Author Archives: Father Andrew

On St John of Shanghai and Western Europe and the Old ROCOR

Introduction

Faithfulness to the beliefs and practices of St John and the Old ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), to which he belonged, is vital for us his spiritual children, for he is a saint. The Old ROCOR of St John greatly venerated the martyred Tsar, who so loved and supported Orthodox of all nationalities, However, this heritage has largely been lost among the politicised bishops of today’s North America, who have adopted the practice of rebaptising other Orthodox into the Church, contrary to the Creed. Ironically, concelebration there with other Local Churches is rarer now than before the Act of Canonical Communion.

That was signed in Moscow in 2007, and we had fought for it for decades. This isolation is especially so in various dioceses, which today are virtually becoming a de facto American Russian Old Calendarist Church Outside Russia. All in St John’s life and writings contradicts the sectarian-minded, old calendarist bishops of today. Whether it is his attitude to the Catholicity of all the Orthodox Churches, his attitude to the Russian Church inside Russia, to the Tsar, to missionary work, and to money, all is different. To throw away his attitudes has been an act of spiritual suicide.

The Catholicity of the Church

In St John’s time, as in my time in the generation after him, the time of our beloved Abba Vladyka Antony of Geneva, the successor to St John in the see of Western Europe, our Archdiocese was in communion with all, whether the Churches of Constantinople, Serbia and Jerusalem or, already from 1991 on, with the Russian Church inside Russia, known as the Moscow Patriarchate. And ROCOR’s new calendar Romanian parish in Paris, with three priests, was the Archdiocese’s largest. There were no connections between him and old calendarist sectarians.

As St John said at the ROCOR Council in 1938: ROCOR must not cut off communion with other Local Churches (1). And in 1960 he preached that: We in ROCOR keep our unity, in communion with all the Churches, with whom it is possible to be in communion with (2). He concelebrated with all he could concelebrate with, just like Vladyka Antony and all of our generation. This is quite unlike today’s proud schismatics, who consider that communion with others would dirty them, for only they are ‘the One True Church’.

In St John’s time, ROCOR never declared that it was a separate Church or the whole Church, but simply an inseparable part of the Russian Church, temporarily working on a self-governing Synodal basis, until such time as the atheist regime in Russia has been abolished. St John wrote that each Local Church has a significance of its own…all together make up the one Universal Church and contribute to it their own specialities and gifts…Our ROCOR is the free part of the Russian Church…Spiritually the Russian Church is indivisible…

The Russian Church Inside Russia

You ask why I commemorate Patriarch Aleksei of Moscow. You say, ‘He’s a Soviet!’ I tell you, ‘Inside Soviet Rus is Holy Rus! God hasn’t abandoned our people. The Soviet Union is still Holy Russia’.

St John was clear that ROCOR was only part of the Local Russian Church and that it maintained spiritual unity with the other part, but it had been only temporarily forced to reject its administration. Just like us today. In 1960 he wrote that ROCOR is not spiritually divided from its suffering Mother, It prays for Her and at the same time is united with Her, until such time as the reasons for disunity have vanished (3).

In other words, just as in our case, corrupt administration did not mean spiritual division, only administrative separation and so freedom from its hatred, corruption and decay. Therefore, we live within a canonical Church, even if not in the Russian Church, which today is no longer captive to Communist atheism, but which is captive to Capitalist mammonism, the dollar, with all its forces of self-interested schism.

St John added that: ROCOR, no longer administratively submitted to Metropolitan Sergius and his Synod, remains as before, feeling spiritually one with the suffering Mother Church (4). Naturally, at that time the Synod never declared that the Church inside Russia was without grace. Indeed, Vladyka John said that the official Church in Russia does of course have grace, even if individual bishops behave unworthily (5). Moreover, in 1945 in Shanghai St John restored the commemoration of Patriarch Alexei II in his diocese and encouraged others to do so.

On 31 July 1945 he wrote to Archbishop Viktor of Beijing:  In view of the lack of information about the Synod Abroad for several years, any other decision of our diocese would make it completely independent, autocephalous. There are no canonical reasons for such independence…and would not be recognised by the Patriarch. Relations with the administration of the Church are now possible (6).

In his Epistle to his flock in Shanghai, written on 2 August 1946, he said: The information that canonical communion with the Moscow Patriarchate has been restored without hindrance has brought us sincere joy…We pray to the Lord, that he will hasten that desired and awaited moment when the First Hierarch of All Rus, going up to his Patriarchal place in the Church of the Dormition in Moscow will gather around himself all the Russian hierarchs who have come from all the Russia land and all foreign lands (7). This prophecy was realised in 2007.

True, in obedience to Metr Anastasy, St John later ceased publicly commemorating the Patriarch in the litanies, but he still commemorated him at the Great Entrance and the Proskomidia. Indeed, he continued to commemorate the Patriarch every day when he was in Paris. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer for him remains…liturgically we are one. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we with it and in it (8). When he was in Western Europe, for almost four times longer than he was in America, St John continued to correspond with Patriarch Alexei II and blessed parishioners to go to Patriarchal churches.

He certainly never accused the Moscow Patriarchate of heresy. Fr Peter Perekrestov pointed out that: ‘St John never in a single piece of writing, sermon or letter used the term ‘Sergianist’’. This was of course the purely political accusation, a pseudo-heresy invented for political reasons by the CIA and its asset Count Grabbe and their others. And they themselves later did fall away from the Church in the first manifestation of the ROCOR rebaptism heresy in the 1970s, so resisted by Vladyka Antony of Geneva (9). This was followed by the second manifestation of this same heresy in 2021.

The Tsar

The greatest crime committed with regard to the family of the martyred Tsar must be erased by ardent veneration for them and glorification of their spiritual feat.

The Russian Imperial Family in exile stayed in Tobolsk, the city of St John’s 18th century ancestor and patron saint, also called St John (Maximovich). Here too is another spiritual link. Increasingly, especially in Russia, St John the Wonderworker (another of his titles) is venerated as a second St Nicholas the Wonderworker, as he helps travellers. He is after all ‘Wonderworker of the latter times’, as we sing to him in his Akathist, composed by one of his spiritual children, who also later composed an Akathist to the martyred Tsar.

In his preaching St John rejected the lies of both liberals and conservatives about the Tsar and always sought the truth. The cosmopolitan, anti-patriotic bourgeois liberals, who helped depose the Tsar in February 1917, openly mocked and slandered him. They called him reactionary, corrupt and bloody, and most of them wanted to adopt an atheist Republican or possibly agnostic Constitutional (as in the UK) political system. Thus, they naively led the country into the bloody tyrannical yoke of the Communist atheists, who followed a German rabbi’s grandson, Marx.

The Western-loving conservatives, who also helped depose the Tsar in February 1917, bishops among them, lost their careers, money or estates and were bitter for this reason. They called the Tsar weak, indecisive, stupid, a religious fanatic and they murdered the slandered, pious family man Gregory Rasputin. Some of them said that the peace-loving Tsar should have murdered all his opponents (as they did under the White flag – it is little known that most so-called Whites were anti-Tsar) and especially hated anyone who reminded them of the state of the poor in Russia. Having sold out to Western countries in 1919, most went to live in Western Europe and some of them later even fought for Hitler.

St John considered that the Emperor Nicholas II had always been a model of piety and total dedication to God’s will, showing the patience of the Righteous Job, on whose day Tsar Nicholas had been born. St John deemed that the crime against the Tsar and his Tsarina was made all the worse by the murder of their innocent children. He said that such crimes do not go unpunished. They cry to heaven and bring down the wrath of God onto the earth. And so he called all in the Russian Lands to repentance:

Rus’ must bow down before the humiliated, slandered and martyred Passion-Bearer Tsar. Only then will he will have that daring before God, and his prayer will save the Russian Land from the misfortunes that it has had to bear. St John constantly repeated to others that only in such a case would the martyred Tsar and his Holy Family become new heavenly defenders of Holy Rus’ and that their innocently spilled blood would regenerate Russia.

Missionary Work

Orthodoxy in the West will revive. There will be Orthodoxy in Britain and Ireland, in France and Germany, in Holland and Spain and in America, too. Every language and nation will have Holy Orthodoxy. This is the charge laid on our Russian immigration for our repentance.

St John converted people to the faith wherever he lived, in Serbia, in Macedonia, in China, in the countries of Western Europe and in the USA. And he also united people. In Shanghai, he brought warring, nationalistic Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs and Chinese together. Later he did the same in San Francisco. For he was no Russian nationalist and imperialist, unlike the ROCOR bishops who put him on trial in America.

This openness to all nationalities, which he took from the Tsar, who had wanted to establish an Orthodox church in every European capital, is why St John was much criticised for his pastoral concern that brought him to allow a Western rite. Unlike Western Europe, where he lived for nearly twelve years, he lasted only three years among the Russian nationalists in the USA. What the critics of the Western rite at that time do not understand is that in the 1950s and early 60s there was a real Western liturgical rite, a living tradition. It then existed, just as St Tikhon had understood fifty years before St John.

All the rite then needed was modifying, returning to Orthodoxy. This is quite unlike today’s situation, when fantasy Western rites are developed. Since there is no living Western rite, all was tragically done away with in the 1960s, today’s ‘Western rites’ are artificial, inorganic restorations, resurrected museum pieces. They attract and live very few, they are not passed down organically from generation to generation. This is unlike the Orthodox rite which is organic, living, is passed down, and for which people know how to sing and read and feel the spontaneous gestures that go with it.

Love of Money

America is a great country, but greed and sensuality will be its downfall.

Here is the prophecy which says everything and for which some so much hate him. For they suffer precisely from these two passions – love of money and perversion. This is why they proclaim that St John did not wear shoes and gave them away to the poor, only because he found them uncomfortable! They need the very expensive vestments from Belarus, gold and diamonds.

For the new, dollar-driven Americanised bishops in their very expensive black leather shoes and with the obsessive personal cleanliness of the sensual, to dress barefoot and in an old cassock and vestments like St John (or St Seraphim) is unthinkable. They need silk and velvet. The most terrifying thing is that in the sixty years since St John was tormented to death, we have seen his above prophecy come true.

Notes: 

[1] Acts of the Second ROCOR Council, Belgrade 1939, P. 402

[2] St John Maximovich. On the Spiritual and Moral Significance of ROCOR, Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, No 6 (2007)

[3] Archbishop John (Maximovich), Brussels 1960, P. 13

[4] Ibid. P. 9.

[5] Letters of Archbp Antony of Geneva to Fr Dimitry Dudko (Posev, 1979 No 12

[6] Decree No 650 of 6 September 1945. Priest Dionysy Pozdnyayev, The Acceptance of the Jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Church Schism in Shanghai. Alfa and Omega No 2 (13) 1997, Pp. 150-151

[7] Ibid. Pp.153, 158.

[8] Bishop Basil Rodzyanko, On Vladyka John. http://www.episkopvasily.ru/ru/works/

[9] Archpriest Peter Perekrestov. The Helmsman of the Church, then and now – the All-Powerful Spirit.  http://www.pravos.org/docs/doc466.htm

 

 

 

The Russian Nationalist and Imperialist Church or a Trinity of East Slav Orthodox Churches?

By this all men shall know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

Jn. 13, 34

You ask why I commemorate Patriarch Aleksei of Moscow. You say, ‘He’s a Soviet!’ I tell you, ‘Inside Soviet Rus is Holy Rus! God has not abandoned our people’.

St John of Shanghai and Western Europe

Foreword: ‘Princes of the Church’

I was brought up in the old, persecuted Russian Orthodox Church of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, who himself was persecuted, suspended and put on trial by nationalist and imperialist ROCOR bishops, who also wanted to defrock him. For forty-seven years I remained faithful to that Church, until it became abundantly clear, in early 2022 before operations in the Ukraine, that the once Persecuted Church, which we had so loved, had become the Persecuting Church.

Worse still, the persecutors were shown to be none other than ROCOR’s newly-appointed, untrained, half-baked bishops. Those who called themselves ‘princes of the Church’ were those who loved money, stole, lied, slandered and cheated. The old bishops who belonged to the Tsar and whom we so loved and respected, must be spinning in their graves. How did this happen? Below I recount the story.

The Ukraine Tragedy and the Future of the Russian Church 

The armies of two brotherly peoples, both East Slav and both largely Orthodox Christian by history and culture, have been slaughtering one another for nearly five years in a war of attrition, just as in WWII. As a war of attrition, it will end just as suddenly. Two million have been killed or maimed, some 90% of them Ukrainians. Several thousand civilians have also been caught up in this since 2014 and died, mostly Russians (14,000 between 2014 and 2022 alone), let alone those killed in the NATO-armed Ukrainian invasion of Russia in 2024, run by NATO from Wiesbaden. And well over seven million Ukrainians have fled their country, heading, in almost equal numbers, east to Russia and west to Western Europe. They refused to be recruited by violence and needlessly die for the Globalists, who are being paid for Kiev’s NATO proxy Army to die.

Meanwhile, the majority of baptised Orthodox, whether practising or not, in both countries, as well as in Belarus and other countries in the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox Church, look on many bishops as bullying bandits, feudal mini-oligarchs (I quote Russian clergy and laity here), who, like the New ROCOR ones, are out to steal their churches. And that mentality feeds down to many priests, obliged to squeeze money out of their flocks for their bishops. Then the clericalist contagion spreads to them and they squeeze some out for themselves. The example comes from the top. Many freshly-baptised, post-Soviet clergy (and then by imitation ROCOR bishops) fell into the money-loving, ‘Wild East’ Capitalism of the 1990s and got stuck there. (There are also the sexual scandals with bishops, but that is another story).

How is all this possible? Only when the majority of ‘baptised Orthodox’ in both countries long ago renounced Christ and are only nominally Orthodox Christians, if Orthodox Christians at all. (As they say, ‘many are Orthodox, but few are Christians’). And only when a majority have patriots and not the politicians, who prefer hundreds of billions of dollars, euros and pounds and huge quantities of lethal Western arms to peace. In reality, most in both countries, baptised but never instructed (despite Christ’s commandment in Matt. 28.20), are pagans who have not accepted Christ, Who told us to love one another. And most want to dominate one another as imperialists, again contrary to Christ, Who told us to serve one another. How do this paganism and imperialism manifest themselves in the Church?

Paganism

The paganism of both peoples can be seen in their superstitiousness, the use of witchcraft and the evil eye, which have always been very widespread in all the Slav (as also in Catholic Southern European) lands. This comes from the underlying paganism, which has never been completely defeated by the Church, as is witnessed to by accounts both in the nineteenth century and in Soviet times, and which then revived enormously in the spiritual vacuum after the ideological collapse of the USSR, with a fascination for ‘extrasenses’, that is, for occultists, magicians, wizards and gurus and their weird, exploitative sects for the naïve and disoriented, who felt lost after the Soviet fall. This paganism is clear in the utter confusion between the spiritual and inward, that is primary, and the material and outward, that is secondary.

This can be seen, for example, in the aggressive preference for secondary Church rituals and customs of dress over kindness and tolerance for one another, in a belief in magic, ‘miracles’, ‘prophecies’ and ‘elders’, rather than in the effort to overcome our sinful, fallen nature. Again, the outward and bodily prevail over the inward and spiritual. And the spiritual is what is required in order to acquire Divine grace. For these pagans, everything is automatic, as in magic – which the devil can indeed provide, if people do not exercise their own will and sell themselves to his occultist magicians and witches. In the real world, nothing comes automatically, including the grace of eucharistic communion. And acquiring grace, as St Seraphim of Sarov said, is the aim of our lives, needs effort – the meaning of the word ‘ascetic’.

This superficiality was also manifest in the Russian Emigration, where One Church split into three warring, spiteful and hateful sectarian groups, not because of any difference in doctrines and beliefs, but because of politics. Love one another, said Christ, but the main practice of each group appeared to be, Hate one another. Similarly, as is well-known, many Russian churches, run by careerists who are devoid of pastoral activity and interest, appear to have a bigoted and ignorant woman or two at their entrance, who enjoy shouting at visitors and insulting them because they have committed some ritual error or are not dressed according to the taste of the insulters. Poorly-trained priests or laity who make others cry through their insults appear to be the anti-pastoral norm in certain churches, especially at confession and during sermons.

In turn, superstition, the almost fanatical attachment to mere outward rites, grew into a love for schism. It is deeply significant that the main, State-enforced schism in Russian Church history is called ‘Old Ritualism’. There was never any difference in doctrine between the Old Ritualists and the majority, who may be called ‘New Ritualists’, all was about ritual differences, all about the arrangement of the fingers in making the sign of the cross. Superstition bred obscurantism, the spiritual disease of pharisaically and joyfully condemning and denouncing others, and the obsession with finding and identifying ‘heresies’ and ‘schisms’, words hatefully and lovingly bandied about in Russian as the ultimate insult. In the land of record numbers of abortions and divorce, all agree on the Creed, but as for someone who differs in ritual…

Here is the origin of the cult of holy water among some Russian Orthodox. Clearly, this relates back to Slavic paganism. Now there is a great need for holy water, to be baptised in it, to drink it and to sprinkle it, but the concept that a child will be magically protected from colds by it, or that you can virtually trample on other people in church in order to get some at the Feast of Theophany or at water-blessing services of intercession after the Liturgy, having ignored confession and communion, is not Christian. And the concept that the use of holy water will magically heal or transform everything is pagan. I remember being asked if I could bless a Russian brothel. I refused. Again, others have been asked to bless the palaces and limousines of Slav oligarchs, who obtained their money over the dead bodies of others. I would refuse.

It has often been said that if the Russian Revolution took place, it was because of the virtual clerical prohibition before it to take communion more than once a year, a practice long conserved by ROCOR, as I only too well remember. In other words, church practice had become a ritual of private services, memorials or intercessions, rather than the common act of taking communion and so becoming a community. The secondary and outward had taken over from the primary and inward. Most Russian town churches today appear to be railway stations, people coming and going, staying for a few minutes to light a candle, or coming only after communion for some private service they have ordered. There are in fact very few parishes in Russia, in the correct sense of communities. Indeed, they are almost unknown.

Imperialism

Like Rome and then Constantinople (the ‘Second Rome’), Russia became an Empire and so was in its turn called the ‘Third Rome’. In other words, all three of these important historical Christian centres were tainted by one and the same Imperialism. The worst case was Rome, which actually developed a systematic, theologically justified and institutionalised structure of centralised power, called Papism, which actually changed the Creed, in order to vindicate its desire to control the whole world. According to this, a mere human-being, the Pope of Rome is the Vicar (Replacement) of Christ, the Head of the Church, the Holy Spirit proceeds from Him, and he is therefore infallible. All this is logical, if you accept a human-being as the replacement for Christ. But that leads to humanist idolatry, as the God-man is replaced by a mere man.

However, if you think that this article is some anti-Roman Catholic polemic, you are mistaken. The Second and Third Romes have exactly the same Imperialism as the First Rome, even if they have not (yet) justified it theologically. Thus, there are virulent Greek nationalists who will tell you in all seriousness (!) that nobody can be Orthodox, if they are not in communion with their favourite Turkish citizen, their Greek ethnarch (‘the first without equals’, as some heretically call him), the Patriarch of Constantinople (by the way, that has not existed for 573 years, it is called Istanbul). However, there are Russian imperialists/nationalists who will tell you that anyone who does not commemorate the Russian ethnarch, the Patriarch of Moscow (his present title), in services is a schismatic. (That favourite Russian word again!)

The Greek case is very strange, since many Patriarchs of Constantinople were heretics, especially in the first ten centuries, until the fall of the City in 1453, though more recently too. So we have to be in communion with a heretic in order to be an Orthodox Christian?! What about being in communion with Christ? As for the equally strange Russian case, it is a result of superstition and in turn of nationalist ignorance. The average baptised Russian Orthodox has no idea that there are 16 Orthodox Churches and that only one of them, the Russian, commemorates its Patriarch or main bishop in the litanies in services. What about commemorating Christ? Does this mean then that the Russian Orthodox Church is the only true Church, as the Old Ritualists claim, and all others are schismatics? (That favourite Russian word again!)

Moreover, the Russian Church had itself to grant independence (autocephaly) to three of the 15 other Local Churches, the Polish, the Czechoslovak and the American – and therefore they do not commemorate the Russian Patriarch. And parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation do not commemorate the Patriarch (as in France), or are not allowed to do so, by law, (as in the Ukraine and Latvia). Indeed, the Russian Patriarch is banned from even visiting such countries. The imperialist ignorance of many Russian Orthodox that there is a much older Orthodox world that exists outside Russia is astounding. Yes, diversity exists. The Church is like a bouquet of 16 flowers, all flowers, but all different. Accept the real Church, instead of living in a narrow nationalist ghetto, ignorant of history and reality.

Here we come to the essence of the ecclesial problem of both Greeks and Russians. Both have reduced the Church to a Greek or Russian Imperialist/Nationalist Church, they have put Caesar above Christ. This explains in the Russian case the aggressiveness, ignorance and even hatred towards Non-Russians, as displayed by Russians who were adults before the Revolution (I knew plenty of them), let alone by those after the process of Sovietisation. That Imperialisation of the local mentality has led to aggressive militarism, as can be seen in the recently-built Military Cathedral near Moscow, as can be seen in the behaviour of preachers such as Fr Andrey Tkachov, who appear to think, like other anti-pastors, Russian bishops and priests, that insulting Orthodox people is normal. How many women did you make cry today?

Some Russians were hated even before the Revolution, most notably in Poland, the Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltics, wherever people had been oppressed by centralised Russian nationalism and militarism. Nothing that happened after 1917 did anything to change that – indeed, Sovietisation made it all much worse. ‘We have the right to do anything we want, and local people must use our language in order to live’, they said, talking exactly like brash American Imperialists from ROCOR. Here is why the Estonian Kaja Kallas, the Pole Donald Tusk, the Moldovan Maya Sandu, the Ukrainian Yuliya Timoshenko and many a Georgian, came to hate Russians. And they found plenty of hypocritical and equally Imperialist Westerners, very jealous of Russia and greedy to steal its resources, to fund them for purely selfish reasons.

Towards the Restoration of Orthodoxy in the East Slav Lands

As the end of the Ukrainian tragedy and the Ukraine in its Soviet form draws near and it is carved up between the different countries, from which parts of it were taken, what is the future for the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’? For this is still the Soviet-invented name for the Russian Orthodox Church. Clearly, both names are incorrect in the sense that a Patriarchate in Moscow and a Russian Orthodox Church can only be relevant to the territory of the Russian Federation. Therefore, it has to stop imperialistically clinging on to territories outside the Russian Federation. Let the Baltics, Moldova, Belarus and the future Ukraine, whatever its actual national borders and future name (Kievska Rus?) will be, have their independence, just as the Orthodox in Georgia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and America had theirs generations before them.

Many Russians, and not only Russians, speak of Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine as a trinity. Indeed, they are, as all are East Slav nations, all speak similar, if not the same, languages, all are Orthodox by culture and history, all are closely related, with intermarriage normal. Now, the Holy Trinity is the model of Unity in Diversity, three Separate Persons in One ‘Undivided and Consubstantial Trinity’ in Church language. Is it not time for the three peoples and countries to have their own independent Churches, a trinity of Churches of Unity in Diversity, as is our model? Let each of them co-exist as friends, not as enemies, loving one another and intermarrying with one another, and not hating and warring against one another. Then we will see that they are really, and not merely nominally, Orthodox Christians.

For the moment, our hope is that all will start referring to the common spiritual heritage of the Russian Orthodox Church, that is, to the saints of all, perhaps especially to the New Martyrs and Confessors. The problem is that at present many only pay lip-service to the latter. The lives of the tens of thousands of those canonised so far are virtually unknown. Significantly, the baptised Orthodox masses still often prefer Stalin to his victims. The reason for this is that in their heads they belong to the Russian Nationalist and Imperialist Church, not to the Russian Orthodox Church. And this concerns not only many people, but also many clergy. The sad fact is that there has not yet been repentance for the past. And that is why they are still killing one another, idolising Lenin and Stalin, and massively aborting, divorcing and swearing.

Afterword: The King is Coming

Those who find this story sad or are scandalised by these truths should take consolation, recalling that the 16 Local Orthodox Churches number nearly 200 million. We, the masses of honest clergy and people, have suffered from or been misled by just a few thousand, who have like bandits seized and cling onto power and riches and war. Now when, as the proverb says, the fish rots from the head, then the head will be replaced by those rejected and placed at the bottom. Those despised, neglected, abandoned and hated at the bottom will replace the head. For when the King comes, and He is coming, the ‘princes of the Church’ will be swept away like so much chaff. This is not our doing, it is the doing of the Lord and it is marvellous in our eyes, for the stone that the builders rejected will become the head of the corner.

In the words of the Tsar’s Archbishop, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, on the 950th Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus:

The reality of Holy Rus is not a delusion or a phantom, but true. The prayer of the saints does not cease to rise up to heaven, those who shone forth in the Russian Lands pray for them now at the throne of God. But not only in heaven, but also here, on our sinful earth Holy Rus continues to exist. The power of those who fight against God has enslaved, but not destroyed Her. The Council of the ungodly who have dominion over the Russian people is alien to them, for it has nothing in common with the essence of Russia.

St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, on the 950th Anniversary of the Baptism of Rus

 

 

The World as Seen from Little Godmanstowe in Edmund’s Land

Exactly ten years have passed since we wrote and published the below. We wonder how Moses and Sarah fare today?

You will not find Little Godmanstowe on any modern map and there is no point in looking for it by satellite navigation, but it is still there, in the north of Suffolk, twixt Icklingham and Thetford, on the edge of the forest. True, on large-scale maps you can find Godmanstowe Farm, but you will not find Little Godmanstowe itself. That is because today it consists of just one small thatched cottage hidden down a winding, overgrown cart-track, all that remains of a small hamlet that fell into ruin in the agricultural depression at the end of the nineteenth century and was taken off the maps.

Today, in the single remaining farm cottage of the lost hamlet, tucked away behind high hedgerows and surrounded by an orchard, live Sarah Dove, aged 119, and her ‘younger’ brother Moses Dove, aged 115. Recently I was able to visit them. As we sat in their living room having tea by the steady ticking of the old grandfather clock, I asked them the following questions and recorded their answers. (We have kept the spelling of some of their pronunciations, grammar and words of broad Suffolk in our transcript of their answers. The differences all go back to Old English and so are more correct than the deformed modern English).

Q: Moses, how come no-one’s ever heard of you before? You and your sister must surely be the oldest living people in England and probably in the world. You should be famous.

A: Thass an easy one, that is. You see, when we were born in this little old house where we’re still a-livin’, daddy Jesse didn’t register us. He said that weren’t none of the guvvamint’s business, so we didn’t have any of them there birth papers like other folk. He didn’t hold with guvvamint, didn’t see why we needed ‘em. Mary the wise woman, who helped ma give birth, warn’t bothered either. And there were no-one else to say anythin’. Long afore we were born, there used to be other housen round us, but they were all empty, the rain came through the mossy thatch and they all come a-tumblin’ down, so we were all on our own. You see, there weren’t enough work on the land then, the fields were all overgrown and the thistles sprang up, and folk left for Norfolk, to Thetford, a-seekin’ work in the factory. Others went to foreign parts, ‘cross the seas to ‘Stralia and Canada. As for bein’ famous, no thank you! We’re quite happy the way we are, we don’t need to be famous.

Q: If you weren’t registered, then you didn’t go to school?

A: School? We didn’t have time to go to school, we were a-helpin’ at home, in barn, in field, a-hoein’ and a-ploughin’, a-hedgin’ and a-ditchin’, a-stone pickin’ and a-gatherin’ firewood, a-rabbitin’ and a-harvestin’, a-pheasant-beatin’ and a-gleanin’, not to mention the garden and orchard, we were far too busy to go th’old school. Anyway, school were over three mile away and we didn’t allus (always) have shoes. We had better things to do than go to th’old school for all that booklore. Our aunts and uncles, God rest ‘em, larned us to read and count well enough. I can write me name, what more do I need?

Q: Nowadays you won’t meet anyone called Moses. Why did your parents give you that name?

A: In them days you allus had a name from th’old Bible. If that weren’t in the Good Book, that weren’t a name, save for two. Them two were Edmund, in honour of our King, and Audrey. She lived out Newmarket way when she were a young mawther (girl). A mort (lot) of our forebears were called Edmund and Audrey in th’olden days. They were holy ones, like the ones in the Bible.

Q: Who’s on the throne now, do you know?

A: Well, our Sovereign’s King Edmund, he’s still a-sittin’ on his throne in heaven, a’rulin’ over his East Anglian kingdom, lookin’ down on us and helpin’ us here. But if you’re talkin’ about Lon’on, that’ll be old George’s gal, but I can’t rightly remember her name. You see, we were born in the time of th’old Queen, that were all different then, none of them there tractors like now, there were only hosses in the fields and an engine for the threshin’. I saw me first motor car when I were five year old, that were a sight, that were, now they’re everywhere, noisy old things, they are.

Q: And who’s the Prime Minister now?

A: I wouldn’t know that, they come and go all the time. Here today, gone tomorrow. I know there were that there Churchill, that were half-American, but after him I lost count. We had other things to do, a-ploughin’ and a-sowin’, a-reapin’ and a-harvestin’, we were too busied with seedtime and harvest.

Q: Do you go into town to do the shopping?

A: Oh no, we ha’n’t been in to Icklingham since I took me pension in 1965. That were when we had the last hosses. They died and I had me pension. I were a hossman all me life, what with general labourin’. Town is all dirt and noise. Anythin’ we need, John Bloomfield the farmer or his wife Audrey fetch and bring round. God bless ‘em both. He’s our landlord. They come round every mortal day and look after us. Mary’s a rare good cook too, bake her own bread. That do smell nice. You see, young John take what he need from our pension and so we live here without a care in the world, no rent, nothin’ to pay, no ‘lectric, no water, he do any repairs we need, he bring all the food we want and logs in the wintertime to mend the fire, lovely and cosy in here then. Ten year ago he had the roof rethatched for us, that cost a fair packet. Bloomfields been farmers here for ever, afore Henry’s time and they’ll be farmers here till kingdom come.

His daddy paid to put on the water in 1961 and had the WC put in. He put in the ‘lectric the year before. Mind you, we don’t like the ’lectric light, bad for your eyes, sooner have natural candlelight, we just use ‘lectric to cook and make the tea and for hot water. Very handy for that. Before that we had water from the well and used a privy in the garden. We still use the well water to make the dandelion and elderflower wine. That taste better like that. Anythin’ we need John get for us, just like his daddy, granddad and great-granddad did afore him. His great-granddad Cyril were a mighty fine man. He’d bring us pheasant and rabbit he’d shot, gave us a right good horkey (harvest home) and a good box at Christmas time. He looked after us right well. Lovely rabbit stews we used to have in them days, better than jugged hare.

Q: What about if you’re ill? Don’t you go to the doctor?

A: Don’t go to the doctor, we’re never ill. We grow our own veg and fruit and eat meat once a week on a Sunday, ‘cept in Lent, o’ course. If we feel poorly, we take a glass o’ Sarah’s elderflower wine and we feel better rightaway. At Easter we have lamb and at Whitsun we have gooseberries from the garden.

The air’s good here. My brother Jeremiah went up to Lon’on once. Never agen. He said the air were dirty. He come back and coughed and spluttered for a whole week. Thass why they call Lon’on the smoke. They do say now they built a road all round Lon’on so as you don’t have to go there. Thank the Lord. Thass all foreign folk there. The best place in Lon’on, said Jeremiah, is Liverpool Street Station, thass the railway station to get out o’ there and hie (hurry) home as swift as you can. Home sweet home. Thass why we’re long livers – fresh air, hard work and never go to th’old doctor. Old Cyril Bloomfield the great-granddaddy, at the end they took him orf to the horspital, thass what finished him off. Came out in a wooden box. Should a stayed at home, boy.

Q: Have you ever been to London?

A: We never been outside Suffolk, ‘cept to cross the border to Norfolk a few times. Been to Thetford twice. Been to Bury (Bury St Edmunds) many a time, at least once a year when I were young. After I took me pension, we took a trip to the seaside once, but there weren’t nothin’ to see there, just th’old water. Don’t go far afield now, there’s a lot to do in the garden and I’m rare slow now.

Q: Do you take a newspaper?

A: That’d be for gentry. What do we need that for?

Q: What about television or radio?

A: We don’t need any old tellyvision, all those pictures a-flashin’ afore you. Thass bad for you. We know what we need to know. We did have a wireless, but that broke after Hitler’s war and we never bothered to have it mended. Thass only bad news on the wireless, what them Lon’on folk get up to and what they be a’ doin’ in foreign parts. We don’t need to know that here.

Q: And the telephone?

A: We never had one o’ those.

A: (Sarah interrupts). Don’t need any o’ those. Every day, rain or shine, we walk up to the wood with our sticks and just sit there. John made us a bench with logs and a plank and we sit there and listen, a-mardlin’ (chatting), a-rememberin’ and a-musin’ on th’old times. That were a hard life afore the war in 14, but that were a good life. That seem like yesterday. The whisperin’ and murmurin’ o’ the leaves and the swayin’ o’ the wheat in the breeze tell us all we need to know. God speak to us through what He made. We talk to th’old trees and they talk to us. In the spring there are bluebells up there and in the summer the peggles (cowslips) come out.

Thass rare nice in the autumn, when the leaves do fall soft as ever leaves did fall. Leaves been a-fallin’ and trees a-growin’ since time began. I love th’old oaks. Stout as England. Our Edmund were tied to an oak by those wicked old Danes. When the Good Lord call us, we want to be buried up there, don’t we, Moses? Thass rare peaceful up there. I just want to fall asleep and not wake up agen and then they can leave old Sarah up there ‘mong the trees with Moses and Aaron, ‘neath the gentle wind on the hill and the swayin’ o’ the branches. Thass where I’ll have my peace and see ma and daddy and everyone on th’other side. On th’other side thass just like here, only far, far better, no aches and no pains, no chores and no frettin’.

Q: Who was Aaron?

A: (Moses). That were me twin brother Aaron. He died when he were only a day old, frail little old thing, he weren’t made for this world, so ma said. We buried him up there ‘mong the trees. He’s a-waitin’ for me now. Been a-waitin’ all these years. I’m a comin’, boy, I’m a comin’ soon.

Q: So there were three of you in the family?

A: (Sarah). No, no, there were seven of us. The eldest were Abraham and Esther, they died o’ the hoop (whooping cough) when they were just little mites. Then there were Abel. He were taken in the Kaiser’s War, out in France, in 1915. He were only 21. Thass his picture over the fireplace (she points to the enlarged photo of a private in First World War uniform), above the photo of ma and daddy on the mantelpiece. John’s father had it made big and framed it up for us on the fiftieth anniversary. They never did find Abel’s body, but there’s a little white cross out somewhere in France for him, the poor little mite. Private Abel Dove’s a-waitin’ for us on th’other side too. They’re all a-waiting for us there. Then there’s me and after me came Jeremiah. He were a worker, he were, never stopped and his little old heart gave out in 1959, God rest his soul. Then came Moses and Aaron, they were the youngest. Now there’s just me and Moses left in all God’s wide world. We’re the last, all alone, a-waitin’ for the Good Lord to come steppin’ ‘cross the fields, a-callin’ us, a-gatherin’ us in like ears of wheat, in His own good time. That won’t be long now. We’re ‘spectin’ Him any day.

Q: Did you never want to get married, Sarah?

A: I’d a married, but there were no min left to marry. They all got taken in the Kaiser’s War. So I stayed at home and looked after ma and daddy. They both died in 1946, after old Hitler’s war, within a week o’ each other. 82 were ma and daddy were 84.

Q: What about you, Moses? Why didn’t you marry?

A: I never were a one for marryin’. I didn’t want to be tied down. I loved to go a-wanderin’ in the woods and fields at night, a-listenin’ to the owls and the little old dormousen nestin’ up, a-watchin’ the clouds by the moonlight. Clouds is God’s angels, each one‘s got a story to tell. Only you have to watch ‘em close to know what they’re a-sayin’. In the summer I allus used to sleep out there, with just the foxes and the badgers and the leaves a’rustlin’ in the night air. In the winter, I’d go up there to walk at night, the leaves all a-rimed white with th’old frost. That were the life for me, next to God’s creatures.

Q: Sarah, what was the most terrible thing you heard of in your long life?

A: Well, I reckon that were the slayin’ o’ the Russian King in 1918, all those poor little children, they didn’t deserve that. Like lambs to the slaughter, they were. They did with them like they did with our Lord. Daddy and ma said the same thing. I was 21 then and that fair marked me. And truth to tell and the devil to shame, ever since then nothin’’s been right with the world, thass all been upside down, people rushin’ about, doin’ each other down, makin’ wars. No more peace ever since.

F’r instance, now they go under the sea and through the sky. Thass not natural. He made the fish to go under the sea. And if the dear Lord had wanted us to fly, He’d a given us wings. Thass angels that fly, thass not for folk like you and me. All those airyplanes, thass upset the weather. And then they went up over the sky where they should never a gone. That were downright presumptious, that were. They had no right goin’ up there. Nothin’ good’ll come of it, you mark my words. Pride go afore the fall. They’re tryin’ to go up like the Tower of Babel, outreachin’ themselves, makin’ tall things as ugly as sin. Well, that’ll all come tumblin’ down agen on their heads. Woe betide.

Mind you, if you go back, things started goin’ awry afore that. Our great-grandma Bathsheba, she were born in 1799 and passed over at 105, used to blame it on old Boney, the Frenchman. (Moses interrupts: Thass when they brought in th’old income tax. Wicked thing that, a-takin’ folk’s hard-earned money. Thass stealin’. Thou shalt not steal, it say, but they still steal through the tax). Well, Bathsheba reckoned Boney were the devil incarnate. Thass our Nelson stopped him, he were a Norfolk man, one of us, one of Edmund’s men. A brave heart he had, he died a’fightin’ for Edmund’s land, our dear land.

Only, after we won and we’d locked old Boney away, that all went to the heads of the Lon’on folk and they started a-takin’ other folk’s lands, just like Boney done afore ‘em, only they did it ‘cross the seas among them poor old black and brown men, a-stealin’ their land and their housen. So they ended up no better than Boney, just as wicked. Thass all wickedness. Black-hearted wickedness. And thass all written down in the big white book in heaven ready for Judgement Day, every deed and every word, nothin’’s forgot. God see it all with His all-seein’ eye. There’ll be a tremblin’ and a shakin’ in those days when He come agen, but there’ll be justice. They’ll say, that weren’t me, but that were they. The Judgement’ll be just, ‘cos the Judge is Just. Just you mark my words. The truth will out. Nothing’s hid that won’t be found out.

But then agen me granddad’s granddad, old Edmund Dove, told him and he told me how the ills began when they went and changed our calendar. Now we’re days and days out and Easter fall weeks afore it should, a few year ago that snew (snowed) at the new Easter! And Christmas come far too early. That don’t seem like Christmas at all. All the seasons are out o’ kilter. Thass against nature. That were them Lon’on folk that went and changed it. Went to their heads, you see. Then they upset our folk out in the colonies in ‘Merica and the colonials took against the German king that them old merchants and bankmen had brought over. They’d got rid of the proper king, you see, all for filthy lucre. That weren’t right either. We didn’t want a German king, we wanted our own king, like Edmund. Edmund were king of the folk in the north and king of the folk in the south, we were all one then, all Christian folk, all proper. Norwich were much bigger than Lon’on in them days, Lon’on weren’t much more than a village. Thass how it should a stayed.

A: (Moses interrupting). That were when all the wrong started, after Edmund’s time. In Edmund’s time there weren’t no Lon’on to speak of. O’ course, that old Henry made it all worse, but it were his great-great-granddad William that came over from France who started it, ‘cos Henry were just a-followin’ in his footsteps. Henry were William, you see, one and the same, ‘cos they had the same devil in ‘em and neither o’ them could keep the faith. Both foreign imps with foreign names, them names aren’t in the Bible. No Henry or William in the Bible. Henry were a Welshman and that William, he were another heathen Dane, but from France. They didn’t love England, our Edmund’s land.

Q: What do you think, Sarah?

A: Oh yes, that were them heathen Danes that arrowed our Edmund to the oak and made him a holy one that started it all, ‘cos they didn’t know the Ten Commandments. They were pirates, you see, thieves. That were the start of it all. Thou shalt not steal, but they stole. We still talk about our Edmund in these parts and when I were a young mawther, they shew me where it all came to pass, over in Hoxne.  I went there afore the War, the Kaiser’s War, that is, and I saw it all, a cross in the wheatfields. I remember it like it were yesterday. After the White King have come, Edmund’ll come back, a-marchin’ through the wheatfields with all his host of men behind him, all Edmund’s men and England’ll be England agen, and there’ll be peace for a time. Then that’ll be the end and the Good Lord’ll come back, just like He said He would.

Q: What should we do about bad kings like the German king and William and Henry? Should we rise up against them?

A: No, no, let the Lord judge ‘em. The Lord give and the Lord take away. Here today, gone tomorrow. If we’re worthy, we’ll get good kings. If we‘re not worthy, we’ll get what we deserve. He’ll take ‘em away in His own good time. You don’t want to do like that old Oliver who were sore vexed and chopped off the poor old king’s head. He were a wrong’un, that Oliver, he finished up bad. They cut off his head, just like he’d done to that poor old king. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. All the rum’uns (bad ones) that follow Oliver finish up bad.

Q: What do you think of Brexit, Moses? I mean leaving the European Union?

A: Europe Union? Never heard o’ that. That must be some Lon’on thing. We don’t have that hereabouts. We’re in our own land, Edmund’s land. Everyone should live in their own land, thass where God put us. Thass sovereign land. Thass natural. We live in the house where we were born. We’re Edmund’s folk, we are, allus will be.

Q: What do you think of all the things happening today, Sarah? I mean the terrorists and all these bombs?

A: Thass all the same thing, these Mohameddans with their wicked old bombs. Young John Bloomfield told us about what they’re a-doin’. You see, the Mohammeddans, they ha’n’t got the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill. Thass all written in the Good Book. They haven’t got the Good Book. Just like them old heathen Danes who slew Edmund – they didn’t have the Good Book either. Hellfire, thass how they’ll end up. Sulphur and brimstone, that stink somethin’ awful. Mind you, thass the same thing for them there soldiers they sent out to kill the Mohammedans, they’re not Christian folk either, they haven’t got the Ten Commandments. Thou shalt not kill. Thass crystal clear. Keep the faith, keep the commandments and you can’t go wrong.

Q: So what’s the future of the world, Sarah? It all looks so bleak. Bad is on all sides.

A: Don’t you go a-frettin’ yourself (worrying) about that. The White King is a-comin’ back in Russia to put it all right. You’ll see. They started a-spreadin’ the evil all round, they got William to bring it here from France, they took it overseas, and then, with the passing o’ time, they thought they could take it to Russia as well, but that wouldn’t take in Russia. Thass where the evil were held in check. Before long the White King’ll come back there and sweep all the wicked there clean away, and then he’ll come here and do the same, in the twinklin’ of an eye, that’ll be.

My great-uncle Isaiah, who were married to my ma’s aunt Martha, told me that before Hitler’s war, after we’d been allies with Russia. He were a preacher down at the green tin tabernacle, that ain’t there no more now. He walked miles and miles every Sunday to preach to local folk, a rare righteous man, he were, one of the Peculiar People, allus dressed in black, with a long white beard. He knew the Four Gospels by heart and a lot o’ the psalms. He preached a rare good sermon and baptised a rare many folk in the river near Bury, a rare clean soul he were and the Good Lord told him many a secret thing.

You see, at the end o’ time, when Our Lord come back, there’ll be a judgement and the good ones’ll go to heaven and the wicked ones’ll go to hell. Folk nowadays don’t know that and thass why there’s so much wickedness about. All those wicked min (men) who take money and lie and start wars and murder, they’ll all burn in hell. If they knew that, they wouldn’t do it. Too late for ‘em now. Thass a terrible thing, to die without a-sayin’ sorry.

Q: Thank you, Moses and Sarah. I’ve learned a lot.

A: (Moses). You need to live and do, boy! Thass th’only way you can larn. Live with God’s gentle things and you’ll know all you’ll ever need to know.

 

 

 

 

Akathist to the Mother of God of Walsingham

Countess Edith the Fair (c. 1025 – c. 1086), called the Gentle Swan, was the wife of Harold Godwinson, Earl of East Anglia. He later became Earl of Wessex, then the last English King of England, and was killed at Hastings by the invaders of 1066. Edith had six children by him, including Gytha, who married Vladimir Monomakh, the future Saint and Grand Duke of Kievan Rus. In her vision of 1061, Edith was instructed by the Mother of God to build a replica of the house of the Annunciation in Nazareth in the village of Walsingham in Norfolk, England. This was all on the eve of the ravaging of England by the last Vikings on 14 October 1066.  It is said that when England returns to Walsingham, the Mother of God will return to England. Therefore, this heavenly vision is commemorated by Orthodox on 15 October, together with St Andrew the Fool, who in Constantinople in the tenth century saw the Mother of God praying for the whole world beneath Her Protecting Veil.

With the Blessing of His Eminence Atanasie, Romanian Orthodox Archbishop of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

 

Kontakion 1

By revelation from on high to the noble Countess Edith the Fair, Thy Holy House was raised up in holy Norfolk. This betokened comfort before the coming misfortune, after which pilgrims all flocked along the Walsingham Way, seeking consolation. Then, O Most Pure Maiden Mary and Mother of our God, in times of darkness and impiety, Thy holy veneration was forsaken and Walsingham wept. But now as Thou art honoured anew in the vision of Thy graceful handmaid Edith, Queen to Godwin and mother to Gytha of the Rus, the spouse of Monomakh, intercede for us with Thy Son, Christ our Saviour, that we may cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Ikos 1

Angels and men alike marvelled at the grace of the Holy Spirit which was announced from Thy Holy House, England’s Nazareth, on the eve of England’s misfortune. Gabriel’s voice announced anew comfort for those oppressed in forthcoming dark and wicked times by foreign men, when holiness was denied. And now we too marvel, for Thou art come again like a quiet but constant flame to our green land to comfort us once more in these latter times. Therefore, we cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, O Virgin Who in exceeding humility didst accept the words of the Archangel Gabriel.        Rejoice, Mother of the Church and Mother of all Christians.
Rejoice, O grace-bearing Lady, forgiveness for our foolish ways.
Rejoice, consolation for the faint-hearted.
Rejoice, comfort for the sick and weary.
Rejoice, warmth for the hearts of the forsaken.
Rejoice, bringer of sailors to safe havens.
Rejoice, strength for the weak in faith.
Rejoice, sweetness for the broken-hearted.
Rejoice, guide of those who have lost the way.
Rejoice, gatherer of the faithful in the last times.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost ready us to enter from the earthly Walsingham into the Heavenly Jerusalem.                                                                                                                                            Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 2

O Sovereign Lady, Queen of these Isles, we have known and we have continually beheld Thy meekness and consolation. Many dead have been brought back to life, sick healed by Thy love, lame made whole, blind restored to sight and possessed made whole at Thy Holy Shrine, the New Nazareth. We confess Thy mild-heartedness and we know Thy tender mercy, therefore we cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 2

Who can understand the mysterious workings of the Three Persons bound by Love? Who can speak of God’s blessings? Who is privy to His counsel? For He raises up and He casts down, He humbles and He exalts, He afflicts and He heals. Therefore, He humbled us on account of our sins and cast down our land, taking away the ancient love of the Orthodox Faith. To Whom then shall we flee in our sorrow, to Whom then shall we stretch out our hands, if not to Thee, O Most Pure Lady of Walsingham? Therefore, with repentant hearts we cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, Thou Who dost intercede with Thy Son for us.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost protect us from anger.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost cleanse us from our sins.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost pray for the forgiveness of all.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost lighten the way of hope for us.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost comfort broken hearts.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost gather together the scattered faithful.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost quell the divisions and tumults of those who have lost the Faith.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost set at naught the councils of the ungodly.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost pilot those who sail through the sea of life.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost forsake none in Thy care.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost cover us all with Thy most Precious Veil.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 3

Mighty works have appeared through Thee and grace has poured forth the silvery dew from heaven over Walsingham, O Most Blessed Virgin. Pious pilgrims to Thy Holy House from near and far have heard anew the announcing voice of the Holy Archangel and been moved to cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 3

As Thou dost possess love beyond words, O Most Good Lady, Thou dost make the light of Thy grace to shine forth in places of darkness and sorrow. Therefore, Thou hast not forsaken us as orphans, but through Thine Image Thou hast come to us who glorify Thy tender-heartedness and cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, ocean of wonders.
Rejoice, abyss of mercy.
Rejoice, ever-flowing wellspring of grace.
Rejoice, unquenchable source of healing.
Rejoice, warmth and comfort of the meek.
Rejoice, Thou Who hast surpassed the laws of nature.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost turn our gloom into bliss.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost change our tears and sorrow into joy and gladness.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost turn persecution into victory to the wonder of all.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost defend us who are oppressed.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost shame the hopes of our enemies.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost make glad the hearts of those who sing to Thee.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 4

In times of trouble when temptations assail us, when sorrow and pain visit us, when patience and love fail us, we hasten to Thine Image and pouring forth our tears before Thee, we cry out from the depths of our hearts: Stretch out Thy God-bearing hands, speak to us counsels of wisdom, lead us up out of evil, that with thankful hearts we may cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 4

In times of old, pilgrims heard of Thy glory and, followed by kings and queens, wended their way to Thy Holy House along the Palmers’ Path, from south through Exning and Thetford, from east through Norwich along the Walsingham Way, from west and north through Lynn, crying aloud before England’s Nazareth: How is it that this is granted to us, that the Mother of the King of kings is come even to our home at the very ends of the earth? And beholding Thine Image, O Lady, they began to sing and cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, O most pure Lily of Nazareth scenting the whole world.
Rejoice, New Eve, giving birth to the salvation of Old Adam.
Rejoice, O Star of Bethlehem, Who gavest birth to the Tree of Life.
Rejoice, O Garden of Paradise, Who gavest birth to the Church.
Rejoice, O Tree of the Cross, granting the Providence of God.
Rejoice, O Cypress of Zion, shading all mankind.
Rejoice, O Rose of Jericho making fragrant all England.
Rejoice, O Vine of Cana, slaking the thirst of all.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost cut off the roots of all our passions.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost sow a meadow of virtue.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost plant prayer in our hearts.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost vouchsafe us to partake of Paradise.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 5

Like unto a star guided by God through the night sky, Thy precious Image has returned to us as of old. In times past the great and mighty bowed down before Thee, but now it is for us Thy humble and thankful servants to keep festival and cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 5

Beholding the plans of the ungodly to destroy veneration for Thee, Thou wast hidden for many years. Now in Orthodox wise Thou art restored to Thy Holy Dowry, and the mystery of our story turns full circle. Therefore, beholding this blessing, with fear and love we cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, invincible fortress of mercy, peace and love.                                                                 Rejoice, unshakeable stronghold of beauty, goodness and truth.
Rejoice, Thou Who hast escaped the wiles of wicked and foolish men.
Rejoice, Thou Who hast put to shame the new Herods who have no love for infants.
Rejoice, Thou Who hast rendered vain the schemings of the enemies of the Orthodox Faith.
Rejoice, Thou Who hast stopped the mouths of blasphemers.
Rejoice, Thou Who hast restored Thy Presence to the English land.
Rejoice, Thou Who hast preserved Thine Image undistorted.                                                    Rejoice, Thou Who dost avert thy gaze from the evil deeds of men.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost not turn away Thy most pure countenance from us sinners.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost shine forth forgiveness to the repentant.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost open the doors of the Mercy of God to all.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 6

All through the English land the Annunciation of the Archangel Gabriel proclaims to us Thy tender humility, O Queen of Heaven! For since Thou first didst come to Thine Isles, we have been saved again and again from the righteous chastisement for our manifold sins. Therefore, as by Thy mercy Thou hast saved us in times past, so now save us once more, that in thanksgiving we may cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 6

Shine forth on us the light of hope before the end, O Most Pure Mother of God, who by Thy birthgiving hast proclaimed the splendour of salvation to the whole world. Forsake us not to the hands of the Enemy, and forgive us the time of unfaithfulness when the foolish were led into error. May the English land once more become Mary’s Dowry as of old, may the love of God flower here in these latter times, may churches and monasteries be raised up once more. May the people, delivered from cruel errors, celebrate with joy and gladness, confessing the Holy Trinity in truth, knowing the Holy Spirit from the Father, according to the words of the Saviour, and cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, Mother of God and Mother of all Christians.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost enlighten all human minds with Thy love.
Rejoice, Thou Who didst adopt mankind at the words of Thy Son.
Rejoice, taking away every sickness and healing every disease.
Rejoice, bringing to safe haven the tempest-tossed.                                                                   Rejoice, unwaning comfort of those in captivity.
Rejoice, unending protection of those persecuted for righteousness’ sake.
Rejoice, patience of those who suffer for the faith.
Rejoice, crown of martyrs.
Rejoice, retribution of tormentors.
Rejoice, loosing of the bonds of those who are bound.
Rejoice, freedom of those captive in body and soul.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 7

Wishing to admonish those who had forsaken Him, God the Righteous Judge permitted the English land to be stolen away from the Orthodox Faith on account of our sins. The nations of the West have been in turmoil, error has abounded for nigh on a thousand years, but now the end is not far. All who set their hope in Thee, O Lady of these Isles, swiftly flee to Thee, awaiting the Saviour. From beneath the ruins, He has given Thee to the faithful as a sure and steadfast hope before the end. Therefore we cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 7

Dread signs and wonders have been shown forth in these latter days, O Mother of God. Blood has filled all the earth, pestilence has struck the world, locusts have filled the airs, fire has fallen from the skies, kingdoms have fallen, yet the Orthodox Faith has remained among us who for long were orphaned. True worship of the Trinity, true confession of the Holy Spirit and the times and the seasons of the Saints are kept, the Faith is preached unto all the ends of the earth. Gathering together the faithful remnant from Thine Island-Dowry and conquering our enemies, Thou art come anew to Eastern shores, O Queen of all. Beholding this new wonder, we all pray with hearts and minds repenting and cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, O mighty Sovereign Lady, Whose glorious light shines from the East to the West.
Rejoice, pillar and confirmation of the Church.
Rejoice, defence and protection of every shrine.
Rejoice, victory vanquishing the world.
Rejoice, help of the helpless and hope of the hopeless.
Rejoice, Thou in Whom all peoples set their hope.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost save those who had lost hope.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost hearken to heartfelt prayer.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost protect us from enemies.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost strengthen us through Thy presence.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost trample Satan beneath our feet.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost shield us beneath Thy Protecting Veil.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 8

Thou hast revealed a wondrous sight, O Most Holy Virgin, in returning to English shores and becoming Queen of Norfolk in threefold vision to Edith the Gentle Swan, keen and wise in her understanding. Nigh on one thousand years have passed and yet the memory of Thee has not died in these Isles. May true veneration of Thee be restored through Thy Son our Saviour Christ. Beholding the righting of age-old wrong, we receive Thy mysterious blessing with fear and trembling and in awe we cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 8

Thou dost enfold the whole world in the arms of Thy love, O Ever-Virgin Mary. Thy journey has been from the East even unto the West, that all might bow down before Thee in godliness. Therefore, as the Light from the East, shine down upon us, forget not Thy Dowry of old, forsake not Thine Isles and their sinful peoples, O Lady, that from the depths of repentant hearts we may cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, O joy of all joys.
Rejoice, O unending cup of tender love.
Rejoice, O consolation of the latter times.
Rejoice, O sweet delight of the age to come.
Rejoice, O bringer of blessings and secret hopes.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost mercifully look down from heaven to earth.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost forsake the joys of heaven for our salvation.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost enter with grace into the hearts of all.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost hallow our hearts with Thine Image.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost make the homes of the poor more splendid than royal palaces.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost make glorious the churches of God with thy lowly countenance.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost dwell in the homes and hearts of all who honour Thee.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 9

Folk of every age and position in life hasten in pilgrimage to Thy Royal Shrine, O Bride of God. Thy hands once held God, but now hold us instead. Thou dost enlighten and console all, warming the broken-hearted in Thy God-bearing hands, O Queen of Heaven. Therefore, making glad, we cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia!

Ikos 9

The eloquence of men is thwarted, their flowing streams of words run dry, they are powerless to find words to praise Thee, O Virgin Mary, for no mouth can praise Thee as is meet. Yet, should we altogether fall silent, then the very stones of the earth will cry out to praise Thee. Therefore, unworthy though we are, our earthen lips cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, inspired sayings of the Apostles.
Rejoice, heartfelt songs of the Martyrs.
Rejoice, fiery words of the Prophets.
Rejoice, golden speech of the Fathers.
Rejoice, bold confession of righteous.
Rejoice, mystic strength of unceasing prayer.
Rejoice, reward of those who struggle against the passions.
Rejoice, indomitable protection of the persecuted.
Rejoice, guide of the young and rest of the aged.
Rejoice, boast of maidens and glory of mothers.
Rejoice, shining with the glory of which words cannot speak.
Rejoice, O Daughter of Adam and Mother of our God.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 10

O Most Holy Mother of God, we call on Thee again, pray that the world may yet be saved. The plots and snares of the Evil One are spread over all the face of the earth, nations rage and storms of worldly temptations rise up against the Church of God, though She will prevail even against the gates of Hell. Therefore, as in Cana of Galilee of old, only say a word to Thy Son and our God, that He may change the water of temptation and human sorrow into the wine of repentance and divine gladness, that we may unceasingly cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 10

O Most Holy Bearer of God, be for us an invincible rampart against the legions of enemies, seen and unseen, who so sorely persecute us. For thou dost fight staunchly and unfailingly for us, who cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, Thou Who dost stretch out Thy God-bearing hands above us.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost trample the spirits of malice beneath our feet.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost shame the plans of the demons, accepted by deluded men.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost make evil to flee away at the thought of God.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost drive the illusions of despair from us.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost still the surging sea of life.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost command the storms of temptation to cease.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost pilot the tempest-tossed.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost deliver us from the depths of sorrow.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost stretch forth Thy hands to those who perish.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost set our feet on the path of salvation.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost strengthen our hearts for battle.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 11

As Thy Son accepted the widow’s mite, accept also our song, O All-Holy Lady, and grant that we may ever offer up our prayers to Thee, Who dost guide our life through the shadows of this deathly world to bright places. Grant us forgiveness of our sins, that we may enter into the Kingdom of Heaven and cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 11

O Most Good Lady, stretch out Thy Protecting Veil, which Andrew saw in the Great City, over all the earth. Shine forth from lowly Norfolk, like the full moon in the dark night of ungodliness and blasphemy. Enlighten our Isles once more with the splendour of Thy purity, that our voices may rise up in Walsingham and in all places and cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, sunrise driving away the demon hordes of the night.
Rejoice, brightness fairer than the morning star.
Rejoice, warmth dearer than the Sun.
Rejoice, ray of hope from the age to come.
Rejoice, unfading light of angels and men.                                                                                    Rejoice, Thou Who art beauty resplendent beyond all speech to tell.
Rejoice, Thou Who art in truth clothed with the Sun of Righteousness.
Rejoice, Thou Who art crowned with the stars of Faith.
Rejoice, Thou Who art adorned with a raiment woven with the gold of Mercy.
Rejoice, Thou Who art scented with the roses of virtue.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost enlighten the darkness of unbelief.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost clothe us with the armour of light.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 12

Grace upon grace we have received through Thee, O Most Pure Maiden Mary. Those who call on Thee with faith go not empty away, for all receive the gift of God according to their need and are crowned with joy. Therefore we cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

Ikos 12

We hymn Thee, we magnify Thee, we bow down before Thee, O Most Pure Lady. Unable to praise Thee as is meet, we fall down before Thy precious Image and in repentance we cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, sweet dawn of our souls.
Rejoice, bright daybreak of our hearts.
Rejoice, blessed morning of our lives.
Rejoice, height beyond our understanding.
Rejoice, unfading glory.
Rejoice, unceasing bliss.
Rejoice, unending goodness.
Rejoice, gladness beyond words.
Rejoice, Thou Who alone art truly Blessed.
Rejoice, Thou Who art exalted above all Creation.
Rejoice, Thou Who art with the faithful at the hour of death.
Rejoice, Thou Who even at the Dread Judgement dost save those who hope in Thee.
Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 13

O Lady praised by all, Mother of the Church and of all Christians, emulating Thy Son and our Saviour in Thy tender mercy, Thou dost cry to us: Fear not, little flock! I am with you and none is against you! Therefore, falling down before Thee with love and giving thanks with tears, we cry out to Thee with faith: Alleluia.

This Kontakion is read three times. And again Ikos 1 and Kontakion 1

Ikos 1

Angels and men alike marvelled at the grace of the Holy Spirit which was announced from Thy Holy House, England’s Nazareth, on the eve of England’s misfortune. Gabriel’s voice announced anew comfort for those oppressed in forthcoming dark and wicked times by foreign men, when holiness was denied. And now we too marvel, for Thou art come again as a quiet but constant flame to our green land to comfort us once more in these latter times. Therefore, we cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, O Virgin Who didst in exceeding humility accept the words of the Archangel Gabriel.        Rejoice, Mother of the Church and Mother of all Christians.
Rejoice, O grace-bearing Lady, forgiveness for our foolish ways.
Rejoice, consolation for the faint-hearted.
Rejoice, comfort for the sick and weary.
Rejoice, warmth for the hearts of the forsaken.
Rejoice, bringer of sailors to safe havens.
Rejoice, strength for the weak in faith.
Rejoice, sweetness for the broken-hearted.
Rejoice, guide of those who have lost the way.
Rejoice, gatherer of the faithful in the last times.
Rejoice, Thou Who dost ready us to enter from the earthly Walsingham into the Heavenly Jerusalem.                                                                                                                                            Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Kontakion 1

By revelation from on high to the noble Countess Edith the Fair, Thy Holy House was raised up in holy Norfolk. This betokened comfort before the coming misfortune, after which pilgrims all flocked along the Walsingham Way, seeking consolation. Then, O Most Pure Maiden Mary and Mother of our God, in times of darkness and impiety, Thy holy veneration was forsaken and Walsingham wept. But now as Thou art honoured anew in the vision of Thy graceful handmaid Edith, Queen to Godwin and mother to Gytha of the Rus, the spouse of Monomakh, intercede for us with Thy Son, Christ our Saviour, that we may cry out to Thee with faith:

Rejoice, O Lady of the Holy House, Who dost ever comfort those who pray to Thee with faith.

Prayer

O Most Holy Maiden Mary and Mother of our God, Who in humility accepted the Good News of Christ from the Archangel Gabriel in lowly Nazareth, our sure hope and calm haven, blessing of our lives, joy of those who grieve, healing of the sick, wisdom of the darkened, reward of the wronged, Thou seest our misfortune, Thou seest our sorrow, help us for we are weak, guide us for we wander, Thou knowest our sins, may they be forgiven as the Lord deigns. O Lady Who announced England’s Nazareth in Walsingham, deliver the land where we live from its errors, restore the Orthodox Faith to Thine Isles and shine forth like an unwavering candle flame in our hearts, making us once more to be Thy Dowry. Save and preserve Thy servants (NN) and all of us here present who pray to Thee with tears. Comfort and protect us who stand beneath Thy Precious Veil, for we have none other than Thee, O Birthgiver of God, to comfort and protect us unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Robert the Devil, the Dismemberment of the US Empire, the Dismantlement of the US Vassal States, and the Dewesternisation of the West, of Russia and of the Church

Foreword: Robert the Devil, the Grandfather of the Anglosphere: 1066-2026

Every year I go past the ruins of the castle of Robert the Devil (Robert le Diable), just outside Rouen in Normandy, France. This Robert is the main character in a medieval legend about a wicked man who was the offspring of Satan and a woman. Most historians identify this mythical figure with a real, evil man – Robert I of Normandy (1000-1035), the father of William the Bastard by his mistress, who was a tanner’s daughter. William (1028-1087) was the Norman mass murderer, who invaded England with some 750 Viking ships in 1066 and has ever since been known as ‘The Conqueror’. It was he who in 1067 transferred his Zionist financial backers from Rouen to his new capital of London, thus founding the City of London. He went on with his barbaric warriors to plunder England (his record is called the Domesday Book – the Book of the Day of Judgement), genociding England and greedily eyeing Wales, Scotland and Ireland for the future.

The 1066 Invasion was not an isolated or disconnected incident. It was only part of the whole process of imposing the new racist ideology of plunder, justified by the Divine superiority of ‘Europe’ or the ’West’, and implemented after the Germanic takeover of the Roman Papacy. There are many dates in this takeover, stretching between 1000 and 1100, marking events which would have been unthinkable in 1000, but which had become normal by 1100. These include the murderous heresy-hunting in the 1020s in France, military campaigns in Spain and Italy from the 1030s, which saw the Popes blessing massacres by their mainly Norman mercenaries, the cutting off of the West from the Church in 1054, the ‘Papal Dictation’ of Hildebrand in 1075, claiming that the Popes are infallible, and the First Crusade in 1095-1096, with its massacres of Jews in the Rhineland and of Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land, where both had been living in peace for centuries.

Like the rest of the European elite, the Bastard’s Viking-descended Norman aristocrats, who plundered England and then formed the ‘British’ ruling class together with English traitors, later took part in the looting of the Capital of the Christian Empire, New Rome, in 1204, and then attacked Russia in more ‘crusades’. That looting was to lead to the permanent occupation of New Rome by the Ottomans in 1453. In the nineteenth century, the Norman-founded British (the word ‘British’ marked the revival of pagan Roman Imperialism) Establishment sided with the Ottomans again. This was its full-scale, unprovoked invasion of Russia, known as the Crimean War, which left half a million dead. Later it supported the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Christian Bulgaria. Although, ironically, William the Bastard spoke no English, his father had founded the Anglosphere, whose centre was to go from Venice and Amsterdam to London in 1688 and then from London to Washington in 1941.

Meanwhile, in the Ukraine: 2014-2026

In 2014 the democratically-elected government of the Ukraine in Kiev was toppled by a violent US-organised and EU-backed coup using snipers, which cost the US $5 billion, according to the Europe-hating Nuland. The new regime, composed largely of extremist Neo-Nazis from the far west of the Ukraine, set about genociding the Ukrainians who did not agree with their Fascist ideology, especially in southern and eastern Ukraine, parts of Russia transferred to the Ukraine in 1922 by the sadistic Western-backed monster Lenin. After the peaceful and spontaneous self-transfer of Crimea (95% Russian) which joined Russia, few in the south and east of the Ukraine, terrified and intimidated, accepted their lot. Some rose up and formed peoples’ militias for armed resistance. And over three million fled Kiev’s genocide and oppression to live in freedom in Russia. To the frustration of the genocided Ukrainians, the weak Russian government did nothing, except engage in diplomatic talks.

The resulting diplomatic agreements, called the Minsk Accords, were never implemented by the Western Powers and its proxy in Kiev. Finally, at the end of 2021, huge Kiev forces, NATO-trained, equipped and financed, massed in the east of the Ukraine despite the Minsk Accords and stepped up their genocide. At this, Russia gathered a force of about 120,000 troops to protect the Ukrainians in the far east of the country and also to threaten Kiev from the north in order to pressure the regime into serious negotiations. After only one day, on 25 February 2022, Kiev agreed to talks in Minsk and Istanbul, after eight years of refusing them. However, at the start of April 2022, the regime reneged on its peace agreement under pressure from the Collective West – the US, the EU and the UK, through their emissary Johnson. Unexpectedly the Russians found themselves in a very weak situation. Their forces were too small to liberate even the east of the Ukraine.

Indeed, its main force was composed of the Wagner Group, a private army of mercenaries and ex-convicts, led by a corrupt, power-seeking oligarch, Prigozhin, and local militias. The small Russian Army itself was weakened by corruption and disorganisation. And the lawyer-led Russian political leadership, always acting according to international law, unlike Kiev, did not know what to do. The Russian chaos of the start resembled the same chaos there at the start of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941. Moreover, they naively realised that the conflict was not between Russia and the Ukraine, which was a mere proxy, but between Russia and the Collective West, represented by the Nazi-founded NATO. This wanted every last Ukrainian to die for it. The Russians of February 2022 had not at all been prepared for this. And so today the Western-created conflict in the Ukraine is in its fifth year and has left about 2,000,000 dead and wounded soldiers, the vast majority of them Ukrainians, outmatched by the very cautious Russian forces, who have lost about 120,000.

Defeat and Dismemberment: 2026 –

Despite military escalation, caused by hubris, that is, the arrogant overestimation of self and underestimation of rivals, the US Empire, formed in 1941, has now lost free access to the grain corridor of the blockaded Black Sea ports, which has become a Russian Lake. Elsewhere, and for exactly the same reasons in another conflict that it needlessly started, the US is losing free access to the oil corridors of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Through further hubris, it may yet lose free access to the Baltic Sea. The US thought it could defeat Iran in a weekend and so repeated Hitler’s hubris of 1941, when he thought he could defeat the USSR in two months. US forces have already been forced to flee West Asia, where Iran has destroyed US bases as far as the Jordan, Kuwait and Iraq. The US will probably have to flee these and all the feudal puppet Gulf States, as Iranian missiles can reach them, and then quit its Crusader fortress, Zionist-occupied Palestine, where the people are in revolt.

The US also intends to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany. Will this lead to the US abandoning all its European vassals, its NATO and EU puppets, especially the minute Baltic States, occupied and held like an unloaded gun to the head of Russia? Withdrawal from Europe, from Italy, Britain and the rest of Germany? All is possible – the US is bankrupt to the tune of $40 trillion and has few arms left. What will happen to its Asian vassals, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, where many also want an end to the US occupation? As for Latin America, with Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua and Cuba, the US is hated by all there, except by the rich oligarchs and their puppets, corrupt politicians and journalists. The US is going to be left to concentrate on itself. Here, dealing with its bankruptcy and the collapse of its infrastructure, its hopeless public school and health systems, mass poverty, drug-addiction and much else, will keep it busy for decades.

The US-led West has behaved like a bully, whose victims have at last been technologically, militarily and economically strong enough to band together in solidarity because of the bully. Western aggressiveness has achieved the once unthinkable. It has allied the vastly diverse and once divided Russia, Iran and China (RIC), which have weapons far in advance of those of the now backward US. And it has also won them the sympathy of 90% of the oppressed, Non-Western world. After all, this is the third invasion by the Collective West of Non-Western Russia in just over 200 years, Napoleon’s, Hitler’s and NATO’s. Those invasions, although always led by one country, France, Germany or the US, were all multinational and all ended in the same way, catastrophically. This is a racist and imperialist war, for the West was trying to extend the border of its blocked ‘Europe’ to the whole Ukraine and so cut off the ‘racially inferior Asiatics’ in Moscow. 85% of the Ukraine is not Europe’s, but Russia’s.

Dismantlement and Freedom: 2026 –

As for that western end of the North-West peninsula of Asia, called Western Europe, two straitjacket organisations, both centred in Brussels, positioned between the Germanic north and the Latin south, are being dismantled. Both are ruled by nuncios, trained by the successor to the Papacy in Washington. The US-led NATO and the EU, that have held Western Europe together for over 75 years, are splintering. Their European administrative elite is irrationally destroying its own countries, cutting off its nose to spite its face, blowing up Nordstream and even refusing to use Russian aircraft to stop forest fires. The largely Orthodox south-east of Western Europe has had to be repressed by undemocratically-elected Germanic EU leaders, just as it was by the German princelings who were appointed to rule Romania, Greece and Bulgaria in the nineteenth century. All want to leave the EU straitjacket and NATO aggression. This is also visible in Catholic Poland, Hungary and Slovakia – see below.

For many in the ex-Catholic south of Western Europe too, in Frexit France, pro-Russian Italy, anti-Israeli Spain and little Portugal, never at ease with the US-imposed and desacralising Protestantisation of Catholicism in the 1960s, want out. Their peoples want their sovereignty back. This leaves only the largely Germanic and highly Americanised north-west of Western Europe. But even here there are voices, especially on the left, that dissent from US imperialism in Gaza, on the West Bank, in the Lebanon, Iran and the Ukraine. And on the right, many also want their countries back. Sovereignist Parties are taking over, whether they are the AfD in Germany, the National Rally in France, or Reform in the UK. Once the parasitic, US-trained and appointed elites of Europe, from London through Scandinavia and Germany to the Baltics, who only ever implement ‘Daddy’s’ policies, are gone, with or without their pay, the people could take over. Goodbye, EU and NATO.

The future is at stake. How new politicians of left and right can co-operate, and they will have to, in Western Europe, remains to be seen. In any case, it seems clear that the old Globalist/Zionist/American ‘centrist’ elite, which bet everything like a crazed gambler on the Zionist US, Ukraine and Israel, is doomed, rejected by left and right alike. It is doomed not only because of the popular opposition to it and its attempts to repress that opposition, but because it has bankrupted its countries. They cannot even afford the elite’s proposed absurd remilitarisation, which the people neither want nor need. New governments will emerge, faced with facing up to the horrific imperialist past of Western Europe. They will be forced to make peace with the first, third and fourth largest economies of the world, those of China, India and Russia, and with their ex-colonies. China for manufactures, India for labour, Russia for energy, and ex-colonies for justice. Here is the future.

Afterword: The Fall of the West, a Dewesternised Russia and a Dewesternised Church

With the defeat in 2026 of the US by technologically advanced Iran and the coming collapse of the US-imposed Kiev regime in the Ukraine and the advance of Russia to the western Ukraine, the delusional dreams of the West are over. Already many even very secular people are talking about ‘The Post-West’, what happens now that 500 years of supremacy based on a mythical racist ideology backed only by a now lost military superiority, are over. In fact, as we said at the beginning of this article, it has been going on not for 500 years, but for 1,000 years, headed by Robert the Devil. The criminal dreams of such as Kaja Kallas to destroy and then fragment Russia, plundering its vast natural resources, are over. The virtual reality of a Crimea occupied by the UK, as in 1854-56, a Belarus and Western Ukraine occupied by Poland as in 1920, a southern Ukraine, Baltic and White Sea, and eastern Siberia occupied by Italians, British, Americans, French, has remained virtual.

It means that Russia can at last free itself from the Western ideology of Communism, imported from German Jewry, and from the Western ideology of the Imperial period that began with Peter I, just over 300 years ago. This meant enslaving the Church under a Protestant Oberprokuror bureaucrat and Anglophile sadistic aristocrats enslaving in blind imitation peasants (as in the Enclosures and Highland Clearances in England and Scotland), as portrayed by Pushkin, Gogol, Saltykov-Shchedrin and many other 19th century Russian writers. A Russian Church would surely decentralise, at long last liberated, as it would begin behaving as a pastoral, and not as a political, arrangement. Its politics, whether under the Soviet, post-Soviet or Imperial periods are a 300-year hangover from Westernisation. The Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople has to do the same, ridding itself of its Westernisation, now evident in the fact that its administration is little more than a CIA front.

Although a dying, totally Amercanised and very right-wing sect of the Russian Church in the USA is now desperately clutching on to totalitarian censorship through dictatorial methods, imitating the autocratic Trump, the rest of the Russian Church is freeing itself. Dictatorship will be resisted in the Church in Western countries. Decentralisation after 300 years of Western centralisation means the return of both the Russian Church and of the Greek Patriarchate to Conciliarity. That is, to Catholicity in the Orthodox sense of the world, to the practices of a Church based on Councils, concelebration and the consultation between clergy and people working together in freedom. This Conciliarity is what in the secular world lies behind the developing economic Alliance of BRICS. However, its origin, however forgotten by decadent Westernised bishops, is in the Church. And there are plenty of real Orthodox bishops in the 16 Local Churches who have not forgotten the meaning of Conciliarity.

 

 

 

Q and A: On the Suicidal Path Taken by ROCOR since 2007

Nobody goes to heaven by sending others to hell.

Q: Looking back twenty years after the 2006 Church Council on the relics of St John of Shanghai, what do you think that the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) should have done after its reconciliation with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007?

A: ROCOR played a very important role in the last half of the last century. Do not forget that from 1950 until 1966, it had a saint in its midst, Archbishop John of Shanghai and Western Europe. Then it witnessed to the Western world of the persecution of the Church by the Soviet atheist State, the inherent worldliness of KGB-manipulated ecumenism and modernism, it spoke in spiritual freedom in the place of its brothers and sisters in the Patriarchal Church, who were enslaved as hostages inside Russia. Having sent representatives to the Second Vatican Council, ROCOR’S greatest moment came in 1981, when, although sixty-four years late, it began the work of canonising the New Martyrs and Confessors. This work is not complete, as archives open, as we see from the July 2026 Synod in Moscow, where new names of New Martyrs and Confessors have entered the Church calendar.

Indeed, from the Year 2000 on, ROCOR no longer served a purpose, since the Church inside Russia had been freed from the State, as proved by the fact that it too had at last begun to canonise even more New Martyrs and Confessors. Since the generation of those who had been adults before the Revolution of 1917 had all but died out by 2000, ROCOR’s destiny was to become four autonomous Metropolias, part of the Mother Church, taking over its Diaspora, as its title of ‘Russian’ was already becoming mythical. If it had joined in with Moscow, it could have spearheaded Russian Orthodox missionary work and witness in the Diaspora, co-operating with others, separating out into four regional Diaspora Metropolias. It would not have become the Moscow Patriarchate, but simply the Russian Orthodox Metropolias of Northern America, Latin America, Western Europe and Oceania.

This is exactly what I worked for after 2007, the event of unity for which we had patiently been waiting since the repentance of Moscow at its Jubilee Council in August 2000. But ROCOR did not work for this after 2007. In May 2006, standing at the Fourth ROCOR Council in San Francisco, where I was one of the ten speakers, I heard the former US ambassador to Kiev, John Herbst, whispering behind me to the then Bishop Agafangel from Odessa, saying: ‘This looks bad. We shall have to work against it from inside’. He was talking about ROCOR’s Conciliar decision (by over 95% to under 5%) to merge with Moscow. He meant that since the decision had been taken, ROCOR would have to be sabotaged from inside, its infiltrated key assets, jealous narcissistic psychopaths, would be activated. And that is exactly what they did, using their agents, who had long ago been planted inside ROCOR for future promotion.

The Moscow Patriarchate? How naïve they are, just like the Russian State, outwitted, as usual, by the infiltration of the CIA! The first indication came immediately in May 2007, when directly after the service in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, where I had concelebrated, one of the most senior CIA-asset priests in ROCOR (he is still alive) turned to me and said in English: ‘We’ve done it’. I knew what he meant by that, though he thought that I did not. I was not a recruit. In May 2007, after the Act had been signed, one ROCOR bishop returned to his country to be greeted by his colleague, the local Moscow bishop, with a smile and the words: ‘Now we are one, we can work together as one’. The ROCOR bishop, a CIA asset since the 1960s, answered him shockingly, that nothing of the sort was going to happen. And herein lies the sin of ROCOR – it did not merge and so lead the way in the Diaspora.

At best it became a museum Church, a relic of the past, turning in on itself, and claiming exclusivity before the outside world as an ideological ghetto, all financed by you know who. Incredibly enough, some extreme right-wingers, later schismatics, in ROCOR before 2007 had actually predicted that Moscow would take over and destroy ROCOR, once the Act of Canonical Communion had been signed in 2007. This was a lie born of the paranoia of elderly pharisees, who were afraid of losing power. In fact, as we have said, it was just the opposite, it was ROCOR which deceived naïve Moscow, using its newly-obtained paper unity with Moscow in order to claim canonicity and so destroy itself. In reality, the small but poisonous American faction gradually destroyed the ROCOR of St John of Shanghai, whom it had already persecuted, suspended and effectively killed in 1966, now hypocritically claiming him as their own!

It denied that he had ever given his shoes away to the barefoot poor, saying that he did not wear shoes because he found them uncomfortable! (I quote a ROCOR bishop). ROCOR sent its control freaks outside the USA to impose its unexportable, Protestant-based, US imperialism on other countries, so ‘draining the swamp’, in fact, however, creating the swamp. It set up the new ROCOR as a sect, that was de facto in communion with no-one, because it considered that all other Orthodox were hated heretics and needed rebaptising. This was to reject the Catholicity and communion of the Church, as is typical of all sects. All it could do from this moment on, as the Russians and Russophiles of the Tradition left ROCOR or were even openly expelled from it, as we were, was to recruit young, naïve, male Protestant converts of the Zionist Evangelical type to replace the people and refill their ranks.

The old ROCOR was killed and the new ROCOR of ignorance of history and Russia, pharisaic condemnation and right-wing fanaticism (the same playbook as had been tried by the Grabbe faction in the 1960s and 1970s) and podcasts for incels, was substituted for it. The new ROCOR flattered their pride, telling neophytes that they had at last found ‘the One True Church’, hypnotising them into spiritual illusion (in Russian ‘prelest’). It was spiritual corn syrup for naïve Americans and a pool of votes for the desperate Republican Party, openly and naively supported by the then ROCOR Metropolitan. ‘You see’, he said, ‘we must vote Trump, as he took part in the anti-abortion march for life in Washington’. Astounded by his naivety, I thought, does he not understand that some politicians will do anything for votes? Does he not know about the misogyny of this man? Does he not know about his Epstein connections?

One day, after this nightmare is over, Moscow will wake up, ceasing to be distracted by the tragedy in the Ukraine, by the Greek invasion of its canonical territory there and in the Baltics, by nationalist centralisation, by the error in Africa, the distressing episcopal scandals of careerism, corruption and depravity, and behave as pastors and not as politicians. Then it will at last deal with ROCOR’s rebellion against the Orthodox Tradition and communion, and apostasy from it, too late realising the huge self-imposed losses of pastors, people and international credibility. Meanwhile, the other fifteen Local Orthodox Churches continue to witness, and we continue in them and with them. Moscow will have to catch us, through overcoming its schisms, restoring communion and concelebration, decentralising its Non-Russian parts, returning to the canonicity/conciliarity/catholicity of the Church.

 

 

On the Present Decadence, the Post-West and the Pre-West

The closer the collapse of the Empire, the more insane its laws.

Cicero, c. 44 BC, assassinated soon after

A fish rots from the head.

International Proverb

Decadence is a period when all collective and individual excesses (= national and personal sins) are not only legally permitted, but also encouraged. This is because all spiritual and therefore moral values (since morality comes from spirituality) have been lost in those societies. Thus, collectively, Western nations, like the Vikings of old, make wars on behalf of Satan against other countries in order to steal their resources, murder or kidnap their leaders, hide behind proxies who foolishly die for them, engage in piracy and genocide, and despise international law. Individually, hundreds of millions of souls resort to drugs, alcohol and depravity, entailing epidemics of death, disease, abortion, divorce and broken homes, which create unbalanced and rootless adults.

A US President as foul-mouthed as any vulgar trooper and bullying as any mafia gangster, Fascist (‘liberal’) European politicians who despise their own and other peoples and more or less openly engage in sexual perversions and cocaine-consumption, laws which allow the State to murder young people (abortion) and old people (euthanasia), laws which allow men to become women and women to become men, adults to be infantile, psychic illnesses considered normal and, above all, terrible pestilences (covid) and wars (as prophesied in Matt. 24, 6-13 and Lk. 21, 11) take place. These wars are all about the lust for power of a ‘civilisation’, which is based on the plundering of other countries by organised violence, and therefore make war against peace.

That millennium of organised violence, which culminated in worldwide wars in the last century, murdering a hundred million Non-Western ‘subhumans’, half of them Russian and Chinese, is very nearly over at last. Today we are witnessing the dying flailings of the cornered beast, which is in fact World War III. Its politician puppets and media hirelings, who every day spout lies which would shame Goebbels, still glorify the Western past, which was founded on violence and loot, and praise its imaginary Global (Zionist) future: ‘The West is Best’. They do so only because they are paid to, as they have no truth, conscience, integrity, right and wrong (morality). They live for power, worldly glory (fame), riches, lust and war. ‘Every man has his price’, they say.

We saw this in the lock-ups (‘lockdowns’) of Western populations which accompanied the accidental (?) release of the covid virus. After that we saw this in the restrictions, censorship, illegal imprisonments and debanking of dissidents, and ‘cancelling’ of Russia, promulgated among Western populations, after the US-installed and financed Kiev regime began persecuting and genociding Russian-speaking Ukrainians. The only reason for all this was for the millennial elites of the Western European legacy States to cling on to power. By creating fantasy bogeymen, pestilence and a ‘war’ by a country allegedly intent on marching from Moscow to London, the elite paid by arms merchants proclaim to their brainwashed plebs that they do not need peace.

And because the Church is in the world, some individuals of the elite in the Church are infected and stained by all this. They are outwardly in the Church, but in fact they are ravening wolves in shepherd’s clothing, fallen into the same worldly passions as their masters who infiltrated them. They are not of the Church and the Church spits them out like fishbones that have been stuck in our throats for years and which we have been choking on. Meanwhile, the real Church goes on, seeking everything that is not of this world, spiritual power, the glory of God, the riches of the spirit, the love of God and peace. The rest has no interest. We look for the restoration of Holiness, the Nation, the Family, the Person and Peace. This will come after the collapse of it all.

This collapse is the collapse of the West. Russia is already becoming the ‘post-Western West’, by which we refer to the ‘West’ that was invented in the eleventh century, imported into Russia over 300 years ago, and now dying out. Even some in the West are following Russia and also becoming ‘post-Western’. Thus, the war in the Ukraine is between Europeans who follow the Tradition and ‘Ukrainians’, in fact Galicians, who share in the Fascist ideology of the 1022-2022 West, promoted by the elite of Western Europe, recently – Napoleon, Hitler, Churchill, Thatcher, Starmer, Sarkozy, Macron, Merkel, Merz. This is Fascism because it oppresses all who reject the cult of the West. It also rejects us, because we are ‘Pre-Westerners’, that is, we put Christ above all.

The thousand years of the West after ‘the Age of the Saints’ of the first ‘Pre-Western’ millennium were a technological ascent, but a spiritual descent, and have now reached an end-point. Although the elite, ever greedy for power, fame, money, lust and war, justifies its continuation, some people can see its end, especially the young. Having seen the consequences of war, drugs, alcohol, depravity, abortion, divorce and broken homes, they are starting to return to the Church, to the ‘Pre-West’. This is not the Church of the elite of ravening wolves in shepherd’s clothing, it is the Church that seeks spiritual power, the glory of God, the riches of the spirit, the love of God and peace, the restoration of Holiness, the Nation, the Family, the Person and Peace.

 

A Destiny

Foreword

Come from the country, from a very small town in North Essex, I have been asked why I am where I am today: a mitred archpriest of the Russian Church and rector of one of the largest Orthodox churches in England, which is in my native city. I have been persecuted and slandered by cruel and evil men for telling the truth, and sent by Divine Providence to the Moldovan part of the most hospitable and friendly Romanian Church, whose Moldovan Archbishop is the kindest bishop I have ever met. As one of our many Russian parishioners, who has known me for over sixteen years wrote to me just now: ‘You have gone from thorns to the stars’. However, the answer to the question why I am here is in four revelations that came to me long ago.

Revelation One: Childhood

In childhood I was influenced of course by my parents, my two elder brothers, grandparents, relatives, friends, schoolteachers and fellow pupils. The third child of a third child father and a third child mother, a great many of my relatives were Victorians from the century before last. From them and from all the local people, especially from the older ones, I obtained a keen historical sense. In childhood three people influenced me especially, an aunt and two elderly people, who were unofficially called saints by others. Although they were all Christians, they would not have called themselves Protestants or Catholics. They had been illuminated from on high. There were five other local people who influenced me in particular in early childhood, who were officially called saints by others. These were: Sts Albright (794), Cedd (664), Osyth (c. 700), Edmund (869) and Audrey (679), who had all lived in England’s golden age of holiness, within 250 years of one another.

I asked myself why there had not been any saints in England for nearly a millennium? Why had the Holy Spirit, whose fruit is the saints, dried up? What had gone wrong in the history of England? Why did the Establishment version of English history begin with the catastrophic defeat of England by Papally-blessed Norman Viking thugs in 1066, when I knew about King Alfred the Great, who loved other peoples and had converted the English Vikings to Christ nearly 200 years before? Why did the Norman-founded Establishment insist on calling the English ‘Anglo-Saxons’, when they never called themselves that? Why did the English write afterwards that the Norman massacres were so terrible that it seemed as though ‘Christ and His saints slept’? And how was Old England overlaid and concealed by a disreputable Britain and then British Empire? Here were questions to which I sought to find answers in many places and from many people.

Revelation Two: The Wars

Born in the middle of the last century, I grew up with my grandfather, who told me about his First European War in Baghdad, Jerusalem and Thessaloniki. And I grew up with my father, who told me stories of his Second European War in Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Italy, Austria and elsewhere. Snatched from a quiet and peaceful country home for military service and sent abroad, he saw what the British Empire actually was. He had had no idea what it was and had only been told something about a civilising mission. Instead, he found in Egypt, Sierra Leone and South Africa a thieving, corrupt and racist crime regime, which exploited the native peoples. Yes, the British drank tea from China in ‘china’ cups, but it had been paid for with African slaves and Indian opium and millions of lives had ruthlessly been destroyed. That was the Empire. My father also explained to me that the then British Prime Ministers are only puppets of the Zionist Empire – as they still are, all come from the same factory.

Revelations Three and Four: Christ and Russia

At the end of childhood, when I was twelve years old, I received a double revelation, when I saw my future. This came to me when I saw a film which opened with a scene of spiritual immediacy. This was a scene with a Russian priest conducting a funeral. After this, I simultaneously read the Gospels and began to teach myself Russian. All had become clear to me, except for the details.

Afterword

Aged twelve, I knew God’s will for me, my destiny, though I did not know when and how, who and what. The rest has only been putting two and two together. Fundamentally, nothing has changed. Today I am still waiting for the Russian Church to find its freedom. It has wonderful saints and martyrs, but its pastors have been suppressed by politicians and I am unlikely to see it free in my lifetime. 300 years have passed, but it is still subject to the rule of Caesar, to Imperialists, to Soviets, to the CIA, to the evil anti-missionary careerists, and to all the rest who oppose Christ. The greatest saint and missionary of the Russian emigration, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, was essentially martyred by the ecclesiastical politicians of the USA.

 

Those who would like to know more can obtain the book Paradise Just Beyond: Fragments of an Autobiography, 1956-2026, 168 pages, A5, spiral-bound. This will be available in August from frandrew_anglorus@yahoo.co.uk for £5 or $10 from overseas, payable by Paypal.

 

 

Message

Dear Father Andrew,

On the joyful occasion of your 70th birthday, I wish to offer you my heartfelt congratulations and assure you of my prayers, together with those of all the clergy, monastics and faithful of the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

As we give thanks to God for the gift of your life, we also give thanks for the many decades that you have faithfully dedicated to the service of Christ and His Holy Church. For nearly fifty years, your priestly ministry has been marked by unwavering devotion, missionary zeal and a profound love for Holy Orthodoxy. Through your pastoral care, your theological writings, your lectures and your tireless witness, you have helped countless people discover the beauty of the Orthodox faith and have strengthened many Orthodox communities throughout Western Europe.

One of your most enduring contributions has been your deep commitment to recovering and making known the rich Orthodox heritage of the British Isles. Through your books, articles and years of research, you have lovingly brought the lives of the ancient Saints of these lands back into the consciousness of many Orthodox Christians. In doing so, you have reminded us that the Orthodox faith is not something foreign to Britain, but is deeply rooted in the spiritual history of this land.

I also wish to express my sincere gratitude for your friendship, your kindness and your constant support for the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese. Since joining our Archdiocese, you have continued to enrich our common witness through your wisdom, your pastoral experience and your generous collaboration. Your life has been a bridge between peoples, traditions and generations, always pointing others towards Christ and His saving Gospel.

May our Lord Jesus Christ, Whom you have served with such faithfulness and devotion for so many years, continue to bless you with strength, peace and the joy of His Kingdom. May the Mother of God ever keep you under her protecting veil, and may all the Saints of Britain and Ireland, whose memory you have so faithfully revived and cherished, intercede for you and guide you in every step of your priestly ministry.

Many blessed and fruitful years, dear Father Andrew!

With heartfelt gratitude, profound respect and every paternal blessing,

† Atanasie

Romanian Orthodox Archbishop of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

108 Years of Treason and Cowardice and Deceit

The Romanov throne was destroyed not by young bomb-throwers or forerunners of the Soviets, but by the bearers of aristocratic surnames and court titles, bankers, publishers, lawyers, professors and other public figures.

Chapter 16 of the Memoirs of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich

Foreword

We are now in the fifth year of the disastrous and tragic war between Russia and the Ukraine. Between one and two million soldiers are dead. Of one thing we can be certain, this war would never have happened, indeed it would have been unthinkable, in the time of Tsar Nicholas II, because he represented not petty and hateful nationalist division, but multinational peace and unity.

In the meantime, pray for Amvrosy and Vladislav, young men in their twenties, dragged off the streets of Kiev by violent and overpaid thugs of the regime two weeks ago and now forced to the Front after two days’ training. They do not want to die needlessly. They do not want to fill the pockets of Ukrainian officials, warmongering Western politicians and arms-dealers with billions of dollars. Their only hope is surrender to the vastly superior Russian forces. Their mothers of these two young men, who live near my house in Kiev, are frenetic. But at least D. is safe in Portugal, and so is his brother in Norway. They got out in time over the mountains. Lord have mercy! Let us now return to our subject.

Slandered by Propaganda

Nicholas II is one of the most slandered people in history. He most certainly was not weak, indecisive, incompetent, stupid, or dominated by others, as atheist Western and Soviet propaganda portray. Every attempt to slander him with lies has been overturned. Thus, the tragic stampede after his Coronation, leaving 1,389 dead resulted from aristocratic incompetence, compared to the 2015 stampede in Saudi Arabia which left at least 2,400 dead; the unprovoked attack on Russia by Japan was plotted by the Western Powers and turned into a costly Russian victory, with Japan bankrupted by costly Western arms.

As for the 100 and more who died from the crowd of 3,000 in 1905, that was nothing to do with the Tsar – he was not even in Saint Petersburg when Marxists hid behind stolen church banners and icons ‘in a peaceful demonstration’ and opened fire on troops, who returned fire; the terrorist revolts of 1905 and their 9,000 victims were the result of guns smuggled into Russia for atheist revolutionaries paid to destroy Russia. As for World War I, this was the fault of Berlin, which supported the Austro-Hungarian attempt to genocide the South Slav peoples, and had been planning a War for years.

Socio-Economic Success

Even before he was crowned, Nicholas had worked for the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the remarkable opening up and settling of largely empty Siberia. Nicholas II reigned over an accelerating Industrial Revolution that led to a nearly 50% rise in the ever more prosperous Imperial population. This was accompanied by eleven reforms, including the huge agrarian reform, the reform which led to the massive growth of free education and literacy, which had reached 56% by 1916, and the introduction of a free health service in 1898, 50 years before the UK, and a social security and justice system.

The Tsar was a radical moderniser, who reigned over the electrification of his Empire, with the development of hydroelectricity, submarines, rocketry, radio, the first helicopter designs, monoplanes and bomber aircraft. Under the Tsar life expectancy reached 68. By 1913 he had brought Russian Imperial agriculture to be Europe’s breadbasket and its economy to be the world’s fourth largest, which is what it is again only today. By all accounts, by 1950, when the Tsar would have been 82 years old, the Russian economy would have overtaken that of every other nation, including that of the USA.

Foreign Policy

In foreign policy Nicholas II was the only world leader who promoted international peace, founding the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 and, though mocked, was called ‘the apostle of peace’. This was the beginning of many international treaties and the regulation of war. He had an excellent double education in law and military affairs, knew European history very well and spoke five European languages fluently. He also defended nations as diverse as Thailand, Ethiopia, Morocco, Persia, Tibet, Afghanistan, Hawaii and the Boers from aggressive Western colonisation and asset-stripping.

The Tsar also tried to find peace in the warring Balkans, with their divisive German puppet-kings, through establishing a Balkan Union. His diplomacy had long been successful in avoided the international conflict that the warmongering Western nations wanted to start in powderkeg Europe with its rival imperialisms in 1912 and 1913. His policy here was to balance each nation against the other. That he finally failed in this was not his fault. Tragically, it was not possible to stop the European attempt at suicide, when Europe absolutely wanted to commit suicide.

Projected Spiritual Reform

The Tsar wanted to debureaucratise the Church administration, which had opposed the canonisation of St Seraphim of Sarov, and to restore the Patriarchate. He failed, as he was opposed by the petty ambitions, jealousies, rivalries and quarrels of the State-loving episcopate. He had little time for the empty ritualism of a Church, where if anyone who took communion more than once a year would be eyed as a fanatic. He defended the pious name-glorifiers of Mt Athos, who were hated by loveless episcopal bureaucrats, who were backed by the largely atheist aristocrats. Both groups betrayed him in 1917.

He saw eighty-one saints canonised in twenty years against only five canonised in the previous 175 years. By 1917 there were 1,256 monasteries, against only 631 in 1890, 117 million Orthodox, with 163 bishops, over 115,000 priests and deacons and 78,767 churches – against only 39,700 in 1890. Tsar Nicholas made generous personal gifts to all the Local Churches which he wanted to free from ethnic narrowness. By 1898 there were 22,000 Orthodox in Japan, Orthodox missions in Korea and China, and seventeen churches had been built in major Western cities, including in Nice and New York.

A Military Genius

Nicholas II, a military man by training, was forced to become commander-in-chief of the Russian forces in August 1915, replacing his utterly incompetent and foul-mouthed overgrown cousin. That was the treasonous Grand Duke Nicholas, a snobbish, atheistic and anti-Semitic aristocrat, who treated his despised troops as cannon fodder, just like the Allied generals on the Western Front. His incompetence had led to the shell shortage and the retreat from the Carpathians in early 1915. Having taken 2 million Austro-Hungarian prisoners, by 1916 Tsar Nicholas had won the greatest Allied victory of the War.

If only his timid General Brusilov had had the courage to follow through on the Tsar’s carefully planned breakthrough in 1916, Austria-Hungary could have been knocked out of the war. Russian troops would have liberated both Vienna and Berlin by 1917. Unlike Napoleon who reached Moscow and later Hitler who almost did, the enemy in World War One did not reach Russia. They only occupied eastern Poland, Lithuania and what is now Catholic western Ukraine and western Belarus, where satanic anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place – none took place in Russia, though huge ones took place in Berlin and Vienna.

His armies suffered only some 50% of the casualties of the Allies on the immobile Western Front. This was despite the fact that his troops faced the vast majority of the German Army on a highly mobile Front that was half as long again as the Western, as well as facing the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans. Nicholas II failed on the very verge of victory in early 1917, as Churchill recorded. However, he failed only because of the ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’, as the Tsar described it, of decadent and Russophobic aristocrats, corrupt generals and bureaucrat-bishops, supported by the ‘Allies’.

Afterword

When Tsar Nicholas and his family were murdered 108 years ago on 17 July 1918, the order for it had gone out from financiers in New York. The victim of ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’, the world is still suffering from his murder. Without his overthrow, there would not have been a World War Two, let alone today’s tragedy. Without that, we would be living in a far different world.

Of this St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, who proposed his canonisation in the mid-1930s, wrote: ‘That blackest crime, which was committed against the Tsar, must be effaced by fervent veneration for him, glorifying his feat. The Russian Lands must kneel down before the humiliated, the slandered and the martyred….Then the Passion-Bearing Tsar will be granted great boldness before God and his prayer will save the Russian Lands from the disasters borne by them….Innocently shed blood will regenerate Russia….A restored Russia is needed by the world, which has lost the spirit of life and trembles with fear, as before an earthquake’.

17 July 2026