Russian Church calls for condemnation of Stalin, Lenin Crimes

Moscow, July 25, Interfax – A remembrance service for victims of Soviet-era repressions was held by the Solovetsky Stone on Moscow Lubyanskaya Square on Monday.

“Many are trying to tell us that that period should be forgotten together with the great number of victims,” head of the Synodal Department for Church and Society Relations Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin said at the ceremony.

The Church, the public, veterans and political repression victims “must do their best so that no one and nothing is forgotten,” he said.

Society cannot live a calm life or “have a decent future” unless it learns the lessons of history, “condemns morally, politically and legally the committed crimes and restores the good names of people who were oppressed only because they were clerics, nobles, Cossacks, well-to-do and hardworking farmers, merchants or belonged to other social groups declared enemies of the people,” he said.

Russia will not have a decent future unless “the criminals – Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Uritsky, Sverdlov – who organized the Red Terror and Stalin repressions, are named,” he said.

“We know for sure that the hands of those people were stained with innocent blood and all of their merits, real or imaginary – and there are both real and imaginary merits – do not justify what they did. Our society, state and people must not only know but also declare that,” he said.

He called for praying for the killed people “who died of suffering, and for the future of this country, which must admit mistakes and crimes of the past, purify its memory and conscience and become a nation living by the law of truth, peace and love.”

A rally organized by the Society of Repression Victims was held before the remembrance service.

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