Through The Year With Uncle Joe

As he was dubbed by his friend and ally, Winston Churchill, who signed over Eastern Europe to him. They have not forgotten.

It ought to be surprising that anyone is surprised at the decision of the Russian Orthodox Church to issue a Stalin-themed calendar.

People are often vaguely aware of the Russian Orthodox Church's complicity in the crimes of the Soviet regime. But it is amazing how frequently one encounters perfect ignorance of that fact.

Indeed the collusion and worse of churches throughout the old Eastern Bloc cries out for a television documentary, perhaps even a series, with attendant newspaper articles and so on.

The Polish priests and the East German pastors are still fairly well-remembered, although they could do with being revisited, not least because they must and do often wonder why they bothered. But the whole story needs to be told.

The same is true of the formal and informal theology of the English-speaking and sometimes even the African-initiated churches in apartheid South Africa.

People know about the theological justification provided by the Afrikaans churches. People know about the valiant stand made officially by most of the rest.

A few people, although nowhere near enough, know about the immense self-sacrifice of those who opposed apartheid within Afrikanerdom, including within its churches until they were very often driven out of them.

But taboo continues to surround the role of the English-speaking whites. And of those blacks who were persuaded that the ANC was purely, since no one doubts that it was in no small part, a viper's nest of Stalinism.

As well as those whose tribal backgrounds, often at once defining and defined by ecclesiastical affiliation, placed them in opposition to the ANC.

And as well as those who were simply bought off, sometimes with the best of intentions such as the desire to save a desperately needed pastoral ministry, but even so.

The true record of the Catholic and what were then still called the "mainline" Protestant churches in the American South is also long overdue a properly critical investigation.