22 April, 2009

Happy Lenin’s Birthday!

Today (April 22) is the birthday of the Father of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. As we continue our march to socialism, we should celebrate the lives of it’s founding fathers.

Lenin oversaw the executions of possibly a quarter of a million of his own people, and had the model of forced labor camps later used by Nazi Germany.

Even the clergy did not escape his tyrannical methods:

Lenin remained an advocate of mass terror, according to Richard Pipes. In a letter of 19 March 1922, to Molotov and the members of the Politburo, following an uprising by the clergy in the town of Shuia, Lenin outlined a brutal plan of action against the clergy and their followers, who were defying the government decree to remove church valuables: “We must (…) put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. (…) The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing (…) the better.”[68] Estimates of the numbers of the clergy killed vary. According to Orlando Figes[69] and The Black Book of Communism[70], 2,691 priests, 1,962 monks and 3,447 nuns were executed as a result of Lenin's aforementioned directives. Historian Christopher Read estimates from the records that a grand total of 1,023 clergy were killed in the whole period 1917-23.[71] However, the late Alexander Yakovlev, the architect of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) and later head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, cites documents that confirm nearly 3,000 were shot in 1918 alone.[72] Yakovlev stated that Lenin was "By every norm of international law, posthumously indictable for crimes against humanity."[73]

I won’t speculate on what it means that today is also “Earth Day”.