Word: stalinism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...used to blaming others, in particular the government, for shortages and other problems. Now, thank goodness, we have begun speaking not only of Stalin's personal guilt, but of the guilt of his entourage for crimes against the people. Let's be honest and admit that it was not only the ruling clique that was guilty, but the people as well, who allowed the clique to do whatever it wanted. Permitting crimes is a form of participating in them, and historically, we are used to permitting them. That is priterpelost. It is time to stop blaming everything on the bureaucracy...
...Soviet Union contains the biggest of these disputed churches, made up of millions of Catholic believers, mostly in the western Ukraine, who were forced into the Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin in 1946. Since then, many of these Ukrainians, who still consider the Pope their leader, have led an illegal underground existence. Despite Vatican overtures on their behalf, the Russian Orthodox Church resists having the Kremlin give legal recognition to the Catholics, arguing that they belong within Orthodoxy...
More significantly, on April 29 Gorbachev held a meeting with Patriarch Pimen and other members of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy. The encounter, which "deeply impressed" the Patriarch, was the first public reception of Orthodox leaders by a party Secretary since 1943, when Stalin revived the church to win popular support during the worst days of World War II. In another act of conciliation, the regime this month returned to the church a section of its holiest shrine: the 11th century Monastery of the Caves in Kiev, which had been seized in 1961. Now monks will again live there...
...another 325 Orthodox sites over the past three years, church activities remain sharply restricted in the Soviet Union. Only 7,000 churches are functioning in the country today, compared with 70,000 in pre-Revolution days. Formal religious instruction is banned. And the 17 church-control laws instituted by Stalin in 1929 even forbid charitable work, although bit by bit some Christians are being allowed to help at clinics, mental hospitals and homes for the aged. There is no word as yet on the fate of the long-promised revision of Stalin's laws. Cautions Alexander Ogorodnikov, an ex-prisoner...
...should be skeptical of Gorbachev's claims that the horrors of the Stalin regime were an aberration from Soviet socialism. After all, Gorbachev and his colleagues still glorify Lenin, who effected one-party dictatorship, the subordination of justice to expediency, and the use of terror as an instrument of control...