Vladimir Putin says Christianity similar to communism!

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s has caused controversy by a statement comparing Christianity to communism.  

Putin compared Vladimir Lenin to a saint and declared that Soviet communist ideas come from the Bible.  

Faith has always accompanied us, it strengthened when our country, our people faced particularly difficult times,” Putin said in an interview for the documentary film “Valaam,” a clip from which was broadcast by the Russia 1 TV channel.

There were such severe years of militant atheism [during the Soviet period] when priests were killed, churches were destroyed. But at the same time, a new religion was being created — Communist ideology, which is very similar to Christianity, in fact. Freedom, equality, brotherhood, justice — all of this is enshrined in the Holy Scripture, it’s all there. And what about the Code of the Builders of Communism? This is a sublimation, it’s really just a primitive excerpt from the Bible, nothing new was invented, the president said.

Putin went further by comparing the Communists’ attitude to the Bolshevik leader Lenin to the veneration of saints in Christianity.  

Look, Lenin was put in a mausoleum. How is this different from the relics of saints for Orthodox Christians and just for Christians? When they say that there’s no such tradition in Christianity, well, how come, go to Athos and take a look, there are relics of the saints there, and we have holy relics here,” Putin concluded.

After Lenin died in 1924, his body was embalmed and put on display in a mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow. The cult of Lenin was part of Soviet ideology. The public debate about the possibility of giving Lenin’s remains a proper burial began during the early days of Perestroika in the 1980s.

Putin’s words were music to the ears of Communist Party members. 

I think these words of the president very effectively and reasonably smooth out the acute angles around the theme of the mausoleum,” Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Ivan Melnikov said on Sunday, as cited by Interfax.

He said however, that “communists and all the leftist patriotic forces [in Russia] understand that communism is close to Christianity as much as the form of capitalism that exists in our country and our economy today is far from Christianity.”