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on the contrary. They just kind of, well, "live in the thirties," accord–
ing to Losoto. What she won't tell us is that they are in fact the dust–
covered mongrels of Stalinism, the "Voroshilov Marksmen" as
they're called. In debates, their major objective is to keep their op–
ponents and their opponents' arguments up against the wall.
The fourth movement, though not good, is also not on the con–
trary either. It seeks to "exhume and restore the Grand Old Days of
the Orthodox Church." Four movements, well that's pretty good,
but it's rather obvious that pluralists aren't too comfortable in this
plurality.
Losoto would willingly tolerate this fourth movement of mod–
ern Russian thought if it supported only the artistic marvels of the
Church, but alas, they are going to promote
all
of Orthodoxy which
is a "sin" against
pure
Bolshevism. " ... If you consider the
Orthodox Church our history, then yes, we pulled the rug out from
under history, and rightly so." When Losoto talks about the Or–
thodox Church, she's not actually distinguishing it from any other
Christian denomination; it's not as if she's for Catholicism or Luth–
eranism. Instead she protests against all Christianity, against the
belief in God in general. In our homeland religious belief was re–
placed by the worship of alabaster idols, first of Lenin and then of
Stalin, and now back to Lenin.
Pamyat condemns the profanation and destruction of churches
that occurred all over Russia. Losoto condemns the pamyatniks for
displays of "historical tactlessness": after all, by the time the churches
were destroyed they weren't monuments to the glorious past but
rather "nests of clerical reaction." In justifying vandalism our
modern journalist fights for the concept of tact - this is the stuff of
the "theater of the absurd ." And yet she feels sorry for the Cathedral
of Christ the Savior because "its destruction was the result not of the
exigencies of the revolutionary situation . . . but of narrow thinking
that valued only the new aesthetics . ... "She finds a positive exam–
ple of the wondrous "new" in the Palace of Soviets, the apex of which
takes the form of a Lenin bust as big as the mausoleum itself.
In fact, however, the Komsomol and the Pamyatniks are not
enemies. While they are at odds in terms of Pamyat's defense of the
Church and its supposed concern with the spirit of Christianity, the
national Bolshevik essence of Pamyat comes to light in its unruly
and shameless anti-Semitism and active anti-Western sentiment.
When the pamyatniks look for wreckers of the Russian past, they cry
