Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Thrifty Joseph Stalin belatedly bet another blue chip on the Spanish Loyalists last week in the form of ten splendid Soviet warplanes. Tons of other Soviet war paraphernalia have reached the Leftists in the past month via France. Amid wild cheering in recently bombed Barcelona, Soviet war birds in mass formation darkened the sky and last week the Leftist Cabinet reorganized itself for a last-minute effort to crawl between the jaws of defeat and wrench out the tonsils of victory...
...word in Moscow for several months has been "Watch Kosior, he's gaining on Yezhov!" Yezhov, who is the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union as head of the Secret Political Police, won his power by persuading Stalin that the Dictator's life was being menaced by Russia's former Secret Police Chief Yagoda, recently executed (TIME, March 28). The quickest, most dangerous way to climb in Russia is by persuading the Dictator that a new set of his most trusted henchmen have just turned against him, and recently there have been signs that ambitious...
...form a new "Living Church," and to preach modernist, Marxian, non-super-natural doctrines while wearing the flowing robes and black boxlike mitres of the bishops of old Holy Russia. Both the Living Church and the Orthodox Church have existed since then at the pleasure of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. The Government's policy has been to tolerate religion so long as there were people who wanted it, and at the same time to encourage the work of such bodies as the League of Militant Godless...
Lately, vexed at the waning influence of the atheists and the tenacity of Christianity, Stalin started his crusher to work on churchmen-in particular on Metropolitan Sergius, head of the Orthodox Church, and Metropolitan Vitalius, head of the Living Church (TIME, Jan. 24). These dignitaries, and a great many more, were accused in the Soviet press of everything from drinking champagne with nuns to plotting assassinations of Soviet officials. Last week, with at least 20 bishops in jail and one, Metropolitan Theophan of Gorki, reported executed, the threat of the crusher appeared to have "converted" at least one potential victim...
...trot out a renegade churchman-a propagandist stunt which is not peculiar to the dictator nations but has been used by U. S. bigots (with "ex-monks," "escaped nuns," etc.)-would benefit not only Stalin but the discredited Russian Godless. So last week Metropolitan Nikolas' renunciation of "religious lies" appeared in the atheist journal, Bezbozhnik. He declared that he had begun to feel that his church duties were burdensome, and finally discontinued them entirely. "For me," wrote the Metropolitan, "the face of the priesthood has been unmasked." Thereupon Nikolas proceeded to particularize, naming prelates by name and accusing them...