The Man who burned Lenin: Extraordinary Life of Gabriel Urgebadze

Tbilisi, May 1, 1965.Thousands filled the streets for one of the Soviet Union's greatest public celebrations.Above them hung a massive portrait of Vladimir Lenin.Then an Orthodox monk set it on fire.His name was Gabriel Urgebadze.The crowd turned on him. He was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually confined to a psychiatric hospital, where his faith itself became part of the evidence used to judge his sanity.But that was only the beginning of his story.Long before the flames, Gabriel had been a boy who saved his money to buy a Gospel, a young soldier secretly seeking the Church, and a priest who built a small church with his own hands. In the decades that followed, he would become one of the strangest and most beloved spiritual figures in modern Georgia-a monk mocked as a madman by some and sought out as a holy elder by others.Drawing carefully from historical records, surviving documents, and eyewitness testimony, The Man Who Burned Lenin tells the remarkable true story of Saint Gabriel Urgebadze without turning history into legend or stripping faith of its mystery.It is the story of a man who lived under a system determined to build a world without God-and refused to let that world decide whom he would worship.Volume 1 of True Stories of the Orthodox Saints.