Quote of the Month (March)

Writes Dr. Matthew Dal Santo over at The Spectator Australia:

After seventy years of Bolshevik character assassination, the recognition of the genuine piety of Russia’s last rulers is welcome: the Tsar’s sense of bearing an unsought but sacred duty before God for his peoples is clear enough from his papers.

By contrast, Western tellers of Russia’s Revolution often still seem to delight in the cheap thrills of character assassination, as if they were themselves part of a Petrograd bread riot. Yet there’s a case to be made that the vices they ascribe to Nicholas (‘indecisive’, ‘pathetic’, ‘weak-willed’, ‘uxorious’, ‘superstitious’, ‘stubborn’) should be seen as the reverse side of the redeeming virtues whose absence they will (rightly) denounce in Stalin: the fear of God, humility, restraint, marital fidelity, obedience to conscience, faith.

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