Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church do stand in a special position as regards the dialogues among the Oriental Orthodox, the Orthodox and the Catholics and as regards the process of Christian and ecclesiological re-unification, and this not only because in Realpolitik they are actually and potentially a whole lot more numerous than the Greeks. So too within European Christendom, the Russians are special, and they have a special and in important senses leadership role to play.

To many Descendants of European Christendom other than Russians the forgoing may seems strange. Indeed to play a holy role the Russians will need to rethink and change much within themselves, not least the mass fashion in recent decades to try to view the atheist Communist period as somehow a continuation of and in continuity with — rather than an abominable interruption from — Russia's holy role within European Christendom and Christendom universal. Embracing evil in order to manufacture martyrs is not worthy of the least among Christian societies. Lapsed- or atheist- Jews may have started ... well, clearly did start and lead Bolshevism. Equally clear is that they could not have and did not do it alone. As difficult as it may be to acknowledge this about one's grandfathers and fathers, how can there be reconciliation, much less leadership, without truth?

If one is actually speaking of the Second World War, the beginning of that war may quite convincingly be dated to 17 de julio de 1936 and the start of the Spanish Civil War, in which Communist ideology and Soviet military assistance figured so prominently. Another possible dating would be to July of 1937 and the commencement of the full-scale hostilities of the Second Sino-Japanese War (7 July 1937 – 9 September 1945), in which hostilities the Soviet Union also participated and from 1937 (Советские Добровольцы в Китае). With perhaps 2.7 military deaths on all sides and as many as 22 million Chinese civilians killed, this war, from a world perspective, is hardly the minor footnote that it may seem to most Descendants of European Christendom. At all events the Second World War - Вторая Мировая Война did not begin for the Soviet Union — for Russia, the Ukraine, or Belarus — in 1941, though countless thousands of major monuments throughout Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus, including this large one right next to the Lavra in Russia's spiritual capital of Sergiev Posad, contain this lie written in stone and in steel. For the Soviet Union the European War began in 1939, and the Soviet forces began it. In this massive Soviet war of aggression, the Red Army, the military forces of the Soviet Union, attacked (that is, started murdering people in):

• Poland on 17 September 1939;
• Finland on 30 November 1939 (the Winter War - Talvisota - Vinterkriget - Зимняя Война of 30 November 1939 to
  13 March 1940, in which tiny Finland cleaned the giant Soviet Union's clock);
  
• Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania between 14 and 16 June 1940 (Estonia under the command of Andrei Zhdanov, lovely).
  Within a few days there were 500,000 Red Army troops in these three countries; and
  
• Moldova (Bessarabia and northern Bukovina) on 28 June 1940.

The circumstance can be left to another day and webpage for exploration that, when Nazi Germany commenced their invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 in their Operation Barbarossa - Fall Barbarossa of unprecedented scale, Germany progress east was so swift because Red Army forces were arrayed not to optimize effective defence from invasion but rather for their own invasion in the other direction. Part of any such discussion would also have to include an examination of the hypocrisy of the American Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt and Über Alles the hypocrisy and self-dealing of Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill and his most deliberate schemes to convert a brief local European war into the World War, his second, which left 50 to 80 million dead, the ascendancy of world Communism with tens of millions more dead, and the extinction-level-event threat which was the Cold War.

The forgoing sentences may seem to the reader at first blush to be out of place on a website dedicated to the re-unification of the Orthodox-Catholic Church, as to the re-establishment of civilizational integrity within Christendom, beginning with European Christendom. Those who reflect more thoroughly on the poisonous role of nationalism/chauvinism both as a heresy within the Church — sometimes labelled Ethnophelitism — as also in the process achieving meaningful civilizational integrity governed and restrained by subsidiarity. Less than two months forward from this 22 March 2015 writing, the Russians will be celebrating a 70th anniversary of the 7/8 May 1945 V-E Day, when those for whom it is personally expedient will attempt, and doubtless with a large measure of success, to use this central identity-forming event to buttress and rejuvenate an enormously exaggerated and artificial sense of separateness — separateness from their genetic and spiritual kin in the rest of European Christendom — or better yet actual siege mentality, within the minds of Homo Sovieticus (plural Homo Sovietica?). Orthodox Christian Russians and Orthodox Christian Russia deserve better.

«Національний Музей Історії Великої Вітчизняної Війни 1941–1945 Років» – National Museum in Kiev of the History of the Great Patriotic War 1941 - 1945 though one reads that in 2015 the name was changed to the more honest «Національний Музей Історії України у Другій Світовій Війні» – Museum of The History of Ukraine in World War II

World War II morphed into some holy struggle of Orthodox Rus' against "The West"?

Though in truth the plaque only reads: "To the Memory of the First Victims of Facist Occupation of Pskov in 1941."

The Orthodox Christian Cross afixed to the memorial for the Bolshevik-Communist-Jew- inspired/created Великая Отечественная Война – Great Patriotic War is all the more striking and ironic here, at the Спасо-Преображенский Соловецкий монастырь – Holy Transfiguration Solovetsky Monastery, as the monastery was closed, the monks martyred and the Island turned into one of the more important "labor" camps within the system the world has come to know as the

Estimates of the number of people murdered through the hundreds of camps of the Communist camp system rarely dip below the 2,000,000 figure, and some credible estimates reach to 10,000,000. (Obviously, the official estimates off of Soviet statistics can not be trusted.) What is more, the camp on the Solovetsky Islands — Соловки – Solovki, technically, Соловецкий лагерь особого назначения (СЛОН) – Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON) — was, to quote Александр Исаевич Солженицын – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the very Mother Camp, the prototype for the whole system.

Of course little efforts like attaching an Orthodox Cross to a Soviet memorial, common as such are even in the second half of the second decade of the XXI century, must be understood in context. Russia is full of a very great many of European Christendom's very finest people. And the enterprise which is United European Christendom needs Russia. Still, it is disheartening in ways that are difficult to describe that, very much like with the Catholics in Western Europe and the Americas, some of the worst people in Russia are those one encounters in the Church. the ignorant and malevolent, the chauvinistic and nationalistic counterparts, so to speak, of the heterodox and homosexualists which polute the Holy Catholic Church.

Efforts to see some kind of contrived continuum of Orthodoxy–Communism–Orthodoxy, with a transmogrified view of history in which World War II becomes some kind of holy Orthodoxy struggle, undermine the value of Big O Orthodoxy's contribution to the Church and Christendom, past and future. And they are ridiculous.

It seems that the Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives of the United States of America do not, in the end, have a monopoly on Schizophrenia, psychopathology and the moronic.

Returning for a moment to matters related to the ГУЛАГ – GULAG,