Download or read book Stalin s Priests written by Erik Brandin and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2018-03-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1972 Pope Paul VI shockingly proclaimed, “Through some crack, the smoke of Satan has entered into the Temple of God.” The Catholic Church has been infiltrated with evil traitors hell bent on its destruction. And KGB agent Rolf Wozack is poised to thrust the final dagger! Stalin’s Priest takes the reader on a spellbinding, page turning, thrill ride with international mystery and intrigue. Russian Premier Joseph Stalin sets out to destroy the church to achieve his utopian communist state. He has priests murdered and destroys churches, but the church continues on in secret. Frustrated and desperate, Stalin hatches a sinister plan to destroy the church from within by sending KGB agents to the seminaries to become undercover priests. Rolf Wozack is one of Stalin’s best agents. Follow his journey from a nightmarish childhood in World War II Poland, where he was orphaned by the Nazi’s then rescued by the Russians, only to be brainwashed by his KGB handlers. Rolf rises quickly through the priesthood and eventually to the Vatican to carry out Stalin’s most important order. Murder! Twenty years earlier in 1917, in Fatima, Portugal, three young shepherd children claim to have been visited by the Virgin Mary. She shares visions of heaven and hell and tells them that Russia will spread evil throughout the world causing great wars and persecution of the church. All this foretold twenty years before Stalin would ever dream it up. Can her warning save the church and the world from Russia’s evil, or will Rolf sacrifice everything and carry out Stalin’s final order?
Download or read book The Catholic Church and Soviet Russia 1917 39 written by Dennis J. Dunn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-18 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, based on extensive research including in the Russian and Vatican archives, charts the development of relations between the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union from the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 to the death of Pope Pius XI in 1939. It provides background information on the animosity between the Orthodox and Catholic churches and moves towards reconciliation between them, discusses Soviet initiatives to eradicate religion in the Soviet Union and spread atheist international communism throughout the world, and explores the Catholic Church’s attempts to survive in the face of persecution within the Soviet Union and extend itself. Throughout the book reveals much new detail on the complex interaction between these two opposing bodies and their respective ideologies.
Download or read book With God in Russia written by Walter Ciszek and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Father Walter Ciszek, S.J., author of the best-selling He Leadeth Me, tells here the gripping, astounding story of his twenty-three years in Russian prison camps in Siberia, how he was falsely imprisoned as an "American spy", the incredible rigors of daily life as a prisoner, and his extraordinary faith in God and commitment to his priestly vows and vocation. He said Mass under cover, in constant danger of death. He heard confession of hundreds who could have betrayed him; he aided spiritually many who could have gained by exposing him. This is a remarkable story of personal experience. It would be difficult to write fiction that could honestly portray the heroic patience, endurance, fortitude and complete trust in God lived by Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J.
Download or read book Church and State in Soviet Russia written by Tatiana A. Chumachenko and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-12 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Church-state relations during the Soviet period were much more complex and changeable than is generally assumed. From the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 until the 21st Party Congress in 1961, the Communist regime's attitude toward the Russian Orthodox Church zigzagged from indifference and opportunism to hostility and repression. Drawing from new access to previously closed archives, historian Tatiana Chumachenko has documented the twists and turns and human dramas of church-state relations during these decades. This rich material provides essential background to the post-Soviet Russian government's controversial relationship to the Russian Orthodox Church today.
Download or read book Stalin written by Ronald Grigor Suny and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 912 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ruler. Many biographers of Stalin turn to shallow psychological analysis in seeking to explain his embrace of revolution, focusing on the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father or his hero-worship of Lenins, or sensationalizing Stalin's involvement in violent activity. Suny seeks to show Stalin in the complex context of the oppressive tsarist police-state in which he lived and debates and party politics that animated the revolutionary circles in which he moved. Though working from fragmentary evidence from disparate sources, Suny is able to place Stalin in his intellectual and political context and reveal, not only a different analysis of the man's psychological and intellectual transformation, but a revisionist history of the revolutionary movements themselves before 1917"--
Download or read book Red Priests written by Edward E. Roslof and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2002-10-24 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1917 revolutions that gave birth to Soviet Russia had a profound impact on Russian religious life. Social and political attitudes toward religion in general and toward the Russian Orthodox Church in particular remained in turmoil for nearly 30 years. During that time of religious uncertainty, a movement known as "renovationism," led by reformist Orthodox clergy, pejoratively labeled "red priests," tried to reconcile Christianity with the goals of the Bolshevik state. But Church hierarchy and Bolshevik officials alike feared clergymen who proclaimed themselves to be both Christians and socialists. This innovative study, based on previously untapped archival sources, recounts the history of the red priests, who, acting out of religious conviction in a hostile environment, strove to establish a church that stood for social justice and equality. Red Priests sheds valuable new light on the dynamics of society, politics, and religion in Russia between 1905 and 1946.
Download or read book Stalin and His Hangmen written by Donald Rayfield and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalin did not act alone. The mass executions, the mock trials, the betrayals and purges, the jailings and secret torture that ravaged the Soviet Union during the three decades of Stalin’s dictatorship, were the result of a tight network of trusted henchmen (and women), spies, psychopaths, and thugs. At the top of this pyramid of terror sat five indispensable hangmen who presided over the various incarnations of Stalin’s secret police. Now, in his harrowing new book, Donald Rayfield probes the lives, the minds, the twisted careers, and the unpunished crimes of Stalin’s loyal assassins. Founded by Feliks Dzierzynski, the Cheka–the Extraordinary Commission–came to life in the first years of the Russian Revolution. Spreading fear in a time of chaos, the Cheka proved a perfect instrument for Stalin’s ruthless consolidation of power. But brutal as it was, the Cheka under Dzierzynski was amateurish compared to the well-oiled killing machines that succeeded it. Genrikh Iagoda’s OGPU specialized in political assassination, propaganda, and the manipulation of foreign intellectuals. Later, the NKVD recruited a new generation of torturers. Starting in 1938, terror mastermind Lavrenti Beria brought violent repression to a new height of ingenuity and sadism. As Rayfield shows, Stalin and his henchmen worked relentlessly to coerce and suborn leading Soviet intellectuals, artists, writers, lawyers, and scientists. Maxim Gorky, Aleksandr Fadeev, Alexei Tolstoi, Isaak Babel, and Osip Mandelstam were all caught in Stalin’s web–courted, toyed with, betrayed, and then ruthlessly destroyed. In bringing to light the careers, personalities, relationships, and “accomplishments” of Stalin’s key henchmen and their most prominent victims, Rayfield creates a chilling drama of the intersection of political fanaticism, personal vulnerability, and blind lust for power spanning half a century. Though Beria lost his power–and his life–after Stalin’s death in 1953, the fundamental methods of the hangmen maintained their grip into the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Rayfield argues, the tradition of terror, far from disappearing, has emerged with renewed vitality under Vladimir Putin. Written with grace, passion, and a dazzling command of the intricacies of Soviet politics and society, Stalin and the Hangmen is a devastating indictment of the individuals and ideology that kept Stalin in power.
Download or read book The Dangerous God written by Dominic Erdozain and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the heart of the Soviet experiment was a belief in the impermanence of the human spirit: souls could be engineered; conscience could be destroyed. The project was, in many ways, chillingly successful. But the ultimate failure of a totalitarian regime to fulfill its ambitions for social and spiritual mastery had roots deeper than the deficiencies of the Soviet leadership or the chaos of a "command" economy. Beneath the rhetoric of scientific communism was a culture of intellectual and cultural dissidence, which may be regarded as the "prehistory of perestroika." This volume explores the contribution of Christian thought and belief to this culture of dissent and survival, showing how religious and secular streams of resistance joined in an unexpected and powerful partnership. The essays in The Dangerous God seek to shed light on the dynamic and subversive capacities of religious faith in a context of brutal oppression, while acknowledging the often-collusive relationship between clerical elites and the Soviet authorities. Against the Marxist notion of the "ideological" function of religion, the authors set the example of people for whom faith was more than an opiate; against an enduring mythology of secularization, they propose the centrality of religious faith in the intellectual, political, and cultural life of the late modern era. This volume will appeal to specialists on religion in Soviet history as well as those interested in the history of religion under totalitarian regimes.
Download or read book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty written by Victoria Smolkin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.
Download or read book A Long Walk To Church written by Nathaniel Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making use of the formerly secret archives of the Soviet government, interviews, and first-hand personal experiences, Nathaniel Davis describes how the Russian Orthodox Church hung on the brink of institutional extinction twice in the past sixty-five years. In 1939, only a few score widely scattered priests were still functioning openly. Ironically, Hitler's invasion and Stalin's reaction to it rescued the church -- and parishes reopened, new clergy and bishops were consecrated, a patriarch was elected, and seminaries and convents were reinstituted. However, after Stalin's death, Khrushchev resumed the onslaught against religion. Davis reveals that the erosion of church strength between 1948 and 1988 was greater than previously known and it was none too soon when the Soviet government changed policy in anticipation of the millennium of Russia's conversion to Christianity. More recently, the collapse of communism has created a mixture of dizzying opportunity and daunting trouble for Russian Orthodoxy. The newly revised and updated edition addresses the tumultuous events of recent years, including schisms in Ukraine, Estonia, and Moldova, and confrontations between church traditionalists, conservatives and reformers. The author also covers battles against Greek-Catholics, Roman Catholics, Protestant evangelists, and pagans in the south and east, the canonization of the last Czar, the church's financial crisis, and hard data on the slowing Russian orthodox recovery and growth. Institutional rebuilding and moral leadership now beckon between promise and possibility.
Download or read book Folklore for Stalin written by Frank J. Miller and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-26 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, folklore, like literature, became an instrument of the political propagandist. Folklorists devoted considerable efforts to attending to what purported to be a rebirth of the Russian epic tradition, producing works of pseudofolklore that as often as not featured Joseph Stalin in the hero's role. Miller's account of this curious episode in the history of popular culture and totalitarian politics, and his synopses and translations of "classic" examples of folklore for Stalin, seek to serve as a resource not only for the study of contemporary folklore but also for the political scientist.
Download or read book Stalin s Holy War written by Steven Merritt Miner and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the complex and profound role of religion, especially Russian Orthodoxy, in the politics of Stalin's government during World War II. It demonstrates that Stalin decided to restore the church to prominence as a tool for restoring Soviet power to previously occupied areas.
Download or read book The Catholic Church and Russia written by Dennis J. Dunn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique account of Russia's encounter with Catholicism from the medieval period to the present provides fascinating insights into Catholic-Russian relations. Dennis Dunn analyzes religious politics in the former USSR and in Russia, particularly in areas where relations between the state-backed Orthodox establishment and the Catholic Church have renewed debates about civil rights, religious freedom and Russian national identity under Vladimir Putin's regime. Discussing issues such as the role of Pope John Paul II in helping to bring down the Iron Curtain, Dunn argues provocatively that Catholic-Russian relations are a microcosm of Western-Russian relations and sheds new light on the historical strain between Russia and the West. Showing how Russia's adoption of a secular ideology - a vain attempt to surpass the West - alienated the Russian government not only from the Catholic Church but also from its own Orthodox foundation, this book discusses how Russia sealed its fate while precipitating the Cold War with the West. Students and general readers interested in Russian history, Western-Russian relations, Catholicism, and comparative religion more broadly, will find this an invaluable and accessible account of an important and understudied subject.
Download or read book Expanded International Information and Education Program written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 1104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Politburo And The Church Kremlin Archives N Petrovsky S G Petrov written by Erdogan A and published by Erdogan A. This book was released on 2021-06-05 with total page 648 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politburo And The Church, Kremlin Archives, N. Petrovsky, S.G. Petrov
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Christianity written by Erwin Fahlbusch and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 994 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Containing more than 300 articles, covering the alphabetical entries P-Sh, this book also includes articles on significant topics ranging from Paul, political theology and the Qur'an, to religious liberty, salvation history and scholasticism.
Download or read book The Living Church written by and published by . This book was released on 1943 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
