Category Archives: Apostasy

On the Pivotal and Worldwide Importance of the Martyred Tsar Nicholas II

Introduction

I was recently asked by a group of pilgrims from Russia how I, as an Englishman, had come to spiritual awakening and the understanding that Tsar Nicholas II is a saint. I answered them briefly, though giving all the essentials of a fifty-year long process, but then realised that the question deserved a more detailed and systematic answer, as it may interest others too. Here now is that detailed answer.

First Impressions

The first event was when as a child I collected stamps and I remember a stamp with the portrait of Tsar Nicholas on it. His face seemed to stare out at me and it struck me as different from all other stamps; why I could not tell, but it was the first impression and memory of the Tsar and it has always remained with me.

The next stage was after seeing the film Dr Zhivago in 1968, I began reading about the Russian Revolution. This was because that Revolution was clearly the essential turning point in the creation of the whole Cold War world which then surrounded me and terrorised so many. I wanted to understand how it had come about.

Pro-Bolshevik accounts that I read then stood out as false; it was clear that any work that justified the bloody genocide of millions by Marxism-Leninism could not be trusted. However, the only other books available in English, mostly written by Western academics, were no less ideologically-motivated. They all seemed to think that the February 1917 ‘Revolution’, or treason by aristocrats and generals, which had deposed the Tsar (and later led to the October 1917 power grab by Bolshevik bandits) was an excellent thing. The sole book with some interesting content was that by Robert Wilton.

However, even my soul could see that this view was only because their authors imagined that every country in the world should be westernised and have the same constitutional monarchies or else republican governments as in Western Europe and North America. But I already knew these regimes to be spiritually corrupted. In other words, the views of these academics merely reflected their subjective and self-interested agnostic or atheistic materialist cultural prejudices; they did not represent objective reality, but merely the psychological conditioning of their authors. But what could that objective reality be? Although I instinctively sensed that the truth was other and profound, I was still searching in the dark for details.

The Emigration in England

On meeting émigré Russian Orthodox in Oxford in 1974, I began to enquire further. Here I heard three different views among those whom I encountered:

The first émigré view was a minority Patriarchal one which said that the Bolshevik coup d’etat was a triumph, that the Soviet Union was remarkable, that there was no persecution of the Church in Russia and that the Tsar had got what he deserved. This was the pro-Communist view. This was the absurd self-deception of blind Soviet nationalism which put the Soviet Union above the Church. This view held no water with me.

The second émigré view, the majority one, was that, although the Bolshevik power grab had been a disaster, the removal of the Tsar by the February treason had been an excellent thing, since the Tsar had held up ‘progress’. Although he and his family had not deserved to die, there was little pity for them, since those who held this view considered that if they were in exile, it was ‘the Tsar’s fault’. This was the pro-Western or ‘Parisian’ view, as I would later learn to call it. These emigres reckoned themselves as apolitical, but in fact they were highly political. In Oxford, for example, this was the view of Anglophile exiles who admired the Western Establishment, who loved Anglicanism and read ‘The Daily Telegraph’, the newspaper of the Conservative Party. This was the absurd self-deception of blind Western nationalism, a worldly, sociological manipulation, which put the West above the Church. This view held no water with me.

The third view, also political and not spiritual, held in Oxford by only two people, but by some others who attended the church in London, was like the second one, but more extreme. These people had a symbolic respect, but little real love, for the Tsar, but what they wanted above all was revenge, their property and their money back from ‘the evil Soviets’. Some of these exiles had worked for MI6 in that spirit of revenge, which knew no forgiveness or prayer for enemies. The Church for them was in many respects a social and ethnic club. This was a rabidly anti-Communist, purely political view which knew only black and white. Typically, many in that London parish rejected the later 1981 canonisation by the Church authorities. This view held no water with me.

I was disappointed. I had expected to find some kind of spiritual sensitivity and spiritual understanding of Tsar Nicholas II among Russians who were connected with Church life. I had not found it. However, in Oxford I did find out about Fr Nicholas Gibbes, former tutor to the Tsarevich, the first Englishman in the 20th century to become a Russian Orthodox priest and the first such priest in Oxford. Arriving in Russia with typically English prejudices about constitutional monarchy, he had been so influenced by his meeting and life with the exemplary Royal Family, that after many years of reflection he had later joined the Russian Orthodox Church. Moreover, on entering the Church, he had taken the name Alexis after the Tsarevich and then, when he became monk and priest, he took the name Nicholas after the Tsar-Martyr. This was a definite influence on me.

Having read about the New Martyrs and Confessors in a book about them published by ROCOR in North America, I was shocked to realise that the fact that they had still not been canonised was clearly only for political reasons, not only inside Russia, but also in the emigration. In 1976 I therefore created my own calendar, adding the names of the New Martyrs, including the Royal Martyrs. I still have that calendar. However, at this point my understanding was still limited; I understood the Tsar only as a martyr and, out of ignorance, did not yet see the holiness in his life and policies as Tsar, which were the preparation for his martyrdom.

Towards a Deeper Understanding

The next stage was in 1977 reading about Vladyka John of Shanghai and his veneration for the Tsar-Martyr. If this saintly bishop, with his international breadth of vision and gift of prophecy, held such views – and he had wanted to see the Tsar canonised at least as early as the 1930s – then there was more for me to understand. After this I obtained copies of ‘Pravoslavnaya Rus’, the bimonthly Jordanville journal. There I read many articles in preparation for the long-awaited canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs. One article, written by Archbishop Antony of Geneva, on the international repercussions of the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II with the active support of the Western Powers, particularly struck me.

After the long-awaited canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors by ROCOR in 1981, I began praying openly to the Royal Martyrs and reading more and more in Russian about the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. My mind and soul began to be illumined. One by one the Western/Bolshevik (essentially the same) anti-Tsar myths, dissolved. The stampede at Khodynka, the myths of the ‘weak’ Tsar and the ‘hysterical’ Tsarina, the pogroms, the Russo-Japanese War, ‘Bloody Sunday’ and the 1905 Revolution, violent mutinies, strikes and outrages, the myth that the Tsar opposed the re-establishment of the Patriarchate and canonical Church order, the myth of the ‘backwardness’ of the Tsar’s Russia, Rasputin, the First World War, the 1917 ‘Revolution’ and then the Bolshevik coup d’etat – all of these had a completely different interpretation from that which had been given to them by Western and Soviet anti-Tsar propaganda. My instincts had long told me this, but I had lacked the facts to piece it all together.

Living by that time in Paris, I was shocked by the views of Russophobic Paris Jurisdiction emigres, many from aristocratic families in St Petersburg, who actually agreed with the anti-Tsar propaganda and blasphemously slandered the Tsarina and Rasputin. Many of them were descendants of those who had carried out the February 1917 Revolution; they therefore had their own axe to grind. It was at this time that I finally clearly grasped that Tsar Nicholas II had lived his life as a Confessor before ever becoming a Martyr. Reading the pre-Revolutionary prophecies of holy elders, I finally understood that the Tsar had been first slandered and then removed by Satanic forces because he and the Russian Empire had been the last obstacle to universal apostasy. And those who agreed with such slanders were actually, though perhaps unknowingly, participating in a form of Satanism.

This became more and more obvious when in the 1990s materialistic Communism (the Tartar Yoke) collapsed as a result of the canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981. What is most to be repented for in the Church Outside Russia is that this canonisation had not taken place much earlier. After the disastrous post-Communist period of the 1990s, when the countries of the former Russian Empire were ravaged by the materialistic Capitalism of Western-supported bandit-oligarchs (the Mongol Yoke), in 2000 that canonisation was at last effectively recognised by the then freed Church in Moscow. Thus came the mystical last chance when all Russian Orthodox, of all nationalities, were called on by the Lord to prepare for the last and worldwide Orthodox harvest before the Second Coming.

And so this recognition made negotiations and then unity with our Church Outside Russia possible. It also meant that it was now only a question of time before the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church would go further and influence the political, economic and social life of the countries where it is in the majority. What is most to be repented for is that some, especially in the Patriarchate outside Russia, rejected that canonisation. How well we remember, for example, being told in 2001 that there were still no icons of the Royal Martyrs at the London Patriarchal Cathedral because there was ‘no space’ on their blank Anglican walls.

The Last Pieces of the Puzzle

Books written about the reign of Tsar Nicholas II over the last fifteen years by professional historians who have access to the archives in Russian Federation, such as Bokhanov and Multatuli (definintely not the absurd Soviet myths of the venal scandalmonger and non-historian Radzinsky, so beloved of Western Russophobes) have supplied me with the last pieces of the puzzle. Like the Jordanville historian E.E. Alfer’ev’s excellent ‘Emperor Nicholas II as a Man of Strong-Will’, Pierre Gilliard’s ‘Thireteen Years at the Russian Court’, Prince Zhevakhov’s memoirs (in Russian) and S. S. Oldenburg’s ‘The Reign of Tsar Nicholas II’ (also in Russian), they supply details, truths which primitive Western (= Soviet) anti-Tsar mythology still reject. I hope that one day the sources will be translated into English. For example

The stampede at Khodynka was caused by the greed of a small element in an unprecedentedly huge crowd of hundreds of thousands, not by the Tsar or his administration.

The Tsar was not weak or incompetent, but an incredibly strong-willed, brave, faithful and courteous man who survived War and Revolution, and, as his contemporaries noted, had his own independent vision, uninfluenced by anyone except the Gospels. Only those who deny the Gospels – like most Western academics and politicians – deny this.

The Tsarina was a self-sacrificing, pious and noble mother and Russian Orthodox patriot, like her sister the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, an example to all Russian Orthodox in the West. She was not a hysterical fanatic or pro-German traitress; only militant atheists and anti-Orthodox think of her as this.

Anti-Jewish pogroms were Europe-wide; the worst ones were in Vienna and Berlin. In the Russian Empire they took place mainly in Poland and among Romanian-speakers. Some of them were indeed started by Jews against Non-Jews and as many Non-Jews died as Jews – about 1500 on each side. The mere fact that so many Jews lived in the Russian Empire is proof of the tolerance of Jews, who had long before sought grateful refuge in the Russian Empire from Western intolerance.

The Russo-Japanese War was treacherously started without a declaration of war by the Japanese. They had been financed and armed by Britain and the USA who wanted to dominate the Pacific and Asia and use Japan as a proxy to weaken Russia. Although non-militaristic Russia spent very little on arms – about a fifth as much as other countries – and its Navy was small and very old-fashioned, by 1905 it was winning the war against a highly militaristic Japan, with its latest British ships, but which was going bankrupt as a result of the costs of the war it had initiated. Russia ended the War on very favourable terms, decided entirely by the strong-willed Tsar Nicholas, who would have continued the struggle, had it not been for the treacherous sabotage inside Russia by a foreign-financed fifth column. Even so, in Japan the peace treaty that ended the War was seen as a defeat.

‘Bloody Sunday’, not at all a peaceful demonstration, but also far less deadly than the propagandists maintain, the 1905 Revolution, violent mutinies, strikes and outrages were terrorist provocations. They had relatively little support outside certain anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox groups in St Petersburg and a few other large cities and they were successfully and courageously put down.

The Tsar had himself in 1904 proposed the re-establishment of the Patriarchate. Those without vision had rejected it. The Church had to wait for the Patriarchate until 1918, because senior representatives, used to the Synodal system, had not been ready for it before.

The Tsar’s Russia was not ‘backward’. In 1914 it was already the breadbasket of Europe and rapidly becoming the greatest industrial power in Europe. 90% of the land then belonged to the people. By 1920 90% of the population would have been literate. By 1950 it would have become the most powerful country in the world, overtaking even the USA. By 2000 it would have had a population of 600 million. What was good in the Soviet system, its world-class education, its health system and sense of national and international social justice were not inventions of the Bolsheviks – they were all inherited from the Tsar’s Russia. And that is precisely why in 1914 the Western Powers wanted to destroy it.

Rasputin was not a ‘mad monk’, but a devout married peasant layman, a good Orthodox family man with three children, who was granted an extraordinary gift of healing by God. His torture and brutal murder by British spies, supported by a transvestite, Oxford-educated Russian aristocrat, was justly seen by the Orthodox peasantry as the anti-people and anti-piety act of decadent aristocrats that it was.

The First World War was forced on the peace-loving Russian Empire by an Austro-Hungarian Empire, backed by an ultra-militaristic, Prussianised Germany, which did not want peace but conflagration. Russian setbacks against Germany, because of the small Russian military budget, lack of guns and munitions and promises on supplies broken by Britain, were matched by successes against Austro-Hungary and the planned campaign of 1917 which would almost certainly have led to victory and the end of the War in that year. Instead of this, the Western Allies chose another year of warfare by encouraging and backing treason by aristocrats.

The Revolution was not caused by the Tsar-loving masses who were suffering some sort of social injustices, but by immensely wealthy and treacherous spoilt aristocrats – conservative but anti-Traditional. Most of these right-wingers ruthlessly exploited the masses, hated the Tsar for his measures of social justice and wanted to grab power for themselves. The Tsar did not abdicate, but they treacherously abdicated from the Tsar and his legitimate authority. Then, in their incompetence, not understanding that the Tsar, God’s Anointed, was the only glue that could hold the Russian Empire together, scarcely six months later, they handed over that power to a bunch of utterly amoral bandits and terrorists – the Bolsheviks.

The Consequences

Retribution came to all the traitors: after 1917 retribution came to the aristocrats who had betrayed the Tsar – they were killed or went into bitter exile, having lost the source of their wealth; retribution came in 1940 to France and Great Britain which had betrayed the Tsar with the humiliating defeat of France and the British humiliation of Dunkirk and the Blitz; retribution came to the Bolsheviks in 1941 when the Soviet Union was treacherously invaded on the feast of All the Saints that have shone forth in Rus; in the Pacific retribution came to the USA in the humiliation at Pearl Harbour and to Great Britain in the humiliation at Singapore, when the Japanese did to them what they, then backed by the USA and Great Britain, had done to Russia at Port Arthur in 1904; retribution came again to Great Britain with the Battle of the Atlantic when the country was nearly starved into submission in 1942 by German U-boats, for the country which until 1914 had been fed by abundant grain from the Russian Empire now depended on North America; retribution came to Austro-Hungary and Germany when the Red Army took Vienna and a devastated Berlin in 1945.

And then all received further retribution in the Cold War, with its ‘balance of terror’, bankrupting arms race and the last generation of paranoiac American hubris, for which the whole world is still paying in 2013. None of this would have happened if Tsar Nicholas II had remained in power in 1917. They are all consequences of his illegitimate overthrow, which the whole world is still suffering to this very day. Are these evil, worldwide consequences not reason enough for universal repentance, repentance for our own sins and for those of our ancestors and nations?

As for the Orthodox Church, the consequences were catastrophic. With the Tsar removed, the Russian Orthodox Church was attacked both by the atheists from outside and by the renovationists inside. With the key Russian Orthodox Church martyred, paralysed and captive, the other much smaller and much weaker Local Churches were attacked by decadence one by one. Above all, the old but spiritually enfeebled Patriarchate of Constantinople fell under the control of Western and masonic agencies, encouraged modernist schism inside and outside Russia, enslaved by the flattering myth of the absurd interpretation of Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon.

And so Uniatisation of calendar and ritual began to follow. The aim was a spiritually neutered and neutralised Orthodoxy, a bland, decadent and unsalted ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, that no longer presents any danger to militant secularism or, ultimately, to the forces of Antichrist. The consequences of this are still being played out in the Phanariot interference in Russian Church life in Paris, the Ukrainian diaspora, Finland and Estonia; in all the new calendar Local Churches; and even in Serbia, Georgia, and at this very moment on the streets of Kiev and in the chancellery of the Czechoslovak Orthodox Church.

Conclusion

The recognition as saints of St John of Kronstadt and the prophetic St John of Shanghai, both firmly of the Orthodox calendar and both firm monarchists, has been a lodestone of Orthodoxy. It was – and is – sometimes hard for supporters of the new calendar, let alone modernism, to venerate these saints honestly and conscientiously. Today, it is the veneration of Tsar Nicholas II as a saint that is a lodestone for contemporary Orthodoxy, a sign of the spiritual awakening to authentic Orthodoxy, or, wherever it is lacking, a sign of the spiritual slumber of semi-Orthodoxy.

To recognise Tsar Nicholas II as a saint is to awaken spiritually and recognise him as the greatest sacrificial victim of the great 20th century apostasy. It is to renounce all the lies and spiritual impurity of the twentieth century and to repent for them. There may yet come a time in this faltering 21st century, which may not end, when the holy martyred Tsar will be recognised not just as a Martyr and the Martyred Lord’s Anointed, representative of all the New Martyrs, but also a Great-Martyr, as was prophesied at Optina.

Cardinal Koch and the Vatican’s current anti-Orthodox Crusade

‘I am the Patriarch of all the Russias. I am not the Patriarch of the Russian Federation, nor the Patriarch of the Ukraine, nor of Moldova…and for me there is no difference between a citizen of the Russian Federation, a citizen of Moldova or any other. The Russian Church exists in 62 different countries’.

His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, Moldova, 2013

Cardinal Koch, Chairman of the Papal Council for ‘Christian Unity’, has today met Patriarch Daniel of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Bucharest. Speaking of this meeting on Radio Vatican, he once more expressed the hope that Roman Catholics may one day be allowed to take the Body and Blood of Christ in the Orthodox Church (the concept that any Churched Orthodox would wish to accept Roman Catholic hosts is so alien as to be absurd).

For this to happen, as Cardinal Koch still does not understand, though he has been told many times already, Roman Catholics will first have to renounce the heresies of Roman Catholicism – something that happens regularly, though on an individual basis. The main Roman Catholic heresy is their renunciation of the Holy Trinity through their filioque heresy, followed by its result, the centralising ecclesiological heresy of papism. However, the implications of these heresies are enormous and we need no look no further than the streets of Kiev today to see them.

The Western Powers, with full Vatican, German and Polish government support, are at present intent on attempting to snatch the Ukrainian people from the Orthodox Church, to which they have belonged for 1,025 years. This attempt to steal the ‘Ukraine’, as it is now called, the birthplace of Russia, by setting up there a US-funded, anti-Christian junta, is directly parallel to the played-out rehearsal by the Western Powers (the USA with its pawn the colonialist EU) to steal Kosovo, the birthplace of Serbia, by setting up there an Islamist cartel of people-traffickers, gun-runners and drug-dealers. Thus, Uniat and schismatic Ukrainian nationalist demonstrators have been bused in to Kiev from Poland and the borderlands around L’viv by their highly-organised, paramilitary EU backers to demonstrate against history.

It may now be after over 20 years of tension that the Ukraine is going to split apart; the Galician-based western 20% of the ‘Ukraine’, the only actual borderlands (‘ukraina’ in the Slav languages), will rejoin Poland, which their people seem to want. So much the better. They can then integrate their atheist European Union, that is, they will see their young people flee to German and Polish factories for low-paid drudgery, their sovereignty lost and their government bankrupted, as in Greece, Cyprus, the Baltic States and countless other countries that so naively fell for the EU bait. In their spiritual suicide they will also see their anti-Orthodox Uniat and schismatic churches empty and close down one by one, as Eurosodom destroys them, as is happening to Catholic and Protestant all over the EU.

The Orthodox minority in this new Polish colony will then be able to join the Polish Orthodox Church and continue as a minority, as elsewhere in Poland and throughout the geriatric EU, defying the EU tide of secularism by surviving and witnessing to Christ. The rest, the 80% of the country that will remain free, probably reverting to its historic native name of Little Russia, will be able to get on with its inevitable and prosperous destiny in the Eurasian Union, thus joining authentic (i.e. non-EU) Europe and Asia.

What is the connection with Cardinal Koch? Like Uniatism, the Ukraine was an anti-Orthodox invention of the Vatican. In 1900 virtually no-one had heard the word applied with its new nationalistic meaning. The Galician far west of the Ukraine is precisely the place where in the last two decades Orthodox have been viciously persecuted (some have been martyred) by Uniats. Their property has been massively stolen by fanatical, Vatican-supported, Ukrainian nationalists, our priests and faithful beaten up by racist, anti-Semitic thugs, whose grandfathers fought in the SS.

The present attack on our Russian Orthodox Church, on our international ideal of Holy Rus and on the Orthodox people of the Ukraine, as it is now called, is nothing new. The Vatican has throughout history mounted crusade after crusade against the Church of God. Today’s Vatican attack, exploiting violent nationalism (‘the aim justifies the ends’, as the Jesuits say) is only just another repeat of the Vatican’s 13th century crusade against the Church of Christ, when the Vatican was defeated by St Alexander Nevsky, or that of their Polish 17th century crusade, of that of the secularised Catholic Napoleon in the 19th century and the paganised Catholic Hitler in the 20th century, which were all against Moscow and which all failed.

This is the real reason why, Cardinal Koch, you cannot take the Body and Blood of Christ in the Orthodox Church; because you have not repented for your inherently secularist sins against Christ’s Church. Only when you have repented for your crimes and anti-Christian crusades, will your eyes be opened, will your spiritual blindness be overcome and your heresies fall away from you, as the millennial delusions that they are. If you, like the hopelessly divided Ukrainian Uniats, with all their nationalistic schisms and renunciation of their historic heritage and identity, wish to support the bankrupt Eurosodom rabble against United, Multinational, Worldwide Holy Russia, to support the materialistic against the spiritual, that is your choice. But do not say that you were not warned.

On Overcoming the Paris Captivity

On Friday 6 December, the Interfax News Agency reported that Fr Vsevolod Chaplin has called on certain Russians to overcome ‘the Paris Captivity’ of academic theology and to give priority instead to the legacy of the New Martyrs. Fr Vsevolod, the Social Affairs spokesman for the Church, is seen by many as the right-hand man of Patriarch Kyrill.

Fr Vsevolod called on certain Russian Orthodox to pay more attention to our own theological tradition instead of to that of the Paris Jurisdiction and its branches, which reject the millennial, monastic-based Russian Orthodox Tradition and prefer Protestant-based philosophies and speculations. He said that if ‘even Muslims and Protestants wonder what to do when there are contradictions between Russian and foreign traditions, and usually choose the Russian’, then it was for Russians themselves to opt for their ‘millennial tradition of Orthodox thought, learning and piety, for the Tradition’.

Like the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, he too inside Russia is convinced that it is time to overcome ‘the Paris Captivity’ of Russian theology and return to ‘the tradition of Orthodox countries in periods of freedom’ and do not have ‘to adapt to domineering Western surroundings, nor to totalitarian atheist regimes’. He recommended all to look at Russian Orthodoxy just before the Revolution (Metr Antony Khrapovitsky and his Patristically-minded followers) and Serbian Orthodoxy (Sts Nicholas of Zhicha and St Justin of Chelije), but above all to devote particular attention to the legacy of the New Martyrs, which ‘provides answers to many present-day issues’. He added that ‘by definition’ the Paris School was ‘marginal in the context of free Orthodox peoples’. (http://www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=53710)

Living outside Russia, we can confirm the truth of Fr Vsevolod’s words and the consequences of such Protestant and Catholic-based ‘theology’ on a practical day to day basis. Thus, one parish of the Paris Jurisdiction in England is losing its premises and so public mission for lack of parishioners, and yet in the same city, there are dozens of Russian Orthodox who regularly travel over a hundred miles at weekends so that they can get to the nearest Russian Orthodox liturgy. They are in fact boycotting an ex-Anglican group of four (with two priests!) who refuse to put up an iconostasis, to confess before communion and celebrate on the Orthodox calendar. They prefer to travel great distances to a busy priest so that they can receive pastoral care as Orthodox, and not as Protestants or Catholics.

Another Paris Jurisdiction parish in France is boycotted by local Russian Orthodox because it also refuses to celebrate on the Orthodox calendar and have an iconostasis, and there communion without confession is obligatory for all (those who do not commune every Sunday are humiliated and made to feel guilty) and little girls are forced into being acolytes. In a monastic group of the same Paris Jurisdiction in France, a woman with a grave sin on her conscience was refused confession last weekend and told: ‘As long as you have not killed anyone, you do not need confession’. This glaring lack of pastoral care and understanding of Orthodoxy in many – though not all – parishes of the Paris Jurisdiction has set it on a course of Uniatisation. This is why Russian Orthodox have been leaving it for decades.

Sadly, such ‘theology’, in fact merely a lack of faith that weakly swims with the heterodox tide, has also spread to convert parts of the Antiochian Jurisdiction in this country, where, in addition to the above practices, there are pleas to celebrate Easter on the Roman Catholic dating and intercommunion is openly practised. Such practices attract only a few unChurched and lapsed Orthodox, who do not know their own Tradition and already take communion in Anglican and Roman Catholic churches.

The World That Was Lost in 1917

Tell them that the evil that is in the world will grow, but it is not evil that will triumph, but only love.

Holy Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II

The Emperor and Empress thought that they were dying for their Homeland. In fact, they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard

Introduction: 1917 the Turning Point

It is often said that the world was lost with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This is not accurate. In fact, the world was lost in 1917 and since then has been plunged into suffering and continual warfare. For the real aim of the First World War, the aim of the Satanic Manipulator behind all the petty aims of his human puppets, was not to find a solution to the tribal, territorial disputes of kindred but rival peoples at the tiny, western end of Eurasian Continent, but to destroy the vast Eurasian Russian Orthodox Empire and its Tsar. This Heartland-Empire stood for the averting of wars, spiritual life, unity and balance; therefore it had to be slandered so that it could be destroyed. It alone stood in the way of what the technologically advanced but spiritually dwarfed Western peoples chose to describe as ‘universal progress’. This ‘universal progress’, since 1917 unchecked by the Russian Empire and its Tsar, is the history of all the wars and catastrophes of the last 100 years.

Above East and West

The symbol of the vast Russian Orthodox Empire, the double-headed eagle, combined East and West. This was and is the symbol of Christ worldwide. Thus, with its western borders peaceful and stabilised for many years, the Tsar and the Empire embarked on the Great Asian Plan to secure the Pacific coasts of Siberia, ensuring the security of Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea and fragile China against rapacious Japan with its British and American financed military machine and British-built Navy. It was this Japan that stabbed the Empire in the back, as, ironically, it later did America and Britain. Elsewhere in Asia the Empire supported the sovereignty of Afghanistan, Tibet and Siam (Thailand), and in Africa, Ethiopia and South Africa. And, most importantly, it supported the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and especially the Holy Land. The Empire stood above and united East and West; it was universal, which is why our own salvation is in her salvation.

Above Left and Right

The Sovereign Monarch towered above the petty combats of self-interested political parties and the vainglorious personality politics of corrupt parliamentarianism. Only the Anointed Sovereign had a vision beyond left and right and saw the whole. Only he was strong-willed and independent enough to reign and responsible to God for the well-being of the Empire. He had to fight both against leftist terrorists and decadent and hugely wealthy aristocrats, including members of his own extended family. These latter, because they already had immense riches which their hard hearts would not give to the poor, wanted the power of the Sovereign for their own futile and vainglorious ends, and so overthrew the whole Empire, whose destiny was also that of the betrayed Tsar. Thus, they handed all to the ruthless and terroristic atheists, who thought that they could create a paradise on earth if only they could seize power by violence, however many millions they might have to kill in the process.

Above Provincialism and Degeneration

The best of the Church of the Russian Orthodox Empire was international, stretching around the world into the Americas and Western Europe. It stood above petty Balkan nationalism and its provincial Greek phyletism, not to mention the warring tribalism of Western Europe, which the Empire had tried to overcome with peace-making at the Hague. The Orthodox Rus’ of the Empire was international. The aims of the First World War that had been imposed on the Empire became to free others, Germans, Poles, Czechoslovaks and Serbs, from centralised tyranny, and to gather all the Orthodox Christian lands, including Constantinople and Carpatho-Russia, together. The Royal Family, European and Orthodox, stood above such provincialism and the spiritual and so moral degeneration linked to it. The family life of the Sovereign was exemplary and showed elegance, purity and beauty, a model for family life today; they prayed together, they became saints together, an icon of the family.

An Unbalanced World led to the ‘Balance of Terror’ of Left and Right

In 1917 the traitors took Russia out of the First World War and so the world became unbalanced. The old hope of Nicholas II of allying Russia, Germany and France in peace was for ever lost. And the immediate results were the USA entering the war, taking over decadent Europe, and Zionism triumphing with the support of the bankrupt British government. This has since ensured permanent warfare between the West and the Muslim world. The result was then the disaster of Versailles, which directed its vengeance against the misled German peoples, who had lost their homelands, instead of the centralising Prussian elite. Europe did not learn the lesson of its attempted suicide and so the Second World War was made inevitable. The world became divided between Left and Right, East and West, Communist and Fascist, and even after the Second War, it went on to live for almost another fifty years in terror of being obliterated by nuclear warfare, the costs of which were bankrupting.

Provincialisation and Degeneration

Two sayings state that ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ and ‘divide and rule’. The ‘Balkanisation’ of division has been exactly the policy of today’s anti-Orthodox Powers. Thus, Constantinople, like other ancient but tiny Patriarchates, has since 1917 become a Western-controlled puppet and the once Orthodox or partly Orthodox Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, Baltic States, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland have now lost their sovereignty and enslaved themselves to EU colonialism and economic, spiritual and so moral degeneration. Today the heavily Polonised, heavily Uniatised, Galician-centred westernmost borderlands, the western 20% of the ‘Ukraine’, for the moment belonging to the real Europe of Orthodoxy, seek slavery to the same, false, anti-Orthodox ‘Europe’ of the US-founded ‘European Union’. The broken family life of the provincial and degenerate EU is anti-exemplary and shows vulgarity, impurity and ugliness; it is an anti-icon of the family.

Conclusion: Treason and Cowardice and Deceit

The Tsar-Martyr, from whom the elite and then the people abdicated, said: ‘All around – treason and cowardice and deceit’. These are the anti-Trinity that destroyed the Russian Empire and led to his triumphal martyrdom and that of millions of Russian Orthodox Christians. Tsar Nicholas faced the treason and cowardice of unprincipled, anti-Orthodox aristocrats, who had lost their faith, and of left-wing terrorists, and the deceit of the Western Powers who, Allies on paper, rejoiced at his downfall. However, all have been punished: the left-wing terrorists betrayed and killed each other; the faithless, anti-Orthodox aristocrats were shot, exiled and chose schism; and the Western Powers, colonised by their colonies, deceived themselves and are now dying powerless. None of the above three groups has so far been able to recognise the Tsar as a saint, for to do so would mean repenting for all their errors and lies of the last 100 years and more – and they are too proud to do that.

Against Western Elitism: Not Against Western People

Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves.

(Genesis 11, 4)

Introduction

To be opposed to or to dislike any particular people as a whole is defined as racial prejudice, since nobody can know a whole people. Thus, ‘anti-Semitism’, now usually defined as hatred of Jews, is racist. In the last century millions of Jews were slaughtered by anti-Semites in Western Europe. On the other hand, anti-Zionism is not racist; many devout Jews are anti-Zionists and Zionism was long ago condemned as racism by the United Nations. This is because Zionism is a political belief that Jews are a people superior, ‘exceptional’, to others. Similarly, to be opposed to Western people is racial prejudice; but to be opposed to Western elitism, the racist belief that Western people and values are superior to others, is not racist.

Indeed, Western peoples have always been the first victims of Western elitism, ever since it was developed as an ideology in the eleventh century. First to suffer were Western people in Sicily, then in England, Wales and soon after in Scotland and Ireland. Only after this came the oppression, by Western elitism, of Non-Western peoples. The first of these suffered at the very end of that same eleventh century. These were Jews in Western Europe and Muslims in the Middle East. After them, and throughout the second millennium, came new victims – in Africa and Asia, in the Americas and Australasia, in India and China. Our question then is twofold: What precisely is Western elitism and how should we react to it?

Western Elitism and Opposition to it

Western elitism is the result of a debased or secularised religious ideology. This developed firstly into Roman Catholicism, secondly into Protestantism, which withdrew religion from the public domain, promoting morality at home and secularism in public, and finally into atheist secularism. Western elitism founded a humanistic culture that is dehumanised because it is heartless and irreligious. It is secularist, materialistic, mechanical, idolatrous, acquisitive, individualist, rationalistic, intellect-bound, exploitative, capitalist, usury-bound, globalist. It has only a truncated, discursive, rationalistic and atheistic way of thinking. With only superior science and technology, it has cleverness, but no wisdom.

Western elitism thinks it is universal and looks on others as irrational, backward and superstitious. It has brought forth a way of life that is cold, calculating, soulless, faithless, rootless, immoral, mindless, cowardly, philistine, shallow, superficial, trivial, banal, artificial, frivolous, selfish, greedy, hedonistic, effete, fashion-addicted, corrupt, decadent, degenerate, promiscuous and money-grubbing. It is the essence of spiritual mediocrity and moral emptiness and has no sense of destiny, creative depth, ideals or lofty ambition. It has commerce, comfort and amoral pleasure, an idolatrous faith in its own creation, but not faith in the Creator. Godless, it has become proud, arrogant and full of hubris.

Western elitism, expressed in imperialism and colonialism, now called globalisation, has created many perverted reactions, ironically conditioned by forms of Western elitism such as Marxism. These reactions see the world in black and white, are violent, fundamentalist, terroristic and nationalistic. They regard not just Western elitism but all Western people as savage and barbarous. Such perversity defines the suicide bombers (kamikaze) of Shintoism, Hinduism and Islamism. The destruction by Islamist terrorists of the Twin Towers and mass murder of people of all races and all creeds working for global capitalism in the Capital of the American Empire is the most classic case of such anti-Western terrorism.

Conclusion

There is no justification for a racially, nationally or religiously exclusive attitude to the Western world, especially one involving violence and terrorism. Discerning opposition to the West is valid, never terrorism. Moreover, opposition is to be directed at Western elitism, not at victimised Western people, and opposition must be guided by Faith. Faith tells us that there is not only discursive, intellectual thought, but also non-discursive, noetic thought, the thoughts of the soul. Faith tells us that experience of reality is more important than mere rationalism, that the wisdom of a simple and pure heart and spiritual heroism are far mightier than any technology, that repentance is required for thinking that we are mightier than God.

Western elitism is not a civilisation because it has lost its spiritual roots and so a unified spiritual culture. It is without Faith or Tradition. It is neither authentic, nor profound, having no spiritual values or ambition to seek salvation and Paradise. The contemporary spiritually and morally aimless West needs an inclusive world view and way of life based on its own Orthodox Christian roots. This world view is noble, integral, holistic, organic, it has historical tradition, spiritual depth and health and understands inevitable suffering and death. Today’s Western world, dominated by Western elitism and its illusory technology, is called on to reverse history by repentance, returning to its roots in the Faith and the Tradition.

On Recovering the Lost Provinces of Western Europe

In the fifth century the westernmost provinces of Europe were lost by the Christian Empire to barbarian Germanic invaders. However, in the sixth century St Justinian the Great was Emperor in the Christian capital in New Rome from 527 to 565. The last Roman Emperor to speak Latin as a first language, Justinian sought ‘renovatio imperii’ or the restoration of the Empire by recovering the lost western provinces. This ambition was expressed by reconquering the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa as well as the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy and Rome to the Empire after more than half a century of barbarian control. His forces then reclaimed most of southern Iberia, establishing the province of Spania. Unfortunately, this recovery was to be all too short-lived

At the end of the sixth century, seeing that physical recovery was impossible, in Old Rome, itself provincialised, Pope Gregory the Great set about the spiritual recovery of the provinces, starting with Britain. This recovery succeeded and spread, but was fragile. Already towards the end of the eighth century the Germanic leader Charlemagne had changed the Creed and fallen into iconoclasm. Although he soon died, in the mid-eleventh century the Germanic iconoclasts not only returned to power, but took over the Roman see, creating the definitive Schism of 1054. No help could come from those who had remained faithful in New Rome, so oppressed were they, and indeed in 1204 the Christian capital was sacked by the barbarians, finally falling in 1453, its leaders having compromised themselves with the barbarians.

At this, the task of the spiritual recovery of the lost Western provinces fell to small and oppressed Russia as the only free country in the still Christian world. It, however, was faced with the hostility of the rulers of Western Europe and it was not until the nineteenth century that Russia was able to begin to preach the Christian Faith to the captive peoples of the Western provinces. However, the leaders of Western Europe became even more aggressive and invaded Russia in 1812, 1854 and again in 1914. This last invasion led to the fall of Christianity there in 1917, which came about through the treachery of the westernised upper classes, who betrayed their own ruler. In 1941 Western countries again invaded now fallen Russia, but with the sobering result that it began a fifty-year process of return to Christianity.

It is since 1991 then that Russia has been undergoing a long period of regeneration, painfully striving to re-establish at least something of Christianity. Although this process is far from complete, it provides hope that the spiritually sensitive in the lost Western provinces can return to the Church of Christ, especially if Russia is regenerated in full. This return can neither be on the basis of an uninteresting nationalistic form of Russian Christianity, nor on the basis of a minimal and opportunistically compromised form of Russian Christianity, as among some in North America, Paris, Finland and Estonia. It can only be on the basis of the maximal Christianity, the fullness of Orthodoxy. In this way, the lost provinces of Western Europe, including our own East of England province, can reintegrate the Church of God.

Regeneration or Degeneration

Spiritual nihilism is a major threat to European civilisation…yet not all values can ever be destroyed among mankind. There are still those who care who will kindle the flame and pass it from hand to hand until the country is flooded by a new wave of regeneration.

New Martyr Alexander of Munich (+ 1943)

Russia

The greatest geopolitical and human catastrophe and the cause of the worst genocide in the last century was undoubtedly the Russian Revolution. It led to the satanically-inspired murder of all that was best in the near-millennial Christian culture of Rus, East Slavdom; this was indeed ‘spiritual nihilism’. For without the Revolution there would have been a Russian victory in 1917 and Russian troops would have freed Prussianised Germany and the peoples of Austria-Hungary from the tyranny of their emperors and upper classes. There would have been no fateful Versailles Treaty and no unjust mistreatment of the German and Austrian peoples, no Lenin and no Stalin in the former Russian Empire, no Hitler and no Second World War. True, there would have been the terrible losses of a three-year First World War, but they could at least have been repented for by the instigators of that war throughout the 1920s. Instead, they were never repented for and so were never made up for.

The atheist Soviet Union was an interruption of all East Slav history, a break with the destiny of Rus. Although the Soviet Union is no more, its utterly mismanaged collapse was yet another disaster and so the paths of Russian destiny have still not been resumed in full, far from it, and the effects of discontinuity are still present. They can for example be seen in the self-defensive and ignorant Soviet nationalism of the brainwashed elderly, which admires the genocidal war-leader Stalin. But this is a generational phenomenon that is dying out, just as the admiration of brainwashed, elderly Britons for their compromised war-leader Churchill is also dying out. However, the break with the destiny of Rus can also be seen in the fact that the remains of Lenin have still not been disposed of, in atheist place-names that still abound everywhere, in still existing admiration for all those who so shamelessly co-operated with Stalin, not to mention in the luxurious wastefulness of today’s Russian elite.

In criticising the wastefulness of that elite, we should not forget that there were also abuses before the Revolution. Oligarch is only a new name for aristocrat. That Revolution was caused by the self-serving, decadent and corrupted upper class. On the other hand, we should not think that all was corrupted before the Revolution – the problem was in the wealthy, westernised classes. If all had been corrupted, then from what trees could the spiritual blossom of the New Martyrs have come? The modernist Russophobes who think that all was corrupted before the Revolution are those who do not venerate the New Martyrs, who ‘have no space for their icons’, as in the former Sourozh Diocese. And if all had been corrupted, where also could the best of the culture of émigré Russia have come from? From where could the heartfelt music of a Rakhmaninov, the lament of the emigration for what was and what might have been, the endless melody of nostalgia for a vanished civilisation, have come?

What is the situation today? President Putin has been admired by some for his foreign policies. That admiration may perhaps be justified. But his internal policies seem to be little more than empty words, promises without substance – as we can see from the present Muslim immigrant troubles in Moscow. There still hang over Russia the old and huge problems of ABC, alcoholism, abortion and corruption, the first two vestiges from the atheist period, the last mostly from the abysmal decadence of the Capitalist Yeltsin period. All these problems lie behind the unresolved and severe demographic crisis. However, critics of contemporary Russia, and we have no illusions that there is much to criticise there, for we have seen it ourselves, tend to forget that what survives in Russia today survives miraculously, after the worst persecution of Christ known to history. All of us who seek a Tsar restored must show patience, recognising that the processes of repentance and regeneration are painfully gradual.

Europe

Once Europe was strong, but today it is degenerating, which in many respects makes it even more fragile than regenerating Russia. Through the European Union Europe is entering a period which resembles in its tyranny the old Soviet Union. Europe’s future survival as a living, and not as a dead, culture is dependent on its willingness to overcome the cumulative degeneration of its spiritual nihilism. This is exactly what the still fragile process of spiritual regeneration in Russia has come from – the willingness of at least some there to overcome the spiritual nihilism of the past. And this is what Europe must learn from Russia – if it wants to survive. Europe is a poem – in its little, hidden, underground parts dating from before the Schism, in the beauty of its nature and culture, from the mountains of Norway to the fado songs of Portugal, from the shores of the Hebrides to the forests of the Tyrol, from the palaces of Paris to the fountains of Rome. But now the very existence of that poem is at risk.

This is because Europe is also a gigantic museum of the effects of the Schism. Having forsaken the Church, it declined into Catholicism and from there descended to Protestantism and so to atheist Secularism. Europe is littered with the remarkable monuments of its millennial Schism, its cathedrals and its churches, its castles and its fortifications, its museums and its galleries, its statues and its adornments. All this it can and should keep, as witnesses to its past culture, both good and bad. But Europe’s cultural evolution has come to a dead end because its spiritual evolution has reached a dead end, the end of the process of its Schism, which has descended during a millennium from total faithfulness to total faithlessness. So now Europe is at a turning-point and faces a choice between total self-destruction and the renunciation of its atheist Secularism and the millennial process behind it and so the return to the fullness of its founding Orthodoxy of a thousand years ago.

Nowhere today can the threat of atheist Secularist Europe be seen in more black and white terms than in the Ukraine. For, bribed by the EU, the Ukrainian puppet elite is now turning its back on 1025 years of East Slav history and its choice of civilisation – the choice for Christ – made in 988, and is instead choosing Eurosodom. For what was a vulgar commercial union forty and more years ago, at first tyrannically removing the freedom for Europeans to be themselves, is now altogether destroying fundamental Christian morality. The EU tyranny has never had any respect for local culture, as we know from the recent past of Western Europe, and as can be seen in its present manipulation of the Ukrainian media, similar to its past manipulation of the media of one victim country after another. The Ukraine and its Church also are heading for ‘Europeanisation’, ‘Hellenisation’, the same illusions as in bankrupt Greece, the Baltic States, Hungary, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania.

In the Ukraine, we see face to face the stark choice: Christ or Eurosodom. No group there faces a greater inner contradiction than the Uniats, with their hideous new Cathedral in Kiev. On the one hand, they claim to belong to Christ, but on the other hand, they support Eurosodom. If Stalin had left to Poland the largely Uniat, far-west Polonised provinces, the only ones which are truly ‘Ukrainian’, that is borderlands, none of this would have happened. If the European Union does invade the Ukraine, then the vast majority of the Ukraine may well join a regenerating Russian Federation, welcoming it as liberation. Then too, in the far south-west, faithful Carpatho-Russia, ‘Transcarpathia’, will at last be established as an Autonomous Republic of the Federation, righting Stalin’s historic injustice against it. The Ukraine may soon face a choice: Spiritual Regeneration with the Russian Federation or Spiritual Degeneration with the European Union. Whither goest thou, Ukraine?

On the Importance of Sobriety (2)

Edited E-mail Correspondence Following the Questions and Answers of 17 September

Q: In your answers in the correspondence in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ (17 September) you seemed to be defending ROCOR as a Church of moderation, which is why the extreme Greek and convert old calendarists left it between 1986 and 2007. But surely there were extremists among the Russians in ROCOR, for example, people who actually seriously believed that there was no grace in the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church? And they did not leave in 1986.

A: On the ROCOR side I knew of only two Russians (admittedly very senior figures) who asserted that the Patriarchal part of the Russian Orthodox Church had no grace. But I met hundreds, if not thousands, of ordinary ROCOR clergy and laity who believed otherwise, freely gave the sacraments to anyone from Russia and indeed were scandalised by such an absurd thought of gracelessness. So let us look at all this in proportion. You will always find a few extremists in any group of human-beings, but that does not mean that the vast majority are extremists. By definition they are not.

However, it is also true that a few members of ROCOR at that time (I am speaking about the Cold War period before 1991) appeared to be more interested in anti-Communism than in Christianity. However, the members of that generation have either died out or else have left ROCOR since 1991. The problem for them after the fall of Communism was that they no longer had any motivation to be active in Church life. You cannot be anti-Communist when Communism is no more. They had lost their raison d’etre, and so they gradually disappeared from Church life. This was most regrettable for them, but on a human level it was a great relief to us because they had put us ordinary ROCOR laity and clergy under pressure, trying to politicise the Church, which we resisted.

And I would like to add to all this very important qualification. Those few who previously claimed that there was no grace in the Patriarchate after 1991 received several clergy from it without ordaining them, let alone baptising them! And they gave the sacraments to Patriarchal laypeople without dreaming of baptising them. So it had all been empty words, rhetoric, political propaganda and not actions. In reality, they full well knew that the Patriarchate preserved apostolic succession. They rejected their own absurdity, which had only ever been a purely political ploy. I seriously think that the ludicrous concept of a graceless Church inside Russia may even have been invented by the CIA. It is simply not theological, but purely secular.

Q: You have said before and also in ‘On the Importance of Sobriety’ that all Russian Orthodox parishes outside Russia will eventually come under ROCOR administration. But why should not all, including ROCOR ones, come under the administration of the Church inside Russia instead?

A: There are three reasons why not. First of all, the agreement of 2007 was crystal clear: all parishes outside Russia will come under ROCOR, all parishes inside Russia will come under the Church inside Russia. Secondly, there is the name, ROCOR. It is only logical: only ROCOR is the Church Outside Russia, it is absurd to have parishes outside Russia that belong to the Church inside Russia. It is literally inside out or, if you prefer, outside in.

However, there is a third and moral reason. During the Cold War period (I mean, after 1945 and until well after 1991) the Church inside Russia was under KGB administration and there appeared outside Russia very many unworthy representatives of the Patriarchal Church, at best Soviet bureaucrats, at worst liars and renovationists, politically or morally compromised or just plain corrupt. (The notable exception was Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels). And I am afraid that the Church inside Russia lost all the trust of the world outside Russia at that time. In a word, it shot itself in the foot and ever since it has had to pay the price for the distrust that it created.

As a result, even today, I cannot think of a single person in ROCOR who would go under the Patriarchal administration outside Russia. Even today, virtually the only people under the Patriarchate outside Russia are those who have come out of the former Soviet Union over the last 20 years

I mentioned Archbishop Basil (Krivoshein) of Brussels as an exception, but it must also be said that his integrity was wasted, as that of other sincere people. He had the nominal title of Archbishop, but his diocese consisted of little more than two priests, two deacons and about a dozen laypeople. And in general, until 1991, the Patriarchate only had tiny churches outside Russia. Russian Orthodox outside Russia would have nothing to do with a KGB-sponsored organisation. That is not a secret and not a theory. It is simply a fact of history.

An example of such corruption is the case of the late Archbp George (Wagner), who was a victim of it. A priest of the Patriarchate in 1950s Berlin, he was asked by it to become a Soviet spy. To his credit he refused and left for the Paris Jurisdiction. He was just one in a very long series of sincere people who left the Patriarchate because of its corruption. Another even more striking example is the present Metr Hilarion of ROCOR, who was brought up in the Patriarchate in Canada and left it when he realised that it was not free.

And that was all a great loss of talent for the Patriarchate. But it was their own fault; they did it to themselves. In general, the Patriarchate, whether in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London or New York, lost many people, the best friends of Orthodox Russia in the West, because of its unworthy representatives, with their political and moral compromises and corrupt personality cults. It lost the best friends of Orthodox Russia precisely because its representatives were not the best friends of Orthodox Russia. This is why ROCOR is an autonomous part of the Russian Church. If ever, things go badly in Russia again – as they could, the situation is still relatively fragile – ROCOR will retain its independence. That is very important.

Fortunately, virtually all such unworthy representatives had died out before the reconciliation of 2007, sometimes well before. Now we are waiting for a new generation. The Patriarchate outside Russia has been expanding with the new emigration. We believe that the majority of the new representatives are and will be more worthy, will at least be up to the standard of ROCOR and so prepare the Patriarchal churches outside Russia for their transfer to ROCOR.

Q: Do you feel bitter about this waste during the Cold War due to the captivity of the Patriarchate at that time?

A: Of course not! A Christian cannot feel bitter because he believes in Divine Providence, the ever-present, intervening love of God. This makes all mistakes into opportunities, all negatives into positives.

Q: What is your view of the murder of Fr Pavel Adelheim in Pskov last August

A: On average one priest a year is murdered in Russia and every murder is a tragedy and a crime, including that of Fr Pavel. I saw a Russian programme about the murder. His matushka appeared and spoke of the tragedy with great dignity.

However, Fr Pavel Adelheim himself was a well-known dissident and controversialist, a marginal figure and in that sense a bit like the late Fr Alexander Men, who is believed by many to have been a Catholic. The latter is a hero to all those who are anti-Orthodox, especially since he asserted that ‘it is better to be a Hare Krishna than to be like Fr Seraphim Rose’. (By the way, under the old regime the London Patriarchal Cathedral on Ennismore Gardens refused to sell his books, just as they refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs; that has changed now). Murder is a tragedy, but it is does not absolve anti-Church views. I am not saying that Fr Pavel was like Fr Alexander Men, he was not pro-Catholic, but nevertheless he was very much a fringe personality. It is very interesting that although deaths like that of the late Orthodox priest Fr Daniel Sisoev are hardly mentioned in the West, Fr Pavel’s was widely reported and by two groups.

The first group was the freemasons of the Russophobic Rue Daru with their Western supporters and the second was the equally Russophobic old calendarists. It is disgraceful that such anti-Russian-Church groups opportunistically and self-justifyingly try and make capital of a tragic murder, which was carried out by a satanist. You cannot justify schism. What such sectarian groups as Rue Daru and old calendarists, two sides of the same coin, do not understand is that the Church is not an exclusive club for those with eccentric views, but it is for all who believe in Christ. The fact that Fr Pavel had peculiar views and was then tragically murdered does not for one moment mean that those views are justified.

Q: Russophobia has been in the international spotlight recently. What would you say about the civil war in Syria and President Putin’s recent intervention that averted US missile attacks?

A: First of all, this is not a civil war. The original legitimate protests against the dictatorial Syrian government were hijacked by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey (all Israeli-backed). 1200 murderers, rapists and bandits were released from Saudi prisons, armed and trained by Western Special Services in camps in the Jordan and Turkey and paid over $1000 dollars a month to murder, maim and cannibalise innocent Syrians. Together with them there are tens of thousands of fanatical foreign mercenaries, Chechens, Tunisians, Libyans and many Muslims from Western countries like Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. (These terrorists, who use chemical weapons in Syria, are the same people who prepare chemical weapons in Somalia). The war in Syria is a war between Syrian patriots on the one hand and foreign-financed traitors and foreign mercenaries on the other hand.

As regards the intervention of President Putin, the man who is so hated by Rue Daru and the old calendarists, what is remarkable is that for the first time, someone has stood up to resist the New World Order, that will lead to the enthronement of Antichrist in the rebuilt Temple on Zion. (Speaking of Russia, called the ‘Heartland’ in geopolitical science, Zbigniew Brzezinski said that the ‘New World Order’ would be built on its ruins). President Putin may even have averted a Third World War and certainly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, unlike President Obama who should be stripped of his.

It was not a billion-peopled China or India or Africa, representing half the population of the planet between them, but Russia that stood up to the New World Order. President Putin has played the role of the Orthodox Tsar, of ‘him who restrains’ (2 Thessalonians 2, 6). This is remarkable on the part of a mere politician. Moreover on 19 September the President went on in his Valdai Speech to explain that the role of Russia is in Orthodoxy and that this is her Christian civilisational role against the secularist and suicidal West which has opted for Sodom.

The West has two great enemies in Russia today. The first is President Putin, the second is Patriarch Kyrill. It will do its utmost to bring them both down, as it has already done.

Q: Why?

A: Because the secularist West knows that if either of them is successful or both of them are successful, they will with time be replaced by even more powerful Orthodox figures in Russia. They will not only resist the New World Order even more successfully, but will actually reverse it, restoring the Russian Orthodox Empire in Eurasia and worldwide Orthodox unity. That will be the end of the Antichristic, unipolar global project, of Orthodox countries eternally indebted and enslaved to the European Union, the end of absurd new calendarism and masonic puppet Orthodox bishops, the beginning of freedom for Orthodoxy in China, financial support for the Orthodox missions in Latin America, Africa and Asia, the building of tens of thousands of churches there and, if God wills and the world lasts long enough, the foundation of new autocephalous Churches. In a word, this will be the great gathering of all Orthodox Christianity before the end.

Q: It is 20 years since the attempted coup of October 1993 in Moscow, with the bombardment of the White House and the Yeltsin era. What are your thoughts?

A: The 1990s were a disgraceful period, when Russia went from Communism to Consumerism, from lies to theft. Russian public assets were stolen by those whom we now call oligarchs through so-called ‘privatisation’. These oligarchs, international criminals, now live in asylum under British government protection in London and elsewhere in the Western world that so adored their stolen billions that so impoverished Russia. This was massive, State-sponsored theft. In the 1990s the West tried to dismember and destroy the Russian Lands, just as it had tried to do under the seven months of the Provisional Government of 1917. It is said that these new Kerenskys, Harvard-educated privatisers, the cowboys of the ‘Wild East’, actually rigged the election of 1996 so that the drunkard Yeltsin could win. It is possible. The CIA has plenty of experience in rigging elections all round the world. In 1917 the decadence lasted seven months; in the 1990s it lasted seven years until the Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the canonisation of the New Martyrs in Moscow.

Q: Some conservative convert Orthodox, especially under the Patriarchate of Antioch in the USA, would perhaps be shocked by your words. They think that privatisation is good. What would you say to them?

A: Conservatism is not the same as the Tradition. To use American vocabulary, neoconservatives or ‘neocons’ (unprincipled Money Tories or economic liberals in Britishspeak) worship God and Mammon against the Gospel. Indeed, monetarism is just another word for Mammon. And even the so-called Paleoconservatives (High Tories, UKIP, noblesse oblige, the Patriarchal) are not the same as Orthodox. Firstly, paleoconservatives have a tendency to racism. Secondly, unlike Orthodox, they have little sense of social justice. (If socialism exists, there are reasons). And thirdly, the paleoconservatives tend to attract a lunatic fringe, people who are obsessed with conspiracy theories, hate the Jews, admire Hitler and other such nonsense

Q: What are your hopes and fears for the revival of the Russian Church in Russia today?

A: We must understand that the revival of the last 25 years, although spectacular, has only just begun. As Patriarch Kyrill said last week, at the present rate it will take 100 years just to build enough churches to catch up with the number of churches that existed in the Russian Empire before the Revolution. Instead of building 1,000 churches a year, over the next ten years 14,000 churches need to be built every year. That is what would be happening if Russia were not nominally Orthodox, but actually Orthodox. Another example: at the Synod in Moscow on 5 October seven new bishops were nominated. That is very good and it should bring the total to more or less 300 bishops. But if Russia and the Church’s canonical territories were actually and not nominally Orthodox, there would be 200 times more bishosp being nominated – 1,400 new bishops. Then any future Inter-Orthodox Conference (falsely called a Pan-Orthodox Council by the Phanariots) would be Orthodox

Q: One last question. Earlier you mentioned Fr Seraphim (Rose). Do you think he will one day be canonised?

A: God makes saints, not men. It may be that one day God will reveal Fr Seraphim to have been a saint. It is quite possible, judging from his life. But, before this, the monastery at Platina will first have to return to ROCOR. That is what Fr Seraphim would have wanted. That would be justice correcting the historic injustice of Platina leaving ROCOR, something carried out after Fr Seraphim’s repose. I would even say that the main impediment to Fr Seraphim’s canonisation is precisely the fact that Platina has not yet returned to ROCOR. Then everything will fall into place.

Q: Would Fr Seraphim have agreed with the reconciliation between ROCOR and the Church inside Russia?

A: Of course, he would. He was a deeply anti-sectarian person, as you can see by the way in which the proud ‘super-correct’ persecuted him in the 1970s. He was a genuine monk who had no pathological complexes, like many of the super-correct converts at that time. He suffered greatly from them, especially when they insisted on being photographed with him – photographs that they now display in their self-justification! ‘Look at me, I’m standing next to Fr Seraphim, I’m a saint’. That is what they proclaim and yet in his lifetime they were his worst enemies. It was the same with St John of Shanghai. Some of his worst persecutors during his lifetime, those who put him on trial, proclaimed after his canonisation how much they had supported him!

Q: When you see what is being introduced in the Western world, what has been called ‘Eurosodom’, are you pessimistic or optimistic about the future

A: It is a strange fact that all empires end in sodomy because they lose faith, they no longer have any self-belief and so they commit suicide. It happened in Ancient Greece and Rome. And today we are seeing not the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but the decline and fall of the Western Empire. It is a tragedy. And it is the duty of Orthodox to try and save the best of Western culture before it disappears altogether under the tidal wave of atheism.

Am I pessimistic or optimistic? True, it is quite possible that only very little of my above hopes for the future restoration of Orthodox Russia will be realised. I have no illusions. But even so, even despite all this, I remain optimistic because, although man proposes, God disposes, and God has already won, ‘trampling down death by death’. The worst that can happen is that we die. And if, I repeat if, we die repentant, and I underline repentant, we will go to Paradise! Who can be a pessimist? Fear not, little flock!

Neo-Hesychasm and the Struggle for Authentic Orthodoxy

Already before the First World War, British Establishment freemasonry in Cyprus, then 65 years ago, in 1948, the US State Department in Constantinople, and then 32 years ago, in 1981, the EEC (now called the EU) in Greece, have all taken part in their conscious Crusade to enslave the Church. They have wanted to create an artificial, politically correct Orthodoxy, acceptable to the secular powerbrokers of this world. This pseudo-Orthodoxy, a lightweight ‘Diet Orthodoxy’, persecuting of piety, Cross-less, fasting-less, comfortable, consumerist and anti-ascetic, is sterilised, diluted, degutted, neutered, castrated and disincarnate.

It is therefore new-calendarised, uniatised, anglicanised, protestantised, modernised, liberalised, finlandised, often beardless and homosexualised, confessionless and repentance-free because of its self-admiring pride, the sense of the sacred and mystery removed together with the iconostasis, and replaced by plastic, steel and chrome, salt that has lost its savour. The Neo-Frankish neo-colonialist process has so far affected some 20% of the Orthodox world, but not the vast majority of the Russian, Serbian and Georgian Churches, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, or parts of the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches and others.

There is conscious resistance to such humanistic modernism and renovationism. The latter have manipulated shallow, spiritually weak, uprooted and so disincarnate, nominally Orthodox intellectuals in the Diaspora in particular, victims of their own pride of mind and vanity. The ascetic alternative to the above Westernised and Western-supported and financed ‘Orthodoxy’, this alternative for which we have fought for most of our lives, comes in the form of the ever-renewed Tradition of the authentic Orthodox Faith – which we may call Neo-Hesychasm. This means the Trinitarian opposition to all of the above, implying:

The continuing recognition of the Fatherhood of authentic monasticism in Church and society; the Sonhood of conscious commitment to the Incarnational, Orthodox civilisational world view and ethos, with its sense of supra-national Orthodox unity (the Patriarch of Moscow taking on the unifying role of the Tsar until the election of the new and coming Tsar, the Patriarch of Constantinople having lost this role in 1453); the Spirithood of an unshakeable commitment to authentic Orthodoxy worldwide, with, implicit in this, the understanding and openness to heterodox to make missionary work among them possible.

Our Mission

It was under the Carolingian regime at the end of the eighth century that Western Europe first began the long process of abandoning the Incarnation, that is, of abandoning Sacral Orthodox Christian Civilisation. In its place it would put the disincarnate dualism of iconoclastic clericalism on the one hand and the secularised State and society on the other hand. For by clericalising the Church, making it into less than the Church under the illusion of making it into more than the Church, a Super-Church, the State and the rest of society were gradually desacralised. The illusion of spiritualising the Church by imposing celibacy on the clergy meant disincarnating the Church from society, thus creating secularism.

As we have said, the first movement to desacralisation can be seen under the Carolingians. This took place through their rejection of the Holy Spirit’s incarnational role in sacralising the material world, that is, through the Carolingian Trinitarian filioque heresy and its resulting iconoclasm. Fortunately the Carolingian Empire collapsed and the part of Western Europe subject to it remained in communion with the Church for another quarter of a millennium. Unfortunately, the Carolingian project was revived by Carolingian-descended, Germanic popes in the middle of the eleventh century and its next stage appeared as papism. And since then the desacralising apostasy has continued inexorably.

As a result, after a thousand years of the degenerative process have gone by, Western Europe has today become, on the one hand, a fascinating complex of tourist-filled, medieval cathedrals and menacing castles, of museums and monuments, where life is observed, but not lived, and, on the other hand, a disfiguring complex of consumerist, financial depravity and amoral technology, of Sodom and Gomorrah. It has been our duty and calling to encourage the reintegration of the last surviving fragments and vestiges of Orthodox Christianity in Western culture back into Orthodox Civilisation, as it has itself managed to survive in its homelands outside apostatic Western Europe.

This has above all involved the then crucified and now risen Centre of the Orthodox Church and Civilisation, Russia, where the Centre is slowly awakening and being restored, as it strives to throw off the old cultural reflexes of the Soviet period. In piercing the veil of Western history and explaining it, in scattering the confusing, in looking beyond and so looking forward to Orthodoxy, which means being radical, we have been hampered. We have been hampered by the political compromises of that part of the Church that was under Soviet Communism. And we have been hampered by the political compromises of that part of the Church that was and increasingly is under US/EU colonial administration.

We have also been hampered by individuals who have compromised themselves with extremisms and deviations of the left side and of the right side, which they have adopted from weakness, in preference to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The Church is above left and right, above margins and fringes, above both personal and nationalistic compromises. The Church is the Tradition of the Holy Spirit, transcendent yet immanent, beyond history, yet in history, beyond weak humanity, yet incarnate in weak humanity. As the world globalises and moves ever closer to its self-created Armageddon with ever new developments, the Church responds to them and gives the world here and now the choice and chance of Her eternal perspective.