First Published in Russian at: https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2026/09/14/tri_illyuzii_rossii
Introduction: White Man Speak with Forked Tongue
I have known Russia and two of its incarnations, the Soviet and the post-Soviet Capitalist, for fifty-three years, since my first visit to the USSR in 1973. I also used to know the last Russians, now no more with us, who had been born in its previous incarnation, that of the Tsars’ Russia. One constant question throughout this time is why Russia has made so many tragic mistakes in its history, why it has been so misled and believed in the illusions sold to it. It often seems as though Russians have behaved like naïve Native Americans.
The latter sold their lands and their natural resources to the first colonists in exchange for strings of beads and other shiny toys from manufacturing industries, whether metal axes, rifles or fire-water whisky. It is rather as one South African Protestant Archbishop, Desmond Tutu, put it: When white missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray’. We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land. Russians too have believed in shiny beads.
- The Imperial Illusion: Nine Generations
The first illusion began around the year 1700. Members of the Russian elite, the boyars, were forced to shave off their beards and change their dress, selling out their national identity in order to imitate Western feudalism and its aristocratic ideology. Thus, Imperialism began, serfdom was introduced and a profound inferiority complex vis a vis the West appeared. The Russian elite parroted Western aristocrats, enslaving and exploiting their own, all in exchange for Constitutionalist Anglomania and Republican Gallomania. For Russia, for the Russian language and for Russian people they had only contempt.
The Russian aristocracy fell for Western toys and many came to speak French as their first language and speak Russian like Frenchmen. Some light came in 1861, when one Tsar had the courage to abolish serfdom. In the age of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, vast amounts of land were returned to the people, despite the treacherous aristocrats. Like him, the intelligent realised how they had been tricked and needed to return to pre-Imperial Russian Tradition, in Church architecture, iconography, singing and to the spirit of St Seraphim of Sarov, so despised by the elite. This illusion lasted essentially for 200 years until 1917.
- The Soviet Illusion: Three Generations
Then, in 1917, the intellectual elite, made up of the most Westernised elements of the aristocracy and the middle class, (‘the intelligentsia’) was sold another Western ideology. This time it was the old-fashioned German philosophy of Marxism, which promised ‘a bright future’, paradise on earth. And the natives accepted this new illusion and believed in it, many dying as a result, including themselves. For those who did not escape into exile died before firing squads and in camps, or starved to death in Saint Petersburg, besieged by another German ideology, the new-fashioned philosophy of Fascism.
It was only as a result of this Western genocide in the 1940s that the Soviet elite started out on the path to Russian sobriety. But this was also a path that was undermined by economic stagnation, the inevitable result of Marxist ideology, with its ideological blindness and so failure to recognise human nature and basic human needs. Thus, it was that after 75 years, three generations, of a fairy tale of economic illiteracy, at the end of 1991 Soviet Marxism collapsed into bankruptcy. It was not defeated militarily, it destroyed itself. But then yet another illusion would be naively accepted.
- The Capitalist Illusion: One Generation
From 1992 on, the Zionist billionaires who rule the USA and their vassals who rule Western Europe sold naive ex-Soviet people ‘freedom and democracy’, with the poisoned fruits of consumerist Capitalism and privatisation. Another shiny new toy for the natives. Again, the Russians accepted it all and believed it. And so treacherous oligarchs, CIA lovers, appeared together with a vicious bandit mafia. Lawlessness prevailed. Millions died prematurely in the 1990s epidemic of mafia murders, alcoholism and despair. However, unlike the first two illusions, this one began to end fairly quickly. In little more than 35 years it was over.
In 2015 the Zionist billionaires and their political vassals who rule the West persuaded President Putin to accept a new toy, the Minsk Accords. He agreed to these in the hope that peace and justice would come to the Donbass. Instead, the CIA-run Kiev regime continued its genocide there and simply gained time to build huge defences, minefields and trench systems, planned by NATO, which only after four and a half years the Russians are finishing off. Such naivety, as President Putin has himself admitted to, is now ending. In 1700 Russia turned West. After believing three Western illusions in thirteen generations, it is at last returning to its roots.
Conclusion: Tsar Nicholas II
Tsar Nicholas, who was the first to understand the error of the Imperial illusion and wanted to return to Russian roots, was betrayed by virtually his whole country, including most of the State-loving bishops. Aristocrats, like members of his own family or the pervert Yusupov, rejected him and joined in with the slanders. Only a few individuals remained faithful and most of them, like Patriarch Tikhon or our own Count Pavel Benkendorff, soon died or were martyred. And there was little repentance for any of this.
Neither among many old emigres, the last of whom I knew in exile in Paris, who went on justifying themselves and maligning the Tsar, nor among the majority of post-Soviet people, was there repentance. Russia and the whole Orthodox world are still suffering from that treachery, self-inflicted suffering. Healing will only come through repentance, for treachery cost millions of lives. All this goes back to the first illusion and spreads to the second and third illusions. Without the return to its roots, the Russian tree will die.