STALIN'S TOWER OF BABEL

Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven: and let us
make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands. — Genesis 11:3
 

MONUMENT TO MEGALOMANIA You want Big Brother? How about Biggest Brother? This gargantuan edifice was one of the grandiose designs for a future Moscow drawn up during the Soviet dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, whose idol-like statue looms over the structure like a pagan god prepared to show benevolence to those who bring him the acceptable sacrifice of their very being to his altar, while threatening to rain down fire upon those who refuse to obey his iron rule.

And that was no idle threat: In his day, Stalin ordered the killing of tens of millions of enemies, real and perceived. At his command an entire region, the Ukraine, was left to starve as grain was taken from the population and distributed elsewhere. Meanwhile in Russia he affected godlike powers such as omnipresence through a network of spies and informers and omnipotence through a policy of turning any former ally who'd been imprisoned or killed into a nonperson by expunging any evidence of their existence, even from Communist Party records and encyclopedias (a group photo with Stalin could the next year appear in the same book doctored to show one less person). People disappeared from their homes in the dead of night and were never heard from again. Truth became solely what Stalin dictated it to be.

This fearsome deity also was a god of war, as seen by the troops marching in formation before his temple at the bottom of the picture. At his order, they would march halfway across Europe pillaging, raping and, in the end, enslaving whole nations. Indeed, as our Lady said at Fatima, Russia would spread her errors and in a most horrendous way.

Yet like all false gods, Stalin was only able to deliver on his promises of fear and destruction; his promises of prosperity and equality always were empty and the masses struggled to survive in what he assured them was a workers' paradise. The hoped-for land of milk and honey that he once held before them as their destiny had become a sick joke, as the Russian people typically struggled with yearly crop shortages due in part to the collective farming system and with stores containing half-empty shelves, conditions that would outlive him as they are inherent flaws of Communism. (The shortages always officially were blamed on drought or other natural excuses, anything but the fact that the system itself was at fault, and Western aid came in on a regular basis. Here were the idol's feet of clay, yet through deceit they remained covered and in some quarters are even concealed to this day.)

As a monument that seeks to celebrate an imagined victory by Stalin's atheistic Communism, the figure may well be heard to say: "I have reached the summit, ascended into the heavens, and having surveyed all that around me, I solemnly tell you that God does not exist!" In all of this there is a strong resemblance, both to the biblical Tower of Babel cited at the top, as well as another passage in Genesis where the serpent tempted Eve with a lie, thus setting the stage for all the evil that would be visited upon humanity down through the millenia: "You shall be as gods." (3:5)

In the end, there's a third quotation from scripture, here from the words of Christ Himself, that may best sum up the idol Stalin: "You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he stood not in the truth; because truth is not in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof." (John 8:44)