Saturday, October 08, 2005

for a new russia, new relics


MOSCOW — Russia is rewriting its history, one corpse at a time.

The latest chapter involved a funeral with full military honors inside the sacred Donskoi Monastery here on Monday, attended by the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Aleksy II, and some of the country's leading politicians. The body of Gen. Anton Denikin, a czarist commander of the losing side in the Russian Civil War, was laid to rest again, this time in his motherland, 58 years after he died in the United States.

He was not the first. Several other outcasts of the Soviet period - White Russians, ideologically suspect intellectuals, descendants of czarist royalty - have at last found their place, posthumously, in a new Russia. Buried with General Denikin last week was Ivan Ilyin, a philosopher who was expelled by the Bolshevik dictatorship in 1922 aboard what came to be known as the "philosophers' ship."

"They believed that a time would come when our country great and free would take them back," Aleksy told the mourners. "Now that day is here."

Read the whole thing here.

1 comment:

Jo said...

so much blabbidy blah blah.

Perhaps if the AP would have done their research, and this is the point where the article lost credibility with me, they would have known that the skull they pictured belonged indeed to an adult male about the Czar-Martyr's age, however it has been proven through DNA evidence that no-one in the crypt of the Royal Martyrs is in fact a Romanov. However that doesn't mean that the Romanov's didn't play an intrigal part. Their Martyrdom for the faith of our Fathers is enough to bring tears to ones eyes.

Joe Zollars