Source: Reuters
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L24767313.htm
MOSCOW, July 24 (Reuters) - The Soviet Union sold the sacred bells from Moscow's oldest monastery as scrap and they ended up in the United States. Seventy-seven years later, Russia is bringing them home, drawing a new line under its communist past.
Charles Crane, a U.S. industrialist and diplomat with a passion for Russian art and culture, bought the Danilovsky monastery's 18 bells from Joseph Stalin's atheist government in 1930 and gave them to Harvard University.
Danilovsky's bells avoided the fate of thousands of others from Russian churches that were seized as scrap metal and melted in Stalin's industrialisation drive in the 1930s when thousands of priests were executed or sent to Gulag camps.
President Vladimir Putin's government, the Russian Orthodox Church and business leaders, mounted a successful drive for the bells -- some up to 400 years old -- to be returned to the monastery, near central Moscow, in the coming months.
At Harvard, they will be replaced with new similar bells.