On January 27, as part of the International Christmas Educational Readings, which are held under the auspices of the Moscow Patriarch Kirill, in the Special Operations Division “F. E. Dzerzhinsky”, a meeting of the priests from the diocesan departments of the Russian Orthodox Church, which provide the spiritual care of the Russian military, was held.
In the photo, the priests pose around the bust of Soviet communist Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Bolshevik secret police (Chka), whose name became a byword for the methods of the Red Terror. The violent system he founded to crush and eliminate the “enemies of the revolution”, which led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people, was inherited and developed by Stalin in the repressions of the 1930s.
The regime in the Russian Federation is currently rehabilitating communist leaders and methods, including the so-called “Chekists”. On the territories occupied in Ukraine, streets and settlements are renamed with Soviet names, monuments to Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and other communists, whose names are associated with mass murders and persecutions against the Church of Christ, are being erected again.
The photo is a silent proof of the new captivity of the Church of Christ in Russia, which is deprived of the opportunity to follow the commandments of Christ in conscience. As has been the case before in history, the enemies of the Church need clerics to cover the iniquity with their consent and obedience. In this case, it becomes even more difficult for people to distinguish wrongdoing, because those who are called to lead them to Christ, set up as an example to follow His persecutors.
