The Only Man Who Dared Speak to Stalin About God

Who would dare to speak to Joseph Stalin about God? Ask the history books, and they answer quickly. No one. Stalin was the high priest of atheism, sworn to build a country without God. But ask the old church people of Russia, and they tell a different story. The most powerful man on earth, knocking in his darkest nights on the door he himself had nailed shut. They tell of a message from a praying bishop in a far country, carrying terms no general would dare to send. Of icons in the sky above a surrounded city, and a blind old woman who told him how the war would end. And the strangest part is this. The written record of those years shows the atheist empire doing, one by one, the very things the message demanded. To understand how that can be true, begin where he began, with a mother who wanted a priest. Joseph Jugashvili was born in Gori, in the mountains of Georgia, son of a poor shoemaker who drank and beat him. His mother, Ekaterina, was a washerwoman who feared God, and she had one dream for her boy Soso, that he would stand at an altar. The child could sing, and he sang in the church choir. First in his class, at 15 he won a scholarship to the seminary at Tiflis, and for five years studied scripture there in a seminarian's black cassock, while his mother believed her prayers were answered. But the dormitories gave him a second education. Forbidden books passed hand to hand, and secret circles whispering of revolution. In 1899, weeks from the final examinations that would have made him a priest, he walked out of the seminary and did not come back. The official record called it an expulsion for spreading propaganda, and perhaps it was. His mother kept her faith until her death in 1937. And when her son, by then master of the Soviet Union, visited her near the end, she told him what his daughter Svetlana later wrote down. It is a shame that you did not become a priest. Stalin, Svetlana wrote, repeated those words with relish all his life. The one judgment no one could arrest. The young revolutionary took a new name, Stalin, the man of steel, and in time he took the empire. And the empire he built declared war on the god of his mother. Churches were seized and shuttered by the thousands, their bells torn down and melted for industry. Their priests arrested wave after wave and vanished into the camps. Of the tens of thousands of churches that stood before the revolution, only a few hundred dared hold a service by 1939. The Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the largest church in Russia, built by a whole people's offerings to thank God for deliverance from Napoleon, was dynamited into rubble in 1931 for a palace never built. The League of the Militant Godless took the campaign into every schoolroom. God is a fairy tale. Religion is poison. By the summer of 1941, of all the bishops of the Russian church, four remained free. Heaven, the state announced, had been abolished. The invasion of June 1941 broke upon the country like a wave. By autumn, Leningrad was ringed by German guns, and the enemy stood at Moscow's gates. On July 3, his voice came over the radio, and the whole country heard the head of the atheist state open in the language of the church. Brothers and sisters, my friends, Then, far away in Lebanon, Metropolitan Elia of Mount Lebanon shut himself away and prayed for Russia without ceasing. And the tradition of the church tells what happened next. The Mother of God appeared to him, and she did not speak comfort. She spoke conditions. Open the churches and monasteries across the whole country, she told him. Free the priests from the prisons. Carry my icon of Kazan around besieged Leningrad. Serve a molaben, a prayer of intercession, before it in Moscow. Then let the icon go with the armies to Stalingrad. It was, as the church tells it, an ultimatum from heaven to the one government on earth that had outlawed heaven. And so a bishop in Lebanon became the one man who dared speak to Stalin about God, and he spoke in God's name. The tradition tells that Stalin, who in those weeks could find no other way to save his country, gave the word, let it be done. In Leningrad, under the guns, the icon of Kazan was carried around the starving city's defenses, and Leningrad did not fall. At Stalingrad, it stood with the army, and the battle opened with prayer before it. That same autumn, the church of the Tikhvin icon in Alexievsky, a Moscow church never closed, keeps another tradition. On Stalin's own order, a copy of the wonder-working icon was flown in a great circle around the besieged capital, a wall of prayer in the sky. Within weeks, the German drive on Moscow broke in the snow. The tradition keeps one more visit from that autumn. Matrona Nikonova was a blind peasant woman of Sabino, who had not walked since girlhood and owned nothing, and to whom all Moscow came for counsel and prayers. For decades she had received the poor and the powerful alike, when, as Zinaida Zhinova, who shared her rooms, tells it, the door opened one October night in 1941, and Stalin himself came in. What could the ruler of atheism want from a blind saint? The tradition says he asked her the only question that mattered. Will Moscow fall? And Matrona answered him as she answered everyone, without fear. The Red Rooster will win. Victory will be yours. You alone, of all the authorities, will not leave Moscow. Stalin did not leave Moscow. Through the worst weeks, while the government itself was evacuated east, he stayed in the Kremlin and directed the defense, and Moscow held. No paper records that night. The story lives where such stories have always lived, in the memory of the faithful. Today, in the Great Cathedral of Tbilisi, an icon shows her blessing Stalin. What happened in the open is written in the state's own record. On Easter night of 1942, the curfew over Moscow was lifted, so the faithful could walk their candlelit processions in the capital of atheism, a river of fire for the risen Christ. And on the night of September 4, 1943, three old men in black were driven through dark streets to the Kremlin. They were the metropolitans Sergius, caretaker of the empty patriarchal throne, Alexei of Leningrad and Nikolai of Kiev, nearly all that remained of the Russian church. Stalin received them himself, asked what the church needed, and one by one granted it. Churches could open, monasteries could open, seminaries could teach again, priests could come home from the camps. Four days later, the bishops gathered for their first council in 25 years and elected Sergius Patriarch of Moscow, the throne empty since the revolution was filled. By the war's end, more than 10,000 churches stood open again, in an empire that had promised to finish with God forever. What are we to make of it? The old teachers of the faith were never surprised. A man can walk out of a seminary, they say, but the seminary does not walk out of the man. The words he sang as a boy wait like seeds under snow. Watch what the most powerful atheist of the age did when death stood at his door. He addressed his people as brothers and sisters, heard heaven's terms from a bishop, let the icons go before his armies, and rebuilt with his own signature the church he had spent twenty years destroying. Whatever Stalin believed in the daylight of his ideology, in the dark he reached for the God of his mother. He died on March 5, 1953, in a room full of frightened men. His daughter Svetlana, who was there, wrote the moment down. At the very end, she wrote, he opened his eyes and cast a terrible glance over everyone in the room. Then he lifted his left hand, as though he were pointing to something above, and the next moment he was gone. To whom was he pointing? The seminarian who ruled an empire that denied heaven? His daughter never understood that gesture, and she never forgot it. Perhaps the old church people are right, and the truth is simpler than the history books. Heaven watched him all his life, And at the last he knew it. Next time, we travel to China, to a monk who lived 120 years and was said to have visited heaven while still in the body, the great master Zhu Yun. If this story stayed with you, like the video and subscribe to the channel, because there are doors inside this story we did not open tonight. The full terms brought down from heaven in 1941, and what happened in the war when they were carried out. What Saint Matrona saw when the most feared man on earth came to her door, and what she told him. And what became of the churches Stalin reopened after he was gone, when a new ruler tried to close them again. Leave a comment and tell us which door you want opened, and that story will get an episode of its own. And one question to carry with you. Why did the most powerful man on earth fear a blind old woman who did nothing but pray?