During a clip from the “Valaam” documentary film that was aired Sunday on the Russian media outlet Russia 1, Russian President Vladimir Putin favorably compared Soviet ideology and communism to Christianity.

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“Communist ideology is very similar to Christianity, in fact, freedom, equality, brotherhood and justice — all of that is laid out in Scripture,” declared the Russian president.

Putin also stated the moral code for Soviet citizens was based on “a primitive extract from the Bible.”

“Lenin was placed inside a mausoleum: How is that different from holy relics?” he asked, while acknowledging that “someone might not like” the comparison.

The statements from the Russian president may have been meant mainly for domestic consumption prior to the upcoming Russian presidential election in March. A controversy has raged within Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union over the question of burying Lenin’s body, currently in a mausoleum in Red Square, outside the Kremlin.

Putin’s comments “reasonably smoothing out the controversies surrounding Lenin’s tomb,” party deputy head Ivan Melnikov was cited as saying by the Interfax news agency on Sunday.

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“Communists and all other patriotic leftists know that communism is as close to Christianity as Christianity is far from those forms of capitalism that are in our country and economy today,” Melnikov added, reported The Moscow Times.

It seems Putin may be trying to rewrite some parts of Soviet history as the communists destroyed the church in Russia and installed a cold atheism to replace it. The Russians who escaped to the West during the October 1917 Revolution stated the Bolsheviks destroyed what had been pure and holy in Russia, and the past was like Atlantis, that Russia would never be the same again.

“The Patriarch told me that when the Soviet troops were ready to enter the archipelago, for some reason they stayed on the beach, invited clergymen from the monastery.” One of them went, and suddenly a Soviet officer said to him: “How much time do you need to collect and leave ? “They asked for a few days, collected all the most precious, all the holy things.They left and everything was taken away, and in this connection I thought: of course, in the hardest days of civil war and the theomachism, then, when the seeds of schism in Russian society were laid, the seeds of unity always remain First and foremost, thanks to the Russian Orthodox Church, and the fact that the officers then allowed the monks to leave and take away the shrines is the best evidence that the seeds of unity have never left us,” said Putin.

“The Orthodox faith always accompanied us, it was strengthened when it was especially difficult for our country and our people.” There were very hard theophany years when priests were destroyed, churches were destroyed, but they created a new religion. Freedom, brotherhood, equality, justice – it’s all in the Holy Scripture, it’s all there, and the code of builders of communism? It’s sublimation, it’s a primitive excerpt from the Bible, nothing new has been invented. Enen was put in a mausoleum – how is this different from the relics of saints for Orthodox Christians, and just for Christians? They say to me: “No, in the Christian world there is no such tradition.”

“In the heart, in the heart of a Russian person, it has always been, is, and I am sure, will remain forever.” Just as in the soul of any of our citizens who profess our other traditional religions – Islam, Judaism, Buddhism. , but in the basis of charity, justice, honesty, love.We have a multi-confessional state, but these moral foundations of the multinational Russian people are common, they unite us. ”