GENERAL LEONID IVASHOV DELIVERS A NEW "REVELATION" ABOUT STALIN'S SECRET PRAYERS IN 1941
And Gleb Pavlovsky supplements the "revelation" with important detail
"I know that Stalin, beginning approximately in the fall of 1941, prayed nightly in churches," Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, the president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems, declared on 9 May in an interview with the newspaper "Business Online." As a Portal-Credo.Ru correspondent reports, the general, who has a reputation as a geopolitician and supporter of the "messianic idea" of Russia, supplemented the legend circulated in Orthodox circles with new details.
According to Ivashov, Stalin's prayers in Moscow churches occurred "in the dead of night, around 1:00 a.m." "His security guard warned the priests not to leave," the general explains. "Stalin arrived accompanied by one or two bodyguards; they stayed outside; and he entered and kissed the priest in the Orthodox way and requested that he read for him one or another akathist. While he stood he did not cross himself, and only when he left the church did his make the sign of the cross on himself."
Leonid Ivashov maintains that he learned these details from the late Metropolitan of Volokolamsk and Yuriev Pitirim Nechaev of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow patriarchate, who, in his turn, supposedly quoted the "bell ringer of one of the Kremlin churches," although all Kremlin churches had been closed by the soviet government in 1918 and some of them were later demolished and hitherto they have not been transferred to any religious organizations.
The general maintains that "there were witnesses who wrote that Georgy Zhukov also crossed himself before every battle, as did other soviet marshals also."
Commenting on Ivashov's "revelations," the famous Russian political scientist Gleb Pavlovsky notes in his blog: "But the Vozhd was bashful and in order to maintain the secret of the confession the priest was shot in the morning and another was shuffled into the Kremlin." (tr. by PDS, posted 10 May 2017)
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