This is all proof that Russia was never properly Consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
True.
Also the Communist regime was never put to trial or went to any reconciliation process; nothing that resembles Nuremberg (with all its defects) or various reconciliation committees of Central Europe or South Africa.
The Pussies story, however, has an aspect that probably escapes most Western observers. That aspect is Sergianism: the heresy by which the official Russian Orthodox collaborated with the commies since 1920’s. The essence of the heresy is that in order to save some salvageable remnant of the physical churches, some clergy, and some albeit severely limited, semi-public Christian life, the Church in Russia had to accept a servile attitude toward the regime and still undergo demolitions of most churches and near complete expulsion of Christianity form public life. So the patriarchs were all at the same time functionaries and secret informers of the NKVD/GPU/KGB; no priest could be approved to service unless cleared through the communist system. The Church, for example, made statements to the Soviet Leadership of the kind “your pain is out pain; your joy is our joy” at the same time as priests were fire-squadded and churches turned into warehouses or blown up.
There was also a Catacomb Church that did its service in secret, but by the time the Soviet system collapsed in 1991, it was virtually extinguished.
The free Russian Orthodox Church remained abroad, known under a number of acronyms, but most used was ROCOR, — Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. That mostly served the Russian emigres, and originally was the Church of the White Movement.
After the Soviet Union finally croaked, it was the Sergian, collaborationist Church that received government support, and also, naturally, immense support form the people, who simply did not know another Church. The symbiosis of the Church and the Russian post-communist government became pervasive under Putin. One might sa,y that was a natural development given the KGB roots of both the Patriarchy and the Kremlin. When Putin ran for his — one loses count — N-th term at the top spot in the country, Patriarch Kirill endorsed him. So the situation now is peculiar: all kinds of people, many of them pro-Western and pro-democratic in their intellectual makeup, the others — religious conservatives who would be of the same political and philosophical mold as the esteemed readership of FR, — all decent people that abhor Communism, putinism, and the present day Russian KGB-reared plutocracy, all people who would normally welcome warmly a resurgence of Christianity in Russia, — are now in firm opposition to the official Orthodox Church, the so-called Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchy).
The Pussies’ protest seems to be either an outright provocation by the Kremlin or, at least, a stupid act by feminist youth exploited to the Kremlin’s advantage. The result is that now an attack on Putin is also an attack on the Russian Church, on Christianity, and by extension, on the Russian nation; the kind of cultural attack that we at FR are quite familiar with on the American soil. The Russian right wing is confused (isn’t that a familiar condition): Sergianism is abhorrent, — on that, let us agree with the Pussies,— but so is the desecration of the national shrine, the Temple of Christ the Savior, rebuilt after the collapse on the USSR on the spot where the first Cathedral was blown up by Stalin, and erected to commemorate the 1812 victory over Napoleon.
The West does not understand any of that, and given the Western notions of separation of Church and state sees only a legitimate political protest. In turn, the russian right wing only deepns its mistrust of the West, which once upon a time was seen as an ally against Communism, but now is a source of secularism and moral decay.
Patriarch Kirill, now a political player just as much as a religious leader, would like to have the religious conservatives in the West to see his plummeting popularity in Russia as a result of atheist resurgence. And indeed, 70 years of artificial selection did leave a mark: atheism, including militant one is a common feature in Russia and, not in a small way thanks to the Sergian heresy and Kirill-Putin alliance, it can feel vindicated.
So it is in that environment that public crosses are coming down.
It is a mess,... sort of like our condition here in America.