The gates of hell shall not prevail.

All around treason and cowardice and deceit.

Tsar Nicholas II after being overthrown

Introduction: The Judgement of the Nations

The world lies in evil, says St John the Theologian. This is why the world always refuses God’s Truth. But as we Christians are called on to live in the world, to which we do not belong, we have to know what spirit directs the world and how to remain faithful to God’s Truth despite it. Thus, although it is natural for Orthodox to defend our countries as patriots, we know that Christ stands above patriotism. Therefore, we clearly recognise that wars against or even between Orthodox Christian countries happen only because Orthodox Christian countries put nationalism above Christ. Such wars are the Judgement of God on apostasy. Such was the war between Serbs and Bulgarians in 1912-1913, such is the war between Russians and Ukrainians. God does not force Himself on others. Leave God and He leaves you. Those who do not live with God choose to live with the devil, the father of lies. Such is the choice possible with human freedom.

Political Ideologies Against the Faith

Wars of the Collective West against Russia, whether Hot or Cold, have never ended. Though they began earlier, they began in earnest after the Russian defeat of Napoleon’s multinational invasion in 1812, when it became clear that Russia had become a Great Power. Since then, the tide of War has only ebbed or flowed. It flowed with Napoleon in 1812, again with the Anglo-French-Muslim invasion of Russia from 1853 to 1856, again with the Western-financed Japanese attack on Russia in 1904, part of the Imperial British ‘Great Game’. Then it flowed with the German invasion of Russia in 1914, with the British-rigged overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, with the Collective Western invasion of Russia between 1919 and 1922, and with the German-led invasion of 1941. It ebbed at times, recently after 1991 until the NATO proxy Georgian invasion of Russian-protected Ossetia in 2008, and flowed again in the Ukraine after 2014.

The situation is usually presented as follows. There are only two choices in this world: either to be for Russia and for all the propaganda in favour of Russian nationalism, for instance, for the nationalist Tsar Ivan IV (admittedly much less harmful than his dreadful contemporary Henry VIII), for Tsars, especially for Peter I and the German Catherine II, who introduced feudal serfdom, for Lenin, who created the Ukraine, for Stalin, who murdered hundreds of thousands, and for xenophobia against anything Western. Or else it is possible to be for the West and for all the racist Russophobic propaganda against Russia and Russian culture, playing on the inferiority complex of pseudo-Western Russian liberals, for anything in favour of the US substitute Patriarchate of Constantinople, for LGBT, or for the CIA-run ROCOR, and for spreading Russia-hating myths like ‘Russian roulette’, which was only ever an American invention.

In other words, the situation is all about a choice between alternative nationalist political ideologies, but not at all about the Christian Faith, it is all about viewing the Church through the lens of nationalist politics. And yet it should be about Faith. What about Christ and His Church? Have they forgotten? There are in fact 16 Local Orthodox Churches. 14, nearly 90%, of them, are not Constantinopolitan or Muscovite (even if those two have some 50% of the Orthodox people between them – once you subtract all the Non-Russians under Moscow, not least the Ukrainians). And in any case, the vast majority of Churches people and educated clergy even in these two Local Churches of Moscow and Constantinople are for Christ and have no truck with nationalist ideologies. Only their leadership is contaminated by the anti-pastoral, Papist spirit of politics, power, money and prestige. Some wonder if such even believe in God.

The Fruit of Replacing the Christian Faith by Nationalist Ideologies.

The bureaucratic elite of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, to be exact the tiny minority of Phanariots, are well-known for their love of money, prestige and power, which is why they worship and imitate the Vatican and present themselves as ‘Eastern Papists’, ‘first without equals’. They form a Dictatorship without Catholicity. Sadly, as none of them is married, this also leads to perversions, just as in their favourite Vatican. And so their political ideology is Ecumenism yesterday, the Green Patriarch today, LGBT tomorrow, and the day after the next fad from the Western woke bandwagon. But nothing changes, it all remains exclusivist Greek nationalism, phyletism, called ‘Hellenism’. The Archpastors have been replaced by Archpoliticians and, sometimes, Archbandits. And the bureaucratic and careerist elite of the Patriarchate of Moscow, where there was once great potential, similarly fell from freedom and grace.

Copying Greek nationalist Phanariots, in recent years they invented their exclusivist and racist ideology, ‘the Russian world’ – the same Dictatorship without Catholicity. However, unlike the secularist Greeks, they marketed themselves as having ‘traditional values’. Sadly, Lenin’s mummy is still revered in the centre of Moscow, the capital of abortion, and Russia is full of statues and the names of Stalin and his henchmen like Sverdlov. Traditional? And some bishops are sexual deviants or mini-oligarchs. Masculine? Well, have you seen the videos of Russian metropolitans with boyfriends and bishops? Masculine? Orthodox Christianity is about family life and that is definitely not anti-woman and anti-children. The Moscow Patriarchate will even support the new ROCOR heresy of rebaptism, as long as clericalist ritual is observed and the Patriarch’s name is heard. All others in the other 15 Local Churches are schismatics or heretics.

This is because, according to the nationalists, the schism and heresy of all the others is not to commemorate the Russian Patriarch, even though that is forbidden by the local State and ROCOR did not do it for eighty years. Certain of the senior bishops are mini-oligarchs who rule their dioceses under harsh, totalitarian regimes, as the new, all-American ROCOR has copied. One metropolitan in Russia has recently bankrupted his large metropolia. Some priests are very poor because their bishops take their money with threats, like mafiosi. As a result, you have many scandals, like those in the Skopin Diocese, in Kolomna, Rostov on Don, Nizhny Novgorod, Tatarstan, Kazan (among several others) and that here in England. And then there is the viper’s nest of careerist homosexuals who attack seminarians and honest priests. Where is the Russian Church of the Saints, of the New Martyrs and Confessors, part of the whole Church of Catholicity of All the Saints?

Conclusion: The Victory of Christ

And where is the glorious Church of Constantinople, led by the Antiochian St John Chrysostom, followed by a host of saintly patriarchs, persecuted monks and faithful? Archpoliticians and Archbandits instead of Archpastors. And it is the same problem everywhere. When bishops stopped being real monks, then it all went wrong, beginning with Rome in the late eighth century. Regardless of where human-beings live, in Moscow, Constantinople, or anywhere else, regardless of when they live, yesterday, today, or tomorrow, human nature remains the same and the temptations are the same. There is one acid test, the one that Christ gave us and lived for us in his Life on earth: By their fruits you shall know them, and, A new commandment I give you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

On Athos, in Diveyevo, Optina and Pochaev, Putna and Prislop, and in all the other bastions of Orthodoxy, we are praying for the freedom of the Church. Away with luxury cars and yachts, private railways carriages, silken cassocks and gold! The Diveyevo Brotherhood is coming for the Great Cleansing of the corrupt in the Church. St Sergius of Radonezh, St Xenia of Petersburg, St Seraphim of Sarov, St Matrona of Moscow, Elder Nikolai Guryanov all lived in poverty. And so will you!