The patriarch decided to hide the fact of Stalinist repression against his family. References to his father’s and grandfather’s imprisonment disappeared from a collection of Kirill’s speeches

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The patriarch decided to hide the fact of Stalinist repression against his family. References to Kirill’s father’s and grandfather’s prison terms disappeared from a collection of his speeches

On July 28, the Moscow Patriarchate publishing house released Patriarch Kirill’s book War. Beyond the Limits of Visible Causes and Consequences. Under a thick cover is a compilation of Kirill’s speeches devoted to war, Russia’s history, and the church’s role in the “SMO.” As MO noted, when the collection was put together, a significant detail concerning repression in the patriarch’s family disappeared from the original texts.

🔹One of the texts used to compile Kirill’s book was a 2009 interview with the Ukrainian channel Inter. In it, Kirill says it is wrong to compare Hitler with Stalin, while adding that his family was repressed under Stalin: his grandfather Vasily spent almost 30 years in the camps, and his father Mikhail was sent to prison for participating in a church choir (his prison photo is in the picture).

🔹The book uses the same 2009 text, but the story of the repression against the patriarch’s family has been cut out of it (in the picture). In the original, Kirill clearly criticized Stalinism. Now the patriarch has limited himself to the phrase “I am by no means a supporter or defender of the Stalin era” without any further explanation.

🔹Information about repression in the patriarch’s family was cut out?utmreferrer= from Ruwiki as well, the censored analogue of Wikipedia. There, Kirill’s father’s biography begins in 1960 (after his prison term), and information about the grandfather is missing altogether. In the original, on Wikipedia, the same text contains) several paragraphs about the persecution of the Gundyayev family.

👉🏼In the book, Kirill acknowledges Stalinist repression, but Stalin himself has in recent years remained beyond criticism for him, and his personal responsibility for signing execution lists goes unmentioned. Earlier, Kirill had called for Stalin to be respected for his achievements and had described Putin as a “leader” in Stalin’s mold. We wrote here about how Stalin appears on Orthodox icons.

Read the full publication on the website

In the photo: Mikhail Gundyayev, Kirill’s father, in a 1934 prison photograph