Lurking Shadows

Sixty-five years ago today (March 5, 1953) Josef Stalin died of a massive heart attack.  The news  of his death was a relief both here in America and around the world.  A few days later, one New York newspaper published a photo of Stalin lying in state in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions in Moscow. I was ten years old when I saw that paper.  The photo caught my attention and became indelibly etched in my mind and has remained there for all these years.  I read with interest what that newspaper had to say about the life of Josef Stalin (of whom I knew very little) and from that moment on I decided it was important for me to pay attention to history and world events.

Isoeb Dzhugashvili was born in 1889.  While studying for the priesthood, he began reading Karl Marx and soon became an activist in the Marxist Social Democratic movement and a student of Vladimir Lenin.  In 1913 he took on the new name Stalin, which comes from the Russian word for steel, and continued to move up the ladder in the new Russian empire until his dictatorial takeover and control of the Communist Party and the new USSR.

He is credited with saving Russia from Nazi domination during World War II and that is probably true.  However, Josef Stalin, according to history, is considered one of the worst mass murderers of the twentieth century. His reign of terror was horrific and he is believed to have overseen the deaths of between 8 million and 20 million of his own people.  

At ten years of age I had no knowledge of the Holocaust, no awareness of Jim Crow, or consciousness of the injustices that prevailed in the world at that time.  I certainly had no sense of what was happening thousands of miles away in the Soviet Union.  Suddenly, reading about Stalin,  I became conscious of the fact that darkness was more prevalent than the light in many places.  I  became aware of an opposing force to what I had heard the preacher say, “All that came to be was alive with his life, and that life was the light of men.  The light shines on in the dark, and the darkness has never quenched it” (John 1:4).  

The darkness may not quench that light of which the scripture speaks, but neither has that light quenched the darkness.  It is still dark in this world.  The shadows are deep and the light fails to penetrate the crevices where those shadows lurk.  Do those shadows lurk in me? in you? Of course they do!