Page 54 - Communism in Ambush

Lenin's body was mummified like an
Egyptian pharaoh's and placed in a
tomb reminiscent of a Greek temple.

Thirty years later, when the "young lawyer" had become the head
of the Bolshevik government, his ideas remained unchanged: Famine
could and should "strike a mortal blow against the enemy." The enemy
in question was the Orthodox Church. 36
A letter Lenin sent to members of the Politburo on March 19, 1922,
shows he wanted to use hunger as a method to break the bond between
religion and the masses, to numb their reactions and thus facilitate his
planned assault against religious institutions:
In fact the present moment favors us far more than it does them. We are al-
most 99 percent sure that we can strike a mortal blow against them [our
enemies] and consolidate the central position that we are going to need to
occupy for several decades to come. With the help of all those starving
people who are starting to eat each other, who are dying by the millions,
and whose bodies litter the roadside all over the country, it is now and
only now that we can—and therefore must—confiscate all church prop-
erty with all the ruthless energy we can still muster… All evidence sug-
gests that we could not do this at any other moment, because our only
hope is the despair engendered in the masses by the famine, which will
cause them to look at us in a favorable light or, at the very least, with indif-
ference. 37