Over the last fourteen years I have got to know particularly well a couple who are spiritual children and whom I call the Earl and Countess of Orthodox East Anglia. Nobles of Russian extraction, they have made their home in England and chosen to live in the mystical heart of our local East Anglian Orthodox Church and Kingdom. Count (Earl in the English system) Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, agreed to this extensive conversation after I interviewed his wife over a month ago. With his permission we have slightly edited his words, though his English is excellent.
On the table in the oak-beamed living room, where we conduct the interview, stands a golden samovar, bought in St Audrey’s Ely, alongside a portrait of the Tsar’s Family. Nearby stands a lovely vase with a bouquet of fragrant roses, which the Countess has picked from the garden of their thatched farmhouse in High Suffolk, near the Norfolk border. The Countess has served us tea from her favourite Royal Albert service, the doors to the garden wide open before us. Such is the setting for this second conversation, the recording of which stretched on into the lengthening shadows of the English summer evening.
Q: Can you please tell us something about your family?
A: In 1775 the Benckendorff family was awarded an estate of 8,000 acres in Sosnovka in the Tambov province of Russia for services to the Crown. After the Revolution most branches of the family, like ours, remained inside the USSR, but we had to change our name for fear of being murdered by the Bolsheviks. Indeed, one priestly ancestor is a New Martyr. At first, we remained in Russia, but after 1945 we moved to what had by then become the eastern Ukraine, though that region is now back in Russia again after 100 years of Soviet-imposed exile.
After 1917 one branch settled in England. This was the family of Count Alexander Benckendorff, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain between 1903 and 1917. His family found itself stranded in the White Russian emigration, as Alexander had passed away in January 1917. Unlike his brother Paul, who was very close to Tsar Nicholas in Tsarskoe Selo, Alexander was never Orthodox. He had become a Catholic by conviction from Lutheranism and is buried in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral in London.
Q: Where did you meet the Countess?
A: In the Ukraine. There I, a Benckendorff, met and married another Benckendorff, though the Countess was previously quite unknown to me and her branch of the family had also assumed another name. Some time ago I worked out that we are eighth cousins. The way we met was quite extraordinary, neither knowing that the other was of Benckendorff descent and yet feeling that we were kindred souls. Both of us were divorced, having made bad marriages when we were far too young, like so many who were brought up in the Soviet Union. The marriages did not last very long and there were no children. Some years after we met, in 2008, we left Russia and settled in the West.
Q: Did you know about the English Benckendorffs then?
A: No, we did not know anything about the ‘English’ branch of the family until five years ago. To our surprise, we discovered that they had lived in south-east Suffolk, very close to where we first lived before we moved here. Their choice was because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Ransomes farm machinery, made in Ipswich, was used on our estate and there were also contacts with the Suffolk Fisons fertiliser company, which later came to own a very large property called Harvest House in Felixstowe.
And so the family story turned full circle. In any case, Suffolk is where we have made our home and we in no way regret it. This is the land of St Edmund, the patron saint of Suffolk and of England, and we fly his flag here. You introduced us to him and to the other local saints. We respect the Local Church and honour the local saints. That is our Orthodox duty. We had thought of calling our Suffolk home ‘Sosnovka’ from the name of our estate, but we agreed that we must be local and so we named it ‘St Edmund’s House’.
Q: What did you study as a young man?
A: In the 90s I studied history at the University of Kiev and then some years later theology at St Tikhon’s University of the Humanities in Moscow. However, I never taught history, because in the 1990s we had to practise commerce in order to survive. We were fortunate in business because of my knowledge of English and French and my wife’s knowledge of German. We did very well. That is how I came to study as a mature student at St Tikhon’s in Moscow and then we moved to the West in 2008 and England in 2010. Nearly six years ago we bought this old farmhouse. Now I still study theology and the history of the Russian Church and I have also written a novel in Russian under a pseudonym. We also breed roses which involves travel to many places, including to Germany. Financially we have been helped by the investments we made in the past.
Q: As you know, I come from the Suffolk-Essex border where the dry and sunny climate and the soil are ideal for seed growing, which was my father’s profession. He was a sweet pea expert and even has a sweet pea named after him. How did you come to breed roses and not, for example, sweet peas?
A: Like you, Fr Andrew, we love sweet peas, also lilac and many other flowers and shrubs, but both of us have always loved roses more, already in the Ukraine, where in the east the black earth is so fertile and the climate is so good. Some twenty years ago my wife fell in love with roses in a monastery there, where she had the obedience from her spiritual father of maintaining the monastery rose garden. A huge variety of roses is available in Russia and the Ukraine with sturdier stems than in England, even though you have David Austen roses. One of our favourite roses is ‘Zephyr’ from Turchinov. We also love lilacs and again there is a Russian lilac called ‘Beauty of Moscow’. We are introducing Russian roses, lilacs and others into England. This seems to be our mission!
Strangely enough, we discovered that my great-great-grandfather’s cousin, the ambassador Alexander Konstantinovich, and his wife, Sofia Petrovna, who was a Tolstoy, also grew roses. Then their grand-daughter, Natalia Konstantinovna, who passed away only in 2018, grew them. Her husband, Thomas Humphrey Brooke, who was a friend of Sir Alfred Munnings, became an internationally acknowledged expert on roses. He was a close friend of the rosarian Peter Beales at his gardens in Attleborough in Norfolk. Humphrey cultivated over 500 varieties of rose. I know Peter Beales’ son, who has just retired. Roses must be in the Benckendorff genes.
Q: Let us turn to Church matters now. As you follow Church affairs very closely, you know much about the schism between Moscow and Constantinople on account of the Ukraine. Do you see a way out of this?
A: There is always a way out. It is called repentance, the antidote to despair, the antidote that Judas did not take. Beware, he did not take the antidote and hanged himself. What must be done to undo this schism is to work in reverse. This means going back to what caused the schism and reversing it. This means that Constantinople must abandon its pretensions to the territory of the Russian Church in the ex-Soviet Union. These pretensions were formed because the Patriarchate of Moscow refused to grant anyone outside the Russian Federation autocephaly and because Washington paid Constantinople to commit the crime of setting up a fake Church in the Ukraine. Still, if Moscow had given the Ukrainian Orthodox Church autocephaly years ago, creating a national Church there, Constantinople would never have meddled, because the Ukrainians would have been satisfied already.
Next, or preferably before that, Moscow must immediately stop its schism with Constantinople, start concelebrating and abandon its excommunications and defrockings, freeing people to act according to their conscience. The schism was quite unnecessary and just brought Moscow into exactly the same isolation and disrepute as Constantinople, losing it all sympathy. Two wrongs do not make a right. How do you say that in English, when both are equally guilty? There is an expression with six and six in it.
Q: Six of one and half a dozen of the other?
A: Yes, that’s it. Anyway, Moscow must also negotiate a canonical solution to the African problem. Either Africa belongs canonically to the Patriarchate of Alexandria or to Moscow, or else the territory must be divided and different geographical regions will belong to one or the other. For example, Egypt, or even all Muslim North Africa, could remain under Alexandria and Moscow could take Black Africa, where it has a lot of political support, though only if it is prepared to set up a real, local, independent African Orthodox Church. You cannot have overlapping jurisdictions on the same territory. We must support the canonical order of the Church internationally.
Q: Is this realistic? Look at the Diasporas, where we have had overlapping jurisdictions for over a century.
A: Things are changing. Look, the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine will be over soon. The Kiev regime is collapsing. Some even say it will all be over for the Dormition, on 28th August. Perhaps not so soon. In any case, the USA is giving up on its Fascist friends in the Ukraine, who have failed. Americans hate failure. What is the way out? One way is if Trump, who is already the real President – some even say that Biden is literally, not just metaphorically, dead – could perhaps denounce the whole Ukraine project. He could say that it was all a fantasy of Biden, ‘Genocide Joe’, as they call him.
Trump must abandon the fake OCU Church that Constantinople set up in the Ukraine with US dollars, denouncing it as created by those who deceived him in Washington in 2018. President Putin will make the freedom of the Church a condition for peace anyway. The Church must be free from the persecution of the OCU, which must return the thousands of churches it has stolen. Trump must give up the illegal sanctions against Russia, release frozen Russian assets and return the stolen interest on those assets.
In this way President Trump can get a photo opportunity of the Two Presidents. He will be shaking hands with President Putin in Moscow (Trump loves having his photo taken) as the great hero, peacemaker and dealmaker, unlike Biden the warmaker and failure. Why, Trump could get a Nobel Prize – those prizes are funded by the CIA anyway, as we saw with Solzhenitsyn. Trump and Moscow can sign an agreement, stating that Washington has no claims to the Ukraine and that Moscow has no claims to the Baltics, Finland, Poland, Romania, or anywhere else west of the Ukraine. This will be historic, but should all have been done 33 years ago in 1991.
Q: What about Moldova?
A: This agreement would include Moldova, unless some minorities who live there along the border with the New Ukraine or Russia vote by democratic referendum to transfer, for example, the Transdnistrians and the Gagauzians. Most of Moldova will eventually go back to Romania. It is historically inevitable. The Patriarchate in Moscow has lost the loyalty of most Moldovans through its centralising racism and many there are already joining the Romanian Church.
Such a deal of the Two Presidents would give both Russia and Western Europe security, making NATO entirely redundant, which is what both President Trump and President Putin want. Such a new security agreement for Europe could be presented as a triumph for Trump (the Americans are experts at PR) and Moscow will be fully satisfied. Russia will set up the third Union State in the New Ukraine, which will be a second Belarus, perhaps also landlocked, as all the south and east of the old Ukraine, which are Russian, as I know, may well rejoin Russia. The Ukraine will be demilitarised and denazified, as Moscow needs. With such a deal both sides will save money and, above all, both will save lives.
Q: Do you think the New Ukraine will retain the western borders of Stalin’s Ukraine?
A: Moscow may well give some extreme western parts of Stalin’s Ukraine, for Stalin’s borders are what Biden and the EU Commissars have been fighting for, back to Poland, Romania and especially to Hungary, our ally. This would be seen as a great victory for the USA and as a great victory for Russia, though it would not be a victory for the Western European elite. But that elite does not count for anything internationally and can be ignored. Moscow negotiates only with Trump, neither with the sick old man before Trump, nor with the Western European puppies who lie and cheat.
With peace in the Ukraine, the Patriarchate in Moscow will also have to negotiate a new relationship with the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kiev, under which I began my Orthodox life. And probably also a new relationship with other parts of the Russian Church outside the Russian Federation. Otherwise, Moscow will lose everything there too. A wave of autocephalies must follow. The age of Soviet central planning is over. It was over with the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, only the Church authorities did not keep up with changing times.
Q: Why do you say that this will not be a victory for the Western European elite?
A: The Western European political elite, its ruling class, has for eighty years been living off the USA, licking its heels and barking when told to. It has become dependent on the USA, not only a drug-addict enslaved to the USA, but also a vampire that sucks its blood. As in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, that elite does not want freedom. But Western Europe is a very expensive slave to keep and the now bankrupt USA can no longer afford it, just as one day it will no longer be able to afford to keep its other vassals, Israel, Japan and South Korea.
The American Empire is like the Roman Empire which in the early fifth century could not afford to keep Britain and had to abandon it. Western Europe will have to find its own way, control its own destiny, defend itself. Actually, it will be able to slash its futile military spending once the new security agreement or non-aggression pact with Russia has been signed. That is also what Russia wants. It is tired of being invaded by the West.
Today the USA is letting go of Western Europe. This means the UK and the EU, minus Hungary, Slovakia, others like Serbia and maybe later many more like Romania, Greece, and perhaps even Italy. The first three have already more or less negotiated their way out of the EU into BRICS. Freedom from the USA will undermine the parasitic globalist Western European elite of puppies and puppets, banksters and gangsters, unprincipled and hypocritical pawns all of them. They backed the Kiev Nazis even to their own detriment, allowing prices for their peoples to double and letting the Americans blow up the Nordstream pipeline.
That ruling class of perverts will have to resign, if they are not first voted out, or better arrested, because they no longer have the protection of Trump’s Washington. The Western European swamp will be drained. That is why they and their globalist media propagandists like the BBC feel betrayed and hate Trump. As a result of all this, we shall at last see new Western European rulers, hopefully far more respectful of the wishes of the native peoples of Western Europe. Then can be abandoned those satanic and blasphemous pagan festivals like Eurovision and the 33rd Olympic Games Opening Ceremony, which openly mocked Christ, Who was crucified when He was 33. No wonder French cathedrals burn down. If that is Western Civilisation, then there is nothing left to defend.
All these countries can then be at peace with the eastern half of Europe, comprised of Russia, the New Ukraine and Belarus. Importantly, this eastern half stretches on into North Asia, to the Chinese border and the Pacific Ocean. Russia is the gateway to Asia, the future, where three of the world’s four largest economies thrive. We are at last seeing the Gaullist vision of a natural unity which stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Western Europe will no longer be unnaturally cut off, but will rejoin the whole of Asia, of which it is only a north-western peninsula.
All this is possible, though if and when it happens is another story. It may all take many years and I trust more in Vance than in Trump. These are just my thoughts and hopes. We shall see.
Q: Will England take part in this New Western Europe, which will at last become a real part of Eurasia, which geographically it always has been?
A: Ah, dear old England. A good question. I really hope so. If the USA rejects England, it will have to leave the USA. It will not be the fifty-first State of the USA. And with the very fragile, violent and divisive situation in the present fifty States with their 35 trillion dollars of debt, that is not an enviable position to be in. I think England should ally itself with the new, post-American, Eurasian Europe of the BRICS Alliance. Ireland, Scotland and Wales surely will. May St Edmund and the English saints guide England towards this.
But for England to become sovereign again, the oppressive British Establishment ruling class will first have to be removed, with its private elite schools, Oxbridge, Westminster, BBC, Financial Times, Economist, tabloid press like the Guardian, the Telegraph, all those other Daily State propaganda mouthpieces, and the Blairs, Camerons, Sunaks and Starmers. As you have very often written, Father, that elite is alien, not Norman by blood, but Norman by mentality, spiritually Norman, made up of spiritual invaders.
Q: We have got into political affairs. To come back to our question, what in your view was the essential error behind the Greek-Russian schism?
A: Lack of communion. It is vital to remain in communion with everyone. It is a great, great sin to break communion, because if you do this, you cause division in the Church. And the Moscow bureaucrats who surround the Patriarch committed this sin, weaponising communion. And look where they are now: isolated, feared, unloved and scandal-ridden. It is all so Soviet. They have lost all their best friends – they even lost you, Father, who spent all your life fighting for communion and the reintegration of the Russian Church.
Q: Why do bishops break communion?
A: It is always because they want more power. And what do they do once they have power? They introduce novelties in order to justify themselves. This was exactly the case of Rome in the eleventh century. All the innovations they introduced after they had broken off communion from the Church were self-justification for breaking communion. And self-justification is the opposite of repentance.
A thousand years on and the Popes of Rome and the Vatican machine have still not repented, still claiming to be rulers of the Christian world, and so they are still out of communion with us, who follow the principle of the Local, which is the principle of Catholicity. They instead imposed the Centre, that is, Rome. Can you imagine, they tried to impose their barbarous Latin on the descendants of the Civilisations of the Incas, Maya and Aztecs! No respect for the Local!
We must be very strict about keeping in communion. The way back, the return, is in respecting the canonical territories of each Local Church. That is what Rome did not do and instead tried to impose itself by the sword on Orthodox territories, with their crusades, inquisitions and so on. Now Constantinople is trying to do the same, imposing centralisation in imitation of Papism. And Moscow Church bureaucrats tried to do the same, but God has intervened, its Soviet Empire over Non-Russians is crumbling.
Q: I would like to come back to my original question, which we did not answer. Do these considerations give us a solution to the divisions in the Diasporas, where there have been several overlapping jurisdictions for over a century?
A: In the Diasporas, where there are mixed Orthodox populations, responsibility for organising new Local Churches lies with the majority ethnic group, but that majority must respect all the customs of the minorities. This is what Bishop Tikhon, the future Russian Patriarch and Saint, did when he headed the multinational Northern American Orthodox Church before the Revolution. Then Carpatho-Russians and Russian-converted Alaskans were the majority, but minorities like the Syrians, Serbs and others were together with them.
Today the Greeks are the Orthodox majority there, as also in Australia, but unity is blocked because of the political and imperialist style of the Greeks. As long as they have that Hellenist style, unity will be impossible. Only when the Greeks have a Non-Greek Patriarch, will they be taken seriously. As regards Western Europe the Romanians are the majority. Here I am hopeful, because respect is what our Romanian Metropolitan Joseph gave our Russian and Moldovan parishes with our calendar, languages and customs, when we had to flee to his canonical protection from pseudo-Russian episcopal persecution. And we in turn greatly respect and love the Romanians. I love their singing and their simplicity! Mutual respect is vital.
Q: One well-known Russian Metropolitan said that the Moscow-Constantinople schism is as big and as permanent as the 1054 Western Schism. What do you think?
A: That was nonsense. This schism is all about personalities and they are temporary. Here today, gone tomorrow, as you say in English. Neither Moscow, nor Constantinople has renounced or changed the Creed, unlike Rome in 1054. So this schism is not at all on the same level as 1054, it is not a dogmatic issue, but a vulgar issue of territory and personalities. And personalities change and are replaced. In any case, the Metropolitan-oligarch who said that, the bureaucrat was in part responsible for the whole fiasco, is now suspended and completely discredited. Nobody is listening to him any more. Here today, gone tomorrow.
Q: Can other Local Churches play a role in healing the Moscow-Constantinople schism?
A: Of course, and a vital role. The Churches of Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, Macedonia, Poland and perhaps others like Antioch, Czechoslovakia and America, and of course the canonical Church of Metropolitan Onufry in the Ukraine, will play a vital role. Even some bishops in Greece and Cyprus are sufficiently non-racist to understand the reality. Some Local Churches are already playing that role, stressing the Conciliar principle, the principle of Sobornost, that is, Catholicity, which, by the way, is the exact opposite of Catholicism and it is precisely the spirit of Catholicism, that is Papism, which caused the schism. Read the interview with the new Bulgarian Patriarch, who was elected after the American candidate lost and was humiliated and the Greeks had to go home like whipped dogs. His words are inspired.
Q: Do you know Metropolitan Onufry?
A: Not personally, only by sight, but I do know Metropolitan Agafangel of Odessa and Archbishop Diodor quite well and they have the same spirit. The further you are from Moscow, the more you find that spirit.
Q: You mention that the essence of the schism is the lust for power on the part of bishops and the spirit of Catholicism or Papism which lies behind it. Can you expand on this?
A: We are all waiting for the restoration of canonical order in the Russian Church, but this cannot happen until the end of what some Russians call ‘Philocatholicism’. This means the fawning admiration by some Russian bishops of the Vatican power-structure, which is the concept of a Church-State, a Church which is a State, or is even more powerful than a State, as history saw at Canossa. However, I am completely against this word because I respect ordinary Catholics, who are Catholics only because they were born in a certain country and I would never insult or disrespect them. The disease inside the Russian Church is not Philocatholicism, the disease is ‘Philopapism’. That is the real heart of the issue, And, by the way, it has nothing to do with ecumenism. Some of the worst Philopapists are anti-ecumenist.
Q: In that case, can you define ‘Philopapism’ for us?
A: Yes, but first understand that Philopapism is not just a Russian disease, it has long infected Constantinople, where it is called ‘Eastern Papism’, and before that it infected Rome, where it has always been called Papism. In Rome the problem was and is Western nationalism, in Constantinople it is Greek nationalism and in Moscow it is Russian nationalism. In Russia, it is not at all a recent Soviet disease, ‘Sergianism’, unlike as some very politicised, anti-Communist emigres used to imagine, it goes back centuries in Russia too, long before Communism.
It existed, for example, just before the Revolution in the awful persecution of the so-called ‘Name of God’ monks on Mt Athos. It was Tsar Nicholas who stopped that persecution, which had been instigated by Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky), who later became the first leader of the émigré ROCOR. The persecution was carried out by bureaucrats who were more or less atheists. The First World War followed it. And most of those very same bishops who had persecuted simple piety, then abandoned Tsar Nicholas at the Revolution and even rejoiced at his overthrow. Later they had to repent, redeeming themselves at the price of martyrdom or of exile. They had to pay the price for their earlier vile persecution.
Q: What about the Soviet form of Philopapism?
A: The post-Revolutionary bout of Philopapism goes back to Metropolitan, later Patriarch, Sergius, who wanted to ‘save the Church’, just like the Popes and the recent Patriarchs of Constantinople. How can you ‘save the Church’? Christ is the Saviour! The Church does not need saving, it is we, including bishops and patriarchs, who need saving. Who do they think they are? The problem is that the Philopapists see the Church as a purely worldly organisation, just like the Popes of Rome, who used to lead armies in order to defend their Church. In order to defeat the barbarians, they themselves became barbarians! Who then was the gentleman?! From Patriarch Sergius this infection spread down to personalities like Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), who characteristically died in the arms of the Pope. Some say that he was a secret cardinal. Maybe. That is not the point. From him the disease has contaminated further to this day.
This disease is the mentality that bishops are ‘princes of the Church’, in fact they are perverted oligarchs, just like the Borgias in Renaissance Rome. This is poisonous. It is why I refused to go to many churches when I lived in the Ukraine and Russia. They were an immoral business operation and many bishops there are immoral, chosen only because they know how to make money, not because they believe in God, pray, or are monks. I think many of these new Russian Borgias should go to prison. The current Metropolitan Hilarion affair is only the tip of the iceberg. Others must be trembling now too. The truth is coming out and judgement is coming to them all.
Q: You said that Philopapism goes back centuries in Russia. When did Philopapism begin?
A: It came in after the fall of Constantinople, the Second Rome, in 1453. So began the idea of the Third Rome. Fighting against St Nil of Sora and the hesychast Non-Possessors – St Sergius of Radonezh had been one of them earlier on – the situation came to a head at the so-called ‘Raskol’, that is, the Old Ritualist schism 200 years later. Then the administrative centre of the Russian Church in Moscow was contaminated by Philopapism, which was also encouraged by the idea of the Third Rome, which maintains that Russia has a messianic mission. Russia does have a mission, but it takes place within the multilateral Alliance of Civilisations, which is what BRICS is about.
In other words, Philopapists think that Russia is exceptional, indispensable to the world and therefore anything its rulers do is justified. The antidote to this was in the concept of Moscow as a Second Jerusalem, but that option was cruelly rejected by the Moscow bureaucrats. It is not that I am in favour of Old Ritualism, which was a form of ignorant nationalism, but I am against persecution. What difference is there between the State persecution of the Old Ritualists in the seventeenth century and the State persecution of Orthodox in the twentieth century?
The Philopapist mentality creates pharisees and ‘high priests’, as Christ called them in the Gospel, those who like ‘the first places at table’. Philopapists consider that they are the chosen people and so above the law, above the canons, ‘exceptional’. But this mentality is why the pharisees crucified Christ, Who called them to order, what we call canonical order, and told them that our Kingdom is not of this world. He overturned the tables of these new moneychangers, which is what you did, Fr Andrew, when you chased out the new pharisees who were threatening you and screaming at you in 2021 and 2022. All those who persecuted you are one by one being removed. Bishops are not above the canons.
It is the Holy Spirit Who chooses us for mission, not pharisees. Pharisees think only in worldly terms of money and power, and camouflage themselves with messianism as self-justification for their lusts. It is simply lust for money and power that contaminates these people. Once they have money, they want power. It is always the same old sordid story of corruption and perversion. That is Philopapism.
Q: But Phariseeism itself is universal, isn’t it?
A: Yes, of course. It was this same missionary, messianic mentality which inspired the atheist Jew Bronstein-Trotsky, who wanted to spread the Communism of the Third International (which replaced the Third Rome) worldwide. He also persecuted, leading the Red Army and causing the deaths of millions. But it is not only Jewish, it can be Frankish, Norman, Venetian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, German, Soviet, American, or anything else.
For instance, Soviet messianism strangely resembles American messianism. This is because the struggle between Washington and Moscow is in fact the struggle between the First Rome and the Third Rome, for the USA is the heir to the infallible Popes of the First Rome. ‘We are the exceptional people, the indispensable nation’, the infallible US have been saying of themselves ever since the collapse of the SU (Soviet Union), though its collapse had nothing to do with the Americans. (See how even the initials US and SU and their symbols, the white star and the red star, are the same, just the other way round).
Communism collapsed because it is unrealisable and went bankrupt. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union went to the heads of the US elite. They claimed absurdly: ‘This is the end of history and we have won. As the victors, we can set up a World Empire, called Globalism, we have exceptional authority, therefore no laws apply to us, we can carry out genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Libya and Syria, in the Donbass and Gaza, we can ignore the International Criminal Court. We can do whatever we want’. In reality, this is just the same vulgar old imperialism, absolutism, immorality, cloaked in their smug Protestant self-righteousness and infallibility. It is Philopapism.
In reality only God is exceptional. No human being or country is exceptional.
Q: What do you think of what some call the ‘liberal opposition’ in the Russian Church, clergymen like Protodeacon Andrey Kuraev and the popular pastor Fr Alexei Usminsky? They are also opposed to these Vatican-adoring, ‘money and power’ Russian bishops, the pharisaic Philopapists, as you are.
A: The dissident liberals are opposed to the Philopapists, but not for the same reasons as I am. The liberals are opposed to such bishops because the liberals are in reality rationalistic and modernistic Protestants. Like all Protestants, they are naturally anti-Catholic, anti-Papist. However, like all Protestants they are also generally pro-Western and some are traitors to Russia, just like their corrupt enemies whom they fight and are also traitors to Russia (I make exceptions for some who are just extremely naïve and not very intelligent). We disagree with the liberals because we are not Protestants and we follow the historic Orthodox Faith.
We are not traitors, we are patriots of Russia, that is, of the real Russia, of Orthodox Rus. President Putin is preparing the way for that, for the coming Emperor. He took on not just Paris and Berlin, but the whole West and won. We hope that God gives him time to help cleanse the Church next.
However, I do disagree with the appalling way that the liberals have been treated, with their so-called ‘defrockings’ by the selfsame corrupt bishops. You cannot defrock a clergyman because he has different political views from his bishop under the absurd pretext that he is being ‘disobedient’. The threat of defrocking forced them and many others, in the Netherlands, Lithuania, Spain, USA and in Russia into joining Constantinople – they had no alternative. This is yet another example of the Moscow bureaucracy weaponising a sacrament, this time not the eucharist, but the priesthood. But grace is given by the Holy Spirit, not by pieces of paper signed by jealous or wicked bishops. Thank God, Patriarch Kyrill is beginning to remove them, suspend them or retire them. He has a lot of work to do.
Q: How is authentic Orthodox missionary work different from American missionary work?
A: If you have a missionary message to spread to others, the message of Christ, then you do not spread it by violence and threats. This is what the ‘Roman Union’ of the Vatican did. This is what the ‘Soviet Union’ did. Now this is what the ‘American Union’ (which is USA and NATO – basically the ‘European Union’) does. They have all used violence and threats. This has guaranteed the downfall of all of them. It is what is happening now.
The American Union, usually called ‘The West’, is collapsing, it too has gone bankrupt. They have done it to themselves, just like the Soviet Union. As someone from the Soviet Union, I can see very clearly how the European Union has become the same. The commissars, mentality and lies of its politicians and journalists are exactly the same. But the Godless are always defeated because they are all from Babylon. Their Tower always collapses.
Authentic Orthodox missionary work does not use violence and threats. I have recently discovered the Russian saint, German of Alaska as an example. What a great monk! And how he has been ignored by Church authorities and was resisted by Russian State authorities (long before ‘Sergianism’!). He is unknown in Russia. St German lived among the Inuit people ‘as one of them’. Not even a priest, he did not impose his language or customs by violence or threats against the people. He did not try and steal their property. He was their servant and defender, not their persecutor or a ‘prince of the Church’. He was the real Apostle of Alaska. He was able to convert people, because he was Christlike.
In this he was just like Sts Cyril and Methodius, Apostles of the Slavs, St Stephen of Perm, Apostle of the Zyrians, St Nicholas, Apostle of Japan, or St Macarius, Apostle of the Altai, he respected others. That is the problem of the Moscow Patriarchal bureaucrats today, lack of respect for others, for the Local. And that is why they are losing everything, they put politics above the Church. If I may paraphrase St Matthew’s Gospel: Seek ye first the kingdom of man, and all these things will be taken from you’. They do not deserve to keep it. God will take it away from them because they are unworthy, just as He took Constantinople away from the Greeks in 1453 because of their racism. St German of Alaska’s way is the only way that Russia could convert the world and in no other way. Any other way is Philopapist.
Q: Whenever we talk, I feel nostalgic, as though I am talking to one of the old Russian emigres I knew in the 1970s, like my godfather, Nikolai Zernov. I would sit in his apartment in Northmoor Road in Oxford and look at the huge picture, almost fresco, he had of the Kremlin ‘before the deluge’, as he called it. Then there were Princess Kutaissova, Elizabeth Lopukhina, Dimitri Obolensky, Nadezhda Gorodetskaja or Lydia Slater, Boris Pasternak’s sister. They all had the same mentality. Why is this?
A: This is because we are Russian emigres like them! But I take your remark as a compliment. All I can say is that though we lived in the Soviet Union, we always kept our family traditions from before. Above all, we never, never accepted any Sovietisation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which has increased this Philopapist corruption and perversion today. This has made it and those who are too closely allied with it, like those crazy ROCOR Protestant converts in New York, into pariahs. It is so sad and so unnecessary. They have painted themselves into the corner with their notorious scandals, as you say. Now they are complaining because the rest of the Church at best ignores them and at worst openly mocks them. But how else are you going to treat psychopaths?
Q: Do you have any words of hope for our readers?
A: Yes, there is one thing. You know, I never used to like Trump. I thought he was a clown as well as a criminal and a narcissist. He was also a Russophobe and armed the Neo-Nazis against us and sanctioned us. But recently, he said something very Orthodox, no doubt for the first time in his life and without knowing it. He said: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! I even wanted to buy a picture of this moment, but my wife stopped me. She has no interest in politics and says it is all a waste of time. She prefers gardening and our two cats to politics. She says cats are far more intelligent than politicians.
She may be right, she so often is. But I still maintain that the concept of ‘Never surrender’ is Orthodox, because Christ never surrendered. If He had surrendered, there would never have been the Resurrection. So I say that Trump was saved for a purpose by the grace of God, the bullet missed him, but hit Biden instead and stopped World War III, and we should all repeat: ‘Fight, fight, fight’! Another American said something like: ‘Only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world do change the world’. This is in fact the definition of our fools for Christ. They change the world, corrupt and perverted bishops do not. Why, they cannot even change themselves.
July 2024