Word: stalinization
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...Lenin had pledged toleration but delivered terror. "Russia turned crimson with the blood of martyrs," says Father Gleb Yakunin, Russian Orthodoxy's bravest agitator for religious freedom. In the Bolsheviks' first five years in power, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were cut down by the red sickle. Stalin greatly accelerated the terror, and by the end of Khrushchev's rule, liquidations of clergy reached an estimated 50,000. After World War II, fierce but generally less bloody persecution spread into the Ukraine and the new Soviet bloc, affecting millions of Roman Catholics and Protestants as well as Orthodox...
...violence did not cease with Stalin's death in 1953. In 1981 Pope John Paul barely escaped assassination. It is believed in the highest circles of the Vatican that Gorbachev's Kremlin predecessors were the masterminds, though the Soviets deny this. The reason for the attack, claims a ranking official of the Holy See, was that the Polish Pope refused to accept the division of Europe into East and West. "The East bloc," says this official, "realized he was a destabilizing factor...
Most important, 3,000 new churches have opened in the past nine months. However, Russian Orthodoxy's current 10,000 churches are a far cry from the 18,000 that existed when Stalin died, and just a fraction of the 54,000 before the Bolshevik Revolution. Ever since World War II, when Stalin fostered a , revival of Orthodoxy in order to enlist its support in the war effort, the Kremlin's policy has been not to liquidate the church but to infiltrate and control it. For that reason, the Soviet regime has always preferred docile Russian-led Orthodox and Protestant...
...battle for religious freedom is not yet won. The Supreme Soviet has still not taken up a long-anticipated revision of the repressive religious statute instituted by Stalin in 1929. There is no certainty whether, or when, parliament will scrap the hated law, which subjects all church activities to Communist control and forbids parish education. Nor, given the history of the U.S.S.R., is there certainty that rights proclaimed in speeches and laws will be honored by bureaucrats...
...Chicago in three large waves. Between 1890 and 1930, more than 350,000 Polish peasants poured into the city to labor in the steel mills and meat-packing plants. Their descendants now live in the suburbs or in neat bungalows on Chicago's northwest and southwest sides. As Stalin's Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe after World War II, another flood of immigrants arrived, many of them soldiers who had fought with the Allied forces...