Category Archives: Persecution

December 2018-December 2022: On Becoming a Local Church

After the Liturgy for the Feast of the Entrance into the Temple of the Mother of God on Sunday 4th December, Fr Andrew was interviewed informally about the present situation of the Orthodox Church. Below is the slightly edited interview.

 

Q: What would you say about the events in the Orthodox Churches over the last four years?

A: The present very tragic situation of the Local Orthodox Churches is such that I almost feel nostalgic for the first third of my Orthodox life, before 1989, during the Cold War. In those days there were two groups of Local Churches: those in front of the Berlin Wall and those behind the Berlin Wall. All was clear. You knew exactly why some spoke in one way (because they had a Communist gun in their backs) and why others spoke in another way (because they had an anti-Communist gun in their backs). The first were involuntary hostages, the second were voluntary hostages.

I did not think I would live to see the present chaos, which has accumulated as a result of the errors over the last thirty-three years. First of all, precisely in December 2018, exactly four years ago, the Church of Constantinople, backed by the USA, for purely political and financial reasons started a major schism with the Russian Church in the Ukraine (it had already started a minor one in Estonia, back, I think, in 1994). This 2018 event was the foundation of the OCU, or ‘Poroshenko’s Orthodox Church’ (PCU), as it is called in Ukrainian. Result? The Russian Church refused to concelebrate or have anything to do with the Church of Constantinople and all those who supported it, for example, the Church of Alexandria. In so doing, however, it locked itself into isolation.

Then, in 2019, the small New-York-based Diaspora part of the Russian Church began taking numerous clergy and churches from Constantinople. This caused even more division and controversy. Then, exactly two years ago, in December 2020, the same fraction started a schism with the other Diaspora part of the same Russian Church, which is based in Paris. So there developed a still unresolved schism inside the Russian Church itself! A Church in schism with itself. What have we come to? Then, a year later, in December 2021, the Russian Church formed a schism in Africa, taking nearly 200 clergy and parishes from the Patriarchate of Alexandria, nearly half of its total number of missions there.

As if that was not enough, on 24 February 2022 the Russian Federation invaded the Ukraine and most of the hierarchy of the Russian Church backed the action. From this highly divisive moment on, the once multinational Russian Church started splitting into different Churches, the Russian, the Ukrainian, the Latvian, and perhaps tomorrow the Estonian, the Moldovan and the Lithuanian (where the situation is already dire after the uncanonical defrockings of clergy for merely expressing a different political viewpoint from the Russian Patriarch).

As a result, the Russian Orthodox parishes in Western Europe are cruelly affected, for a majority of their clergy and people are not Russians from Russia, but Baltic Russians, Ukrainians, Moldovans etc. So people have left those parishes, many of which are now undermined. Therefore new parishes of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (not the tiny and uncanonical OCU) have been opened for the (so far) four million Ukrainian refugees in Western Europe. The situation is catastrophically divisive.

Oh, for the good old days of the Cold War! It was all so simple then.

The whole situation is in an out of control spiral. Where will it end? What has happened over the last four years – most of the events taking place every December – is that the century-old uncanonical chaos of the Diaspora, with its multiple jurisdictions, has been spread to Estonia, the Ukraine and Africa and may very well spread elsewhere. For example, it now looks as though Cyprus is going to be affected in the same way, with two jurisdictions developing there too.

This is all due to a problem of lack of authority in the Church, caused by those who are more interested in politics than in Christ. And here authority is very different from bullying authoritarianism. Authority comes from the Holy Spirit, whereas authoritarianism comes from a perverted human spirit.

Little wonder that the Vatican is looking on and saying: ‘What do you expect, look at the chaos of the Orthodox Churches, always at each others’ throats, because they do not have the Pope in control and guaranteeing unity’. Of course, that is nonsense. Anyone who knows anything about the schismatic situations within the Roman Catholic Church knows it to be nonsense. Nevertheless, there is a problem and that problem can only be solved by the highest organ of authority in the Church, a real Orthodox Council, free of politics. Sadly, at the present time the chances of that are probably as small as they were fifty years ago. We have not moved forwards at all. However, miracles do happen.

Q: What do you think will happen in the Ukraine?

A: The arms and army of Russia will win against the very weak and now even weaker NATO in the very risky war that the US began there in 2014. For there has never been a war between Russia and the Ukraine. The latter is just a location for the NATO battles. The war has always been purely between Russia and NATO. The Ukrainians and the huge number of mainly Polish mercenaries there have only been pawns and cannon fodder for the USA, just like the now increasingly arm-less NATO. The new cemetery for them in Poland has 1,200 dead so far.

However, the coming Russian victory in the face of the lack of real support for Kiev on the part of the now bankrupt West, does not solve the pastoral problem. You can conquer a country, but you cannot force its people to attend your churches. There will have to be an Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, without mention of a Russian Patriarch. The only very unlikely chance of unity would be if there were to be a Ukrainian Patriarch of the whole Russian Church and the ‘Moscow’ title was dropped from it altogether. Then the once multinational Russian Church might be restored.

Q: But surely this is just another Cold War situation, with the Church divided as before into two, East and West?

A: Not at all. It is far more complex than that. There are now three groups of Local Orthodox Churches. There is the Russian Church all by itself in the first ‘group’ and the US-backed Constantinople/Alexandrian Churches in the second group. Those two groups are at daggers drawn. Then, there is the third group, the thirteen other Local Churches. The thirteen others are the only ones that are in communion with everyone, Greek and Russian alike, but still independent of both of them.

True, the Cypriot and Greek Churches may well be forced by political pressure from the local US ambassadors to join the Constantinople/Alexandria group. This would leave only eleven in the third group, independent of both Russian and American politics. However, it seems as if more new Local Churches will also be founded and increase the number of those eleven. Certainly, Autocephalous Ukrainian and Latvian Churches would join that group and any others that might come into existence, for example, perhaps in Moldova. Quite simply, nobody wants to be too close to the Russian or Constantinople Churches at the present time, but all want to remain distant from them and any schismatic actions.

Q: So there is great disunity in the Church?

A: Tragically, yes. For instance, if I think about the Russian-French parish where I used to serve in Meudon, a suburb of Paris, I can clearly see this disunity. In Meudon there used to be only one church, the one where I served. It united everyone locally. Now there are three small parishes in the same small suburb and none of them is in communion with each other! There is the one where I served, which sadly has become very closed, almost club-like and very much Russian only, excluding Non-Russians and even Russians who do not have a certain spirit. Secondly, there is a very modernist Greek parish, which mainly uses French, and finally there is an old calendarist Greek parish, which also mainly uses French. It is so sad to see this quite unnecessary disunity. This is not a local church, but three anti-local churches.

Q: How do you see your own situation in Colchester?

A: In Colchester we defended the church against the evil one. Let me explain.

I remember in 1976 the Belarussian priest in Cambridge, a dear friend, Fr John Piekarsky (Eternal Memory to him), telling us how in the late 60s all the people in his home village in Belarus near Dokshitsy, gathered together and stood around their village church which the atheists, instructed by the crazy Ukrainian Khrushchov, wanted to destroy. An armed militia faced them. The people made it clear that the soldiers would have to gun everyone of them down in order to close their church. The militia backed off and the church was saved.

We also have a Ukrainian parishioner, whose grandmother, Galina, also in the 60s, just lay down in front of the bulldozer which the atheists were going to use to destroy the village church. She made it clear they would have to murder her, the most respected person in the village, to close the church. The atheists backed off and the church still stands today.

Well, we did the same, using English Trust law as our defence. We too had to defend our church from those who wanted to take it away from us, demanded the keys (which we refused to hand over), persecuted and slandered us (only the weak in faith believed such nonsense), and then wanted to close it, just as the atheist nationalists of the OCU do in the Ukraine. We won with the support of many.

Now is the time to confess the faith, there is no need for martyrdom, that is not yet required. But we have to confess the faith against aggressive bullies, those with hatred and not love in their souls, whether Communist or Capitalist. They will have to kill us to steal our churches. We made that clear to them despite, and because of, their aggressiveness and they backed down and lost everything. That was visible to all.

Q: What sort of churches do you have in your group, which since last February has been inside the Romanian Church?

A: I suppose we are rather like Moldovan churches, not just in the sense that we all have Moldovans, but in the sense that we are Russian and Romanian. However, we are also more than that in Colchester, as we have 25 nationalities and our other churches, in Coventry, Little Abington just outside Cambridge, Wisbech, Bradford and Felixstowe, are all still multinational.

Q: Do you have any Greeks among your parishioners?

A: We have very few Greeks, only four in fact, for the simple reason that there are hardly any practising Greeks in any of those places.

Q: How would you characterise the Colchester parish?

A: As you know, our patron saint is in effect a Ukrainian from Poltava who lived all over the world and was multinational in his outlook, St John of Shanghai and Western Europe. He also accepted the Western rite, which at that time, over sixty years ago, was still a reality.

Now, all my life I have worked and prayed that we might be able to build a Local Church. Be careful what you pray for, because you might get it! Well, towards the end of my life, we have managed to avoid all ghettos, both ethnic and ideological, and have been given what we prayed for, a local church.

In the home countries of Orthodoxy, inevitably churches will be mononational. That is normal. In capital cities like London, Paris and Berlin, centres of immigration, you will also have embassy churches, that is, mononational churches. That is not the case here outside London. Here we have to go with the flow, to go with the majority. God sends you a flock of all nationalities, who knock at your door. You behave as the Good Samaritan, not like the priest who walked by on the other side. You have to accept them all, with all their diversity, but it is logical to be with the majority, providing that their hierarchy behaves canonically, and not schismatically.

Q: Isn’t it difficult to have different nationalities together?

A: It can be, but it does not need to be. Nationalists and racists do not come to us (but nationalists and racists tend not to be Christians and, if nominally Orthodox, do not set foot in church anyway), but those with a little tolerance do come. And they learn to accept each other, with the result that you end up with mixed marriages, mixed in the positive sense of inter-Orthodox. For instance, our second priest who is Romanian is married to a Latvian and that is only the tip of the iceberg. We have couples who are Scottish-Cypriot (yes, he did get married in his kilt), Estonian-Nigerian, Moldovan-Guinea-Bissau (that must be unique!), Romanian-Slovak, Ukrainian-South-African, Lithuanian-Serbian, as well as the really rather ordinary English-Russian.

Sad to say, I have seen very many Orthodox parishes all over Europe closing in my lifetime. Why? Because their flocks died out. The original immigrant-parents, the first generation, died and as their children were assimilated and gave up attending a church which to them was foreign, the parishes died out. We must not do the same here. We have hordes of children at our church, between 50 and 100 at every liturgy. I am told that this is more children than in any other church in this country. They are our future. We must not lose them to narrow, bigoted, right-wing ideologies, relating to the past or to the present, or lose them to attempts by exclusivists to grab our properties, as they are the properties which belong to all the local Orthodox of all nationalities, or to some ethnic narrowness, which refuses to preach Christ in the local language.

In the last three months we have chrismated two English people (former Protestants) and baptised another one (who had not previously been baptised) into the Church. May this continue. So, despite the great changes and the chaos caused by politics over the last four years, we continue. We continue despite them all and despite their opposition.

 

 

The Church of Scandals?

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.

Psalm 145, 3

Moscow refuses to give independence (Autocephaly) to the Churches in the Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics, Western Europe, and so its churches empty. People vote with their feet. Reality takes over. In Latvia even the State grants the Latvian Orthodox Church Autocephaly!

Some are scandalised by this. Why? Nobody should be surprised at this. In the 19th century Protestant British politicians gave the Church of Greece its Autocephaly and later the secular and nationalist Bulgarian government gave its Church Autocephaly. It took time for others to recognise it, but eventually those who objected just had to face reality and recognised it. In the last century the Churches of Poland and Czechoslovakia went through similar trials and in Brno in the Czech Lands the tribulation continues to this very day. The recent case of the Serbian Church and the Church of North Macedonia is just one more example of politicians declaring Autocephaly and a Mother-Church just having to accept a fait accompli after 60 years. Reality is always stronger than any theory or ideology, just as the pen is always mightier than the sword.

Bishops closed churches because of State orders regarding covid. Some faithful were scandalised by such bishops. Our church, like others, just went into the catacombs and we remained secretly open, faithful to Christ. ‘Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for you neither go in yourselves, neither allow them that are entering to go in’ (Matt: 23, 13).

In the USA many are scandalised today by the actions and words of Archbishop Elpidiforos. Others are scandalised in the USA by the actions and words of Metr Joseph of Antioch, by his mistresses and his money. In England a bishop stays at a hotel with his boyfriend. They spend the Saturday evening drinking beer in the bar before going up to their rooms. They did not know that the hotel manager who saw it all was Orthodox, a parishioner of the local church. The scandal was endless. Ordinary people are better than bishops. That is how it seems to so many simple believers, who are certainly not saints, but neither are they hypocritical pharisees. But we still pray for the salvation of all of them.

As one commentator put it: ‘It seems that bishops impose one set of standards and canons on clergy and laity, but they do not observe those standards and canons themselves and even cover up for each other’.

The number of well-known bishops of ALL jurisdictions whom I have known personally over the last fifty years who stole money, were freemasons, had boyfriends, had mistresses (and children), or caused schisms is almost endless. So what? Why are you scandalised? They will have to answer for their souls at the Last Judgement. As for us, we should be working on the salvation of our own souls and our answers at the Last Judgement.

For decades I have said that either bishops should be real monks, who have spent a minimum of ten years living the monastic life day in, day out, and learning how to love others through poverty, chastity and obedience, or else they should be allowed to be married, as in the first six centuries, indeed in some parts of the Orthodox world, for the first twelve centuries. You cannot have it otherwise. The Church is not a Californian cult. To paraphrase the bishop St Basil the Great: ‘O self-proclaimed Princes of the Church, your skulls pave hell’.

What can be said to the people who are scandalised by all this?

First of all, just remember that of the Twelve one was called Judas and he was a traitor. Do we celebrate him? Of course not. But we do celebrate the Eleven who remained faithful and Matthias, making again the Twelve. Stop looking at the negative. The negative you will always have with you if you keep looking at it. And look at the Positive, Christ, Who is always with us.

I will not throw away my basket of apples, just because one of them is rotten. And even though there are a thousand baskets of apples and in each basket there is one rotten apple, I will still not throw away the thousand baskets of apples because of a thousand rotten apples.

I go to church to meet Christ because He is there. I have no other reason to go to church. As for those who have other reasons to go to church, all we can do is to pray for the salvation of their souls.

The Church of Scandals? No, the Church of God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What happened to our parish was the work of the devil, and those who dared to lay hands on God’s temple and God’s people are acting like bandits.

Below we report the latest news from our dear friend of over 30 years, Fr Joseph Feysak. in Brno in Moravia, who for two years now has been under persecution from his ‘bishop’. Sadly, this is a familiar story. Clearly, the work of closing a church is the devil’s work – and also the work of this ‘bishop’, who claims he is doing God’s work!

Today’s Sunday holy, divine liturgy was held contrary to the customs at our historical church of St. Wenceslas, because it was not possible to hold services in our temporary shelter on Karásková náměstí.

Although the prospects for Sunday morning did not sound too favorable in terms of weather, in the end we were in for a pleasant surprise.

Father Jozef started the holy liturgy with his helpers and singers even in light rain. However, no one was deterred by these small drops and moisture from above. Believers and their children came throughout the holy liturgy so that they could confess and later receive the Pure Gifts of Christ.

The Holy Liturgy was held in the same place where a similar big event took place this year before Easter – on Palm Sunday.

The green color of the surrounding grass and leaves on the trees also colored the pleasant impression of today. We felt as if the sky had come down to earth and turned into the purple of the green branches.

The conclusion of the holy liturgy was a sermon by father Jozef, followed by a 40-day panichida for the innocently killed brother in Christ, Ruslan. All those present were moved to join in the common prayers, sympathizing in their hearts with the relatives of the slain young man.

Father Jozef’s sermon today was no less significant. With its content, inner message and open confession, it awakened in each of us a fiery faith, hidden in our hearts. It was so clear and true that in all of us, the flames of our faith began again powerfully, encouraging us to remain in unity and love regardless of the heavy adversities and discomfort that each of us suffers, most of all our spiritual shepherd himself.

Father Jozef quite clearly and openly described the injustice that has been going on for a long time on the part of vicar bishop Izaiáš and his priests, who illegitimately and anti-churchly occupied our holy temple here in Brno.

This occupation of our temple was something illegal, unchristian and impious. It was a barbaric act of violence. And whoever committed such violence in the Church, against God’s people, could not have acted out of God’s love. Or do you think so?

No, no!

What happened to our parish was the work of the devil, and those who dared to lay hands on God’s temple and God’s people are acting like bandits.

The famous elder Gabriel Svatohorec told father Jozef clearly that he must separate himself from such people. He must not serve either with the vicar bishop Isaiah or with those who support him, because such people have fallen away from God and His love.

Today was sad and happy at the same time, as it usually is.

However, our grief and dismay, as well as the initial rain, eventually gave way to joy and sunshine. God remembered us. As a reward for our perseverance and steadfast faith, He sent us His gracious caress in the form of God’s blessings from above.

May the Lord bless all our parishioners, may he have mercy on our enemies.

The Lord is with us!

And we hope that it will continue to be so!

In the true love of Christ

Your bro. Michael

The Church and the Holy Spirit

Quench not the Spirit.

1 Thess. 5, 19

When the Son of Man comes, shall He find faith on the earth?

Lk 18, 8

It seems strange that we should talk about the Church and the Holy Spirit, as if they were in some way contradictory. Surely the Church is the Body of Christ which radiates the Holy Spirit? Sadly, sometimes this is not the case, though only when we talk of the Church in the sense of the Church authorities. There is such a thing as the persecution of the faithful by Church authorities and this has been seen very many times in Church history.

This always happens whenever the Church authorities (not the Church) have allied themselves with the rich and mighty of this world, seeing the Church only as an opportunity for power and a well-paid career and church buildings as mere real estate, and not seeing the Church as the Body of Christ and suffering human souls who seek the Revelation of God.

Of course, this does not excuse the sectarian counter-reactions to them which often occur at the grassroots, at the present time in the form of old calendarist groups, which repeat the errors of Donatism of long ago. We have quite recently seen these phenomena even in the question of mask wearing.

Thus, just like atheists, the careerist, modernistic, liberal-inclined and secular-minded Church establishment, those who want and are the institutionalisation of the Church, are for masks. Seeing the Church as a mere corporate organisation, an anti-missionary business, they are also for many almost blasphemous practices which appear to deny the holiness of the sacraments. Some of them clearly think that the Body and Blood of Christ are merely bread and wine, just like those others who long ago lapsed from the Church, the Protestants and increasing numbers of Roman Catholics. Like secular people who so weakly believe, they fear death.

On the other hand, there are those whose faith is blind, having zeal not according to reason, and who behave irresponsibly. They would take no precautions whatsoever, sure that you can catch nothing from other people inside a church building. This is clearly a mistake. If there were an outbreak of cholera or the plague, they would not frequent other people, including inside the church building. Just because Covid-19 is less serious, it does not mean that we should not avoid it. We do not fear death, but this does not mean that we seek death.

We Orthodox, in the mainstream between the persecuting extremes, keep our churches open as far as State persecution, widespread now, allows us. We take reasonable precautions in obedience, but we do not avoid God’s Will, knowing that all is in His hands. In the past we have seen off perverts, freemasons, slanderers. We are not frightened of a new wave of persecution by the jealous. We shall stand up to the new persecution, wherever it comes from, left or right, with three unconquerable weapons:

The prayers of the Old Saints of Europe, the Saints of the First Millennium.

The prayers of the New Saints of Europe, the New Martyrs and Confessors.

The prayers of the Imperial Martyrs, the Royal and Holy Family of Europe.

Nobody, however jealous, rapacious and cunning they are, can take these away from us.

 

 

What is Happening in Montenegro?

I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about the current goings-on in Montenegro since the corrupt, NATO-supported mafia regime there adopted a law which aims to confiscate the property of the canonical Orthodox Church. Naturally, the law has a ridiculous Orwellian name (something like “the law on freedom of religion”), and is presented as an honest attempt on the part of the Montenegrin government to regulate State-Church relations in the country. In fact, however, the law was clearly created to confiscate the property (including churches and monasteries) belonging to the Orthodox Church in Montenegro which, unlike other major religious denominations in the country, was never invited to any kind of official discussion or dialogue with relevant government institutions etc responsible for creating this law. The most controversial part of the law states (in essence) that all property belonging to the Church since before 1918 for which there is no adequate evidence that it belonged to the Church and not the State will be confiscated by the State. The false premise here is that the State then supposedly owned all Church land, which by the way is completely false. Government functionaries have obviously denied this, but it is the logical consequence of the law. Several members of the leading party (i.e. members of the Montenegrin mafia) have made pronunciations about the Serbian Orthodox Church being a “relic of the past” which needs to “die out”, and have said that perhaps some churches could, in the future, be used for whatever the government finds useful, such as cafés, pastry shops or casinos (!).
The current president (read: dictator) of Montenegro, who has been in power for around thirty years, and who is himself unbaptized and an atheist, has recently declared that it is his intention to “recreate” the “autocephalous” (sic) “Montenegrin Orthodox Church”. This is obvious historical revisionism and political manipulation (which is I’m sure you understand very well), the same kind that we’ve already seen in the Ukraine and other places. This fake “Church” has no members (other than perhaps a handful of government bureaucrats) and is led by a former priest (defrocked and excommunicated by the Patriarch of Constantinople) named Miraš Dedeić.
Naturally, the faithful have been protesting this whole development for years (the first draft of the law was finished in 2015) and since the law was passed about a week ago there have been huge gatherings – prayer services, processions and demonstrations all across Montenegro. Over 100,000 are believed to have participated the day before yesterday alone, and more still during the previous week. Despite these massive protests (in a country, by the way, which has a population of only around 600,000) and a large gathering on December 21 in Nikšić where tens of thousands gathered despite the bad weather and the fact that the government blocked the roads to Republika Srpska and Serbia, hardly any attention has been paid to this anywhere. Obviously the media in Serbia, Montenegro and the surrounding countries have reported all this, along with some alternative media outlets, but hardly a word from foreign media. If one sixth of the population of, say, the United Kingdom, protested against something – don’t you think that might be mentioned in the news? Perhaps more than a few times even?
Today the looming war with Iran has naturally crowded out all other news, but even before that there was hardly any mention of these recent developments in Montenegro. I suppose the diabolical mainstream media only report the things that serve their agenda, and spin everything to suit their narrative.
Anyway, I just thought I’d send you this message and a few links to some relevant articles and videos. I didn’t even get into the unbelievably condescending interview given to the Serbian media outlet Kurir by Patriarch Bartholomew where he inferred that some of the Serbian bishops are “ungrateful children” whom the “Mother Church” (i.e. Constantinople) nevertheless “loves”. Can you imagine? He also went on to bash the Russian Orthodox Church for its supposedly terrible actions in the Ukraine etc. The article in Serbian is linked below, Google Translate usually does an okay job translating from Serbian to English.
In any case, what can I say? Please pray for me and for us all, for the Church and all the faithful who are suffering across the world. Times are clearly not that good right now.
And have a wonderful and peaceful Christmas!
Filip
https://orthochristian.com/126743.html – Police in Podgorica beat up a bishop and faithful protesting against the law
https://orthochristian.com/126889.html – Politicians who voted for the law are excommunicated, the faithful protest all over Montenegro
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r1PzVnqLqjc – Yesterday’s prayer and protest in Podgorica
https://mitropolija.com/2020/01/02/istinska-crna-gora-2-januara-2020-godine-uvece-video-foto/ – Images and videos from protests in cities and towns across Montenegro

My Life, the Last Battle and the New Orthodox World (N.O.W.)

‘Tell the people: Although I have died, I am alive.’

St John of Shanghai

Foreword: The War

Forty-five years ago I was told by one who could have known better that, as I had been waiting for years to join the Orthodox Church, I now faced a choice: I could either join the Greek Church of Constantinople or the Church of Russia; it was all the same. But only to him was it all the same, as, in spite of, or rather because of, his great intellect, he was spiritually confused. He lived in an alien compromise, washing his hands before the critical choice. I joined the Russian Church because, since the age of twelve, I had known through revelations to my soul that my destiny was most definitely in the Russian Orthodox Church. However crippled it may have been after 1917, I was destined to share in that agony, indeed, although it seemed foolishness to the Jews and to the Greeks alike, only by sharing in that agony could I hope to find my own salvation. I sensed even then that what he had told me was somehow untrue. At best it could only have been a delusion. It was not all the same – and recent very sad events have shown this to all absolutely clearly. Let me explain:

The Church is not to be found in a people who believe that it is a chosen people. Many Hebrews believed that they were the chosen people, but they stoned the prophets and crucified the Son of God. To this day many of their descendants reject Christ, some considering themselves superior to the rest of humanity. Then the Western European elite came to believe in their ‘exceptionalism’ (that is, their claim that they too were above God) too, all in order to justify their organized barbaric aggression. So a thousand years after Christ, they too fell away from the Church, rejecting the Holy Spirit and seizing control of the Church in the West in order to justify their conquistador power-grab. So, like pirates, they began persecuting us ordinary Christians and conquering the rest of the world by fire and the sword. Then their secularist descendants, in turn the Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, German and finally American elites, did exactly the same, demanding world hegemony (‘globalism’), also rejecting Christ because they consider themselves superior to the rest of humanity. (Hence their anti-Semitism: the other ‘chosen people’, the Jews, were rivals to them, therefore they had to be eliminated). In the Church there has now come the turn of certain Greeks, telling us that only they are Christians, that God speaks only Greek, and, as one very well-known Cypriot archimandrite told me, even that their pagan ancestors had prepared the way for Christ! Many Russians fell victim to the same delusion, in the same way believing in themselves instead of believing in God, taking communion only once a year. So they lost everything and overthrew the God-appointed Christian Emperor in 1917. Only through the blood of the New Martyrs and the tears and sweat of the New Confessors did repentance eventually begin to come to them.

All these ‘chosen peoples’ failed to understand that salvation comes only from the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Church of Christ through the Mercy of God and the Holy Spirit – not from some earthly ‘Jewish Rome’ of some mythical ‘chosen people’. For this reason, once I had chosen the Russian Church, I was to spend the rest of my life at war, in tireless battles, in unceasing strife, in the trenches, on the Western Front, fighting for real Christianity, for the real Russian Orthodox Church, together, of course, with many others. We all fought against the narrow-minded, nationalist delusions and impurities of those who had lost the big picture, who could not see the wood for the trees. They told us that only Russians could be Orthodox, that only their own exclusive little fragments of the great Imperial Orthodoxy, which had not undergone the blood, tears and sweat of others, could be right, that God’s Church needed ‘saving’ or ‘reforming’ (naturally, by themselves!). Some of them even persecuted and took to court as a common criminal the greatest saint among them all, St John of Shanghai. Little wonder that the Lord sent me to a military Church. I never sought any of this; it was all imposed on me. My soul would have died had I not taken part in this spiritual warfare. My life has been unceasing warfare in four battles, all fought beneath the Protecting Veil, which my patron-saint saw and which is the only reason why I am still alive.

Three Battles

My first battle was to take part in the struggle to help free that small part of the Russian Church Diaspora in England, which was dependent on Moscow, from spiritual impurity. After nine years, by 1983, I realized that I would fail in this. It was a task quite beyond me, with my very feeble abilities and from my modest, provincial, rural background; the enemies were invested with the strength of a personality cult, with all the authority of men and their city establishments, they had no time for a ploughman’s grandson. I was knocking my head against brick walls. So I left into exile, seeing my limitations. I understood that it would take far-reaching political changes inside Russia and indeed the departures or deaths of some outside Russia before this battle could be won (I did not know then that this would mean twenty-four years). Victory was inevitable, but only God Who created time, could in time bring the victory. My battle had been premature. By myself I could do nothing. It was good for me to know this.

My second battle was to take part in the struggle to help free that small part of the Russian Church Diaspora, which was dependent on Constantinople (Rue Daru), from spiritual impurity. I fought in Paris and thought that this battle was winnable. It was – almost. However, after six years in 1988 there came a turning-point when I saw that I would fail in this battle too. The intrigues of freemasons in high places meant that I could not help win this battle – all my friends were in low places. I knew then that this Paris group would eventually (I did not know then that this would mean thirty years) disappear into spiritual irrelevance. Those who had betrayed the Tsar and made him and his Family into martyrs had also betrayed the Church. So I left, having understood that here too it would take far-reaching political changes inside Russia and indeed the departures or deaths of some outside Russia before the battle to bring even a part of this group home to the Russian Church could be won. Victory was inevitable, but only God Who created time, could with time bring the victory. My battle had been premature. By myself I could do nothing. It was good for me to know this.

My third battle from the first day of 1989 onwards was to take part in the struggle to help free that part of the Russian Church Diaspora, which was dependent on New York (ROCOR), from spiritual impurity. Here there was a much greater chance of success, for the contaminating Protestant disease of ‘super-correctness’ (as another disciple of St John of Shanghai called it), with its ignorance, phariseeism, extremism, sectarianism, old calendarism, psychological (not theological) deviations of convertitis and Cold War money, had many opponents in the USA itself and even more in Western Europe where I was fighting on the Front. And above all, my Diocesan Archbishop supported me and I supported him. The ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, a spiritual son of and the European successor to St John of Shanghai, was in effect the first real Orthodox bishop I had met. We had an identical understanding of the Church. By myself I could do nothing, but now I was far from being alone; I was simply one of very many, a little cog in a large machine. I did not know then that this struggle would take eighteen years, for only in 2007 did the Church win the day. I was taking part in our first victory, together with millions of others, in the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, to which I had always belonged in spirit. Only geography had ever divided us.

After the Three Battles

Once this battle, in which I had played only a tiny role, eventually from my provincial home-town, had been won by the many, especially by the bishops who had been inspired by the grace of God, I knew that the two other houses of cards where I had earlier lost the day would fall in their turn. I just did not know that it would take another twelve years. Between 2007 and today, in 2019, I have seen both these first lost battles won. History won them. What I knew in the past, that they would be won only in God’s own time, has come to pass. What we have fought long and hard for has been obtained. Thus, we now at last have for our Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland a bishop, pleaded for during over four decades. He is Orthodox, understanding the local language and people, not phyletist, venerating the local saints and not denying them, missionary-minded like us, encouraging us and not destroying us, not under the control of laypeople, in good health, and who will be resident here in just a few weeks from now.

Secondly, the Russian Orthodox Exarchate of Western Europe, awaited for over three decades, was at last established in Paris only a few weeks ago. This means that our House will be built on rock, not on sand, and that the ‘Euro-Orthodox’ fantasy of the Paris Brotherhood is now dead. The future Local Church of Western Europe will be authentically Orthodox. For what we have sought for and fought for since 1988 now is. There is now a real Orthodox Exarchate for Western Europe, with many regional dioceses and young bishops, hundreds of parishes and several monasteries, venerating the local saints and not denying them, the foundation of the new Local Church. Led by Metropolitan John in Paris, who bears the name of our missionary father in Christ, St John of (Shanghai and) Western Europe and so continues in the tradition of Archbishop Antony of Geneva, it will of course need much more time to develop. It consists of the generally newer Russian Orthodox parishes of Western Europe, in many dioceses and with many bishops. However, alongside it and complementing it, also stand the two (Western European and German) dioceses of ROCOR, with their five bishops, two of them younger and active. This consists of the generally older, more integrated, Russian Orthodox parishes of Western Europe, a few of them until recently under Constantinople, but now at last come home. The two parts need each other and hopefully their bishops will meet regularly in order to help each other in their own joint Synod.

However, in this Year of the Lord, 2019, there is the last mystical battle (last for me) in the series of mystical battles in this Hundred Years’ War, which for a century has so deformed Church structures in the Diaspora. This battle is also against spiritual impurity, against masonic ecumenist and modernist intrigues. However, this last battle is the battle inside the Russian Lands, inside historic Rus’; it is therefore not a local battle for English, French and American Rus’ in London, Paris and New York, for part of the small Russian Diaspora, it is a general battle which concerns the whole Church. This is taking place today in the Ukraine, but it affects all. For the Church is the mystical centre of the world and it is the Ukraine which is now the mystical centre of the Church. And this is why we have come here now, sent to fight from the Western Front to the Eastern Front. All will stand or fall by their attitude to what is happening in the Ukraine today, to this battle between Christ and Satan. Whose side are you on?

The Fourth Battle

The internal administrative centre of the false Orthodoxy against which I fought in all our four battles, was formed in Istanbul a century ago. It came into being only because of the long-planned overthrow of the restraining protection of Imperial Tsardom. However, the Western disease which had overthrown the Christian Emperor and so the Christian Empire and then brought that centre into being had already infected Russia and elsewhere before that. For the disease contaminated all nationalities, including many in the Russian Lands and from there in the Diaspora. The disease came to be called renovationism and the renovationists were keenly supported from Istanbul. Today it has become crystal clear that the whole of the supposed Orthodox world has now to side either with real Orthodoxy or else against real Orthodoxy. The time of reckoning has come; the time of compromise is over. No-one can stand by any longer with the indifference and conceit of Pilate. Even though this battle is of exactly the same nature as the series of three battles which we fought in the Diaspora before this one, now it is not the Diaspora, but the Ukraine which is the sword that divides. The battlefield has changed to the Ukraine, but the battle is the same one; it is the battle for spiritual purity, for canonicity, for real Orthodoxy.

Gradually, over the last two months, one Local Church after another has decided to side with spiritual purity, canonicity and real Orthodoxy and so support Metr Onufry and the Church of God of the Ukraine. The rest of the Russian Church with ROCOR was the first to support him wholeheartedly. The Local Churches of Serbia, Bulgaria, Antioch, Poland, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, Cyprus, and unofficial but spiritually free (= non-political) voices in the Churches of Greece, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Georgia, followed. So far, thirteen out of eighteen Athonite monasteries have joined us. And a few days ago the episcopate of the basically Carpatho-Russian OCA (Orthodox Church in America), which had dithered for several weeks and where some had for years even been threatening to desert the Church for Istanbul, decided the same. This is their spiritual victory and our very great comfort after decades of spiritual slumber, of wandering far from the Church with American phyletist delusions. It means that the little OCA is maturing, at last deciding to accept its destiny, abandoning its eccentric spiritual isolation and so finding its positive identity by returning to its roots under St Tikhon. Inspired by the breath of new life, it can at last begin to play a significant and fulfilling role as one of the component parts of the future, united, much larger, multinational Russian Orthodox Churches of the three continents of the New World, of the Americas and Oceania.

This leaves the episcopates of only two Local Churches, the large Romanian and the tiny Albanian, not politically free and sitting on the fence, paralysed like Pontius Pilate ‘for fear of the Jews’. They are silent, neither supporting nor rejecting, awaiting instructions from above on whether to support the petty nationalism of the phyletist schism of Constantinople or not. The false church in the Ukraine, founded by the US-backed separatists in Kiev, is officially under a certain Sergei Dumenko. He is actually a Vatican- and US-approved puppet-layman, therefore both pro-Uniat and pro-LGBT, and not a metropolitan, His false church has been seen to be without grace, without sacraments, without the Holy Spirit. His church is that of ‘the Ukrainian god’, as one Ukrainian minister has put it. His enthronement in Kiev six days ago was ignored by all the Local Churches. His so-called ‘Church’ is only a regime-manipulated charade of empty rituals, just another small ultra-nationalist organization – an absurd anachronism in this global world. It is supported by teams of police-backed Nazi bandits who intimidate and beat up Christians, because Nazis have no concept of the meaning of the word ‘Christian’. And these anti-Christian men of violence are directly supported by an alien and corrupt political regime in Kiev, supported by alien and corrupt regimes elsewhere, and, to their eternal shame, by Greek ‘bishops’ in Istanbul.

Afterword: The Victory

The decadent, self-appointed, Paris-School ‘theologians’ from the past slip away one by one. With them their secularizing ideologies from the past, Ecumenism (anti-Orthodoxy; against the Father), Modernism (anti-Sovereignty; against the Son) and Liberalism (anti-People; against the Holy Spirit), slip away into spiritual irrelevance. Their books of intellectual fantasy-philosophy are ready for the dust of forgotten library shelves. Those who frustrated, wasted, impeded and persecuted us for so many decades are leaving the stage and we are beginning to see the future clearly now. For the New Orthodox World (N.O.W.) is taking shape. The New Orthodox World (NOW) is led not by anachronisms, relics from the past in cities of empires which have not existed for centuries, but by vibrant and missionary multinational Local Churches, Autonomous Churches and Exarchates worldwide. These are not narrow and corrupted nationalist museums for State rituals, flag-waving and cultural nostalgia or the playthings of disincarnate but very aggressive, politicized and politically correct, liberal intellectuals, but living organisms, cleansed to prepare us all to meet the King before He returns in all His glory. And in the New Orthodox World, NOW, there is the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Church of Christ, awaiting Him and resisting the Enemy of Mankind, who comes before Christ in order to create disunity, disorder and distress among us.

The death-threat which I received three years ago, sent me because the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, did not stop me or deter me for a single second. In a dream, come to me after receiving that death-threat, I opened my front door and saw an agent on my doorstep. He at once fired his revolver at me, but the bullet rebounded off my priest’s cross, killing him instead of me. He fell to the ground and his corpse was dragged away to a waiting car by his colleague, who in fear and astonishment uttered powerless curses. I left and hid in a secret and remote place where I could not be found. I was rescued by the prayers of one who long, long ago had also taken refuge in such a place and I was taken to a faraway land. I have never paid any attention to dreams, especially such dramatic ones, but I remembered this one. However, I only really understood its meaning and symbolism on my first day here. It means that, like all of us, I will die when God decides, not when men decide, for though man proposes, God disposes. It means that the bullet rebounds, for if men want to kill the truth, they kill only themselves (exactly as they have done for the last one hundred and five years, with their atheist wars, one after another). And those who try to kill the Church in the Ukraine are committing spiritual suicide; indeed, their death-bearing bullet has already lethally rebounded onto themselves.

Victory has been ours in the Diaspora, because we have been willing to die for the Church of God and our enemies have not – because they are inherently attached to this world and so fear death which is of this world. Victory is ours in the Ukraine, because we are willing to die for the Church of God and our enemies are not – because they are inherently attached to this world and so fear death which is of this world. This is why we shall win this last battle now – because we do not fear death, for we believe and we know that Christ is the Life-Giving God, Who rose from the dead and freed the captives in hell. They, however, have only heard of the Risen Christ as a theory and symbolic myth for their heads. They believe it not in their hearts. Therefore their heads, like their lives, are full of the philosophies and works of death. But we do believe and we know and we tremble in awe before the Living God, Who is the Great God, Who works wonders and Who is with us, so that none is against us. Let the dead bury the dead. As for us, we shall not die, but live, and we shall declare the works of the Lord. The Lord is our Enlightenment and our Saviour, whom then shall we fear?

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

Kiev, 1-8 February 2019

 

 

 

 

The Struggle for the Restoration of the Christian World

‘Western Civilization? That would be a very good idea’.

Attributed to Gandhi

Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

Samuel P Huntingdon, The Clash of Civilizations, Chapter 12

Introduction: The Christian World

The Christian (also called Orthodox) world covers nearly one seventh of the world’s land surface, numbers 220 million people, 3% of the world population, and is responsible for 6% of world economic output. The core country of the Christian world is the heart of the former Russian Empire, for the moment called the Russian Federation. Outside this core lie various provinces, for the moment cut off from the core by the Western Powers and their manipulations of the petty nationalist vanities of traitors. These provinces are: the Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Greece, Belarus, Moldova, Bulgaria, Georgia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Cyprus. However, millions of Christians also live in countries like the USA, Kazakhstan, Germany, Syria, Poland, Italy, France, Latvia, Australia, the UK, Slovakia, Albania, Kenya and Israel and are scattered in smaller numbers through almost every country and continent in the world.

The Non-Christian World

Our Christian Civilization, often called Orthodox, that is, Orthodox Christian, confesses in our sign of the Cross the Holy Trinity and Christ, True God and True Man. This is unlike the ex-Judeo-Christian and now atheistic Western world, also called Euroamerica. This apostatic world has not in fact confessed the real Holy Trinity for a thousand years, abandoning Christ for humanistic self-idolization and spreading the mythology of its imagined superiority throughout the world. As a result it has ever since aggressively invaded and greedily raped the rest of the world through organized violence. This barbaric violence, from Charlemagne’s slaughter of the Saxons in 782 to that of the Teutonic Knights, from Hitler’s Blitzkrieg to Rumsfeld’s ‘shock and awe’, has known no bounds, as also its greed, from that of the bloodthirsty Crusaders to the sadistic conquistadors of Columbus, from Clive of India to De Beers.

The Great Deviation

Some may criticize and say that even many in the Christian world do not confess the Holy Trinity and Christ: they point to endemic corruption, high abortion and divorce rates or widespread addiction to various drugs. Of course, they are quite right in this respect: in the Great Deviation of the Twentieth Century, that catastrophic aberration of the Western and Westernized elite which cost hundreds of millions of lives of many peoples, the Christian world was overthrown by apostasy and nominalism. However, by the grace of God, it has over the last generation begun its repentance and so its slow return to the Father. Although there is very far to go to the Father’s House, its general direction is diametrically opposed to that of the Great Deviation, when it abandoned its values for the mess of pottage promised by the Apostatic West, which today is ever deepening its atheistic aberrations.

A Destiny and a Struggle

As an Orthodox born and living in the West, it has been my destiny and the struggle of my life to fight for the civilizational values of the Old West, of the Holy Trinity and of Christ, True God and True Man. These values are essential to our conscious Christian world. We have had to oppose Western cultural arrogance and hubris and today its Trotskyite globalism, which has made the West hated by all. This is the result of the terminal moral decline of the West, come about through its rejection of real Christianity, which stood at its own roots a thousand years ago, as we have described in detail over the last 45 years. We have always fought against our external enemies, the secularism inherent in and inherited from the Papal-Protestant roots of the Non-Christian West, as well as the illusions of the Non-Christian East. However, our greatest struggles have always been against our internal enemies. Who were they?

For the Faith

Firstly, we have had to fight for the purity of the Christian Faith against venal conformists, both Soviet and Western. The Soviets said that there is no God and that therefore all was permissible, the Westerners said that there is a God, but He supported their aggressive violence, rapacious greed and hypocrisy, telling them, for example, to invade oil-rich Iraq. There were internal enemies who went along with these out of treason, cowardice and deceit. The treason was that of those who said that they were Christians but, taking advantage of the paralysis in Moscow, in fact behaved immorally, all being permissible, and so persecuted us. The cowardice was that of those who feared not God, but feared their Western-controlled authorities, and so persecuted us. The deceit was that of those who said that they were Christians, but so lacked love that they supported the enemies of Christ and their vices, and so persecuted us.

For the Christian Empire

Secondly, we have had to fight against those who wanted to deny that Christ is True God and True Man. Denying that Christ is True God, the first wanted to secularize and humanize His Body, the Church, making Her into some petty nationalist mascot, no more than a national flag. Failing to understand that the Church of God is international and universal, they tried to provincialize Her, making Her parochial, instead of accepting Her as Imperial. These vain and weak people were played off and ego-flattered by US ambassadors in the Balkans, who, dividing and ruling, appointed their patriarchs and so created schisms. Denying that Christ is True Man, the second ones we had to fight against were those who wanted to disincarnate His Body, the Church, making Her into a dreamy, impractical philosophy, an irrelevant intellectual conceit, not the fire in the belly of the Church of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

For the Emperor

We have fought for the purity of the Christian Faith, resisting the treason, cowardice and deceit of external and internal enemies. We have fought for the Incarnation of the True God and True Man, the Christian values which result from the fact that, although we are not of this world we are in the world, so justifying the future restoration of the Christian Empire. Thirdly, we have also had to fight for the Emperor. In this matter we have had to fight against those who want to deny that the Holy Spirit comes to earth to inspire the representative of Christ on earth, willed into being by the Faithful People of God. This is why we have defended the last Emperor from the widespread calumnies against him. And this is why we explain why we await the next Emperor. He is vital, for He is the future Emperor who alone can resist the Western preparations for the Antichrist and so can delay his coming.

Conclusion: To the Future

Euroamerica has ignored the common sense advice of its own geopolitician Samuel Huntingdon. Some 25 years ago he pleaded with the West to abandon its hubristic arrogance and recognize that its ‘civilization’ of ‘organized violence’ is not at all universal. Its atheistic materialism is not ‘the end of history’, as the foolish and deluded Fukuyama proclaimed after the end of the Cold War. Since then the West has destroyed itself under the fantasist neocons who want to take over the world. In Iraq in 1991 and 2003 it finally lost the Muslim world, in Georgia in 2008 and in the Ukraine and in Syria in 2014 it made an enemy of Russia, in 2016 of Turkey, and so has allied Muslims, Orthodox and Chinese against itself. It is now itself splitting apart, with Brexit, Trump and the fault-lines of the EU and the USA, as the West falls into the abyss of its own moral depravity, caused by its millennial rejection of Christ.

 

On the Martyrdom of St Gregory the New

The wicked shall do wickedly and none of the wicked shall understand; but those who are wise shall understand.

Daniel 12, 10

There exists over a century’s worth of ridiculous articles, books and films slandering the Orthodox elder, prophet and new martyr Gregory Rasputin. These hundreds of works are based on atrocious vilification and blatant lies, for the purposes of self-justification, which initially permitted the illegal seizure of power in Russia, and later of sexual titillation and lurid sensationalism in order to satisfy money-grubbing greed. As an example, one relatively recent work, claiming authority!, ‘The Last (sic) Word’, written by the Soviet playwright, Edvard Radzinsky and published in 2000 in this country, is just more pulp fiction mascarading as pseudo-scientific history. It too was duly translated into various Western languages to titillate those who want more salacious, tabloid-style stories and earn the publishers and author millions.

However, since 2000, serious works in Russian, the untranslated seven volumes by Sergey Fomin and the untranslated studies by Alexander Bokhanov, Yury Rassulin, Igor Evsin, Tatiana Mironova and Oleg Platonov, all serious historians and researchers, have disproved the conscious and unconscious slanders against Gregory Rasputin-Novy. The figure of St Gregory the New, venerated by the holy elder Nikolai (Guryanov), has now emerged and we are able to establish the details of his martyrdom. In this we have been helped, strangely enough, by two English writers, Andrew Cook (1), an investigative journalist, and Dr Richard Cullen, a former expert in forensics with the Metropolitan Police (2), who have both exposed the involvement of British spies in the torture and murder.

Although both non-Russian speakers and so both naively and ignorantly repeating the absurd background slanders against St Gregory, their interest has mainly been in official British involvement and the details of his appalling torture and murder, carried out by a ruthless British spy with the help of decadent Russian traitors. And that is new. Thanks to their investigations, we now know almost exactly how in the last hours of his life on earth Gregory Rasputin was tortured, who tortured and killed him and why. In reality, the first murder of the so-called ‘Russian Revolution’ was committed by a British secret agent. Let us sum up the still unchallenged and perhaps definitive findings of Cook and Cullen about Gregory’s last hours on earth in Petrograd, today’s Saint Petersburg.

According to eyewitnesses, Gregory was picked up from his flat at 64 Gorokhovaya Street in the then capital by the fabulously rich, Oxford-educated Prince Felix Yusupov around midnight on 16/29 – 17/30 December 1916. He left with him in a car driven by another plotter, the Polish Dr Stanislav Lazovert. He was taken to the Yusupov Moyka Place, having been enticed to a meeting in a basement dining room there, chosen as it was virtually soundproof and would muffle any noise. Apart from Prince Yusupov, a bisexual transvestite and occultist, also present were Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov, also a notorious and amoral loose liver (later known for a relationship with Coco Chanel), a vulgar, anti-Semitic politician called Vladimir Purishkevich, an army officer and friend of Yusupov called Sergey Sukhotin and a British spy called Oswald Rayner.

Rayner had been a close friend of Yusupov in Oxford in 1909. He had studied modern languages at Oriel College from 1907-10 and Yusupov had studied Fine Art for four years from 1909-1913 at nearby University College, where he had taken drugs. They may have been involved in a homosexual sex affair with each other, as is common in the British Establishment and is today the pride of its secret services (3). After Oxford Rayner was eventually to become one of four British spies working for the SIS (4) in Petrograd. The others were the head of the SIS in Petrograd, Samuel Hoare (later a discredited, Fascist-appeasing Conservative politician, who became known as Sir Samuel and Viscount Templewood), who was a friend of the equally unscrupulous Purishkevich, and two lesser British agents, John Scale and Stephen Alley, also involved in the plot to murder Gregory.

Once at the Yusupov Palace after midnight on Saturday 17/30 December, Gregory was given wine to drink and plied with cakes laced with tiny amounts of potassium cyanide. The dose was incompetently administered according to the study by Alexander Bokhanov and so weak that Gregory suffered at most a minor headache and stomach-ache. So he was tortured by the professional sadist Rayner, leading to ‘a slow, lingering and painful death’ (5) in the basement room. Firstly, he was attached with a garrotte around his neck, either seated or else spread-eagled against a wall (5). His face and body were then beaten with a cosh, with which his genitals were also crushed, which must have been agonizing. He was also knifed in the left side and at some point his right eyeball was gouged out, an injury probably caused by Yusupov’s shoe.

After these tortures, carried out at about 2.30 am and in any case not later than 4.00 am on Saturday 17/30 December, Gregory was shot three times. This was done at point blank range, from less than eight inches (20 cm). One shot went through his stomach and liver and the other was fired from behind the kidney. These were fired from two different weapons, possibly from a Browning by Yusupov and a Sauvage by Purishkevich (Grand Duke Dmitry swore an oath that he had not killed Gregory). These wounds did not stop Gregory from trying to make the sign of the cross (the fingers of his right hand were set in this pose) before a fatal third shot, from a .455 Webley, standard British issue, a smaller calibre weapon than those used for the first two shots, was fired at point blank range into his forehead. This killed the prophet Gregory outright. It was the feast day of the holy prophet Daniel, a quotation from whose book (Dan 5, 30) was later found in the house where the Tsar and his family and servants were martyred eighteen months later.

Gergory’s body was covered in a cloth, variously described as a curtain or a robe, the legs and arms tied with rope and then wrapped in Gregory’s beaver fur coat, which could not be disposed off otherwise. It was taken by the driver Lazovert, Rayner and probably other conspirators, either British spies or else Sukhotin, through the secluded rear entrance of the Palace and bundled into a car, no doubt the same one as before. This was driven to the nearby Bolshoy Petrovsky Bridge near Krestovsky island, where the body was thrown into a large ice hole, no doubt reconnoitred beforehand, in the Malaya Nevka river, which flows into the Gulf of Finland. On being thrown into the river, the body bounced off the fourth bridge support, which further injured the head, and an overshoe fell off onto the ice. The flow of the water should have carried the body away, ensuring that it disappeared for ever. It did not.

That it did not, that no weights were attached to the body and that human blood was found on the parapet of the bridge and an overshoe on the ice were all basic mistakes of the conspirators. In reality, thanks to the finding of the blood, the overshoe and the bad choice of site, the body was recovered by the river bank just two days later, on the morning of Monday 19 December 2016/1 January 2017, only some seventy yards from where it had been thrown in. In Western countries it was New Year’s Day 1917. Meanwhile, Purishkevich and Romanov stayed in the Palace, toasting one another, and cleared up the mess, also shooting a Palace dog. This was done so that the corpse of the dog would explain away the noise of the first three shots that had killed Gregory, in case they had been heard and any possible traces of blood. All the above is a reconstruction from the Russian autopsy and modern forensic investigation of evidence and photographs of the corpse.

All of this had been a carefully and cynically planned conspiracy, with everything being prepared beforehand over several weeks, if not months. After the murder, Yusupov and Purishkevich both lied about what had happened in their conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Both of them had prepared fictionalized and dramatized stories in self-justification. These fabrications were related soon after the events, carefully concealing any British involvement, which would have ruined relations between Great Britain and Russia. So why was Gregory murdered? The classic excuse was because Great Britain feared that Gregory was advising the Tsar to conclude a separate peace with Germany. This of course was pure propaganda in order to justify the British murder and later coup d’etat. Gregory had no political influence over the Tsar, who had totally ignored Gregory’s request not to enter into the War in 1914. And in any case, the Tsar had never had any intention of concluding such a peace, as the British full well knew.

The real reason for the murder was that Gregory stood in the way of the overthrow of the Tsar and his replacement by Anglophile traitors from the House of Romanov, like the Grand Duke Dmitry who as a Romanov guaranteed immunity from prosecution for the murder, supported by equally treacherous masonic politicians in the Duma. Great Britain’s interest in murdering Gregory was that with the Tsar at the head of the re-equipped and reinvigorated Russian Army, Russian victory was guaranteed in 1917. Such a victory, from a British viewpoint, had to be stopped. Triumphant Russian troops liberating Berlin and Vienna from tyrants, the consequent control of all Central and Eastern Europe freed from Prussian and Austro-Hungarian tyranny by Imperial Russia, the long-awaited restoration of Poland, once most of its territory had been freed from them, and the Russian liberation of Constantinople and control of the Dardanelles (as perfidious Britain had agreed to on paper), were not in British imperialist interests.

This is why Britain freed the evil Trotsky from a Canadian concentration camp in April 1917 (6) and sent him back to Russia, as later Germany sent back Lenin and others, and why the anti-Christian and pro-Bolshevik (7) British Prime Minister Lloyd George had openly greeted the overthrow of the Christian Emperor (6) as the attainment of ‘one of our war aims’. (It was similarly acclaimed in France and the USA, which, opportunistically seizing its chance, entered the War immediately after the coup d’etat in Russia, which US citizens had helped finance). Indeed, according to the French ambassador, Paleologue, and many others, the overthrow had been carefully plotted by aristocratic Russian traitors together with the British ambassador, Buchanan, at the British Embassy in Petrograd.

The conspirators all believed that if Gregory, the ‘Friend’ of the Tsar and Tsarina, could be removed, then they could persuade the Tsar to abdicate and Russian domination of the Continent could be prevented. This had been exactly prophesied by Gregory and of course it is exactly what happened, for two months later the Tsar was overthrown in a plot, orchestrated by cowardly generals, treacherous politicians and deceitful Romanovs. This would extend the bloodletting of the First World War from three years to four and a half, costing directly millions more lives, not to mention tens of millions of lives later under the Soviet Bolsheviks and the German Fascists, who would never have come to power without the coup d’etat against the Russian Emperor.

In reality, the liberation of Eastern and Central Europe was achieved not by the Christian Russian Empire in 1917, but in 1945 by the atheistic Soviet Union, the Frankenstein monster of Lenin and Stalin created by the meddling, anti-Christian West. The torture and murder of Gregory Rasputin-Novy and all that followed lies like an impermeable bloodstain on the British Establishment which ordered and carried out his execution, a crime only recently exposed and which has never been officially admitted, let alone expiated. In the Great Reckoning that is to come, it would be well if the British Establishment made a beginning to its repentance now.

Notes:

1. To Kill Rasputin, Andrew Cook, 2005

2. Rasputin, The Role of Britain’s Secret Service in His Torture and Murder by Richard Cullen, 2010

3. See for example: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mi5-named-uks-most-lgbt-friendly-employer-in-annual-stonewall-ranking-a6820261.html

4. The SIS (Special Intelligence Service is the British agency that does the dirty work (torture and murder) for MI5 and MI6. It still exists and is active. One of its ex-agents, a South African, told me in private conversation in 2012 that it commits up to 100 murders per year.

5. Cullen, P. 197

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky

7. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lloyd_George#Prime_Minister_.281916.E2.80.931922.29