STALIN BIOGRAPHER'S CALL TO CONSCIENCE

In the wake of the action by police officers in intimidating a Christian for displaying the text of the Bible in his Blackpool cafe, the final two paragraphs of Dmitri Volkogonov's biography of Stalin are worth quoting in full.

Colonel General Volkogonov's father was executed under Stalin and he spent his boyhood in exile with his mother in Siberia. He published his masterly biography of the seminarian turned mass killer in 1989 shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union:

In this book I frequently refer to conscience. People like Stalin regard conscience as a chimera. One cannot speak of the conscience of a dictator: he simply did not have one. The people who did his dirty deeds for him, however, knew full well what they were doing. In such people conscience had 'gone cold'. In consequence, the people allowed their own consciences to be driven into a reservation, thus giving the grand inquisitor the opportunity to carry on with his dark deeds.

The Soviet people have not entirely lost their belief in high ideals. They have shown themselves to be capable of repentance, rebirth and renewal, and this has had much to do with the liberation of their consciences from the shackles of shameful unfreedom. They have freed themselves, certainly, but it is too soon to beat the drum. In Russian and Soviet history there have been many brave attempts at making a new start, but too many of them ended with the defeat of the reformers. Perhaps it is premature now to say that the process of renewal is irreversible. Stalinism is after all not yet dead politically. Crises and their solutions have not only a progressive, but also a conservative logic. One can only pray that one's worst fears will not turn out to be prophetic. But our history gives one pause (Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy, trans. Harold Shukman 1991, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, pp580-581).

Cranmer's Curate offers two reflections in the light of this: 1). It is worth noting that a man who grew up in a society where the true God had been banished and supplanted by a murderous dictator is minded to pray for his country.

2). The human conscience without the personal spiritual regeneration that only the Jesus Christ of the Bible can bestow is notoriously fragile.

That is why the drive by the forces of political correctness to suppress the Bible fills one with such foreboding for Britain.