Now the history books and the popular imagination have to catch up with those facts.

I hope it will happen in due time, and that time is now. The true history of the materialist Communism and the collapse of this ideology must be known. The rejection of God, the rejection of Orthodoxy, led to the sacrifices of the Church’s millions of faithful. They are now the New Martyrs and Confessors.

The West does not want to learn from Russia. I believe that ignorance, the naive mind are being deliberately cultivated. Fr Seraphim’s warning ‘Today in Russia, tomorrow in America’ is about to become ‘Yesterday in Russia, today in in America’.

Dear Fr. Peter,

i could not agree more…to honor their memories we need to make sure that people hear these stories…particularly young Americans who are notoriously ignorant of history.

Last Sunday, at the parish I attend in Michigan, we had a visiting retired Romanian priest. He wanted to do a memorial for all of the communist martyrs. Earlier the priest had told me of some of the hardships he had faced in Romania, due to the communists.

At the conclusion of the service, a young (recently converted) black man came back into the vestry to say “hi” to the altar servers…a normal ritual for us.

While he was there, I asked the priest, “Father…how many priests would you guess the communists killed?” Then I encouraged him, “Tell Athanasios (the young black kid) about the communists.”

So here was this old Romanian man, in broken English, telling his story in vivid detail to this young, wide eyed, black kid – explaining what the communists were really like – not the CNN version.

This is powerful stuff…and we, who know about it, have a responsibility to tell the story.

Thanks for sharing yours…and NEVER stop!

Best Regards,
Dean Calvert

It is neither easy nor acceptable for the left to acknowledge the devastation wrought by the implementation of its fellows in various Communist states. Some did, of course, but many just changed the topic – often trying to focus on conversation to their advantage (blacklisting, etc. – even though it is Conservatives today who have the better claim to it). Robert Conquest wrote a definitive work on the Holocaust in the 80’s and, for a while, all but the most stalwart leftists were silent. An outstanding and thorough scholar, his more recent work, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, traced out the very same sympathies among the intelligentsia in the West that you have succinctly described here. Muggeridge and Chambers were both heroic and paid the price, yet somehow I doubt a movie will be made about ether in the near future, though their stories are compelling. (Why Witness is not a movie is beyond me.) Good summary, Father – and a powerful (and very widespread) warning of how our passions can so easily blind us.

More than embarrassment or conspiracy. The American intelligentsia was taken with the promise of Communism in the 30’s and 40’s. The American media was largely compliant with Soviet propaganda and the academy, as is so often the case, was very slow in recognizing situations that did not fit their biases. Walter Durranty, the chief correspondent for the New York Times (little more than a Stalinist stooge as it turns out) set the narrative for the American press. When access to Russia was completely cut off, the narrative held.

There were exceptions of course. Malcolm Muggeridge reported the truth early on and lost his job at the Guardian for it. Robert Conquest, Soviet historian, was also clear-headed and honest. The writer George Orwell saw the evil and wrote about it. There were others who were part of the Communist party in America who broke from it and told the truth too, such as Whittaker Chambers (his book Witness is a masterpiece).

The dam didn’t really break however until the 60’s when Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulags” were published in the West. It decimated the Marxist establishment of Europe and then Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II rose to power and worked to bring down the Evil Empire.

There was a very strong resistance to the truth because the myth of utopian society had taken hold in the West too (it’s still here). What made Solzhenitsyn so powerful was that it was a quantified first hand history. The facts could not be ignored.

Now the history books and the popular imagination have to catch up with those facts.

Or lack of film footage. (How shallow we are. If we don’t “see” it, it didn’t really happen.) Remember, our GI’s liberated the Nazi camps, which permitted both living witness of them and filming. No one, unfortunately, liberated any of those who suffered under the Soviet holocaust. (That would have required doing what Patton advised at the end of WWII and going into Soviet territory.) Any horror without footage is merely an historical artifact for the TV generation.

I wonder what it is this silence surrounding Communist Holocaust. At least one order of magnitude larger in severity than what we all know to be the Holocaust and so little publicity. Embarrassment or conspiracy?

And yet, my maternal grandmother was the most devout, holy, righteous person I have ever known in my life; she was pregnant and miscarried during the starvation among other things. When many within the immigrant community within which I grew up encouraged downright hate for the “Russian” I never heard my grandmother say a disparaging word about anyone; only a recurring reminder – never forget.

Because of the providential goodness of God I live in a country in which I worship without fear of retribution or persecution and wear the uniform of a chaplain in the United States Armed Forces. Are we perfect in America; have we arrived to a place for other countries to emulate – No; not when we under the “rule of law” permit 1.3 million children to be murdered through abortion as an elective surgical procedure. So the words of my grandmother still sound in my ears – never forget. Let’s take this one step further – let others know, so they will never forget.

Fr. Peter