gold, which have been made for them to worship, to the moles and to the bats;
20 to go into the caverns of the rocks, and into the clefts of the ragged rocks, from before the terror of Jehovah, and from the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake mightily the earth.
Until verses 18 and 20 happen, verse 19 will be honored mainly in the breach rather than in the observance.
Today, Christians commonly blame Communism entirely for the wars in Russia and so forth. But many Christians, (cf. White Russians), supported the Czars and serfdom/slavery. And they fought Lenin, and forces for democracy. Thus they contributed to many deaths.
IF Christians had not supported serfdom/slavery, as part of the "divine right of kings," perhaps a communist revolution would not have been necessary.
Lenin has received his reward and unless hypothetically he repented it is, insofar as a mortal has a right to speculate about such matters, a safe probability that his reward will be far more acute then anything any of us can give him
Rick mentioned the quote, "he who does not work, does not eat." The irony is that most Russians would have been stated a parody of that quote, "he who does not work, eats," from the fabulously popular Krushchev-era comedy, "Operation Y and Other Adventures of Shurik."
You are obviously confusing your medieval history ("the divine right of kings") with the turbulent history of russia in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. the problem was that the White Russians were much too disorganized and on the perifery to fight the bolsheviks- who had control of the heartland and used terror and murder.
Lenin should be removed. I remember as a child dreaming about lobbing some grenades in the mausoleam. hehehehe. blow that sucker up!
The middle ages gave us the separation of church and state in the 11th century, which was wound back from the sixteenth on by centralised national churches (Russian Orthodox among them) under the control of absolutist monarchs.
From the beginning, Christians taught obedience to the civil power: “Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority...” (1 Pet 2:23 cf Rom 13:1, 13:5)
In the 11th century, during the quarrel between the Empire and the Papacy, “divine right” was used by the Imperial party to assert the autonomy of the civil power in its own sphere, free from ecclesiastical interference. In some countries today, this is by no means a dead issue.
In the 17th century, “divine right” was used by Legitimists to assert the indefeasible right of a ruling house, notably partisans of the House of Stuart and, similarly in the 19th century by French supporters of the Bourbon claimant against Orléanists and Bonapartists, conveniently forgetting Pépin le Bref’s deposition of Childeric III, with the approval of Pope Zachery.
More significantly, in the 17th century, “divine right” was linked to the idea of sovereignty: the notion that, in every independent state, there must be some person (or body of persons) who can make or unmake any law whatsoever. This was closely linked with the revival of Roman Law; its original proponent, Bodin, was a lawyer from Toulouse, in the heart of the “pays de droit écrit.” It is the very antithesis of mediaeval feudal and customary law.
Lenin's staunchest defender was a Komsomol chief and Communist Party member on our reconstruction team who never tired of telling us that "he who does not work, does not eat." Strangely, this prematurely paunchy young man seemed to be the greatest exception to the principle.
I think your little essay above comes close to portraying this brilliant, demented fanatic in his true colors.