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"All religious ideas . . . are an unspeakable abomination:" Lenin.
"'Let God bless you with success, and with glory your great deeds for the sake of our country:" Sergei to Stalin.
The 1943 Christmas season in Moscow was the merriest since 1916—the last Christmas of the old war and the old order. It was also the most solemn. The thick snow, which makes every Moscow Christmas a white Christmas, lay heavy over a capital that is the heart of a nation. And that heart, in Russia's third wartime Christmas, beat strong and steadily with an enormous pride of achievement. It was as if the whole Russian nation, watching for the appearance of the first evening star that (according to the Russian Orthodox custom) breaks the absolute pre-Christmas fast, looked westward from Moscow, and could see the Russian armies, like a mobile wall, inch by inch fight back their age-old enemies—Nemtsi, the Germans.
But this Christmas season was solemn to the Russian spirit, for deeper reasons even than military victory. By its official restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church (TIME, Sept 13) the election and recognition of a Patriarch (TIME, Sept. 27), the Soviet Government had made Moscow once more the religious capital of some 100,000,000 Orthodox Christians (there are comparatively few dissenters in Russia), had bridged the crevasses that for 25 years Bolsheviks have tried to open between Russian believers and nonbelievers. Once more the peasant trudging in from the land and catching the sunlight flash on the gilt onion "domes of Moscow's remaining churches could utter the traditional invocation with the traditional tenderness:
Moskva! Moskva!
Zolotaya golova!*
But the Soviet Government's recognition of the Church has done more than restore Moscow as the capital of a religiously united Russia. It united Europe's Danubian and Balkan Slavs in a Slavic religious continent whose heartland is Rus sia, whose metropolis is Moscow.
Whether or not the new status of the Russian Orthodox Church was permanent (and there were many signs that it was), as a tactic of the Soviet Government the change was still big enough with political consequences to be a landmark in the history of Russia and of Europe, and therefore of the world.
Three men are directly responsible for this achievement:
1) Adolf Hitler. He believed that the Russian Orthodox priests and their congregations would flock to the side of Rus sia's Nazi invaders, who would free them from the persecuting Bolsheviks. What Hitler did not foresee was that his inva sion would turn Russia from a country in which a majority of defenseless Christians was ruled by an aggressive anti-religious minority into a nation in arms, in which the majority, though intensely patriotic, was no longer defenseless.
2) Joseph Stalin, Russia's No. i realist, who observed this fact with great interest, for he recognized with Lenin, whose "best disciple" he claims to be, that "facts are stubborn things." Stalin was also aware that restoration of the Russian Orthodox Church was roughly equivalent to Russian religious occupation of the Balkans.