Introduction: National Demons

Just like every person, so every country also has its demons. France has its absurd narcissistic vanity (Louis XIV, Napoleon, Mitterrand, Macron), Britain has its overweening delusional arrogance (Churchill, Thatcher), surrounded Germany has its crazed bouts of bipolarity (Kaiser Wilhem, Hitler), the USA has its freakish urge for global domination (Clinton and Biden), and Russia has its fits of suicide, heightened by the host of totalitarian demons of its great suicide from 1917 on, when even the name ‘Russia’ disappeared until Hitler restored it.

On the other hand, the Ukraine has its ever-grasping and outrageous sense of entitlement, heightened by the injustices of Soviet persecutions, especially of the territory Stalin stole from Poland, directed from Moscow from 1939 on. Tragically, these old demons of the post-Soviet and atheised Ukraine and of the post-Soviet and atheised Russian Federation brought the two countries to war with each other in 2014. That war worsened in February 2022, after the Western sponsors of the Kiev regime had refused peace talks for eight years.

The Atheist Tragedy in the Ukraine

The demons love and laugh at human bloodshed and suffering, which they create, and have especially been mocking fallen Orthodox since 1917, toying with the Church of God through the passions of certain bishops of various nationalities. The demons gloat at human misery and the despairing souls they capture as a result. And the demons continue to mock today. The conflict in the Ukraine is a geopolitical struggle which pits US-led Globalism, parasitically feeding off Ukrainian nationalism, against Russian-led Nationalism.

The latter treats all Non-Russians as second-class citizens. The conflict in the Ukraine is catastrophic, for it is a civil war, a war between former brothers. It was made possible because the mass of both Russians and Ukrainians have lost their faith, the result of the demons that entered the Russian Empire in 1917 and which have still not been exorcised. Real Orthodox Christians do not kill one another. Now the tragic conflict in the Ukraine is in its fourth, probably final, year. Over 1.2 million Ukrainian soldiers and 100,000 Russian soldiers are dead.

Communists and Nationalists

The three Russian aims were stated very clearly from the very outset, as the Liberation from Neo-Nazi Kiev of the purely Russian Donbass in eastern Ukraine (still not achieved after over three years, though this aim has had to be extended to other provinces), and the Demilitarisation and DeNazification of the Ukraine. After all, the war was caused by the categorical refusal of the Nazi Kiev puppet regime, installed by frightening violence in 2014 against the democratically-elected government, to allow the Federalisation of the multiethnic Ukraine.

Instead, the regime imposed a centralised NATO system, just like that of the Communists before it. They no longer call themselves Communists, but instead Nationalists, but spiritually those are still Communists. Clearly, as a result of that refusal to decentralise, the Ukraine would fragment and fall apart, as is always the result of Stalinist centralisation, whether in the Ukraine or in the Russian Federation. There the new militaristic and clericalist trend of erecting statues of Stalin is growing, a clear sign of its reviving nationalist centralisation.

The Atheist Tragedy in ROCOR

The situation in the Ukraine is mirrored in other Stalinist-style centralising organisations all over the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and even outside it, in, for example, in the Russian Church and even in its New-York based émigré fragment, the so-called Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). It is known as the American Synod, for today it is Russian only in history and name. In reality, its main language is American English, and its ideology is right-wing Protestant Americanism, a Disneyfied Russian Orthodox fairy-tale.

With large chunks of hellfire Lutheranism of the convert type thrown in, this ideology is appropriate for ‘the Republican Party at prayer’, but not for the Orthodox Church. The old ROCOR of Russian emigres has been substituted by the new ROCOR, a process which can be dated back to its internal coup d’etat, which took place approximately in 2017. In the case of the new ROCOR too, Orthodox aims should be Liberation, Demilitarisation and DeNazification. For like the Kiev regime, it too has replaced Faith with a political ideology.

Liberation in the USA and England

First of all, there must be liberation from the ‘Persecuting ROCOR’, the mentality of pharisaic sectarianisation, which led directly to its schism from the fullness of the Russian Church as well as from the rest of the Orthodox Church, and its rejection of the Local Orthodox Churches, which ended in a ghetto of self-isolation and the Donatist heresy of rebaptism. This we have seen in the USA, with the escape from ROCOR of Fr Alexander Belya, who is now in charge of a Vicariate of over twenty Slav clergy and parishes in the Greek Archdiocese.

That situation was mirrored in England with the planned escape of over 90% of the ROCOR diocese to the Romanian/Moldovan Orthodox Church, since well over three-quarters of its 5,000 parishioners were Romanians and Moldovans. It was there received without hesitation on 16 February 2022. The fake Russian nationalism of the new ROCOR (fake because it is in fact American!), its insatiable greed for money, its heresy of rebaptism, its hatred for all Orthodox of the Tradition and outright, shameless lies, define the new American ROCOR.

Liberation Elsewhere

There are also the many clergy and people who have left ROCOR in France and Germany, profoundly unhappy with the anti-Russian, American mentality of the new ROCOR. That unhappiness is almost certain to spread throughout the remaining ROCOR parishes in Western Europe over the next few years, as the clergy and people refuse to become Americans. Now there is also the sad case of Sister Vassa Larina, herself an American-Russian, but in Europe, who rejected the new arch-Republican American Synod, which she calls ‘disgraceful’.

However, rather than returning to the Tradition of the old ROCOR of her father (whom I knew well), she made the strange choice of a liberal ideology, leaving ROCOR for the schismatic Ukrainian nationalist sect, known as ‘The Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’ (OCU). Instead of simply letting her go to such liberals, whom she has always so admired as a liberal feminist academic, the American Synod punished her. In all these cases, it is freedom and respect for other opinions that are missing in the new ROCOR – just as it is in the former USSR.

Demilitarisation and Denazification

The best of the old ROCOR was always politically neutral, not partisan. Now we have ROCOR bishops who are openly anti-Russian, pro-NATO, or belong to the CIA or work for its anti-Orthodox front organisations. True, this process began in the 1960s with the then Fr George Grabbe, but he was a one-off. The new ROCOR explains the decision of the American Synod to get rid of all those of the Tradition, who knew the old Russian clergy and laity born before the Revolution or in the two first generations of the emigration between 1917 and 1967.

They are being replaced with new and idealistic converts, who do not know the Tradition, do not speak Russian, and have little to do with the realities, both positive and negative, of the Church inside Russia today. They can therefore be easily manipulated with fairy-tales and myths of ‘Holy Rus’. As for Nazification in ROCOR, that began in Germany in the 1930s and continued with its support of the Russian Nazis under Vlasov. The survivors of Stalin’s barbarism emigrated to the USA and South America, especially to Argentina, after 1945.

In the New ROCOR

However, they were opposed by the old pre-Revolutionary Western European ROCOR and the Chinese-Australian ROCOR, as well as the minority who had kept the authentic Orthodox Tradition in North America. After the Second World War Nazification was tempered to some extent, but from time to time its authoritarianism came to the fore again. Since the takeover of the old ROCOR by the American Synod in 2017, it has deliberately sent out its new convert-bishops to Australia and Western Europe to entirely dismantle the old ROCOR.

Thus, they tried to retire or force out faithful clergy and people. This substitution is now all but complete. Implementing schism from the Russian Orthodox Church, it has now begun rebaptising other Orthodox, denigrating other Local Churches and telling public and private lies about them, for ‘ROCOR is the only True Church’. This OneTrueChurch Protestantisation has made the American Synod into a sect, which refuses to concelebrate with other Orthodox, except in rare cases where it has self-interest to do so, to try and show that it is not a sect.

Conclusion: Waiting for Repentance

We will continue to pray for them and wait for their repentance, in the hope that they will return to the legacy of the old ROCOR of St John of Shanghai. Their ancestors suspended him and put him on trial, but like the Righteous Job he was in the end justified and glorified by God. Perhaps once this nightmare of the Ukraine is over, there will be great changes and reforms in the Russian Church, based on decentralisation, that is, deSovietisation. A Church which is opposed to LGBT, but which is filled with homosexual bishops is only hypocritical.

Moreover, the Russian Church operates inside a society undermined by abortion and divorce and, as a result, suffers from a demographic crisis. This cannot go on. Perhaps when it has at last dealt with its own deep problems, the Russian Church can draw back the oppressed half of ROCOR which still wants to be part of the wider Orthodox Church and world, and not be part of a hate-filled sect, which condemns all others. Then they will say with other Orthodox ‘Our Father’ and mean it, participating positively in the construction of new Local Churches.