With a dismissive shrug and a condescending smile, Lavrischeva rejected the killings, imprisonment and persecution of millions of Orthodox Christian clerics and believers at the hand of Communists.
What she said was not just an opinion of an elderly woman who wants to reconcile her faith with the ideals of her youth in the officially atheist USSR. Her selective amnesia about the persecution of believers - well-documented and brandished by Soviet authorities - reflects a seemingly paradoxical trend in the recent policies of Russia's Communist Party.
More than 25 years after the Soviet collapse, the party vocally appeals to Orthodox Christianity, Russia's dominant creed. The party's sole post-Soviet chairman Gennady Zyuganov called Jesus "the first Communist" more than once.
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