© AFP / Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV; (inset) Sputnik
"Religion is a sort of spiritual booze, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image." That's according to Russia's first communist leader - Vladimir Lenin. Now though, his successors seem to have very different ideas.
In the aftermath of the 1917 revolution, and during the "Great Terror" of 1937/38, Soviet communists declared war on religious belief, razed churches to the ground and murdered priests by the thousand.
Communism's hostility to religion, and particularly to the Russian Orthodox Church, isn't just a matter of historical record - it is etched into the collective memory of the country.
It is therefore somewhat surprising to hear the leader of the modern-day Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), Gennady Zyuganov, put a rather different spin on things. Jesus was the first communist, Zyuganov told the newspaper
Komsomolskaya Pravda on Thursday. "Put Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and the Moral Code of the Builder of Communism next to each other, and you will just gasp... We need to study the Bible," he said.
Comment: The President has a solid basis for these allegations, because, back in 2018, Patriarch Kirill of Russia's Orthodox church warned that a 'global conspiracy' sought to undermine their church, and soon after a breakaway church in Ukraine was set up, with all the evidence showing this schism was contrived by factions in the West.
As an aside, back in 2017, the Patriarch, referencing the book of Revelation and its depiction of the end times, warned that "we are entering a critical period in the course of human civilization. This can already be seen with the naked eye.". In 2021, it's clear just how prescient his words were: