Category Archives: Fr Nicholas Gibbes

RECOLLECTIONS OF ARCHIMANDRITE NICHOLAS GIBBES (1876-1963)

A personal and unpublished memoir by David Beattie, former British ambassador to Switzerland, written on 3 August 1963, slightly edited.

Copyright

I had known of the existence of Fr Nicholas Gibbes for many years before I actually met him. As a monarchist and as one in touch with Orthodox circles I had always hoped and expected to meet him some day, but when the encounter finally took place it was unforeseen. In June 1961 I happened to be invited to tea at an Anglican vicarage in Bethnal Green. As we sat in the garden a strange figure appeared at the end of the path. This was Fr Nicholas, who was very friendly with my host and often used to drop in. A moment later, the long-awaited introduction had taken place. I realised that I had seen him before in the streets of Oxford and remembered that I had felt in my bones that this figure was probably Fr Nicholas.

I was introduced as one who had lately returned from Moscow, where I had been working for three weeks as an interpreter at a trade exhibition. He immediately devoted his attention to me, to the exclusion of the rest of the company. Without the slightest prompting he began to talk about the Russian Imperial Family. I was later told that this happened very rarely and that I had been “greatly honoured”, for the Family was something sacred to him and he did not lightly talk about it.

He told me that he lived very much with the Imperial Family at Tsarskoe Selo (although he used to go with the Heir to the Stavka (Military High Command) at Mogilev during the war). They led a simple life. The Emperor impressed him as a supremely good, kind man. The Empress too was always very kind, and very resolute about performing her family duties. It was a happy and devoted family, and it seems that Fr Nicholas was enchanted by them. He was especially fond of the Heir, the Tsarevich Alexey; “He was a very lively, delightful boy; I always felt sad when I was away from him.” He bore his illness with great courage, and in spite of his pain was high-spirited enough to be naughty and mischievous at times. He seems to have had considerable character and strength of will even at that early age.

Fr Nicholas said that the children were kind and considerate. On one occasion he was due to give an English lesson to the Grand Duchess Anastasia and (I think) the Grand Duchess Tatyana. He forgot about it. When he remembered, he had just enough time to rush over to the Palace, where he arrived breathless – and without a tie! To appear like that before a member of the Imperial House was of course a heinous crime, but the Grand Duchesses were so kind or well-trained that in spite of their youth they not only made no comment but even refrained from giggling. Nor did they mention it to anyone else, as they might well have done in a moment of thoughtless amusement, for Fr Nicholas heard no more about it. He was horrified when he returned to his rooms and there discovered his tielessness.

Fr Nicholas said that Rasputin was not much more than a name to him, although he had heard rumours and had caught glimpses of him in the corridors. He did not consider him particularly influential or harmful: he thought of him as an ordinary peasant, naively cunning, but endowed with healing powers. He did, however, tell one amusing story in this connection, in a style of self-deprecating irony. Gibbes’ status as a tutor was that of a Court Employee. His salary was very low, for it had been fixed in the time of Alexander II and the Empress, who as a German and a Victorian was very economical, refused to raise it. The uniform was as humble as the salary: “It was like a postman’s. I refused to wear it, and used to turn up in a tweedy English lounge suit.” Gibbes’ great ambition was to be appointed a Gentleman of the Court, a rank which carried with it a larger salary and a more resplendent uniform. “One day the Emperor came up to me and said, ‘Gibbes! You really must have dinner with Rasputin one day soon. Go and see him next Tuesday and arrange an appointment.’ I thought to myself, ‘Good! If I can get into Rasputin’s good books I will have enough influence to get myself made a Gentleman of the Court.’ But alas, Rasputin was murdered before I could dine with him and so I never got my uniform!”

At the moment when the Monarchy fell in March 1917 Fr Nicholas was in the town of Tsarskoe Selo. He immediately returned to the Palace, but was refused admittance. He would not return to England, but stayed in the neighbourhood of the Palace. In August the Family were moved to Tobolsk. Gibbes and the Swiss tutor Pierre Gilliard followed them and were at last allowed to join them there. Fr Nicholas said that the Emperor was particularly glad to see him, for he had been deserted by almost all his courtiers – the very men who should have been the most loyal.

Life at Tobolsk was not unpleasant. At times, however, sad thoughts would inevitably find expression. When this happened it was the Emperor who kept up everyone’s spirits. He would tell little jokes or stories and recall amusing incidents, such as the time when a little dog ran across the parade ground during a particularly solemn military ceremony. Fr Nicholas was impressed by the harmony of the Family. There was never a harsh word, and all were buoyed up by a profound religious faith.

Fr Nicholas then outlined his career after 1918. He took a post in the North China Customs and refused to return to England because of the shabby treatment which he felt it had meted out to the Emperor and his family. When he was ordained he took the name of Nicholas in memory of the Emperor. The new Sino-Japanese war forced him to leave China, and he came back to England in 1936. “I was sorry that I arrived after the death of George V; I am sure that he would have helped me.”

This conversation lasted for over an hour. Fr Nicholas was a short, thin, rather bent little man. He had very rosy cheeks, twinkling bright blue eyes and a snow-white beard, rather straggly and not thick, coming roughly to a point at the middle of his chest. Although he was not poor (he had at least a house in London, a house at Broadstairs and two tied cottages in Oxford) he seemed to be dressed in an extraordinary collection of rags. He dressed very humbly, in a threadbare old cassock. His right hand held a stick and on his left arm there hung a disreputable black shopping bag. He got about entirely by himself, albeit not very quickly. He was perfectly self-sufficient and his mind completely clear. He must then have been about 85. He was a lucid and witty talker, and a delight to listen to. He struck me as being at once simple and practical. His remarks about the Imperial Family were devoted and affectionate. His own faith seemed unquestioning, but he was no mystic. In spite of his appearance and past he was utterly English in his practical approach to mundane matters, and indeed in his humour. He was quite ready to look after his own interests, and in this respect his remarks on Rasputin and George V are illuminating. He was a man to be appreciated and not argued with.

My next meeting occurred on May 30th 1962, when I encountered him in St Giles at Oxford. It was very hot and sunny, and Fr Nicholas seemed rather more frail and hunched than before. I went up and made myself known, as he had instructed me to do at our previous meeting if ever I saw him again. He seemed pleased to see me, and we walked down to the Oxford Union together. He explained that he had come up to get rid of his cottages: because they were tied cottages the old widows who lived in them paid only eight shillings a week in rent and he could not screw it up any further. Then he asked me if I could get hold of a lorry to transport a mosaic icon weighing half a ton which he wanted to present to Walsingham. (I could not oblige.) Suddenly he asked, “Do you know how I keep so young?” (for in some ways he was a young man in spite of his physical appearance). “No, Father, I don’t”, I replied. “Well, I will tell you. Have you ever observed the ways of the serpent? He sheds his skin regularly, and that’s just what I do. In my flat in London I have a very strong electric fire and a very small cubicle. I turn on the fire and wait until the cubicle is very hot. Then I take off all my clothes, pour water all over myself, and go and sit in the cubicle. Very soon all my skin falls off and I come out young again. But do you know” (this with an amused and quizzical glance at me), “I can’t find any pupils to follow my example!”

The weather was so hot, and Fr Nicholas seemed so tired, that from time to time during the day I dropped into the Union to make sure that all was well with him.

The next day was Ascension Day, when several traditional ceremonies are performed at Lincoln College. As I entered the Quad shortly after lunch I saw the unearthly figure of Fr Nicholas standing there in the sunshine. He explained that he had mistakenly thought that term was over, and having seen me the previous day he thought that I was staying up to do some extra work. He had therefore come to Lincoln to find me and cheer me up in case I was feeling lonely. I thought this a kindly gesture.

Fr Nicholas told me that I could always visit him at London or Broadstairs; if the latter house was full there would always be room for me in the hay-loft! I was never able to take advantage of these invitations.

When I saw Fr Nicholas in May 1962 I realised that his physical strength was leaving him and I felt that it would be our last meeting. He died at St Pancras Hospital in London on March 24th 1963 at the age of 87. One could not feel regret at hearing of his death: that would have seemed strangely inappropriate. I remembered rather the great pleasure of talking with him, a pleasure all the greater because every one of our meetings was so unexpected. Above all there was the affection and respect which he inspired. How could one feel regret for him? For I am quite sure that in his simple, matter-of-fact way Nicholas Gibbes looked forward to seeing Alexey and the Family once again.

David Beattie

3 August 1963

 

First Afternote (originally typed soon after 3 August 1963)

Fr Nicholas and the Russian Churches in London

Archpriest Nicholas Popov (Manchester) told me in 1959 that Fr Nicholas Gibbes made his submission to Moscow because he felt that as the land of Russia must have a monarch, so must the Church of Russia have one ruler. I felt from our conversations that Fr Nicholas Gibbes was not entirely happy about Ennismore Gardens. He preferred the more homely and used appearance of Emperor’s Gate, and complained that Bishop Antony (Bloom) had a mania for polishing, gilding and burnishing anything that could be made to look new and smart. At the same time he resented the very natural annoyance felt by Emperor’s Gate about his change of jurisdiction. He said that Bishop Nikodim had been very rude not to invite him within the iconostasis when he was present on one occasion. He also remarked that “Nikodim had formerly been very arrogant, but more recent events had caused him to change his tune.” I do not know what he meant by this.

Second Afternote (based on a diary entry for 9 November 1963)

Fr Nicholas’s Papers

After Fr Nicholas’ death Timothy Ware (now Metropolitan Kallistos) and I were worried that his papers and effects might be dispersed and lost. We thought that every effort should be made to preserve them and perhaps use them for writing and publishing a memoir of him. These latter plans came to nothing because Timothy Ware soon afterwards went to Princeton University and the Foreign Office posted me to Moscow. But as a first step we asked to see George Gibbes, Fr Nicholas’ Russian adopted son. He received us at Fr Nicholas’ London home, 17 Robert Street, near Euston Station, at 2 15 pm on Saturday, 9 November 1963. Robert Street was at that time a rapidly decaying thoroughfare (it has since been demolished), but No. 17 was kept well enough.

George Gibbes had taken care to check our bona fides. He had even looked up Fr Nicholas’ note of my first meeting with him in June 1961, which he had carefully recorded in his diary and which George Gibbes showed me. George Gibbes was very reluctant that any account of Fr Nicholas should appear under a political imprint such as that of the Monarchist Press Association, and he also wanted a rather larger work than the MPA could have produced. He was in fact thinking of writing one himself.

The exciting thing was that Fr Nicholas had kept everything, including even correspondence with his tutor at Cambridge and such other items as his correspondence with the White Army government in Siberia. There were many photographs and boxes of documents. We were shown Fr Nicholas’ little cell, which was being kept exactly as it had been. As often happens with rooms which have been left undisturbed after someone has died, it felt as if Fr Nicholas was actually there in spirit. It was a tiny room, very simple and lined with books and icons, two photographs of the Tsarevich and one of the Empress. The books were curiously mixed: Bibles and theological works, together with the “Law Home Companion”. There was a very old (600 years) and worm-eaten icon which George Gibbes said had once been entirely obscure, but which during the last months of Fr Nicholas’ life had gradually regained its colours. On the day of his death the images of Our Lady and Child had glowed faintly as if illuminated by a spotlight. There was also an icon from the house at Tobolsk. We were told that other relics, including a chandelier from the Ipatiev house at Ekaterinburg, were safe in Oxford.

We left reassured about the fate of Fr Nicholas’ papers, at least for the time being. I believe that the chandelier and icons from the chapel at Marston Street, Oxford, later went to Luton Hoo. They are now said to be in safe storage, but I do not know where, nor in whose custody.

David Beattie,

Colchester

10 November 2018

 

 

Fr Nicholas Gibbes: The First English Disciple of Tsar Nicholas II and the First English Priest of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia

A Talk given at Barton Manor near Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on 7 July 2018.

In this centenary year of the martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, his August Family, their servants and the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, it would be well to recall their first English disciple and the first ever English Russian Orthodox priest, Fr Nicholas Gibbes.

Charles Sydney Gibbes, for short Sydney Gibbes, was born 142 years ago, on 19 January 1876. In the 19th century this was for all Orthodox the feast day of St John the Baptist, the voice that cried in the wilderness. His parents were called John and Mary – more English than that you cannot find. His father was a bank manager in Rotherham, just outside Sheffield, in Yorkshire. Amusingly, this would later be recorded by a Russian civil servant on Sydney’s residence papers in Russia as ‘Rotterdam’.

With no fewer than ten siblings, Sydney grew into a stereotypical, Victorian, Protestant young man of the educated classes. He received his education at Cambridge, where he changed the spelling of his surname to Gibbes, from Gibbs, as the adopted form is the older, historical one. This change was typical of his love of historical detail and accuracy. Sydney is described as: severe, stiff, self-restrained, imperturbable, quiet, gentlemanly, cultured, pleasant, practical, simple, brave, loyal, lucid, witty, crisp, vigorous, honourable, reliable, impeccably clean, with high character, of good sense and with agreeable manners. He seems the perfect Victorian English Yorkshire gentleman – not a man with such an unusual destiny.

However, as we know from history, underneath Victorian gentlemen lurked other sides – repressed, but still present. For example, we know that Sydney could be stubborn, that he used corporal punishment freely, that he could be very awkward with others, and he is recorded as having quite a temper, though these traits mellowed greatly with the years. My good friend from Oxford days long ago, Dmitri Kornhardt, recalled how in later life tears would stream down Fr Nicholas’ face when celebrating services in memory of the Imperial Martyrs, but how also he would very rapidly recover himself after such unEnglish betrayals of emotion.

Underneath the Victorian reserve there was indeed a hidden man, one with spiritual sensitivity, who was interested in theatre and theatricals, spiritualism, fortune-telling and palmistry, and one who was much prone to recording his dreams. Perhaps this is why, when after University he had been thinking of the Anglican priesthood as a career, he found it ‘stuffy’ and abandoned that path. Talking to those who knew him and reading his biographies, and there are three of them, we cannot help feeling that as a young man Sydney was searching for something – but he knew not what. The real man would eventually come out from beneath his Victorian conditioning.

Perhaps this is why in 1901, aged 25, he found himself teaching English in Russia – a country with which he had no connection. Here he was to spend over 17 years. The key moment came in autumn 1908 when he went to the Imperial Palace in Tsarskoe Selo and became the English tutor of the Imperial children. In particular, he became close to the Tsarevich Alexis, with whom he identified very closely. Why? We can only speculate that there was a sympathy or else complementarity of characters; together with Sydney’s bachelordom, this may have been enough for the friendship to develop. In any case, he became almost a member of the Imperial Family and a profound and lifelong admirer of what he called, as an eyewitness, their exemplary Christian Faith, close family life and kindness. His meeting with this Family changed his life forever and he only ever spoke of them with profound admiration.

In August 1917 Sydney found himself following the Family to Tobolsk. Utterly loyal to the Family, in July 1918 he found himself in Ekaterinburg, the city in the Urals between Asia and Europe, East and West, after their unspeakable murder in the Ipatiev House. He helped identify objects, returning again and again to the House, picking up mementoes, which he was to cling on to until the end, and still reluctant to believe that the crime had taken place. Coming almost half way through his life when he was aged 42, this was without doubt the crucial event in that life, the turning point, the spark that made him seek out his destiny in all seriousness. With the murder of the Family, the bottom had fallen out of his life, his raison d’etre had gone. Where could he go from here?

He did not, like most, return to England. We know that he, like Tsar Nicholas, had been particularly shocked by what he saw as the British betrayal of the Imperial Family. Indeed, we know that it was George Buchanan, the British ambassador to St Petersburg, who had in part been behind the February 1917 deposition of the Tsar by treacherous aristocrats, politicians and generals. This coup d’etat was greeted by Lloyd George in the House of Commons as the ‘achievement of one of our war aims’. (We now also know from the book by Andrew Cook that it was British spies who had assassinated Gregory Rasputin and also that the Tsar’s own cousin, George V, had refused to help the Tsar and His Family escape).

In fact, disaffected by Britain’s politics, from Ekaterinburg Sydney went not west, but east – to Siberian Omsk and then further east, to Beijing and then Harbin in Manchuria. Off and on he would spend another 17 years here, in Russian China. In about 1922 he suffered a serious illness. His religiosity seems to have grown further and after this he would go to study for the Anglican priesthood at St Stephen’s House in Oxford. However, for someone with the world-changing experience that he had had, that was not his way; perhaps he still found Anglicanism ‘stuffy’, I think he would have found almost anything stuffy after what he had been through – seeing his adopted Family wiped out. Finally, in 1934, in Harbin, Sydney joined the Far Eastern Metropolia of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.

There is no doubt that he did this as a direct result of the example of the Imperial Family, for he took the Orthodox name of Alexis – the name of the Tsarevich, whom he naturally saw as a martyr. He was to describe this act as ‘getting home after a long journey’, words which perhaps describe the reception into the Orthodox Church of any Western person. Thus, from England, to Russia and then to China, he had found his way. In December 1934, aged almost 59, he became successively monk, deacon and priest. He was now to be known as Fr Nicholas – a name deliberately taken in honour of the martyred Tsar Nicholas. In 1935 he was made Abbot by Metr Antony of Kiev, the head of our multinational Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, and later received the title of Archimandrite.

Wishing to establish some ‘Anglo-Orthodox organisation’, in 1937 Fr Nicholas Gibbes came back to live in England permanently. He was aged 61. Of this move he wrote: ‘It is my earnest hope that the Anglican Church should put itself right with the Holy Orthodox Church’. He went to live in London in the hope of setting up an English-language parish within the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. In this he did not succeed and in 1940 he moved to Oxford. In this last part of his life in Oxford he became the founder of the first Russian Orthodox church in Oxford at 4, Marston Street, where he lived in humble and modest circumstances. In recalling the address of that first church, dedicated to St Nicholas, we cannot help recalling that today’s Russian Orthodox St Nicholas church in Oxford is not very far away from it.

Not an organiser, sometimes rather erratic, even eccentric, Fr Nicholas was not perhaps an ideal parish priest, but he was sincere and well-respected. In Oxford he cherished his mementoes of the Imperial Family to the end. Before he departed this life, on 24 March 1963, an icon given to him by the Imperial Family, was miraculously renewed and began to shine. One who knew him at the time confirmed this and after Fr Nicholas’ death, commented that now at last Fr Nicholas was seeing the Imperial Family again – for he had been waiting for this moment for 45 years. He was going to meet once more those who had shaped his destiny in this world.

In the 1980s in an old people’s home outside Paris I met a parishioner of our Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, Count Nikolai Komstadius. He had met Fr Nicholas in 1954, in connection with the false Anastasia, but perhaps had seen him before, since his father had been in charge of the Tsarskoe Selo estate and he himself had been a childhood friend of the Tsarevich. I remember in the 1980s visiting him. In the corner of his room in front of an icon of the martyred Tsarevich there burned an icon-lamp. He turned to me and said: ‘That is such a good likeness, it is just like him and yet also it is an icon’. Not many of us lives to see a childhood playfriend become a saint and have his icon painted. Yet as a young man in his thirties Fr Nicholas had known a whole family, whom he considered to be saints. Indeed, he had been converted by their example.

There are those who have life-changing experiences. They are fortunate, because they stop living superficially, stop drifting through life and stop wasting God-sent opportunities and so find their destiny. Such life-changing experiences can become a blessing if we allow them to become so. Fr Nicholas was one such person, only his life-changing experience was also one that had changed the history of the whole world. For a provincial Victorian Yorkshire bank manager’s son, who had grown up with his parents John and Mary, he had come very far. And yet surely the seeds had been there from the beginning. To be converted we first of all need spiritual sensitivity, a seeking spirit, but secondly we also need an example. Fr Nicholas had had both, the example being the Imperial Martyrs. As that late and wonderful gentlewoman Princess Koutaissova, whom many of us knew, said of his priesthood: ‘He was following his faithfulness to the Imperial Family’.

In this brief talk I have not mentioned many aspects of Fr Nicholas’ life, such as his possible engagement, his adopted son, his hopes in Oxford. This is because they do not interest me much here. I have tried to focus on the essentials, on the spiritual meaning of his life, his destiny. Those essentials are, I believe, to be found in his haunted and haunting gaze. Looking at his so expressive face, we see a man staring into the distance, focusing on some vision, both of the past and of the future. This vision was surely of the past life he had shared with the martyred Imperial Family and also of the future – his long hoped-for meeting with them once more, his ‘sense of completion’.

 

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.

Local and Faithful, or Westernised and Hellenised

Since the Russian Revolution the Patriarchate of Constantinople has taken into its jurisdiction a variety of Russophobic dissidents. Their schisms have come about because the dissidents have been too spiritually weak to remain faithful to the Russian Tradition and so have been dragged down into party politics or personality cults. Thus, they have either been virulent nationalists or else anti-Tradition liberals and freemasons, cultivating political and theological schisms caused by that Revolution. Having lost sight of the big picture of Orthodox civilisational values, the Orthodox world-view, they have been brought down into petty, provincial concerns.

Some of the dissidents have been Slavs – Russians, Ukrainians or ex-Catholic Carpatho-Russians – others have been Western converts – Finnish, American, French, Estonian or ex-Anglican. Here we look at the dissidents, originally Russophobic, pro-Kerensky aristocrats from Saint Petersburg, who, leaving Russia, then the Church outside Russia and then the Church inside Russia for Constantinople, over 80 years ago formed the Rue Daru jurisdiction in Paris. After nearly a year without a leader, they are now hoping to elect a new archbishop in November 2013.

Although issued from the Russian Tradition and even claiming to belong to it, since they left the Mother-Church these dissidents have gradually become more and more Westernised and absorbed into the US and Turkish-controlled Greek Patriarchate in Istanbul. This can clearly be seen in their forsaking of the Orthodox liturgical calendar and Orthodox liturgical, dogmatic and pastoral practices for modernist, Western, secular practices. This simultaneous Westernisation and Hellenisation is inevitable and can only be avoided by their leaving schism and taking the path back to the Mother-Church.

If, after the election of a new archbishop, they cannot return to the Mother-Church, they will consign themselves to remaining a small archdiocese of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, perhaps 5,000 in number in all, most of their parishes set up in temporary or rented premises and less than 25 strong. Their ethos will continue to be intellectual, not spiritual, philosophical, not theological, disincarnate, not incarnate, with mainly untrained clergy, without a living Tradition and without a Mother-Church, yet dependent on the Russian Church for vestments, literature, musical culture and people to fill its small parishes. Clearly, eventually, they will disappear, absorbed into Greek Church structures and practices.

However, if, after the election of a new archbishop, they can return to the Mother-Church, they will be able to rejoin the multinational and multilingual free Russian Orthodox Church, fifty times bigger than the tiny and captive Patriarchate of Constantinople. They will be able to take part in the construction of the Metropolia of Western Europe, with its hundreds and hundreds of real parishes and historic churches all over Western Europe, the stepping-stone to a future new Local Church and yet at the same time authentically faithful to the Russian Orthodox Tradition and Church in all ways. Local and Faithful, or Westernised and Hellenised: this is the choice that they face.

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Repose of Archimandrite Nicholas Gibbes, English Tutor to the Martyred Tsarevich Alexis

Saturday 23rd March at the Russian Orthodox parish of St Nicholas the Wonderworker, 34 Ferry Road, Marston, Oxford OX3 0EU

9.30 Hours
10.00 Divine Liturgy
12.15 Litya at the grave of Fr Nicholas in Headington Cemetery
13.00 Lunch
13.30 Talks by Metr Kallistos and others
15.00 Tea and departure

In 1934 Archimandrite Nicholas (Gibbes), a Cambridge-educated, Englishman, joined the Russian Orthodox Church, as a result of the martyrdom of the Imperial Family whom he, as Charles Sidney Gibbes, had so devotedly served. In joining Her, he took the name of the Tsarevich Alexis and then, being ordained a priest-monk in 1935, took the name of Tsar Nicholas. Therefore, on Saturday 10/23 March 2013, the day on which Orthodox memorial services are celebrated and the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of Fr Nicholas’ repose, we shall celebrate a memorial service on his grave at Headington cemetery in Oxford.

We shall pray for the repose of his soul and so also honour the saints whose examples converted him to the Orthodox Church. With Fr Nicholas Gibbes, a model of nobility and loyalty, we too shall be witnesses before history and stand firm in telling the Truth. In his life for the Tsar, Fr Nicholas became the first English priest of the multinational Russian Orthodox Church, an English wreath on the invisible graves of the Imperial Martyrs and an act of repentance on behalf of the English Nation.