Transdniestria's Bishop opens memorial to victims of Stalin dictatorship

PMR's own Bishop Justinian of the Tiraspol-Dubossary Diocese condemned the mass executions under Communist dictator Josef Stalin

BUTOVO (Tiraspol Times) - On 8 August 2007, Transdniestria's Bishop Justinian was one of three church leaders to condemn the political purges that took place 70 years ago. Bishop Justinian led an act of remembrance of the victims who were killed by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Along with two other Orthodox church leaders, the head of Transdniestria's largest congregation consecrated a huge wooden cross Wednesday at a site south of Moscow where Stalin's firing squads executed thousands of people.

Created at a monastery that once housed one of the first Soviet labor camps and brought by barge to Moscow along a canal built on the bones of gulag inmates, the 12-meter tall cross has been embraced as a memorial to the mass suffering under Stalin, AP reported.

With the act of the three bishops, the site, known as the Butovo shooting range, was turned into a shrine to the victims of Stalinism. From 8 August 1937 through October 1938 more than 20,000 people were shot and buried there. August 8, the 70th anniversary of the start of mass shootings, is now a day of mourning for believers and for all victims of political repression said the Tiraspol-Dubossary Diocese in an official statement posted on the Transdniestria-based church's website.

Soviet ruler Josef Stalin ranks alongside Hitler as one of history's most ruthless dictators. He was also responsible for merging Pridnestrovie and Moldova in a forced union called the Moldavian SSR, as part of the Soviet Union.

While declaring Butovo a memorial, Bishop Justinian noted in his sermon that thousands of innocent citizens were also murdered during the years of political repression in Transdniestria, including many priests and ordinary parishioners.

The wooden cross was consegrated by Bishop Justinian alongside two colleagues from Moscow and Geneva, respectively. It was carved at a monastery on the Solovki Islands in the White Sea, one of the earliest and most notorious camps in the gulag. It arrived in Moscow on Monday after a 13-day journey that took it down the Belomorkanal, a 227-kilometer canal linking the White Sea with Lake Onega, which was built entirely by gulag inmates.

Murderous dictator condemned by church leaders

Under Stalin's orders, the Russian Orthodox Church was continually persecuted in the 1930s until it became nearly extinct. By 1939, thousands of churches had been leveled, and tens of thousands of priests, monks and nuns were persecuted and killed. Over 100,000 were shot during the purges which started on 8 August 1937.

Churches in Transdniestria have in recent years been among the most active in denouncing the Communist-era repressions. Today, the small and unrecognized country is at the forefront of a religious revival where Communism has been left behind and the government is actively supporting groups who have restored and re-opened dozens of local churches.

This marks a clean break with the past, where political dissent and religious activities were grounds for persecution under Soviet times. In the Stalin-era purges, mass repressions targeted "kulaks", so-called "dangerous" ethnic minorities, family members of oppositionists, military officers, and alleged saboteurs in agriculture and industry, apart from priests and nuns.

Many religions popular in the ethnic regions of the Soviet Union including the Roman Catholic Church, Uniats, Baptists, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. underwent ordeals similar to the Orthodox churches in other parts: thousands of monks were persecuted, and hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, sacred monuments, monasteries and other religious buildings were razed.

According to the declassified Soviet archives, during a one year period covering 1937 and 1938 alone, Stalin's police detained 1,548,367 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, numerous mass graves filled with executed victims of the terror were discovered. Some, such as the killing fields at Kurapaty and Bykivnia, are believed to contain hundreds of thousands of corpses.

PMR President's father jailed under Stalin

The ceremonies in which Transdniestria's church leader played a key role has marked the start of a series of events planned throughout this year to mark the 70th anniversary of the Great Purge of 1937.

During the purge, millions were labeled "enemies of the state" and executed without trial or sent to labor camps, including the father of the current president of Transdniestria (officially: Pridnestrovie, and also known under the informal names of Transnistria and Transdniester).

Political arrests on dubious charges were common throughout Stalin’s rule, resulting in the execution of hundreds of thousands of Russians who were deemed enemies of the Soviet state. As a child, Pridnestrovie's current president Igor Smirnov saw his own father sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor under Stalin for political crimes. The persecution of his father left the young Igor Smirnov with a hatred of totalitarian systems and the persecution of others for their political beliefs. Like Smirnov's father, millions more became inmates of the gulag, a system of thousands of slave labor camps scattered throughout the USSR.

Neighboring Moldova, which is ruled by a Communist Party but claims to respect political freedoms, held no events in condemnation of Stalin's purges. Historians estimate that the ongoing campaigns of political repression under Stalin have cost the lives of millions of people.

Among Stalin's other crimes was his invasion of Romania in 1940 and the forced incorporation of a part of Romania into the Soviet Union. Today, this territory is known as the Republic of Moldova. From 1940 to 1991, Moldova was forcefully merged with a non-Moldovan territory, Transdniestria, and made part of the Soviet Union in an entity called the Moldavian SSR. This entity was never a country and it seized to exist with the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Stalin-created MSSR consisted of today's Moldova plus today's Transdniestria, which had never previously been part of Moldova or any Romanian state at any time in history. Upon declaring its independence in 1991, Moldova itself declared the merger with Transdniestria - and the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which caused it - to be "null and void ab initio". (With information from AP)

See also:
» Canadian government advisor: "Transdniestr trapped in Stalin's cartography"
» Church reorganized Diocese to match Pridnestrovie's borders
» Bishop Justinian: "We have to recognize the people’s self-expression and will"

On the web:
» Tiraspol-Dubossary Diocese