In Georgia, on the days of Christmas celebrated by the Orthodox Church, a loud scandal broke out: in the main cathedral of the country – the Tbilisi Cathedral of the Holy Trinity – oppositionists discovered an icon with the image of the Holy Matrona of Moscow and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Later it turned out that the icon was donated to the church by the pro-Russian Alliance of Patriots party. The Patriarchate of the Georgian Orthodox Church does not see anything anti-Church or reprehensible in the icon depicting Stalin.

Georgy Kandelaki, one of the leaders of the “European Georgia” party, was the first to notice the icon with Stalin’s image on the wall of the Holy Trinity (“Sameba”) church. He took a video of the icon and posted it on a social network with the comment: “True dear way, comrades. Another success of Russian propaganda in the information war: the initiator of the destruction of Georgia’s independence, the killer of thousands of clergy and the creator of the Soviet totalitarian system, was placed on the icon in Sameb.”

Upon closer examination, it turned out that it was an icon of the Holy Matrona of Moscow. She was canonized by the decision of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2004.

According to one of the myths cultivated by some representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, in 1941, when the troops of Nazi Germany approached Moscow, Joseph Stalin supposedly met with Matrona, and she persuaded the Soviet dictator not to leave the capital. In addition, on her advice, Stalin allegedly ordered to bring the icon of the Kazan Mother of God to the front line.

The news about the icon with the image of Stalin in the Holy Trinity Cathedral caused a violent reaction in the country. The founder of the “Republican Party of Georgia” in 1979, a dissident of the Soviet era, Levan Berdzenyshvili, told Radio Svoboda that, in his opinion, this incident testifies to a very serious problem: “If people think that Stalin is a saint, then these people themselves are not holy at all “.