In The God of the Gulag, Volume 1, by Jonathan Luxmoore, which I blogged about last week, the author remarks that “Stalin could quote the Bible at will, and used catechetical language in his speeches and writings”, but adding that he had “little sympathy for its organised expression.” Given that Russian Orthodoxy had been so closely linked to tsarist Russia, with all the repression and inequality this entailed, Stalin’s view of organised religion is not surprising.

But does Stalin’s knowledge of the Bible and his catechetical language make him therefore a “religious” person? No, of course not. He had been schooled at a seminary in Georgia, more to get a decent education than for pious motives, and being a highly intelligent psychopath he knew how to utilise religious quotations for his own purposes, the more readily to give his rhetoric some spurious profundity. By this means he probably fooled many people into thinking that the new religion, communism, really answered the deepest aspirations of mankind.