From Lenin to Putin: The Continuity of Soviet Power by Vladimir Moss
May 22, 2015 (Source: http://www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com)
Most Orthodox Christians agree that the State founded by Lenin in October, 1917 was the most evil in human history to this date. A regime that was openly and officially antichristian overthrew the greatest Christian empire in history and proceeded to try and destroy everything and everyone that in any way retained any kind of loyalty or similarity to the pre-revolutionary past. Recalling the French revolution, but much more radical, the Russian revolution killed perhaps one hundred million of its own, Soviet citizens, and many millions more in other countries, blanketing, at its greatest extent, the whole land mass from Berlin to Vladivostok in a nightmare of militant atheism that caused those who were under threat of being returned to it to commit suicide in droves…
However, there is much less agreement on whether the present-day of Vladimir Putin is a continuation and resurrection of the Leninist regime or not. This is an important question; for in 1918, at her last genuine Local Council, the Russian Orthodox Church led by Martyr-Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the Soviet regime forbidding her members to have nothing whatsoever to do with these “outcasts of humanity”. (Only against the regimes of Julian the Apostate and Napoleon has the Orthodox Church ever issued similar decrees.) This “decree of irreconcilability” has never been rescinded, so if the Putinist regime is truly the successor of the Leninist one, our attitude to it must be similarly irreconcilable. The question therefore is: is the present-day Putinist regime Leninist in essence?
In order to answer this question we have to separate what is essential to Leninism from what is not, and ask whether Putin retains that essence even if in many other ways his regime may be very different… Our thesis is that the essence of Leninism is loyalty to Lenin himself, and that while many things have changed since 1917, devotion to Lenin, and a refusal to condemn him or his reincarnation, Stalin, remains the bond binding together all the epochs of Soviet and post-Soviet history to the present day, as witnessed above all by the continuing worship of his body in the mausoleum on Red Square. Lenin’s teachings are no longer believed in, his party no longer holds power, even his vitriolic hatred of God and Christianity has gone. But he himself remains alive and well in the hearts of the majority of the Russian people. And it is this psychological and spiritual bond, more powerful than any ideological sympathy or antipathy, that makes Leninism a continuing force. Moreover, it is a force that any succeeding leader like Putin can tap into – so long as the idol still remains in place. And why does the idol still remain in place? Because neither in 1991 nor at any other time has there been any thoroughgoing repentance for the sins of the Soviet past or formal renunciation of Lenin.
