We Have Seen It All Before

To the Tsar you did not  belong,

And that is how it all went wrong:

The foe whispered: Scatter and squander,

Give your treasure to the rich yonder,

Your power to slaves, your strength to enemies,

To serfs your honour, to traitors your keys.

Holy Rus, Maximilian Voloshin, 1918

Introduction

It is said that history does not repeat itself, it only echoes down the ages. This is hair splitting. It is the same thing in different words. Since geography does not change, mountains and plains, oceans and rivers do not move, and since human nature does not change, history does repeat itself. We have seen it all before.

The Ukraine

The Ukraine has been known for decades to be the most corrupt country on earth. The West has poured in hundreds of billions of dollars over the last four years. The money has all disappeared, just as the trillions did in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Kiev regime is utterly corrupt. Ministers are now finally being threatened with charges for corruption involving a mere $100 million. Some have fled abroad, their suitcases stuffed with dollar bills (London, the money-laundering capital, is a popular destination). The US is trying to regime-change by charging members of the regime with corruption, rather than by assassinating them. It is time to get rid of the intransigent Zelensky. Its oligarchs and their puppets, like the violent medieval princes and their corrupt retainers who used to live there, vie with one another. We have seen it all before.

For ordinary Ukrainians who have stayed, power cuts have become ever longer and they look anxiously at the destructive moving lights in the night skies and tremble. 1.8 million Ukrainian soldiers are dead or seriously wounded. Millions of young men and their families have fled abroad, 100,000 in the last month alone, in order to avoid the certain suicide of military service against a far stronger enemy. In his bunker in Kiev the actor President Zelensky himself now appears to be in a state of utter delusion, just like the artist Hitler in his bunker in Berlin just before his end, in denial, talking about moving non-existent armies and divisions, as bombed-out Berlin was surrounded by apocalyptic Soviet forces. We have seen it all before.

After taking back Russian Crimea (given to the Ukraine by the atheist monster Khrushchov in 1954) and then the four southern and eastern Russian provinces, given by the atheist monster Lenin to create the Soviet Ukraine in 1922, the Russian Federation may take back the next southern and eastern slice of the Soviet Ukraine. That consists of the other four Russian-speaking provinces (Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa), also given to the Ukraine in 1922.

Russia may also give the bit that the other atheist monster Stalin stole in 1945 back to Romania (Romanians want Romanian North Bukovina/Chernivtsy back, just as they want Romanian ‘Moldova’, which Stalin also stole in 1945). Russia may also give the other Stalin-stolen bits (Zakarpattia) back to Hungary and (Catholic Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk) to Poland (if the Poles want them back). Then, what remains will basically be a mirror image of Belarus to the north, the New Ukraine (or whatever it will be called) resembling a Southern Belarus, the East Slav Russian Protectorate of Kievan Rus. As for the delusional Western European elite, it will brush off its defeat in the Ukraine with the fantasy narrative that the Ukrainians were corrupt and Trump did not send enough aid. It was certainly not their fault.

Russia

The corrupt oligarch-gangster and traitor Prigozhin died in 2023, when a grenade exploded in his business jet, ‘in mysterious circumstances’, as they say. Whenever Russia is in trouble, there always appears a traitor or a rebel, a ‘false Dmitry’ or a Pugachov, who always ends up badly. Meanwhile, loyal Russian oligarchs prosper, as they receive plentiful military contracts from the State. It appears that between 100,00 and 150,000 Russians soldiers are dead, perhaps some 250,000 are seriously wounded.  And though Russia has won the war in the Ukraine, crushing and demilitarising not just the Ukraine, but also NATO, and dividing it into coalitions of the willing and the unwilling, Russia must also win the peace. How will they deal with the hatred they have stirred up against themselves? The mourning widows, orphans, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, the survivors maimed in body and soul, the economy in tatters, the exiled in misery, the lives ruined. Russia continues with its own problems, almost the same as those as those in the Middle Ages, the rival princes of then have become the rival oligarchs of today. We have seen it all before.

President Putin, the once naïve Europhile lawyer from Saint Petersburg, a fluent German speaker, who knows English quite well and who wanted to join NATO, has closed the window on the West, opened by Peter I. He was forced to do so, astonished and hurt by the rejections and hostility of the West that he used to love. And instead he has opened a window on the East, which Tsar Nicholas II once tried to open, but was stopped from doing so by Western-armed and financed Japan in 1904. Now dewesternising Russia has the deep friendship of the East. This is a turning point not only in Russian history, but in Eurasian, and therefore World, history. For the only reason why Eurasia has never dominated the world has been its divisions; those divisions are no more. Western aggression and dishonesty have thrown them all together, Russia, China, India, Iran and North Korea, well over a third of humanity, and receiving all the sympathy of Africa and Latin America.

The greatest problems are faced by the Russian Orthodox Church. Once multinational, it has become national, indeed nationalist and centralised, clericalist, ritualist and militarist, a uniform army. The new quasi-Iranian fundamentalism there has cut the Russian Church off from the mainstream, from the Catholicity of the Orthodox Church. No-one is convinced by Russian Orthodoxy now, as it reels from the scandal of openly blessing weapons of war used to kill other Orthodox, from that of last year’s open adultery of its main ‘Orthodox’ TV oligarch, from the homosexual scandals of senior bishops from Budapest to Chicago, to the scandal of another who plays poker internationally for big money.

The main Patriarchal candidate actually dreams of anointing and crowning President Putin Tsar. As a result, far fewer Orthodox than before go to church. Many boycott it, not only outside the Russian Federation, but also inside it, repelled by the darkness of the new fundamentalism with its boorish and misogynistic attitudes, its ever-growing quasi-Old Ritualist isolation from the mainstream. Fr Ferapont of The Brothers Karamazov has won against Elder Zosima. Russian Church isolation is determined by the fact that it cuts itself off from any who disagree with it. This is a Soviet attitude, not a Christian one, just as parallel US Evangelism is a Zionist attitude, not a Christian one.

The USA

As usual, the USA just wants to double its dollars. After all, it has wasted some $350 billion of them in the Ukraine. It wants them back, with a return. However, the reason is not the usual profit-seeking greed, it is about astronomical US debt, which now amounts to $38.2 trillion. Deindustrialised, it faces economic crisis. The crisis is also moral, as the USA faces the problems engendered by the genocidal results of US Zionism, US-backed and US-armed Israel against Palestinians, and by the crisis of the Israel-linked Epstein scandal. We have seen it all before.

Western Europe

The Establishments of most of Western Europe, their lies backed to the hilt by their generously-funded and utterly mercenary media and academia, are indebted to the ultimate degree. Therefore, they have been busy fabricating provocations: Russian submarines off the coast of Sweden (in fact American ones), Russian missiles and drones flying over Poland (in fact Ukrainian ones), imaginary Russian drones flying over Germany and Denmark, imaginary Russian aircraft flying over Estonia, imaginary Russian arms on ships, leading to French piracy on the high seas, the sabotage of French hotels by ‘Russian’ bedbugs etc. Any fiction to scare the brainwashed sheeple, to justify absurd NATO and the huge expenses of the military-industrial complex, creating the long-desired Third World War. We have seen it all before.

France

President Macron, called Micron by his enemies, and his band of perverts, their popularity standing at 11%, appear to have halted democracy in France. The President himself is obsessed only by his overweening ambition of becoming a second Napoleon, the first President of Europe. His hubris will be followed by nemesis. We have seen it all before.

Germany

Germany is in recession, as it has suicidally destroyed its industrial might by cutting itself off from the cheap Russian gas and oil which once made it competitive and mighty. Fascistic green policies have helped its decline. Its ultra-militaristic Chancellor, amazingly still on 18% of popularity, together with many members of his government, appears to want revenge for 1945. They dream of surrounding Moscow and pounding it with NATO artillery. So far all they have seen is German tanks burning on the steppes near Kursk, in the same area as in 1943. We have seen it all before.

The UK

The Ukrainian armed forces have been provided with a great many British ‘military advisors’, ‘technicians’ and MI6 spies and bodyguards. All their terrorist operations have been run by the British. These are terrorist activities of the cinematic James Bond type, repeats of those between 1941 and 1944, like the disastrous Dieppe raid, which killed and wounded thousands of Canadians, or the futile Dambusters raid, which killed a thousand Ukrainian slave-workers, let alone the then terror bombings which killed half a million German civilians.

The present operations, based in Odessa, Ochakov and Nikolaev, have often been naval in type. Thus, they attacked the civilian Kerch Bridge, sent naval drones against ships, blew up a dam, planned a suicidal and very costly attack to break through strongly-protected Russian territory to the Sea of Azov, landed Ukrainian troops on an island in a suicidal attack, invaded a border region of the Kursk Region in Russia (70,000 Ukrainian dead or wounded), attacked a Russian train, set fire to Russian bombers, tried to assassinate President Putin, tried to bribe a pilot with $3,000,000 to fly his plane with a missile to the West. Since the bankrupt and deindustrialised British are so militarily weak, and their anti-democratic leader very unpopular at 16%, they can do nothing else except commit futile and suicidal acts of terrorism. The only thing they are good at is PR, confusing virtual reality with real reality, cinema fantasies with real war. We have seen it all before.

Poland

Some in ‘the hyena of Europe’, as Churchill called Poland, dreamed of restoring the past, a Greater Poland, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. It is all nonsense. Polish pragmatists, seeing the attitudes of nearly two million Ukrainians living freely among them and bankrupting them, are now turning towards an anti-Ukrainian attitude, remembering the Ukrainian Volyn massacres of the Poles over eighty years ago. The Poles will never forget. It is embarrassing for the Ukrainians, who would like them to forget.

Italy and the Others

It is said that no war in Europe can end until Italy has changed sides. This is because, sensibly, most Italians are not warlike. This change of sides will of course happen. Indeed, all the at present vassal states in Europe will do the same, according to how much good sense they have. Hungary and Slovakia have already done so. Croatia and Austria are slipping towards it, also passing from being pro-Kiev to being anti-Kiev, like Poland. Romania would do so, but Brussels forbids freedom and democracy there. Eventually even the Nordics and the other Baltics will go neutral again, once they have rid themselves of their American-imposed elites. We have seen it all before.

Conclusion

I love the stubborn design you hold,

And I agree to play my role.

Now another drama will unfold:

This time please, please let be my soul.

 

But the order of the acts is planned

The end of my path has been revealed.

I am quite alone; all drowns in the pharisees’ cant.

To live your life is no simple walk across a field.

Hamlet, Boris Pasternak, 1946

There is nothing new under the sun. An observer of this inanity and insanity, I will return to my Suffolk village, where the clocks go slow. Why adjust the clocks, when we are headed for eternity anyway? We have seen it all before.

 

The Western Empire Wanted to Dismember Russia, But Instead the Western Empire Dismembered Itself

The West’s Delusional Divine Mandate

Historians have often noted how the Western elite, unlike the elites of all other Civilisations, has for a millennium claimed that it possesses a ‘Zionist’ Divine mandate. This justifies its continual organised violence against those outside the Carolingian First Reich (Reich = Empire), which was founded in 800 AD in the Frankland centre of the Western world. This became clear in the eleventh century in the Frankish ‘proto-crusades’ on the European periphery, in Sardinia (1016), Sicily (1022), Iberia (1064) England (1066) and then in its attacks on West Asia, formally called ‘Crusades’, which began in 1096. This also became evident in the ‘Teutonic Crusades’ of the 13th century against North-Eastern Europe and later the genocides, colonisation and exploitation of what is now called Latin America, starting with the gold-hungry Columbus in 1492. These extended to North America, Russia (which it then called Muscovy), Africa, Asia and Oceania.

At that time this Divine mandate was justified by the Western European leader, absolutist by Divine Right, the absolute power of the Popes of Rome. This mentality was continued by anti-Catholic Protestants, such as the British, who justified their genocides and asset-stripping by claiming that they were bringing ‘the savages’ their ‘civilising mission’ through the equally absolutist authority of their Bible. Today, when Western leaders are anti-Catholic and anti-Protestant, they justify their genocides and asset-stripping by their equally absolutist ‘moral crusade’ of ‘humanitarian intervention’, as in Iraq – ’God told me to invade’, said George Bush. All is permitted because only the (authoritarian, oligarchic and Globalist = Imperialist) Western world brings ‘freedom and democracy’, that is, freedom for perversion and for its elite to tyrannise and exploit the whole Globe.

Where does this supposed Divine mandate come from? Secularists say that it comes from their ‘superior’ ideology of ‘humanism’, which ‘primitive peoples’, ‘blacks, browns and yellows’, do not possess. The scientifically-minded prefer to speak of the technological advance of Western countries over others. All this is cultural arrogance, hubris. For most of the past millennium the civilisations of countries like China and India, as well as the many Latin American civilisations, were in all respects well ahead of Western civilisation. In our view, what lies behind the hubris of the belief of the Western elite that it has a Divine mandate, is their dogmatic self-belief that God told it that the Holy Spirit comes to it uniquely from its leader, the sole representative of God on earth, originally the infallible Pope of Rome, but now the infallible Western elite, the new Popes.

The Long Century of Fallen European Empires

In July 1918 the Russian Empire, modelled by its elite since 1721 on Western Empires, fell. In November 1918 the German (the Second Reich = Second Empire, founded in 1871), Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires followed. Twenty-seven years later, in May 1945, the German Third Reich fell. Thirty-eight years later, in October and November 1956, the British and French Empires also finally fell, after their last gasp failed invasion of Egypt, which the ultra-imperialist USA refused to support.

In December 1991 the Soviet Empire fell, after the morally bankrupt Western ideology of Marxism, which had invaded, ravaged and occupied Russia, had gone financially bankrupt.

In the 2020s the faltering Western Empire also fell. Having created appallingly bad relations with Russia, China and India, the world’s three great powers, it failed morally, diplomatically, militarily, technologically and financially. The divided Western Empire fell through its extraordinary hubris, in the same way that the Nazi Empire fell through its hubris, convinced that it was (racially) superior, in the same way as all empires fall through their hubris. The Roman, Carolingian (the First Reich), Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British and American Empires – all those ‘superior’ empires fell through hubris, absurdly high self-esteem and equally absurd low esteem of others, as best displayed in Fukuyama’s delusional 1992 The End of History and the Last Man.

The Old Western World

The Western world consisted of its leader, the US elite, its vassal-elites in the NATO-EU/UK, and to a lesser extent, those on US-controlled islands and coastlands of Eurasia, such as the settler colony of Israel, in South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. However, the highly unpopular US-backed and trained, Globalist elites in these countries are all cut off from their peoples. Sooner or later, after the collapse of their proxy Ukraine, those elites will also collapse, like dominos, beneath the weight of what they contemptuously call ‘Populism’, that is, the pressures of the People and their National values.

For the Western world, the Ukraine was only ever a strategically-located battering ram, to be used for its project to weaken, conquer and then dismember the Russian Federation. The Western-installed, pro-Fascist Ukrainian regime, which violently usurped the democratically-elected Ukrainian government in Kiev in 2014, was flattered, bribed and used, or rather abused, to reject peace and attack Russia. The Ukrainian peoples were the naïve or foolish victims of the little Kiev gang and this Western ideology, led into that delusion by their outraged sense of nationalism, which has led to the deaths of nearly two million of them (‘war to the last Ukrainian’) and the exile of seven million, most to Russia. They were caught in the middle of the Great Game of the contemporary American-led Western world, a repeat of the equally paranoid British Great Game of the 19th century.

The infallible Old Western world has tried to destroy and dismember the Russian Federation by encircling it with bases and carrying out its hypocritical regime-change operations, with illegal bullying sanctions and tariffs, in surrounding countries (and also those surrounding India), despite the UN Charter which forbids such operations: in Georgia (failed), Belarus (failed), Kazakhstan (failed), Afghanistan (failed), Hungary (failed), Slovakia (failed), Serbia (failed), Iran (failed), the other four ex-Soviet stans in Central Asia (failing), Bosnia (failing), Kosovo (failing), Montenegro (failing), Macedonia (failing), Moldova (failing), Romania (failing), Bulgaria (failing), Syria (failing), Pakistan (failing), Bangladesh (failing), Nepal (failing), Armenia (failing), Azerbaijan (failing), Argentina (failing) and Venezuela (failing).

The New BRICS World

The UN has failed, sabotaged and paralysed by the three Western countries on the Security Council, which have blocked all democracy and abandoned the UN Charter and international law. As a result, BRICS has been established to represent the real world, the 90% which are not US vassals. The new BRICS world is dominated by the vastness of Asia, which is populated by nearly 60% of the world’s population: North Asia, led by the Russian Federation (Eurasia and the Eastern half of ‘Europe’, that is, the peoples of East Slavdom from Belarus and the New Ukraine through Russia to the Pacific); East Asia, with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the rest of South-East Asia and Australian Oceania, led by China; South Asia, led by India; West Asia, led by Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the newly-created State of Palestine; Central Asia, led by Kazakhstan, plus the four ex-Soviet stans, Afghanistan and Mongolia.

As for the two other Non-Western Continents, there are Latin America, led by Brazil and Mexico, and Africa, led by South Africa, Ethiopia and Nigeria.

Then there come what are for the moment the Non-BRICS countries of the half-Continent of Northern America (Canada, USA and Greenland), led by the USA, and the half-Continent of Western ‘Europe’ (in fact, the North-Western Peninsula of Asia). The latter consists of the former US vassals in the Western half of Europe, in the EU and Non-EU Western European countries like the semi-American UK. These countries will go their own way, different from that of Northern America, which will be the last to abandon their hubris and start co-operating with BRICS. Thus, the once Hapsburg Hungary and Slovakia, to some extent Austria, Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia and Czechia, are already leading the Western half of Europe, which stretches as far as the borders of East Slavdom, in making peace with the Eastern half of Europe. Once its US-imposed and manipulated leaders, who imagine that they are infallible, like the Pope of Rome, have fallen, the other Western European peoples will be free to join BRICS as sovereign nations.

 

 

How Could the Russian Church Break Free of its Soviet Past?

Save me, O Lord, for there is no longer any that is godly; for the truth fails from among the sons of men.

Psalm 11, 2 (Septuagint) /12, 1

 

The title ‘Moscow Patriarchate’ was ‘Made in the USSR’, under Stalin just over eighty years ago. The title refers to the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has been involved in a great many divisive scandals from the outset. These have involved every level of lack of Christianity, from ignorance, financial corruption, theft, alcoholism and moral depravity, from Russia to Budapest, from London to Paris, to, more recently, the bullying narcissistic schismatic and the international poker-playing Metropolitan. In the first case, all the ROCOR bishops supported the schism, whereas in the second case, Moscow removed him.

In the last fifty years we have seen the Russian Church destroyed by one Russian nationalist bishop after another, and this with an old flock that utterly rejected atheist Communism and chose Church independence outside Moscow’s jurisdiction. And today the same has happened, but with a flock which was more recently assembled from Kazakhstan, the Baltic States and, above all, from the Ukraine and Moldova, who as Non-Russians were treated like third-class citizens. Will they too reject Moscow’s jurisdiction, just like the post-1917 emigration?

Is it all a deliberate attempt at suicide, or just the nightmarish incompetence of choosing the worst possible episcopal candidates? How can the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church reform and revert to being quite simply the administration of the Orthodox Church of Russia, as it historically was? We suggest eight stages:

 

  1. Abandon the Soviet legacy and rename itself ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’. The Patriarch and his administration could move physically to the New Jerusalem Monastery, founded by Patriarch Nikon in 1656 near the River Istra outside Moscow, and which I visited in 2007. On founding it, Patriarch Nikon recruited a number of monks of non-Russian origin as monks for the monastery, as it was intended to represent the multinational Orthodoxy of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Here is the true vocation of the Russian Orthodox clergy, not in corruption, depravity, nationalist politics and war, but in pastoral care, in love for all Orthodox people. For why else did God grant the Orthodox world the potential protection of by far the largest and richest country in the world? Was it so that it could become a bastion of racist nationalism? Or to become atheised and militarised Stalinist State puppets? Or to become a clerical caste of bureaucrats obsessed with protocols and ritualism? Or to become greedy, grasping capitalists and mini-oligarchs?
  1. It restores communion with all other canonical (therefore not the present fake Church in the Ukraine, known as the OCU) Local Churches and refrocks all the clergy, who had been uncanonically ‘defrocked’ for purely political and nationalistic reasons since January 2022.
  2. It grants Autocephaly to the Church in the New Ukraine (that is, to the Church for Ukrainians in the Ukrainian-speaking Ukraine) and to the Church in Belarus, and founds the Baltic Orthodox Church (for Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Finland) and the African Orthodox Church for Sub-Saharan Africa. (This would leave mainly Muslim North Africa to the jurisdiction of the Greek Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Coptic Church and the Churches of Ethiopia and Eritrea).
  3. It grants permission to all Orthodox in Moldova the right to join the Autonomous Bessarabian Metropolia of the Romanian Orthodox Church, and to all Moldovans in the Diaspora to join the Romanian Church, if they so wish.
  4. It reaffirms the Autocephaly given in 1971 to American Orthodox of the OCA, modifying its name to the NAOC (Northern American Orthodox Church), defining its territory as the USA, Canada, Greenland and the offshore islands of Bermuda and St Pierre et Miquelon. It then invites all other Orthodox in that territory to join it, unless they are still much attached to their countries of origin.
  5. It sells all other property belonging to the Patriarchs of Moscow and uses the receipts for missionary work in these new Local Churches, especially in poor Africa.
  6. It defrocks all financially, sexually or ecumenically corrupt bishops and priests.
  7. It closes the ecumenist DECR (Department of External Church Relations, in Russian OVTsS) and replaces it with a Department of Inter-Orthodox Relations (DIOR, or in Russian, OMPO).

 

If only one of these suggestions were followed, it would be a miracle. The implementation of any of them would in any case be to take one step closer to the long-awaited Great Council of the whole Church. There the Catholicity of the Church could at last be affirmed, instead of being denied by narrow nationalism, Russian, Greek or any other.

The Times of London, Monday 3 November 2025

 

The leading article, written by Jennifer Kennedy, and comparing the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Russian Orthodox Church, was published on Page 34 of The Times of the above date. It contains many factual mistakes (there are 16, not 17, Local Orthodox Churches, and the Russian Orthodox Church has for the moment 145 million members, not 95 million). It also contains much Russophobic propaganda and disinformation (the absurd description of an ‘all-out invasion of the Ukraine’ by Russia and the non-existent Russian backing of the Non-EU and highly popular candidate for President of Romania) and other ridiculous tropes. These have been as usual reproduced and paid for on State orders by Western propaganda mouthpieces, such as The Times.

However, the article is correct in its description of those who in England left the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia for the Romanian Orthodox Church (ourselves) – 12 clergy and 5,000 people. However, this took place nearly four years ago and not because of the new Cathedral in Bucharest. Moreover, none of this was at all because of disillusionment, but because of our persecution by the Russian Church authorities, a persecution for resisting schism. This was carried out by a local bishop, despite the warnings of Patriarch Kyrill not to pursue this persecution, and the lies and slanders that followed.

And there is no rivalry between the Russian and Romanian Churches; the new Cathedral of the People’s Salvation in Bucharest is a monument to the triumph of Christ over the dictatorships of both Fascism and Communism which Romania suffered in the last century. Nevertheless, the article is correct in asserting that certain leading bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church have tried to fuse Orthodoxy with Russian nationalism. And this did indeed alienate millions of lifelong Orthodox, Ukrainians, Moldovans, English, French and many others, including even some well-known Russians. They fused the spiritual with crude nationalism at their peril and they are now reaping its bitter fruits, which have so discredited the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church. The once Persecuted Church has indeed become a Persecuting Church.

 

Hallowe’en: A Pastoral Message

Tomorrow is the dreaded Hallowe’en. What shall we do? Here is our eight-point plan:

  1. Put up a cross or an icon on the outside of the front door.
  2. Make sure you keep together as a family. If you want, you can invite another family to your house, so the children can be together. Children do not leave the house or go round other people’s houses and do not dress up in scary costumes.
  3. If the children want to dress up in nice costumes, why not?
  4. Make sure you have some sweets and chocolate for the children. Something special and different.
  5. Have a competition for drawings. Suggested slogans:

Christ is Risen! And that is why we do not believe in Hallowe’en.

Today is our Easter in October.

We believe in LIFE, not death!

Death is Dead. Life is for Living.

Or maybe you can find a better slogan.

  1. Hold a talent competition, with singing or dancing or something else the children (or the adults) can do.
  2. Watch some nice film together or listen to some nice music.
  3. The children can stay up later than usual.

 

Equality, Liberty, Fraternity? A New Motto for the Values of the Post-Western World?

After the fall of the officially Communist USSR in 1991, the old political division between left and right ceased to have any meaning. The new, post-1991 division has been between Elite and People, Globalist and Sovereignist. With the collapse of the US-led domination of the world (‘Globalism’), after the Western defeat in the Ukraine, the utterly discrediting, Western-sponsored genocide in Gaza and the appearance of the Russian-founded, Chinese-backed, but multipolar, worldwide BRICS organisation, a real United Nations, a new motto will be required. The very old and hypocritical, French-invented one of ‘Equality, Liberty, Fraternity’ has been discredited. A new motto is required, which will work among all World Civilisations.

There is no ‘Equality’ in Western or any other society, there never has been and never will be. All Western societies, including Palace-governed, class-ridden French society, are run by and for oligarchies, the symbols of inequality. In any case the word ‘equality’ has been discredited because it has come to mean making everyone the same, that is, levelling down to the lowest common denominator, ‘one size fits all’ (with the exception, of course, of those belonging to the ruling elites, as for example in Soviet or Chinese ‘Communism’). On the other hand, there is such a thing as justice – not Equality, but Equity.

There is no ‘Liberty’ in any society, since ‘raison d’etat’ or State tyranny in one form or another will always prevail. For example, in the absence of real democracy (currently oligarchies put forward their own two slavish puppets and the people have to choose between them), we see the paramilitary brutality, repression and censorship in current Western Police-States. And in any case ‘liberty’ in Western societies has come to mean personal depravity, perversion and irresponsibility, almost to the point of anarchy. We suggest Responsibility.

As for ‘Fraternity’, that means the association of brothers. What about the other half of humanity – the sisters? We suggest the word should be replaced by the word ‘Community’. This would be a reminder and an antidote to the raging individualism of the Western world, with its collapsing infrastructure, crime, urban filth, graffiti, litter and general selfishness and narcissism. This is not acceptable to any World Civilisation, including to the Western Civilisation of the future, which is yet to be reborn.

And so we have a new motto, the values of: Equity, Responsibility, Community.

France, 28 October 2025

How Will the Greco-Russian Church Civil War End?

All wars end in peace. Sometimes peace comes through compromises and ceasefires (the Korean War), sometimes through the total victory of one side and the unconditional surrender of the other (the Vietnam War). The present Civil War between Constantinople and Moscow, the rivalry between the ‘Second Rome’ and the ‘Third Rome’ for control of the Church, began long ago. This rivalry is purely political, as no part of the Church controls the whole. The Church consists of diverse parts and has never been controlled by one local part.

True, the First Rome, in what is now called Italy and which inherited from the pagan Roman Empire the obsessive desire to dominate all others, tried to control all. This only ended up in the self-justifying filioque heresy, which claimed that the Pope of Rome, and not Christ, is the Head of the Church and he has total control of the Holy Spirit. This heresy came to be called Roman Catholicism. Originally it affected only a small and backward part of Christendom, mainly newly-converted, post-Roman peoples and Germanic and Celtic tribes.

The First Rome, with its militarily conquered subject peoples, from Sicily to England, finally separated itself from the Church in the eleventh century. The First Rome was already notorious for carrying out bloody wars, conquests, persecutions, indulgences, tortures and inquisitions in its attempts to impose itself. Later, however, in the sixteenth century, it itself split into many parts, with most of the Germanic peoples revolting against its Latin Yoke. The Latin Roman Catholics became far more numerous only through the crimes of the Western colonisation of Latin America, Black Africa and parts of Asia like the Philippines much later.

It was this same will to dominate that had already tormented the Second Rome and in part led to the fifth-century nationalistic splits from it of Nestorians and Miaphysites, the latter group existing to this day in Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Armenia and parts of Syria. As for the Third Rome, its will to dominate resulted in the disastrous, seventeenth-century ‘Old Ritualist’ schism, created by the enforcement of new rituals by the Russian State. As a result, the Russian word for schism (‘raskol’) came to have the purely political connotations of treason to the State.

Both those in the Second and the Third Rome who want to dominate the rest of the Church today have been much influenced by the millennial example of the First Rome, which they often visit. The temptations to obtain more power and more wealth are very great among some. This will for centralisation, whether of the First, Second or Third Romes, is purely secular. What is the Church perspective? The Church view is made clear from the New Testament. This is of independent Local Churches in different places, which share the same Faith.

Thus, at that time none of the seven Local Churches of Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae, Philippi, Galatia, Thessaloniki and Rome ever tried to dominate any other or even tried to impose something on another. This continues to be the overall situation in the (Orthodox) Church, where 16 Local Churches, now not covering cities, but countries or peoples, continue to exist. They are tied together by the same Faith; the current separation of a few of the sixteen is only because of political rivalry. This unity of Faith, in all places and at all times, is known as ‘Catholicity’.

Catholicity is quite different from ‘Catholicism’. The latter, by definition an ‘ism’ or ideology, denotes the attempt by one to dominate all others. Once Constantinople and Moscow are depoliticised and they rid themselves of their Imperialist pretensions (= the will to dominate and impose), that is, once they have been ‘dePapalised’, then Catholicity will return through the gathering of all at an inclusive, politically free Church Council, which will be free to set its own agenda. For Church Councils are where Catholicity, the Unity of the Faith in Diversity, is expressed.

In concrete terms, this means that Constantinople must give up its claims to traditional Russian Church territory (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, the Ukraine etc) and that in turn Moscow must give up its claim to traditional Greek Church territory (Africa). In order to avoid humiliation for both, the clear way forward is to grant these territories Autocephaly, tcreating new and neutral Autocephalous Churches. Only then can serious discussions begin on joint Autocephaly being granted to areas where mixed Orthodox have lived in numbers for generations.

This means new Autocephalous Churches in Western Europe, Northern America (95% English-speaking), Latin America and the Caribbean, and Oceania. These Churches can only be formed by all the Autocephalous Churches which have populations there, not simply the Greek and Russian, whose populations in those Continents are often only a small minority. In Western Europe, the majority belongs to the Romanian Church, in Northern America and Oceania perhaps to Constantinople, in Latin America and the Caribbean probably to Antioch.

 

On the Present Splits in ROCOR

Introduction: The Historic Splits in the Russian Emigration

After the so-called ‘Russian Revolution’, or rather place coup d’etat, in 1917, the Russian Church in the Emigration split into three groups. These splits were purely political and based on differing attitudes to the Soviet State. However, once the Soviet Union had fallen in 1991, there was no longer any reason for those splits, except for inertia, the ‘enemy deprivation syndrome’, as it is called, the need to be ‘against’ anyone who resists global Western control (‘Globalism’). This is a phenomenon throughout the Western political elite, but also among westernised Russians. It resulted in their bloody and failed invasions of the Muslim world and in the present tragic conflict in Kiev. The latter has been used as a failed puppet and proxy to try and destroy the Russian Federation, breaking it into colonisable pieces, ready to be asset-stripped by Western mining and oil corporations, as it was in the 1990s.

The absurdity of these continuing Russian Church splits became especially obvious after the Jubilee Council in Moscow in the Year 2000, when the Church in Moscow at last openly condemned its former co-operation with the atheist State (‘Sergianism’), condemned ecumenist syncretism (‘Nikodimism’), and began the canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including that of the Imperial Family. (The number canonised is now over 30,000, and the process is continuing). Although only 57% of the small Russian émigré group in Paris returned to Moscow as late as 2018, 95% of the much larger ROCOR émigré group had formally returned in 2007. However, that was not the end of the ROCOR saga – the return was for many only formal. Since 2017, after ten years of relative stability since 2007, its bishops and 300 or so parishes, mainly very small, between 10 and 40 people in number, have been splintering into three groups.

Fragment One: The Vitalyites

We have named the first extreme after the ROCOR Metropolitan Vitaly (Ustinov) (1910-2006). He was the last pre-Revolutionary born ROCOR Metropolitan and a ferocious opponent of the Moscow Patriarchate. After agreeing to unity with Moscow in 2007, those in this extreme in fact ‘played’ the Moscow Patriarchate. Although they had signed up to unity in 2007, they simply used this canonical unity obtained for appearances. Behind the screen of canonical unity, they continued their uncanonical acts. Thus, though not concelebrating with Moscow, they can claim ‘to be in communion’ with Moscow and are therefore ‘canonical’. Though they kept a low profile at first, this became clear from 2017 on and their palace coup against the late Metr Hilarion (Kapral), whose documents they autopenned with impunity.

Composed largely of convert bishops and made up of crazy converts and CIA operatives, from 2017 on the Vitalyites, open fans of Trump, began to form yet another ‘One True Church’. They claimed to be ‘more Russian than the Russians’, (real Russians do not have to pretend) and worked to form yet another old calendarist-type, apocalyptic sect, just like the 5% who had refused to sign up to unity and left ROCOR in 2007 and immediately split into four tiny, warring groups. Vitalyite Orthodoxy is that of the ghetto and the museum and refuses to live in the real world, preferring a self-justifying, US theme-park ideal of ‘Holy Rus’. However, the present Vitalyites are unlike those far less subtle and ignorant groups who refused to sign up in 2007 and left ROCOR then, this group remained to sabotage ROCOR from inside through intrigue and deceit.

Thus, as soon as he had signed the Act of Canonical Communion in May 2007, which he had planned, the leader of this group was welcomed back from Moscow by the local Moscow Archbishop, who rejoiced and commented that ‘now we can do everything together’. That representative was shocked to hear the answer: ‘No, nothing has changed, we are not together’. This group displays the same harsh and sectarian fanaticism and cultish and judgemental phariseeism as those who had left in 2007, but works to corrupt and sectarianise the Church from inside, thinking they have outsmarted isolated Moscow, which is desperate for good PR.

These mainly Western converts display hatred for the present Russian Federation, its President, and those nostalgic for Stalin. They foolishly (or are they paid by the CIA for this stance?) also support Western propaganda efforts which call on Russian troops to leave the liberated Russian territories in the Ukraine, which had been genocided by the Kiev regime. In its hostility to the Russian Federation, this basically anti-Russian group is no different to the other Vitalyites who left ROCOR in 2007 and created similar apocalyptic ‘One True Church’ sects and rebaptise others, including Orthodox. They maintain that they are ‘the only canonical Orthodox in the world!’ This reveals their underlying, schismatic, Calvinist and Lutheran, mentality. This is not theology, it is pathology.

Fragment Two: The Neo-Sergianists

The second extreme, which is the one deliberately left in power by the bribing and flattering Vitalyites, is composed of Neo-Sergianists. They are named after Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow (1867-1944), who became Patriarch of the Russian Church for a few brief months at the end of his life by compromising with the militant atheists, receiving money and power in return. Although these ROCOR Neo-Sergianists mainly live in the USA, their view is that of Russian Federation loyalists and they have adopted the same Neo-Sergianist attitudes to wealth and centralising power as the worst elements in today’s Moscow Patriarchate. And they hold exactly the same centralist, nationalist, militarist, ritualist and clericalist attitudes which they had previously condemned, as does Moscow.

The temptations were too great for them and they succumbed. There is little spiritual and pastoral here, but, as in Moscow, much that is political. Their harsh censorship is exactly mirrored in Moscow, where, to the scandal of the faithful, the intellectuals, liberals, ecumenists and homosexuals have just censored one of the most popular akathists to the martyred Tsar. (They hate those loyal to the Tsar). The Budapest and other scandals have not yet brought them to sobriety and understanding, nor have the appalling scandals in ROCOR. Thus, Moscow is losing all Non-Russian Orthodox, in the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, Belarus, Central Asia and Orthodox throughout the Diaspora, just as ROCOR is losing its Orthodox too – see below.

The Orthodox or Tikhonites

Finally, there are the rest of us, the Orthodox, who resist both extremist political factions, the Vitalyites and the Sergianists. We are also called Tikhonites. Unable to agree to uncanonical ROCOR schism, sect and self-isolation, some 10% of us former ROCOR members, all Tikhonites, have already joined other Local Churches, that is, we have joined the mainstream. However, most of the Tikhonite clergy and people, even if besieged by the Vitalyite and Neo-Sergianist bishops (the two sides of exactly the same coin – extremes always meet and collude), have so far been able to remain in ROCOR. Nevertheless, their situation is becoming more and more difficult, as all five remaining Tikhonite bishops have been ‘retired’ and the last active semi-Tikhonite (though he was coloured by Neo-Sergianism too), Archbishop Peter of Chicago, passed away.

We are called Tikhonites because we are devoted to the Russian-born American citizen, missionary to Alaska, and saint, Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow (+ 1925), previously Bishop of San Francisco and later of New York. He prophesied: ‘The night will come soon, dark and long’. Indeed, it has been. Following his arrival in New York from Le Havre in December 1898, the then Bp Tikhon gathered together Russians, Ukrainians, Carpatho-Russians, Greeks, Antiochians and Serbs and created Orthodox unity in North America, before going on to become Patriarch of Moscow and a saint. It is no surprise that the present leader of the international ‘Orthodox Church in America’ is also called Metr Tikhon. We Tikhonites also much venerate the international St John (Maximovich) (+ 1966), who was also slandered, suspended and put on trial by the then ROCOR episcopate.

We Orthodox, or Tikhonites, know that the post-1917 Russian Emigration, like the Soviet Union itself, has died out and that, living in Western countries and in post-Communist times, there is no reason for us to be separated from other Local Churches. It is our destiny to work together with other Orthodox, contributing our specific liturgical identity and our devotion to the martyred Tsar and all the other New Martyrs and Confessors. As regards the tragic conflict in the Ukraine, we are not naïve and have fully understood that this a geopolitical conflict between the aggressive and greedy atheist West and the Russian State. It has nothing to do with the Ukraine as such. That is just the battlefield. We are horrified by pictures of clergy blessing weapons of war, on both sides.

As regards President Putin, we know that he is a powerful and admired Russian nationalist politician, a very cautious lawyer and a diplomat. But clearly he is not at all our long-awaited Tsar. As the contemporary Russian historian, Peter Multatuli, great-grandson of a New Martyr faithful to the Tsar, has put it: The great mission was given to us, not by rebellious human desire, but by the will of God. Our mission has nothing to do with….so-called ‘Russian nationalism’. Our mission is the rebirth of Russian Civilisation, in which all nationalities who wish so are united for life in God and with God, in the world of Goodness and Justice, in which we can stand up to the atheistic and anti-human Western ‘New Order’, whose aim is to annihilate man as God’s creation.

France, 25 October 2025

 

My Fourth Pilgrimage to Moldova and Romania: 6-17 October 2025

It was then that falsehood came into our Russian land. The great misfortune, the root of all the evil to come, was the loss of faith in the value of personal opinions. People imagined that it was out of date to follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing the same tune in chorus, and live by other people’s notions, the notions which were being crammed down everybody’s throats.

Boris Pasternak, Dr Zhivago, Chapter 13, Section 14

Foreword: Romania and the Universal Church

It was in May 1978 that I spoke to the late Marianna Greenan, a member of the Russian émigré Behr family, about her pilgrimage to Romania. (Both the English and the French branches of the Behrs of that generation were staunch supporters of the Moscow Patriarchate). She told me how she had visited a small embroidery workshop in Romania and realised that all the workers were nuns who had been forced to leave their Convent, as the Communists had closed it. One of them who spoke some Russian explained to Marianna that she said one Jesus Prayer for every stitch that she made.

Then the woman, or rather nun, whispered to Marianna that ‘our persecution is all the fault of you Russians’. Marianna, a member of the Patriarchate, was astonished and asked why. The nun told her: ‘Because you overthrew our Orthodox Tsar and so we are all suffering’. This story has remained with me these nearly fifty years. For the whole Orthodox world has indeed suffered ever since the great treason of the upper-class Russian aristocrats and generals, among them Romanovs, in 1917: ‘All around treason and cowardice and deceit’, as the Tsar wrote.

Introduction: Carpathia and Hesychasm

My latest pilgrimage here has reminded me of my 2004 pilgrimage to the Presov Rus homeland of the ever-memorable Carpatho-Rusyn Metropolitan Lavr (Shkurla) in north-eastern Slovakia. Just across the border from Moldova, eastern Slovakia and northern Romania, Carpatho-Rus, which is still under Ukrainian occupation and so goes by the Kievan name of Transcarpathia, still has hesychast hermits living in the forests on the mountain-slopes.

St Job of Ugolka (+ 1985) was such a one. He is the still living fruit of the Athonite tradition, defended theologically against secularist humanism by St Gregory Palamas. This tradition went north from Athos through Bulgaria and Rila, to Serbia and Romania, to the Russia of St Sergius of Radonezh and his 70 monasteries. Later it passed on to St Paisy (Velichkovsky) in Neamt, St Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina Elders and St John of Kronstadt. That tradition is alive today in such Carpathian lights as Metr Onufry of Kiev.

7 October: A Meeting with Metr Vladimir of Chisinau (Moscow Patriarchate)

Most of Moldova was in pre-Soviet times known as Bessarabia, as Pushkin described, and was an integral part of Romania. However, with the Soviet occupation that large province and its churches were forced to join the Moscow Patriarchate. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, when only some 380 churches remained open, the Church has been restored (nearly 1300 more churches repaired or built) and the people have been returning to the Romanian Church.

The return to the Romanian Church is a spontaneous movement of the people, followed, but not led, by the clergy, as several priests confirmed to me. As the elderly die out, this movement is inevitable, only those who recall Soviet times are staying with Moscow. It has become obvious that Moldova will disappear from the map of Europe within a few years and will be absorbed back into Romania, together with its Church.

Meeting at the Metropolia, Metr Vladimir told me that at present he still has 1,350 churches in this country of two and a half million, all of them using the old calendar. As for the Romanian Church in Moldova, known as the Autonomous Metropolia of Bessarabia (which mirrors the Autonomy given to the Romanian Church in Western Europe), it has taken 300 churches back from Metr Vladimir, all of them also using the old calendar.

The number returning to the Romanian Church has doubled in the last two years and is increasing every month. Other priests told me that the numbers of people leaving and taking their clergy with them, suggest that the Metropolia of Bessarabia, for now with 4 bishops, will be larger than the Moscow Patriarchate, for now with 11 bishops, within two years. The movement is one-way and has been much accelerated by the present events in the Ukraine.

Metr Vladimir admitted to me that the essence of the problem is that the Russians in Moscow treat Moldovans as ‘third-class Orthodox’ and refused to give it Autocephaly. Now it is too late for that. I told the Metropolitan that this is also exactly what Moscow does to most Moldovans in the Diaspora (apart from those under the enlightened Metr Nestor), as well as to English and French Orthodox and to other Non-Russian Orthodox in the Diaspora, stabbing us in the back. He did not know that there are now 30 Moldovan parishes under the Romanian Church in Italy, and 5 in England, with 3 which took refuge in the Romanian Church from ROCOR in 2022.

I said to him that the problem is that he is not allowed a Diaspora and that therefore he is losing most of his Diaspora Moldovans, in the same way as he is losing his churches inside Moldova. I added that we would have joined the Moldovan Church ten years ago, if it had had a Diaspora, rather than continue to be mistreated by politically-minded, Greek-hating Russians who to boot ‘dislike Romanians and only half-like Moldovans’ (and only half-like anyone who is not American), to quote one of their bishops. The Metropolitan looked as though he too had been living with that Cross for a long time. At present he cannot visit Britain or Ireland – the authorities will not grant him a visa.

Metr Vladimir asked me what our experience had been. I informed him that I had studied at St Serge in Paris with the last emigres from before the Revolution. I had spent 47 years in the Russian Church, battling for its unity and meeting two Patriarchs. I told him how a very young Metropolitan in Moscow, who has never spent any time in a monastery, literally told us, all six churches, to ‘go away’. When informed that after nearly fifty years of faithfulness to the Russian Church we would therefore be forced to join another canonical Local Church, the Romanian, the young Metropolitan had simply answered: ‘Too bad for you’.

Metr Vladimir invited us to concelebrate with him; he has no problem with the Romanian Church, despite the fact that the people are leaving him for it. You cannot go against the people when they act en masse, and he knows that. The people ask their priests: ‘We have joined the Romanian Church, will you come with us?’ The priests follow the fait accompli.

8 October: The Convent of Suruceni

Today we go to venerate the relics of St Dionysius of Bessarabia (1868-1943), a great hierarch. He did much to translate the liturgical texts into Romanian, was a patriot of Greater Romania, and his incorrupt relics lie in this beautiful convent, which is still under Metropolitan Vladimir. We venerated his relics, took part in the Akathist and spoke to the Abbess. We were impressed. One of the nuns, who had spent 20 years in the Ukraine, asked me about our views of Metr Onufry (‘a living saint’), and Metr Antony (Bloom) and St Sophrony (Sakharov) and my impressions of them both and why they had argued in 1965. I told her that our church is dedicated to St John (Maximovich), who stood above all such émigré personality disputes.

9 October: St Martha and Maria Convent

Today we went to one of the largest convents in Moldova, also still under Metropolitan Vladimir. A former Communist youth camp, it was founded in 1992 on 200 euros (!). It is a work of faith. It has three churches, one a magnificent large, frescoed church, some sixty nuns and many other very large buildings, including a boarding-school. It runs from the profits of its extensive farm. I met Fr Andrei, the elder, a most impressive spiritual father. We talked long and he spoke of his very poor childhood, when the Communists so oppressed the Church, and he described the Convent’s very, very close links with the monastery of Putna in Romania, which is a great centre of holiness. Putna donated a whole wooden church to the Convent, which stands as the third church.

11 October

Today we baptised a child and served a three-hour Vigil at the very large, brand-new church in Costinesti, a small town near Chisinau. A new Convent is being built alongside it.

12 October

Today we celebrated the Sunday liturgy in the same church. It was attended by about 150 people.

14 October

Today is the Feast of the Protection and we celebrate the liturgy in a church outside Chisinau. It is very pleasing to see most of the people, men and women alike, dressed in national costume.

15 October: Meetings with a Saint and two Bishops in Iasi

Today, my namesday, we leave at 3.30 am to go to Iasi in Romania, about three hours away. There are 500 churches in Iasi itself and another 500 outside this City of some 350,000. But the greatest glory of the Metropolia of Iasi is the relics of St Paraskeva. 200,000 pilgrims have gathered for her feast day before, on and after 14 October. We venerate her relics and can feel the warmth of her millennial hands.

We concelebrate the liturgy with the very young-looking Bishop Theofil from Bacau. Apart from all three priests and three parishioners from Colchester, there are another seventeen priests, four protodeacons and hundreds of people. A choir of young women sings magnificently with Russian chants. Communion is from three large chalices. The largest is 2.5 litres, whereas our largest Sunday chalice in Colchester is only 1.5 litres (a third of a gallon). But our altar is bigger! As is usual in the Romanian Church, this is a real concelebration, all are involved, all take an active part. This is the people’s Church. And of course the people understand everything, as the Romanian used for services is close to everyday Romanian. This is different from both the Greek and the Russian Churches.

After the Liturgy we are invited to eat with Bishop Nikifor, one of the two assistant bishops to Metropolitan Theofan of Iasi. We converse in French and Russian. He tells us that the Russian Church’s decision to go into schism and expel us, because we objected to its schism, is the Romanian Church’s gain. We reply to him that it is also our gain! Then we speak of Fr Raphael Noica, whom we both so love.

We compare the People’s Salvation Cathedral (named in typical Romanian fashion, for this is the Church of the People) in Bucharest with the main Russian Military Cathedral outside Moscow, which were both built at the same time. The People’s Salvation Cathedral is the world’s largest and tallest Orthodox Cathedral, with the largest mosaic collection in the world and the world’s largest iconostasis (407 m2). It can take 6,000 worshippers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Salvation_Cathedral

The Russian Military Church outside Moscow, with its Communist emblems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_Armed_Forces

The comparison is between light and dark, between the beauty of the Ascension (which is the dedication) and an attempt to intimidate by military victory.

Leadership in today’s Romanian Church is under the influence of the new saints. They are the glory of the Romanian Church, its New Martyrs and Confessors, St Arsenie Boca, St Arsenie Papacioc, St Sofian Boghiu, St Dumitru Stăniloae, my own favourite, St Cleopa Ilie, the Shepherd of the Carpathians, and many others. Fr Cleopa was a living saint, a living icon, the people’s shepherd. These saints are the guarantee of the independence and freedom of the Church from politicians. They have the Tradition of life.

Why are the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow not also under the influence of their Saints? Both have plenty of new and great saints and pastors, Athonite Elders like St Paisios and St Porphyrios, or New Martyrs and Confessors, but somehow their politically-minded episcopates seem to have sidelined these pastors and the veneration of the new saints is often nominal.

16 October: Back in Moldova

In a town outside Chisinau I meet one of the most senior priests in Moldova, a theologian, born in Romanian North Bukovina, which Stalin stole and added to the Ukraine in 1945, though this priest has lived in Moldova for decades. I will call him Fr X. We discuss our many mutual acquaintances, living and reposed: Patriarch Alexiy II, Patriarch Kyrill, Metr Onufry of Kiev (who is so similar to the ever-memorable Metr Lavr (Shkurla)), Metr Tikhon (Shevkunov), Metr Antony (Bloom), St Sophrony (Sakharov), Fr Alexander Schmemann.

Interestingly, Fr X. wears his mitre and two crosses only at Easter. I have the same custom, wearing them only ‘for the sake of the feast’, ‘radi prazdnika’. We have the same attitude to such pompous awards. He gives me an icon of St Alexander, a local New Martyr, martyred by the Soviets in Kazan in 1943.

He tells me that several of the local Moscow Patriarchate bishops are either married or else divorced, one is a politician in a cassock, only one is a monk. I tell him that the situation is no different from in Russia, but that I prefer the ones who are still married, at least they are normal. Those who could not live with their wife may have some personality flaw and, unmarried, they may have other vices. It is what the Apostle Paul recommended, that candidates be ‘the husband of one wife’. There are of course the homosexuals, of whom there is only one notorious case in Moldova, though quite a minority of the episcopate in Russia and elsewhere is, as the Budapest affair publicly proved, even to the naïve and the liberals.

I suggest that Moscow, like Constantinople, spends too much time consorting with the Pope of Rome and that his Papism has rubbed off on them. Fr X. corrects me and says that the Pope of Rome would love to have as much power and money as they have in Moscow and Constantinople.

Fr X., who knows Metr Vladimir very well, both before and since transferring to the Romanian Church, once accompanied Metr Vladimir to Romania on a secret trip to negotiate the transfer of his Church to the Romanian Church. Fr X. commented that Metr Vladimir would like to take the whole of his Moldovan Church to the Romanian Church, instead of seeing batches of parishes go to the Romanian Church, one group at a time, the largest batch so far numbering sixty, which was just over a year ago. However, Metr Vladimir cannot transfer, for he is a prisoner, a political hostage. As for the pieces of paper ‘defrocking’ clergy who join the Romanian Church, the Metropolitan told everyone to ignore them – they are purely political documents, which he is forced to issue ‘by the powers that be’.

We agree that the problem is that so many in the Russian Church think in the Soviet categories of atheism and nationalism, as politicians and businessmen in cassocks, but not as pastors. After 1991 they changed from atheism to Orthodoxy overnight, but only in dress. Pastors would long ago have granted autocephaly to any Church which is present in any numbers in the thirteen independent Republics, apart from Russia and Georgia which already had autocephalous Churches, that the USSR broke up into. Now, through its Soviet centralisation, Moscow is losing everything. It is this purely secular and political centralisation of power which makes clericalist Moscow bishops into militaristic generals, who then bully, humiliate and intimidate priests as soldiers whose task is to carry out rituals (‘treboispolniteli’).

We come to the discussion of the conflict in the Ukraine and the delusional attitude of the West. I mention that Hitler in his last months was also delusional, as were his propaganda media. People are always delusional, when they are losing a war. This delusion comes from hubris, as was Hitler’s case, as is the EU’s case and that of all the other Globalists. Hubris comes from the need for victory instead of reconciliation, which friendly groups promote. Hubris in today’s case too indicates a loss of contact with reality and the huge overestimation of the West’s own competence, accomplishments and capabilities. As they say, ‘pride goes before the fall’. As for Narcissus, he rejected the advances of all who approached him, and instead fell in love with his own reflection in a swamp. The swamp in Washington?

Fr X. criticises President Putin. He said to me that the President does not like the martyred Tsar. President Putin considers that the Tsar was weak in 1917, he should have fought against his enemies, even if millions had died.  I comment that for me the Tsar is a criterion of Orthodoxy and that in this way President Putin shows that he is still a Soviet man, without understanding of Christian martyrdom, of the Sts Boris and Gleb attitude of Tsar Nicholas. This rejection of the Tsar’s attitude was precisely the error of the Whites, who created the Russian Civil War, in which perhaps four million people died. The Whites, led by anti-Bolshevik and also anti-Tsar generals and traitors, disobeyed the Tsar, who wanted only peace.

The Tsar knew that it would be useless to fight militarily against the Bolsheviks. Apostasy can only be cured by misfortune – you cannot halt it by force. Thus, Bolshevism was only stopped by the satanic intervention of Hitler, who murdered 27 million people of the old Russian Empire. The White Orthodox Emigration, from which I was issued, initially through the influence of the Benckendorffs 39 years after the Revolution, has prayed for 100 years and more for the coming of a new Tsar, like St Nicholas, and who will reverse the injustices of 1917. But that can only come through repentance and humility, when Russia is spiritually ready. It is still far from that.

I emphasise to him that the White Orthodox Emigration was only a small part of the whole White Emigration. This was composed for the most part of capitalists and traitors to Russia, greedy and grasping people who only hated the Communists because the latter had stolen their property from them, and not because they opposed Communist atheism – they themselves were atheists and as such also opposed the Church and the Tsar. From the Orthodox viewpoint, they were not White at all, rather they were Black, and in the Russian Civil War, which Tsar Nicholas had avoided, they carried out just as many atrocities as the Reds.

Fr X. asks me about the Russian Emigration and why it split into three parts. I tell him that all was determined by the attitudes of the key players, clergy and laity, to the Soviet State. Those who remained in the Patriarchate were coloured by their deep Soviet patriotism and even support of Stalin. Those who went to Paris, mainly very Westernised Saint Petersburg aristocrats, had overthrown the Tsar and wanted a Western-style Parliament, whereas those in ROCOR were simply anti-Communists, who wanted to restore the pre-Revolutionary State, despite all its social injustices and Church decadence (communion at best once a year) and careerism. Virtually no-one was creative and looked to recreating not the pre-Revolutionary Sate of nominal Orthodoxy, bureaucracy and corruption, but Holy Rus’, except perhaps for the repentant Kartashov.

16 October: Exhibition for Queen Marie

In the afternoon we are invited to the town of Straseni, where there is an exhibition at the Museum dedicated to Queen Marie of Romania (1875-1938). Queen Marie was a unique Anglo-Russian figure, the daughter of Prince Alfred (a son of Queen Victoria) and Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of Tsar Alexander III of Russia, aunt of Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsarina. She married Ferdinand of Romania, who became King of Romania.  In 1926 Queen Marie adopted the Orthodox Faith (she did not remain Anglican, as some falsely claim on the internet and on AI, though she later had sentimental sympathies for Bahai). She is much loved here, as she played a great diplomatic role for Romania at the Versailles Peace Conference, wrote over 30 books and spoke poetically of her love for Romania, helping to create Greater Romania, of which she was the last Queen and best ambassadress:

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=maria+of+romania+film&&mid=8DF9E3904F0F41D6455E8DF9E3904F0F41D6455E&FORM=VAMGZC

Queen Marie, the cousin of King Charles’ great-grandfather, spoke very good Romanian, albeit with an English accent, and was immediately loved by Romanians, being renowned for her beauty, wisdom and love of her adopted country and its customs. Later Communist slanders are not believed. Below are some of her sayings:

Nothing is far when you want to get there.

Nothing is ours really, not even our own souls.

In much knowledge there is also much grief.

To be entirely happy in marriage, the same thing must be important to both.

Fashion exists for women with no taste, etiquette for people with no breeding.

Photographs were taken of our international delegation to the Museum.

17 October

We return to England and hear the tragic but unsurprising news that the Anglican Communion has now officially split into two, with the woke side, led by Canterbury and numbering about 15% of the whole, falling away from the African-led orthodox majority.

On the other hand, we hear the good news that our Archdiocese has obtained a very large former church in Peterborough, which we will use, once we have spent £300,000 on needed repairs. We already have the money. This will further increase and strengthen our Orthodox presence in our native East of England. The Local Church is being constructed. This is God’s work.

 

The People’s Orthodoxy, Church Freedom and the End of the War

So-called ‘Western Civilisation’ is composed of a fatal mixture of Roman paganism and Germanic barbarism. Thus, Western Europe gradually renounced its heritage from the first millennium, real Christianity, and became subject to pagan and barbarian practices. That mixture began to claim supremacy over the rest of the world, now known as ‘Globalism’. To support this claim, the Western world used its form of Christianity to justify itself, and so justified the devil through its reductionist and secularist forms of ‘Christianity’, ‘the white god’.

This ‘Western Civilisation’ began to collapse after the fall of the Western European empires in the First and Second World Wars. These had in fact both begun as purely European Wars, which Western Europe had spread worldwide, but used the USA to rescue it from its two attempted suicides. As a result of their Wars, the European elites failed to keep their empires. Therefore, ever since the Second War they have used and manipulated the Western European-founded USA to maintain at least the remnants of their power and prestige.

No Western European empire was more manipulative than the most successful Western Empire, the British, which used the English language and culture to gaslight the USA. This is the meaning of NATO, whose purpose was, in the words of its first (British) Secretary General, ‘to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’. This was in the interests of the American people or in the interests of the peoples of Europe, but it was in the interests of the Euro-American elites, their high finance and military-industrial complex.

The reductionist and secularist forms of Christianity of the Western world differ from real Christianity, which is the Faith of the Orthodox Church. However, there are those ‘Orthodox representatives’ who also use our real Christianity to imitate that of the West, that is, the blend of pagan Roman paganism and Germanic barbarism. They suffer from a ‘Rome syndrome’, which is why such ‘representatives’ continually send their envoys to ingratiate themselves with the Pope of Rome. There is too much Rome and lust for riches and power.

Wherever there are Empires, real Orthodox Christianity has been abused. Most clearly this was the case with the First Rome in the West, but this has also been clear in the case of its imitators, in the Second Rome, Constantinople, and in the Third Rome, Moscow. Outside those two Imperial centres, Constantinople and Moscow, in the provinces, as in the fourteen other Local Orthodox Churches, we follow the People’s Orthodox Christian Faith, not a tightly-controlled, top-down, clericalist and ritualist, nationalised and centralised, State Religion.

Today, Greek leaders have dared to follow the oligarchic, Capitalist interests of the Americans and their vassals. On the other hand, Russian leaders have dared to continue with the Soviet-style, centralised interests of Russian nationalism. In both cases the interests are at root ideological, and tell those who are not of their nationality to ‘go away’, but other Local Churches welcome those who are told to go away. Chauvinism is not why the Lord granted any people the Orthodox Christian Faith. It was given to welcome people, not to dismiss them.

The following of Imperial, nationalist-political, ideological interests comes from a lack of repentance. And when there is no repentance, then enemies come. Thus, the Greeks had to fight the Persians, the Turks, the French, the British and the Americans. As for the Russians, they had to fight against attacks led by the Mongol-Tartars, the Poles, the Swedes, the French, the British, the Germans and today the Americans. As Russia is huge, each attack was combined, composed of several nationalities, as in the Ukraine, where they face the whole West.

Enemies are like the passions. They only attack us when there is no repentance, that is, no defence. This can be seen most clearly in that tragic situation today in the Ukraine. Both peoples are supposedly Orthodox Christian, but they are not, otherwise they would not be fighting. Every attack and every enemy is in fact a call to repentance. As long as there is no repentance, there can be no peace. This is why wars drag on, when they could end very quickly. Such is the case in the Ukraine, even now with a million killed and many more wounded.

The restoration of Orthodox Christianity throughout the Orthodox Church, and so outside Her in missionary work, will come only when Orthodox Christian leaders return to the People’s Orthodoxy and abandon Imperial, nationalist-political, interests. Those secular interests are wholly responsible for the present schism between Russians and Greeks. We confess the Faith, not some rigid, militaristic, and politically-inspired, centralised religion, designed to intimidate priests and imitate States. We refuse your Caesar and, instead, we follow our Christ.