Jealousy not from mind

Abstract

The object of this article is a review of the recently published collection of documents — “Order: The Archive to destroy! The Baltic Exarchate and the Pskov Orthodox Mission during the years of the German occupation of 1941–1944” (S. K. Bernev, A. I. Rupasov. SPb., 2016. 552 p.) The collection was supposed to be one of the important milestone in the study of the activities of the Orthodox clergy on the areas of the Soviet Union, temporarily occupied by the Nazis, during War War II. But in reality, the authors-writers, published materials from inaccessible departmental archives without good scientific comments. They preferred did not involve many fairly well-known facts from the Church history of the twentieth century, that’s why collection of documents became a book with many errors and inaccuracies. From the title of the collection, and also because of many formulations cited in the introduction, there is a very definite impression that, first of all, the collection is purely ideological in character and aims to discredit the ministry of all orthodox priesthood in the temporarily occupied territory, often without bringing any accurate data on the harm caused by the Orthodox clergy to the population of the USSR during the war years. The absence of direct references to documents, as well as the careless treatment of church terms, showing a low professionalism of authors-compilers in the work on the produced material. It is important to note that they have only one archive: The Archive of the Federal Security Service of the Pskov region, which shows the initial ideological framework when approaching the publication of documents and sampling the data itself. It seems that the main goal of the compilation for its compilers, Stanislav Bernev and Aleksander Rupasov, is the rehabilitation of Stalin’s post-war repression against the Orthodox clergy.