Category Archives: Russia

Half a Century in the Orthodox Church in Western Europe (2)

Fleeing the Extremes

The first Christian Emperor was called Constantine. The last Orthodox Emperor was called Nicholas. He was overthrown in the so-called 1917 Revolution, that is, in the palace coup of the aristocratic traitors to the Tsar, orchestrated by the British ruling class. As a result, all the Orthodox Churches, which the Tsar had protected when still in power lost their protector and were called either to martyrdom or else to confessordom. Once infiltrated, the Churches had to resist either the CIA, by confessordom, or else of the KGB, by martyrdom and their earlier equivalents. (Earlier they had had different names, but they were still engaged in the same intrigues). Our balancing act has meant avoiding both these extremes. In our context this has not yet meant becoming martyrs, but it has meant becoming confessors.

Combating the extremes has on the one hand meant avoiding and combating globalism, liberalism, modernism, freemasonry and Vatican-style perversions and, on the other hand, avoiding and combating sectarianism, phariseeism, hateful censoriousness, political ultra-conservatism and Old Ritualist style obscurantism. Both extremes are marked by anti-Christian ‘bishops’, who are in fact thieves, homosexuals and pedophiles. Thus, we fought against the influence of the liberal modernists in the Orthodox Churches in the 1970s and 1980s and then against the sectarian pharisees in the Orthodox Churches in the 1990s and 2000s, until Russian Church unity was achieved in 2007. This was a victory over both extremes, a miracle. But the devil does not like miracles and those who announce that God is Love.

The devil attacked the Greek Church of Constantinople through nationalist racism, called ‘phyletism’ in Greek. However, he attacked the Russian Church, replacing faith and piety with the negativity of nationalist politics, which led to State-orchestrated ritualism, rigid militarism with its blind obedience and harsh punishments, instead of integrity. Professional choirs assured that everything was provided and the people were made passive, without responsibility. From there it was only one step to anti-clericalism. As they say in Russian, ‘mnogo popov, malo batjushek’, ‘there are many fake priests, but few real ones’. And so in the Russian Church, persecution always comes from the bishops. Thus, the Russian Church isolated itself and fell out of communion and catholicity with the 15 other Local Orthodox Churches.

The USA

Thus, our 2007 victory was to give us only temporary respite, a decade of peace. The programme of Americanisation, or more precisely of Trumpisation, of the American Synod of the Russian Church, known as ROCOR, began in 2017. It sent out its US agents to the still ‘unreformed’ (= normal and traditional) parts of ROCOR in Western Europe and Australia to transform these too into ignorant and arrogant convert crazy zones, like themselves, who yearned to create a rigid and ritualistic sect. This all coincided, and not coincidentally, with President Trump’s first term of belligerent Americanism and also with the second phase of the infiltration of ROCOR by the CIA. The latter activated its sleeping agents in the American Synod and recruited new ones, sending them out worldwide to what is an ecclesiastical NGO.

The Age of Trump also coincided with the consequences of the earlier activities of the notorious Mossad agents, Maxwell and Epstein, who worked hand in hand for the greater glory of worldwide Zionism. Epstein was before his murder the model psychopath: charming, superficially brilliant, very manipulative, narcissistic, a pathological liar, with no sense of empathy, a ruthless pervert and a cynical egomaniac. His psychopathic spirit became the standard for the Age and for the CIA agents in question. So much for the psychopathic narcissists of the USA and its Epstein regime. What of the other half of the Western world, Europe and the UK? Here we have not narcissistic psychopathy, but the creeping power grab of centralising Sovietisation, the old megalomaniac temptations of power and money.

Europe and the UK

Immediately after the fall of the SU (Soviet Union) at the end of 1991, the EU (European Union) was founded. The demons behind the former Union had simply fled westwards to an easier prey, the new Gadarene swine of Western Europe. Russia was no longer attractive, as it cast off the yoke of compulsory atheism. Thus, with the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, the EU became a geopolitical project. Instead of a trading community, it had become the political wing of militaristic NATO. The creeping centralising Sovietisation and Epsteinisation of the EU, obvious in its practices, was also clear in its vocabulary. Thus, the (European) Council is the translation of ‘Soviet’, the EU Commissioners mirror Soviet Commissars, the oligarchy mirrors the nomenklatura and the ‘narrative’ mirrors ‘the Party line’. SU = EU.

As for England, it continued on its historic cycle. In 597 it was converted to Christ from that Old Rome, which still openly condemned universal pretensions. In 1066 it was converted to barbarianism from Norman France, sponsored by the ideology of the new schismatic and ‘universal’ Rome, which stifled Christ with the Pope and England with Britain. In 1535 it was converted to anti-sacramentalism from Luther’s neo-pagan Germany. In 2004 it was converted to imperial delusions from Nazi Ukraine and its orange revolution. The cycle is repeated every 469 years. Today, the British Establishment is trying to revive its long-lost past glory, which was not glory, but shame. This imperialism is repeated all through the ex-imperialist Western European ruling class, nostalgic for its delusions of greatness.

The Collapse of Kiev Creates Regime Changes in the USA, Europe and the UK

What the ruling elites in both the EU and the UK have not understood is that all unions break up. The Soviet Union, the USSR, broke up. So did Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and now the Ukraine, so will Belgium, the EU, the UK, and quite possibly the US. The Four Nations of Britain and a reunited Ireland can work together, not in a Union or a Federation (which is a half-way house from a Union, as is the semi-Soviet Russian Federation), but in a Sovereign Confederation, the Ionan Confederation, IONA, the ‘Isles of the North Atlantic’. England must yet depose the British monarchs who have ruled it for so long, invited by the merchant-oligarchs of the City of London from Germany to become an Imperial House, but the Imperial Age is long over and so are they. A new Sovereign England must restore its own English Royal House.

As for the EU and the UK, they are entirely dependent on the black hole of the Kiev regime. They have bet everything on that loser, playing at the casino wheel of geopolitics, without knowledge and understanding, but with a fanatical and blinding, ever-expanding ideology of European unionism. But every time that Europe falls to union, and it is always a fall, whether under Napoleon, or Hitler, or the EU, it then sets about attacking Russia. ‘Europe’ always attacks European Russia, because Russia does not conform to the morally and financially bankrupt ideological narrative of the Eurocommissars. This is why they do not want peace. War is their self-justification, as only war gives them a unifying purpose. However, the Russian Federation frustrates them immensely, for it is playing the long game against the Kiev regime.

Moscow’s methodical advance by attrition, metre by metre, keeping its losses very low, is because it is awaiting the political collapse of Kiev, which will precede its military collapse. (This was why Germany, Britain and France, as Japan had tried in 1904-5, first brought about Russian political collapse in 1917, since political collapse always precedes military collapse). When political Kiev collapses, its army will have nothing left to fight for. Then, Russia will take over most of the old Soviet Ukraine at little cost, allowing Poland, Romania, Hungary and perhaps Slovakia to take back the far western fragments of Stalin’s Ukraine which used to belong to them, as they wish. And then there will be regime change, not in Moscow, but, ironically, in peace-hating Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and wherever Kiev Fascism was supported.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Rout of NATO in its Proxy War against Russia and the Crisis for the Russian Church

A fish rots from the head.

International Proverb

2022

Four years ago, on 24 February 2022, a small and underequipped Russian expeditionary force at last, eight years too late, went into eastern Ukraine to stop the western Ukrainian (Galician) genocide of eastern and southern Ukrainians. There, over 14,000 civilians, men, women and over 400 children, had already been slaughtered by Nazi fanatics from the western Ukraine, many others had been maimed. The Russian aim was to force the western Ukrainians, who had been put into power in Kiev by the USA by violence, into talks. They wanted Kiev to grant human rights to all citizens of the Ukraine.

Millions of mainly eastern Ukrainians had already fled to Russia to escape the genocide by Kiev. And millions of mainly western Ukrainians then fled to Western countries where they were welcomed for political reasons with free accommodation and generous welfare payments. These bankrupting measures made hard-working Western people very jealous. Those mainly western Ukrainians, often with luxury cars, had fled their quite safe homes and jobs in order to protect their sons, so that they would not have to die for NATO in the Ukraine.

The talks, agreed to almost immediately by terrified Kiev, were successful, but on 1 April 2022 the main Western clown intervened and forbade Kiev to make peace. The Russians were taken aback. In their extreme naivety (and also incompetence, corruption, military unpreparedness and stubborn refusal to listen to others), they had not thought that NATO would want to start a war to destroy the Russian Federation and that it would accuse Russia, by far the largest country in the world and with a relatively small population, of wanting to expand its territory!!!

And in their naivety (and self-centredness and inward-looking isolation) the Russians had never considered that millions of Ukrainians would have been so brainwashed by propaganda that they would be willing to die on behalf of anti-Ukrainian NATO against Russia. The result of this naivety was that in the autumn and winter of 2022 the small and underequipped Russian expeditionary forces were humiliated and had to retreat, giving back cities and land to the Ukrainians.

2023-2026

In 2023 the Russians were forced to go on the defensive against the crazy, British-planned attempt by Kiev to break through to the Sea of Azov and take back more land from the Russian forces. Then the Ukrainian equivalent of the whole British Army was destroyed, all for nothing. Russia does know how to defend itself. After six massive Collective Western invasions of Russia by Europeans over the last 425 years (and none of Europe by Russia), the Russians have learned how to defend themselves.

From then on, and throughout 2024 and 2025, the conflict became a war of attrition. Mountains and mountains of obsolete Soviet and very expensive, but also obsolete, NATO equipment were destroyed. 1.8 million Ukrainian troops were killed, seriously wounded, captured, or else surrendered. Hundreds of thousands more deserted. This was not least as a result of their futile and very costly invasion of the southern tip of the Kursk province of Russia, which turned into a trap for them, if it was not planned as such.

Meanwhile, Russophobic Western Europe, which had cut itself off from Russian oil and gas, had slid into recession and bankruptcy. The USA had to undergo regime change with Trump, in order to avoid bankruptcy and yet another humiliating defeat, as per Vietnam and Afghanistan. Trump hurried to plead for peace with Moscow, which was demilitarising not only the Ukraine, but also the whole Collective West. In order to meet its aims, declared quite clearly on 24 February 2022, Moscow would now have to denazify the Ukraine and, as a much more difficult aim, denazify that same Collective West.

Given the massive attrition of NATO’s Ukrainian forces, Russia’s vastly superior industrial and military might and very small losses (about 100,000), 2026 will probably end the conflict, liberating the whole of the Ukraine, with its whole eastern and southern half, Russian until 1922, returning to Russia. And this will mean the rout of NATO and consequently the collapse of the EU leadership, effectively creating a self-imposed regime change. Now, some cowardly Western European leaders are starting to plead with Russia for mercy and to restore the relations which they themselves destroyed. Too late, Western Europe declared war on Russia, not the other way round. Russia will surely ignore the West until it repents and apologises.

The Rout of the West

Europe’s outdated, badly designed, but vastly overpriced arms, tanks, drones and artillery have been used to try and destroy Russia, though Russia has never tried to attack Western Europe. Europe’s outclassed military equipment has burned on the steppes. Now the Age of Impunity is over for the West. It has demilitarised and destroyed itself by its hubris. Only European hubris imagined that Russia is not by far the largest economy in all Europe and the fourth largest in the world, but just a ‘third world’ economy with some oil and gas and a few obsolete missiles.

Russia is all too capable of incompetence (for example, as with the Wagner group), but when it is motivated, it is unbeatable. Bismarck knew that. And all Western invasions of Russia have always ended in victory – for the Russians, and in rout – for the West. Why not learn from history? Ask Napoleon, Hitler and Biden. Megalomania never wins. However, megalomania is also why the Soviet Union collapsed. Its megalomania thought that it could run a multinational, but highly centralised Union. It could not.

The extraordinary thing is that the European Union (started the day after the collapse of the Soviet Union) repeated the same error. So far two countries have left that European Union, Greenland and the UK, (much wealthier Iceland, Norway and Switzerland and pro-Russian Serbia and its satellites never even bothered to join). Hungary, Slovakia and other countries nearby and with similar histories will be the next to leave. Centralisation means atrophy. It happened in the Soviet Union – I saw it with my own eyes. Since 1992 centralisation, and so atrophy, has also happened with the ‘European Union’. I saw it with my own eyes.

The leaders of the European Union, living in a fairy-tale of delusion, wishful thinking, virtual reality and fantasy, have no ambitions, no innovations, no initiatives, no new industries, no new technologies, no social media, no satellite navigation, no AI, no clothing fashions, no popular music, no creative culture of their own. All is copied from the USA, of which Europe is a colony and vassal in every way, politically and economically, spiritually and morally, socially and culturally. The first part of Europe to fall will be the UK. This is a country that has been ruled by a treasonous, Globalist elite of Zionists, cocaine-riddled homosexuals and pedophiles ever since 1997, when a Zionist homosexual’s creation, ‘New Labour’, came to power. Their first act was to abolish the death sentence for treason, that is, for themselves. And then, quite naturally, they made patriotism into a crime.

America and Russia

The American elite believes (believes, because it is an article of faith for them) that their country is exclusive, superior and exceptional. This is because they inherited the intolerant and bigoted mentality of fanatical Protestants, who were often sexually perverted misogynists, who could not get on with their compatriots and so left England. And when the zealots and fanatics left, English people who stayed behind, said: ‘Good riddance’.

This is why most Americans have no understanding of Europeans, including of the English. Unlike them, we are flexible, not driven by a fanatical ideology or filled with gunslinging hatred. We got rid of the Calvinists. We do not want them back. Our flexibility is why, today, despite the present dictatorial regime in the UK, voted in by only 19% of the electorate, there will be transformations. The morally deeply compromised Starmer will have to go and King Charles, who protected his brother from prison, will have to abdicate, simply in order to save the monarchy.

Today we are witnessing the great Russian military victory in the Ukraine and the rout of the degenerate perverts of the Western European and the US elite. The perverts bet everything on their loser Zelensky, the most highly paid court jester in the world, whom they put into power, despite what was evident to almost everyone: that he could not speak Ukrainian or English and is incompetent. The Western neo-feudal, oligarchic elite, degenerate, corrupt and irrelevant, will be swept aside, even though it has existed not just for eighty years, but for centuries.

The moral bankruptcy of the West is now obvious to the whole world. The members of the Western elite are not even immoral, but amoral. They behave like animals. However, for Russia, military victory also means something else. To win a military victory is only the start. Then you have to win the peace. And here is Russia’s great weakness, neither its generals, nor its politicians, nor its industrialists, nor its economists, but the hierarchy of its national Church.

The Meaning for the Orthodox Church

In Orthodox Church life, the members of the Greek Church elite, still proud of an Empire which fell nearly 600 years ago (!), are racially exclusive, ‘phyletist’ in Greek, that is, obsessed by Hellenism. However, the members of the Russian Church elite are totalitarian, that is, their mentality is exclusive, they are national conformists, whatever your race. Thus, in Church terms, the Russians put themselves out of communion with the Greek Orthodox world and then lost the Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltic States. They are, in effect, schismatic.

Moreover, they are on the point of losing Belarus and Central Asia, not to mention the whole of the Diaspora. Here is the fruit of their political centralisation. People of different languages and cultures will leave you, unless you accept them and co-operate with them as a Family. We must give independence to our children, allowing them to live as adults, instead of holding them in a straitjacket, and treating them as though you were driving a Soviet tank over them. Here is the catastrophic Russian failure, which saddens all Orthodox.

In 2003 Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow, whom I knew, expressed the hope that the Russian Church in Western Europe would become the foundation of a new Local Church of Western Europe. He was a churchman who had been born in and grown up in the Russian emigration in Estonia. He expressed our great hope, which we had been waiting for ever since 1988. It was to be dashed. However, after Patriarch Alexei passed away in 2008, all went from possible to impossible in Moscow, for all understanding of Non-Russians ceased.  Russian nationalism set in. Thus, was lost the Ukraine and Moldova. The Russian Church Diaspora, composed largely of Moldovans, is also lost, as Non-Russians in the Diaspora are treated as third-class citizens, as Metropolitan Vladimir of Moldova has publicly and privately remarked to us.

Just as the Greek Orthodox Diaspora committed suicide through racism, so the Russian Orthodox Diaspora committed suicide through the totalitarian and centralising mentality of the Church elite. The breath of freedom is here, but the Russian Church elite has not yet noticed. Russia has won a huge military victory against the whole Western elite. But its Church elite has suffered a huge spiritual defeat: it only has itself to blame. Bishops who hate priests (especially those senior to them and more experienced than them), and detest women and children, are the ones to blame. There is an English proverb which says: ‘It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness’. The proverb of such Russian bishops says: ‘It is better to curse the darkness than to light a candle’.

 

The Return to Civilisation?

I want ordinary Western citizens to hear me: You are told to blame Russia for your problems. That is a lie. Your hardships are the result of your own elites’ greed and their selfish interests. We are not responsible.

President V.V. Putin, 3 February 2026

Introduction: The New Attraction to an Old Church

Like other Orthodox priests, two or three years ago, after the end of covid, I began to be contacted by young people. They were nearly all males under the age of thirty and some were only teenagers. They all wished to join the Orthodox Church, which they did not know, but had heard theories about in internet podcasts. I have always told them to start coming to church (none of them had ever been before), all our teaching and theology are in our services. However, most of them never want to set foot in a real Orthodox church. It is all an internet theory. Only a few decide to come to church and wanted to stay. Those I receive into the Church.

The Return

Over the last twelve months I have received four such inquirers, though only one under the age of eighteen, with the permission of his parents, who were present at his reception. This is hardly a ‘mass baptism’. The word ‘mass’ should only be used for groups of 100 + and in any case I do not practise rebaptism, as it is against the Orthodox Creed. But it is equivalent to a ‘group reception’. Why is this happening now? Why do they want to join the Church and, hopefully, eventually actually become Orthodox? It is the first time in fifty years that numbers of local people have wanted to join the Orthodox Church. Where does this all come from?

Interest in the Orthodox Church and Faith is becoming more common in North America and Great Britain, where spiritual and so social decomposition are far advanced. A real mass reception/baptism of 200 took place in the Greek Church in England last year. This is all about a return to civilisational roots, which we have been inviting for fifty-two years, even since our first writings in 1974. However, this return to civilisational roots is worldwide, not only here. Why? It is the result of the collapse of both Globalist ideologies, of Western Communism in 1991 and of Western Capitalism in 2022, though the processes go back long before that.

The Return to Roots: China and One Century of Humiliation and India and Two Centuries of Humiliation

To say that China is Communist is today absurd. ‘Communist’ may be the name of the ruling Party, the CCP, and the national flag makes reference to that old-fashioned ideology, but it is not at all the reality. The Chinese State is today a Traditional Confucianist State, going back millennia, which runs a form of enlightened State Capitalism, overseen by ‘Emperor’ Xi, who provides efficient and very advanced national infrastructure. China is returning to National Tradition, after its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of the West and after a generation of Maoist Marxism, which was the revolt against the West and which ended in 1979.

To say that India (Hindustan) is the world’s largest democratic State also twists the truth. It cannot help being the world’s largest State as it is the world’s largest country and, yes, Indians do vote ‘democratically’ in their hundreds of millions for its ancient civilisational values, Hindu Nationalism. This is the return of Indians to their civilisational roots after two centuries of humiliation, exploitation and colonialism at the hands of the British and then the two generations of revolt against it and search for identity after 1947. Hindu nationalism is the return to Indian national identity, millennia of tradition – and it is also inevitable.

The Return to Roots: Russia and Three Centuries of Humiliation

To say that Russia is Capitalist or Communist is today absurd. The reality is that the Russian State has since 2022 been returning to Imperial Russia, not so much to the Russia of before 1917, but to that of before 1721, which ran on a form of contractual State Capitalism. Russia is returning to the Tradition, as Tsar Nicholas II wished, after three centuries of humiliation by the West, by two centuries of Westernisation, then by three generations of anti-Russian Western Marxism and a generation of Capitalism. Today Russia has closed the window on the West, since the West has closed its window on Russia, whose militaristic ideology is for now that of ‘the Russian World’.

The Russian Orthodox Church is attached to the Russian State. Today Russian Orthodox clergy bless tanks, missiles and guns for what they see as the Russian liberation of the Ukraine from NATO. Unlike in the Tsar’s Russia, whose last representatives we knew well, though as in Soviet Russia, where the Church was controlled by the State, today’s Russian Nationalist Church is concerned only with Russians. True, certain of its senior clergy have not been cleansed of Western-style corruption and sexual perversions. That will come. Today’s Russian Church is no longer interested in Non-Russians – unless they are in Africa, where the Russian State has plans.

The Return to the Real West

But what does civilisational return in the West mean? As we have been writing and saying for fifty-two years, the West can only return to its roots, and that means to real Christianity, which was here a long time ago. That cannot mean going to a woke woman Archbishop of Canterbury, who succeeds an archbishop who did not know if he believed in God and shielded a pedophile, nor can it mean going to a Pope, whose antecedents invented infallibility only 150 years ago. It means returning to the ancient Orthodox roots of the West, to the first millennium, beyond the manipulations of the barbarian elite which has run the West for a thousand years.

After the 2016 resisted assassination threat against me from MI5, the ‘happy vassals’ of the Establishment tried to get me by destroying me through a CIA hack. The old Establishment did not want to give up. The potential assassins know that the collapse of the Western world Titanic does not mean that Europe and North America have been humiliated and defeated. They know that it means that the anti-Christian Western elite has been humiliated and defeated. And they belong to that. The defeat of the elite is a matter for rejoicing for us, the people. It means that we might yet return from the nightmare of the old elite and see for a new elite.

The Return from Sodom and Gomorrah

With the release of a heavily redacted part of the Epstein files, it is now clear to all that that old Western political, royal, business and media elite is morally bankrupt, riddled with satanic pedophiles, Zionist perverts to the core and even worse. ‘Robert Maxwell’, real name Ludwig Hoch, murdered or suicided, was a MI6 and Mossad agent, like his compatriots, the devil Epstein, the ‘Prince of Darkness’ Mandelson (Mendelssohn) and the French Jack Lang. The dirt that Epstein collected on Western elite perverts, engaged in orgies and satanic rituals, they used for blackmail. We need a new elite. A native Royal House is awaited in England after a millennium.

There should be no surprise at the perversions of the Western elite. They have long been rumoured. The British Saxe-Coburg Gotha Royal Family alone has recently provided the pervert Prince Albert Victor, the debauched Edward VII, the Hitler-saluting Edward VIII, the pervert Prince George, Duke of Kent, the notorious Mountbatten, the tragic Margaret, Diana and Harry and now the awful Andrew. The UK alone has in the last sixty years gone from the abortion holocaust of nearly 11 million lives to supporting the two-year long Gaza holocaust of some 250,000 lives. So they offer up to satan age-old child sacrifices too horrible to describe.

Conclusion: The Future Restoration of Russia

Meanwhile, the Iranian Theocracy, supported by Russian and Chinese warships, has scared off the Great Satan and the battleships of the blustering  bully/coward are again in full retreat, proving all Mossad’s and Trump’s Zionist threats empty. And China grows daily in strength. And Russian nationalism grows. Thus, the Russian Church has betrayed and abandoned Non-Russians, who had to leave it after generations of faithfulness to Christ. But all the prophecies agree that a Russian Tsar is coming to cleanse it from such impurity and other Western-style perversions to restore the multinational, Imperial Way. No Empire can be built on narrow Nationalism.

 

 

Russian Orthodox Church Disunity

The Orthodox Church is the bimillennial Confederation of Local Christian Churches, each largely covering one nationality, one language, one culture and one territory, Russian, Romanian, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Arab, Albanian etc. Today there are sixteen Local Orthodox Churches in all and some have flocks in Western countries as a result of emigration, which has taken place either for economic or for political reasons. Over fifty years ago, in the 1970s in England, I was able to join the Orthodox Church through the émigré Russian Church, an emigration which had taken place after 1917 for political reasons.

Cut off from Russia and cut off from new emigres by Soviet atheism, the dying Church in the Russian emigration was really the only Local Orthodox Church which accepted or needed to accept Non-Russians. (Other Local Churches would generally not even accept those of another nationality. Since then, barriers to other nationalities have to some extent been broken, but that is another story). However, as a result of the political nature of its emigration, the émigré Russian Church was split into three warring parts, none of which was in communion. They were split by political beliefs, which is the only reason why Churches split.

The largest and most international émigré fraction was called the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), composed of anti-Communist emigres and centred in the USA. Then came a smaller part which we may call the Paris Emigration (PE), centred in France and composed of emigres who favoured a Western liberal political system for Russia. Finally, there came by far the smallest part, called the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), composed of emigres who, though members of the Church, out of patriotism turned a blind eye to Soviet atheism. What is the position now, 35 years after Soviet atheism?

The ideology of Soviet atheism was replaced by another ideology, Russian nationalism. Nevertheless, as a result of the fall of Soviet atheism, both ROCOR and PE came into communion with the MP and, briefly, with each other. This was based on sympathy for Russia, but not on full sympathy, as the Westernised descendants of both émigré groups today represent not Russian nationalism, but, respectively, US nationalism and Western liberalism. And for this ironic reason the very aggressive and ideological ROCOR group is no longer in communion with the PE. Thus, division continues, again because of politics.

Thus, even if ideologies have switched from what they were when the Soviet Union existed, they are still here. Having worked for fifty years to bring the three warring émigré groups together, the present lack of communion is tragic for me. Sadly, the younger generation of ROCOR is so Americanised, one might say, narcissistically and imperialistically Trumpian, that it does not accept any views other than its own. Such sectarian exclusivity betrays a vision of the Church which is opposed to the Church as Christian communion and sees it as an exclusive and intolerant sect which condemns and punishes all who disagree.

As regards the fall of the MP into nationalism, this was a logical development from the old Soviet nationalism of the period before the fall of the USSR, but in a new form. Soviet nationalism was paradoxical for Orthodox, as how could Christians be loyal to Soviet atheism? However, this Russian nationalism is also paradoxical. It makes of the Church an Army, a spirit of militarism, ritualism and clericalism, according to which everything is literally uniform, in which there is no place for personal spiritual inspiration and diversity. All isms quench the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth and Love, and nationalism is no different.

Thus, all three parts of the Russian Church illustrate divisiveness and exclusivity through the adoption of different political ideologies, tragically putting Caesar above Christ. Until all three parts of the Russian Church revert to full Orthodoxy, abandoning political or nationalist ideologies of any sort, there will be no general Orthodox unity. The sign of the reversion of the Russian Church to Orthodoxy will be in its recovery of Catholicity, that is, in its renewed and visible communion with the peoples of all other Local Churches. Once we see that, we shall see a renewed and valuable Russian contribution to Pan-Orthodox unity.

 

 

 

We Have Seen It All Before

To the Tsar you did not  belong,

And that is how it all went wrong:

The foe whispered: Scatter and squander,

Give your treasure to the rich yonder,

Your power to slaves, your strength to enemies,

To serfs your honour, to traitors your keys.

Holy Rus, Maximilian Voloshin, 1918

Introduction

It is said that history does not repeat itself, it only echoes down the ages. This is hair splitting. It is the same thing in different words. Since geography does not change, mountains and plains, oceans and rivers do not move, and since human nature does not change, history does repeat itself. We have seen it all before.

The Ukraine

The Ukraine has been known for decades to be the most corrupt country on earth. The West has poured in hundreds of billions of dollars over the last four years. The money has all disappeared, just as the trillions did in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Kiev regime is utterly corrupt. Ministers are now finally being threatened with charges for corruption involving a mere $100 million. Some have fled abroad, their suitcases stuffed with dollar bills (London, the money-laundering capital, is a popular destination). The US is trying to regime-change by charging members of the regime with corruption, rather than by assassinating them. It is time to get rid of the intransigent Zelensky. Its oligarchs and their puppets, like the violent medieval princes and their corrupt retainers who used to live there, vie with one another. We have seen it all before.

For ordinary Ukrainians who have stayed, power cuts have become ever longer and they look anxiously at the destructive moving lights in the night skies and tremble. 1.8 million Ukrainian soldiers are dead or seriously wounded. Millions of young men and their families have fled abroad, 100,000 in the last month alone, in order to avoid the certain suicide of military service against a far stronger enemy. In his bunker in Kiev the actor President Zelensky himself now appears to be in a state of utter delusion, just like the artist Hitler in his bunker in Berlin just before his end, in denial, talking about moving non-existent armies and divisions, as bombed-out Berlin was surrounded by apocalyptic Soviet forces. We have seen it all before.

After taking back Russian Crimea (given to the Ukraine by the atheist monster Khrushchov in 1954) and then the four southern and eastern Russian provinces, given by the atheist monster Lenin to create the Soviet Ukraine in 1922, the Russian Federation may take back the next southern and eastern slice of the Soviet Ukraine. That consists of the other four Russian-speaking provinces (Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa), also given to the Ukraine in 1922.

Russia may also give the bit that the other atheist monster Stalin stole in 1945 back to Romania (Romanians want Romanian North Bukovina/Chernivtsy back, just as they want Romanian ‘Moldova’, which Stalin also stole in 1945). Russia may also give the other Stalin-stolen bits (Zakarpattia) back to Hungary and (Catholic Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk) to Poland (if the Poles want them back). Then, what remains will basically be a mirror image of Belarus to the north, the New Ukraine (or whatever it will be called) resembling a Southern Belarus, the East Slav Russian Protectorate of Kievan Rus. As for the delusional Western European elite, it will brush off its defeat in the Ukraine with the fantasy narrative that the Ukrainians were corrupt and Trump did not send enough aid. It was certainly not their fault.

Russia

The corrupt oligarch-gangster and traitor Prigozhin died in 2023, when a grenade exploded in his business jet, ‘in mysterious circumstances’, as they say. Whenever Russia is in trouble, there always appears a traitor or a rebel, a ‘false Dmitry’ or a Pugachov, who always ends up badly. Meanwhile, loyal Russian oligarchs prosper, as they receive plentiful military contracts from the State. It appears that between 100,00 and 150,000 Russians soldiers are dead, perhaps some 250,000 are seriously wounded.  And though Russia has won the war in the Ukraine, crushing and demilitarising not just the Ukraine, but also NATO, and dividing it into coalitions of the willing and the unwilling, Russia must also win the peace. How will they deal with the hatred they have stirred up against themselves? The mourning widows, orphans, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, the survivors maimed in body and soul, the economy in tatters, the exiled in misery, the lives ruined. Russia continues with its own problems, almost the same as those as those in the Middle Ages, the rival princes of then have become the rival oligarchs of today. We have seen it all before.

President Putin, the once naïve Europhile lawyer from Saint Petersburg, a fluent German speaker, who knows English quite well and who wanted to join NATO, has closed the window on the West, opened by Peter I. He was forced to do so, astonished and hurt by the rejections and hostility of the West that he used to love. And instead he has opened a window on the East, which Tsar Nicholas II once tried to open, but was stopped from doing so by Western-armed and financed Japan in 1904. Now dewesternising Russia has the deep friendship of the East. This is a turning point not only in Russian history, but in Eurasian, and therefore World, history. For the only reason why Eurasia has never dominated the world has been its divisions; those divisions are no more. Western aggression and dishonesty have thrown them all together, Russia, China, India, Iran and North Korea, well over a third of humanity, and receiving all the sympathy of Africa and Latin America.

The greatest problems are faced by the Russian Orthodox Church. Once multinational, it has become national, indeed nationalist and centralised, clericalist, ritualist and militarist, a uniform army. The new quasi-Iranian fundamentalism there has cut the Russian Church off from the mainstream, from the Catholicity of the Orthodox Church. No-one is convinced by Russian Orthodoxy now, as it reels from the scandal of openly blessing weapons of war used to kill other Orthodox, from that of last year’s open adultery of its main ‘Orthodox’ TV oligarch, from the homosexual scandals of senior bishops from Budapest to Chicago, to the scandal of another who plays poker internationally for big money.

The main Patriarchal candidate actually dreams of anointing and crowning President Putin Tsar. As a result, far fewer Orthodox than before go to church. Many boycott it, not only outside the Russian Federation, but also inside it, repelled by the darkness of the new fundamentalism with its boorish and misogynistic attitudes, its ever-growing quasi-Old Ritualist isolation from the mainstream. Fr Ferapont of The Brothers Karamazov has won against Elder Zosima. Russian Church isolation is determined by the fact that it cuts itself off from any who disagree with it. This is a Soviet attitude, not a Christian one, just as parallel US Evangelism is a Zionist attitude, not a Christian one.

The USA

As usual, the USA just wants to double its dollars. After all, it has wasted some $350 billion of them in the Ukraine. It wants them back, with a return. However, the reason is not the usual profit-seeking greed, it is about astronomical US debt, which now amounts to $38.2 trillion. Deindustrialised, it faces economic crisis. The crisis is also moral, as the USA faces the problems engendered by the genocidal results of US Zionism, US-backed and US-armed Israel against Palestinians, and by the crisis of the Israel-linked Epstein scandal. We have seen it all before.

Western Europe

The Establishments of most of Western Europe, their lies backed to the hilt by their generously-funded and utterly mercenary media and academia, are indebted to the ultimate degree. Therefore, they have been busy fabricating provocations: Russian submarines off the coast of Sweden (in fact American ones), Russian missiles and drones flying over Poland (in fact Ukrainian ones), imaginary Russian drones flying over Germany and Denmark, imaginary Russian aircraft flying over Estonia, imaginary Russian arms on ships, leading to French piracy on the high seas, the sabotage of French hotels by ‘Russian’ bedbugs etc. Any fiction to scare the brainwashed sheeple, to justify absurd NATO and the huge expenses of the military-industrial complex, creating the long-desired Third World War. We have seen it all before.

France

President Macron, called Micron by his enemies, and his band of perverts, their popularity standing at 11%, appear to have halted democracy in France. The President himself is obsessed only by his overweening ambition of becoming a second Napoleon, the first President of Europe. His hubris will be followed by nemesis. We have seen it all before.

Germany

Germany is in recession, as it has suicidally destroyed its industrial might by cutting itself off from the cheap Russian gas and oil which once made it competitive and mighty. Fascistic green policies have helped its decline. Its ultra-militaristic Chancellor, amazingly still on 18% of popularity, together with many members of his government, appears to want revenge for 1945. They dream of surrounding Moscow and pounding it with NATO artillery. So far all they have seen is German tanks burning on the steppes near Kursk, in the same area as in 1943. We have seen it all before.

The UK

The Ukrainian armed forces have been provided with a great many British ‘military advisors’, ‘technicians’ and MI6 spies and bodyguards. All their terrorist operations have been run by the British. These are terrorist activities of the cinematic James Bond type, repeats of those between 1941 and 1944, like the disastrous Dieppe raid, which killed and wounded thousands of Canadians, or the futile Dambusters raid, which killed a thousand Ukrainian slave-workers, let alone the then terror bombings which killed half a million German civilians.

The present operations, based in Odessa, Ochakov and Nikolaev, have often been naval in type. Thus, they attacked the civilian Kerch Bridge, sent naval drones against ships, blew up a dam, planned a suicidal and very costly attack to break through strongly-protected Russian territory to the Sea of Azov, landed Ukrainian troops on an island in a suicidal attack, invaded a border region of the Kursk Region in Russia (70,000 Ukrainian dead or wounded), attacked a Russian train, set fire to Russian bombers, tried to assassinate President Putin, tried to bribe a pilot with $3,000,000 to fly his plane with a missile to the West. Since the bankrupt and deindustrialised British are so militarily weak, and their anti-democratic leader very unpopular at 16%, they can do nothing else except commit futile and suicidal acts of terrorism. The only thing they are good at is PR, confusing virtual reality with real reality, cinema fantasies with real war. We have seen it all before.

Poland

Some in ‘the hyena of Europe’, as Churchill called Poland, dreamed of restoring the past, a Greater Poland, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. It is all nonsense. Polish pragmatists, seeing the attitudes of nearly two million Ukrainians living freely among them and bankrupting them, are now turning towards an anti-Ukrainian attitude, remembering the Ukrainian Volyn massacres of the Poles over eighty years ago. The Poles will never forget. It is embarrassing for the Ukrainians, who would like them to forget.

Italy and the Others

It is said that no war in Europe can end until Italy has changed sides. This is because, sensibly, most Italians are not warlike. This change of sides will of course happen. Indeed, all the at present vassal states in Europe will do the same, according to how much good sense they have. Hungary and Slovakia have already done so. Croatia and Austria are slipping towards it, also passing from being pro-Kiev to being anti-Kiev, like Poland. Romania would do so, but Brussels forbids freedom and democracy there. Eventually even the Nordics and the other Baltics will go neutral again, once they have rid themselves of their American-imposed elites. We have seen it all before.

Conclusion

I love the stubborn design you hold,

And I agree to play my role.

Now another drama will unfold:

This time please, please let be my soul.

 

But the order of the acts is planned

The end of my path has been revealed.

I am quite alone; all drowns in the pharisees’ cant.

To live your life is no simple walk across a field.

Hamlet, Boris Pasternak, 1946

There is nothing new under the sun. An observer of this inanity and insanity, I will return to my Suffolk village, where the clocks go slow. Why adjust the clocks, when we are headed for eternity anyway? We have seen it all before.

 

The People’s Orthodoxy, Church Freedom and the End of the War

So-called ‘Western Civilisation’ is composed of a fatal mixture of Roman paganism and Germanic barbarism. Thus, Western Europe gradually renounced its heritage from the first millennium, real Christianity, and became subject to pagan and barbarian practices. That mixture began to claim supremacy over the rest of the world, now known as ‘Globalism’. To support this claim, the Western world used its form of Christianity to justify itself, and so justified the devil through its reductionist and secularist forms of ‘Christianity’, ‘the white god’.

This ‘Western Civilisation’ began to collapse after the fall of the Western European empires in the First and Second World Wars. These had in fact both begun as purely European Wars, which Western Europe had spread worldwide, but used the USA to rescue it from its two attempted suicides. As a result of their Wars, the European elites failed to keep their empires. Therefore, ever since the Second War they have used and manipulated the Western European-founded USA to maintain at least the remnants of their power and prestige.

No Western European empire was more manipulative than the most successful Western Empire, the British, which used the English language and culture to gaslight the USA. This is the meaning of NATO, whose purpose was, in the words of its first (British) Secretary General, ‘to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’. This was in the interests of the American people or in the interests of the peoples of Europe, but it was in the interests of the Euro-American elites, their high finance and military-industrial complex.

The reductionist and secularist forms of Christianity of the Western world differ from real Christianity, which is the Faith of the Orthodox Church. However, there are those ‘Orthodox representatives’ who also use our real Christianity to imitate that of the West, that is, the blend of pagan Roman paganism and Germanic barbarism. They suffer from a ‘Rome syndrome’, which is why such ‘representatives’ continually send their envoys to ingratiate themselves with the Pope of Rome. There is too much Rome and lust for riches and power.

Wherever there are Empires, real Orthodox Christianity has been abused. Most clearly this was the case with the First Rome in the West, but this has also been clear in the case of its imitators, in the Second Rome, Constantinople, and in the Third Rome, Moscow. Outside those two Imperial centres, Constantinople and Moscow, in the provinces, as in the fourteen other Local Orthodox Churches, we follow the People’s Orthodox Christian Faith, not a tightly-controlled, top-down, clericalist and ritualist, nationalised and centralised, State Religion.

Today, Greek leaders have dared to follow the oligarchic, Capitalist interests of the Americans and their vassals. On the other hand, Russian leaders have dared to continue with the Soviet-style, centralised interests of Russian nationalism. In both cases the interests are at root ideological, and tell those who are not of their nationality to ‘go away’, but other Local Churches welcome those who are told to go away. Chauvinism is not why the Lord granted any people the Orthodox Christian Faith. It was given to welcome people, not to dismiss them.

The following of Imperial, nationalist-political, ideological interests comes from a lack of repentance. And when there is no repentance, then enemies come. Thus, the Greeks had to fight the Persians, the Turks, the French, the British and the Americans. As for the Russians, they had to fight against attacks led by the Mongol-Tartars, the Poles, the Swedes, the French, the British, the Germans and today the Americans. As Russia is huge, each attack was combined, composed of several nationalities, as in the Ukraine, where they face the whole West.

Enemies are like the passions. They only attack us when there is no repentance, that is, no defence. This can be seen most clearly in that tragic situation today in the Ukraine. Both peoples are supposedly Orthodox Christian, but they are not, otherwise they would not be fighting. Every attack and every enemy is in fact a call to repentance. As long as there is no repentance, there can be no peace. This is why wars drag on, when they could end very quickly. Such is the case in the Ukraine, even now with a million killed and many more wounded.

The restoration of Orthodox Christianity throughout the Orthodox Church, and so outside Her in missionary work, will come only when Orthodox Christian leaders return to the People’s Orthodoxy and abandon Imperial, nationalist-political, interests. Those secular interests are wholly responsible for the present schism between Russians and Greeks. We confess the Faith, not some rigid, militaristic, and politically-inspired, centralised religion, designed to intimidate priests and imitate States. We refuse your Caesar and, instead, we follow our Christ.

 

 

From Feast to Feast: Nine Days in the Life of

Saturday 20 September

Today, the third Saturday of the month, we have our monthly English liturgy. As usual, the Liturgy is held in the little church and takes only one hour, ending at 10.20, though I do give a long instructional talk of 20 minutes afterwards. Then those who came, a mixture of English parishioners and Russian parishioners with their children – the parents want their children to understand the Liturgy – have tea together in the meeting room. We mix with those who attend the Saturday Russian School which takes place later in another room.

Sunday 21

I arrive at church, as usual, at about 7.15 am. Preparation and the Proskomidia take one and a half hours. We have many tens of thousands of names to commemorate, so we can only pray for all the names once a year. The second priest arrives at 7.30, but has to go to the hospital to give communion to a very sick elderly woman. He is back at 8.30. Then confessions begin at 8.45 with all three priests available and the two deacons helping. The Liturgy begins more or less on time at 9.20. After the Liturgy, I have a Russian memorial service, a Moldovan baptism, and then there are people to see individually. I get home at 3.30.

Monday 22

Today I am visiting Count and Countess Benckendorff at their rose-gardened thatched home in Suffolk. We have not seen one another for a good discussion for several months. First, we discuss what we need to do for next Sunday (see below). Countess Benckendorff will prepare some white roses (white because they are White Russians) for the graves, where the parish has erected new wooden crosses after nearly 100 years. Above all we speak of our favourite topic, the future of Russia and the Russian Church, against the background of the latest news from Russia.

Although both Benckendorffs were born, brought up and worked in the Soviet Union, they have worked through and understood the problems of the last century of Russian history. They are both appalled by the present civil war in the Ukraine and how the West has sponsored it against the interests of both peoples. But the peoples themselves are also responsible. We agree that all this horror is the result of the aftermath of both waves of Westernisation, the Marxist-Soviet one before the 1990s and, from the 1990s on, the Capitalist one of the oligarchs. Both were the result of the Western-organised regime change operation in 1917, known falsely as ‘The Russian Revolution’, that we should rather call ‘The Russian Degeneration’.

As regards the Military Operation in the east and south of the old Soviet Ukraine, it has always been clear to us from the outset that giant Russia would win militarily against small Ukraine, even with full NATO backing, rather as if in a conflict between Germany and Belgium, it would be clear that Germany would win, however much Belgium was backed by outside meddlers. However, from the outset it has equally always been clear that the Russian Church would lose. A Church, one third of whose members are Non-Russians, has lost one third of its members and been turned into an ever more centralised, clericalised and militarised ghetto, hostile to the people and to the spiritual. The violent and conscious rejection of Non-Russians and the Orthodox mission to Western Europe by the now nationalist Russian Church hierarchy for purely political reasons has been its huge loss.

Both the Count and Countess have a great fondness for their distant cousin, Count Paul Benckendorff, brother of Count Alexander, the last Imperial ambassador at the Court of St James (London). Count Paul was very close to the martyred Tsar, ready to die for him, and wrote the book ‘Last Days at Tsarskoe Selo.’ Their view is that in 1917 Russia committed suicide, betrayed by its corrupt aristocracy, the oligarchs of that age, and it still has not recovered from that suicide, even though we are now advancing on the road to recovery, especially compared to fifty years ago.

This can be seen very clearly in the Russian Church hierarchy, as it goes from one scandal to another, to the despairing patience of the faithful clergy and people, more and more of whom are boycotting it, as they have been let down. There is far to go to restore the original Russian Church, as it was before Peter I, the ensuing bureaucratisation and increased ritualisation. The problem is not that the State persecutes the Church or forces it into obedience, it is people inside the Church who think that the Church must imitate the State, just as in the Church of England.

Another thing we agree on is that the decadence in Russia in 1917 was shown by the fact that people no longer took communion, at best, only once a year, often indeed never after baptism. In effect, by 1917 Russia had fallen out of communion with Christ and into the ritualism of the pharisees who can express only hatred. Here is how the leaders of the once persecuted Church became persecutors.

Tuesday 23

Today I bless the home of an English Orthodox family in Bury St Edmunds. Afterwards N. comments that the alien British Establishment want us to rejoin the Globalist EU project (did we ever leave it?), continue the greedy Globalists’ war in the Ukraine in order to exploit all its natural resources, and increasingly control and censor us as they are authoritarians. N. adds that ‘the present Prime Minister claims that we have free speech and if anyone disagrees with him, they will be arrested’. I suggest that all may change, once the leaders of Germany, the UK and France fall, since they are all extremely unpopular, indeed are hated.

I listen to him with a smile, but change the subject to history and say how the problem of Western Europe is that it was conquered by barbarians like the Franks, Vikings and Normans.  As a result, the twentieth century was patterned by the descendants of these barbarians with their barbarian World Wars, fighting against neo-pagans – Communists and Nazis.

In the afternoon I collect the up-to-date statistics for our Church in Western Europe. Our two bishops in the British Isles and Ireland now have dioceses of 119 priests and 19 deacons in 95 parishes and 5 monasteries. We are part of the two Autonomous Metropolias of Western Europe, of Western and Southern Europe, and Central and Northen Europe. They include even our parishes and missions in Finland, the Faeroes, Iceland and Greenland. We now have 10 bishops, 859 parish churches and 30 monasteries, with the number of churches increasing regularly.

We have come a long way from the days of liturgies in front rooms and sheds, with 10-20 huddlers in the catacomb churches of the 1970s. When there were more than 25 people present, they would say: ‘There were a lot of people at church today!’ However, these conditions still endure in the present Russian Church in the Diaspora, which still suffers so grievously from its past errors. Thus, the Russian Church in the Diaspora (ROCOR) may have up to 300 parishes altogether, but only about 50 of them have more than 100 parishioners for Sunday liturgies. Most have between 10 and 40 mainly converts. But we are now in the normal mainstream, in churches that have hundreds of parishioners present every Sunday.

Fr Ioan Nazarcu, our old friend, whom we have known for 15 years, and for some years now has been a priest, has just given the Economist magazine an interview. Although this Rothschild magazine is atheist in ideology, Fr Ioan, whose English is excellent, has been able to give them a first-rate interview.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/09/22/the-orthodox-church-is-thriving-in-britain-thanks-to-immigration

Wednesday 24

Today I have my day off and am at home, dealing with domestic matters and building work. 

Thursday 25

Today I bless a Ukrainian-Moldovan home in Basildon near east London. The parents are worried about transgender propaganda at school and are thinking of returning to Moldova to protect their children from it. I stop at church to get everything ready for the feast on Saturday. It takes me two hours. Then I bless the home of a Russian family in Colchester and stay for tea and conversation. They have just returned from Moscow, which is now very vibrant and generally more prosperous than Western cities, which have so many social problems and suffer from litter, graffiti and potholed roads and pavements.

Friday 26

Today I am seeing Moldovan and Romanian parishioners in Stowmarket in Suffolk and in Diss across the border in Norfolk. I will not make it to the canon this evening in Colchester, where 30-40 Romanian parishioners gather more or less every Friday evening or sometimes at midnight for a Liturgy. Fr Ioan will, as always, cope very well.

Saturday 27

Today is the Feast of the Exaltation for our Russian, Ukrainian and Moldovan parishioners. About 50 people are in church. Afterwards I baptise an adult Russian. 

Sunday 28

 I head to church at 6.45. After the Liturgy, we have the meeting of St Alban’s Circle, our youth group. About sixty people attend. The subject is the life of St John of Shanghai. Meanwhile, Fr Ioan is doing baptisms in the main church, while Fr Sergey has a memorial service in the little church. At 1.20, I leave for Claydon cemetery outside Ipswich and the graves of Countess and Count Benckendorff, wife and son of the last Imperial ambassador, Count Alexander. They are distant cousins of the present Benckendorffs. People place roses on the graves of Countess Sophia, Count Konstantine and his wife Maria Korchinska. I get home at 3.30

At home I have to start getting ready for my pilgrimage to Moldova and Romania from 6 to 17 October.

 

 

Meanwhile, in Alaska…

‘The circus left town, but the clowns stayed on’.

Russian saying

The US war against Russia continues in the Ukraine, although the CIA has at various points also tried extending it to the Baltics, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Azerbaijan. President Trump’s bullying threats of illegal secondary tariff-sanctions against those who buy Russian oil, thus against India, although only against India’s gem and diamond industry (he had, as usual, completely misjudged the situation, thinking that India would be a soft touch), and also against Brazil and China, all failed. (Strangely, he did not threaten Europe, which hypocritically buys large amounts of Russian oil from India). In return, India has cancelled its order for further second-rate US warplanes, which Pakistan’s Chinese warplanes easily shot down; China can at any moment withhold its rare earths; Brazil is largely economically independent anyway.

As for his threats to Russia, the latter openly mocks them, as the 30,000 anti-Russian Western sanctions have only made Russia stronger. Trump’s war against BRICS, which is what all this is, has only consolidated its member-nations – the vast majority of the world – against the weaponisation of the dollar and against illegal US sanctions. So, like all bullies who are faced with those who are stronger than himself, Trump cancelled all his threats with excuses, leaving Kiev, whose leader ‘kills everybody’ (as Trump describes him) and the Western European elite in panic. So President Trump sent his real-estate agent envoy Witkoff to Moscow to sue for peace, cap in hand, and beg for a personal meeting with President Putin. Russia holds, as Trump would say in his poker mind, all the cards.

As Trump’s policies are destroying the US economy, his war against Iran failed, the Israeli Gaza genocide and the compromising Mossad/Epstein/Maxwell files hang over him, and Russia is victorious in the routed Ukraine, he is in urgent need of some PR victory. He needs to regain the lost support of his MAGA base. So why not hold a photo opportunity-meeting with the Russian leader? This will take place on 15 August, the feast-day of St Herman of Alaska and the 80th anniversary of the joint US/Soviet victory over Japan. It will be in what used to be called ‘Russian America’, known as Alaska, though Trump still calls it Russia. After secret Russo-American talks, the meeting was carefully prepared there by RF Kennedy a week before it was publicly announced.

The bankrupt US elite has no more money (37 trillion of debt) or any more obsolete arms to send to Kiev. The equally bankrupt Kiev/EU/UK elites are desperate, but there is nothing they can do either, except to continue to lie. Their favourite lie is that all that Russia wants from the Ukraine is some extra land. How absurd for what is by far the largest country and one of the least populated in the world! The war in the Ukraine had only one cause – the expansion of NATO to the east, when the US had time and again promised ‘not another inch to the east’.

In any case, Western arms are ineffective against the more advanced and far more plentiful Russian technology and are greatly depleted anyway. Moreover, disaffected Western peoples are opposed to their elite’s infantile militarism, and their astronomically expensive support for the bandit regime in Kiev (as also for the genocidal regime in Tel Aviv). This is all unacceptable in Western countries whose basic infrastructure is crumbling into third world status. Clearly, when Moscow, on the verge of military victory in the Ukraine, refuses to make any concessions in Alaska, as winning sides do not make concessions, Trump will be left with the ‘offramp’ or exit strategy (escape-route) that he really wants.

This is to walk away from the Kiev regime, stating as his reason the blindingly obvious, that Kiev, which depends on the war and its money to remain in power, does not want peace. This will leave the old Soviet and new Nazi Ukraine to the fate that its leadership has chosen for it, to disappear from the map. Once he has walked away from Kiev, he will claim that he is not responsible for the Western rout and blame it on Biden and the European dictatorships of Starmer, Macron and Merz. He will remain unstained, unlike Biden who was stained by the US rout in Afghanistan. And then Trump will be able to quit NATO, which is what he ultimately wants.

Perhaps, however, the US and Russia will at last come to an agreement about the new Eurasian Security Architecture, meaning a US retreat from its bankruptingly expensive arms spending. The US can leave the Ukraine to Russia on condition that all other national borders in Europe are guaranteed. This will give Trump the chance to grandstand as the great peacemaker and say he has ended the war and brought peace to Europe. True, winning the war will leave the military winner Russia, as the ultra-cautious Russian lawyer-President knows, to win the peace.

But that will be another story, which will also entail radical changes in the over-centralised, bureaucratic and so politically failed policies of the Russian Church, as well as the abolition of the absurd and $20 million CIA gangster fantasy of the ‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’. The time of reckoning is coming for all. It is all recorded in the Book of Life.

 

 

Church and State: Lessons from History for the Present Day

This is the Ukrainian Orthodox Viewpoint ( from the Society of Orthodox Journalists), which most Russian Orthodox also probably agree with. It begs the question as to why the once multinational Orthodox Church of All Rus, including the once free ROCOR Synod in New York which used to resist Sergianism (erastianism), has become dominated by Russian nationalist politicians, instead of Orthodox Christians, theologians and pastors. Nationalism is not the Church, but schismatic!

https://spzh.eu/en/zashhita-very/87544-church-and-state-lessons-from-history-for-the-present-day

05 August 11:06

Author: Nazar Golovko

In the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Church often co-operated too closely with the State.

From Peter’s reforms to the Revolution of 1917: how state dependence affected the Russian Church – and what lessons the UOC should draw from this today.

Many today wonder: how could it happen that the devout Orthodox people, the “God-bearing nation” as Dostoevsky called them, suddenly rose up against their Church after the 1917 revolution? How could those who once went to their deaths “for Faith, Tsar, and Fatherland” destroy the faith, kill the Tsar, and tear down that very Fatherland?

Indeed, what happened after 1917 defies human logic. Tens of thousands of churches were closed or wiped off the face of the earth, thousands of monasteries and sketes were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of believers were executed, thousands of priests and hundreds of bishops were murdered, and millions were buried alive behind the barbed wire of the Gulag.

How could this happen? And, more importantly – why?

To answer this question – which remains deeply relevant today – we must turn to history.

When the Church ceases to be the Body of Christ

As early as the era of Peter I, the religious life of the Russian Church was subjected to harsh and merciless criticism. On one hand, the Church was attacked for excessive attention to outward ritual forms; on the other, it had fallen under overwhelming state control. Ivan Aksakov, a Slavophile and patriot well-versed in Church affairs, once wrote:

“Thus, in terms of administration, the Church now appears as a kind of colossal bureaucracy, applying – with the inevitable, alas, official bureaucratic falsehood – the methods of German bureaucracy to the salvation of Christ’s flock… Apparently, all the Church has been granted is outward order – a semblance of proper organization…

But one trifling thing is missing: the soul is gone. The ideal has been replaced – the Church’s ideal has been supplanted by a state ideal, inner truth replaced by formal, external correctness. A new measure has been substituted for the old – a governmental measure instead of a spiritual and moral one. Everything is now weighed and measured on the State’s official scale…

The worldview of the state has, like a subtle vapor, imperceptibly seeped into the mind and soul of nearly the entire ecclesiastical environment, with few exceptions, narrowing its understanding to the point where the living sense of the Church’s true mission has become barely accessible. Nowhere is truth so feared as in our Church administration; nowhere is there such flattery as among our hierarchy; nowhere is the spirit of Pharisaism so strong as among those who ought to hate falsehood the most.”

The Church and the Authorities: harm or benefit?

Indeed, it’s hard to deny that the Church of that era had surrendered itself to imperial will. For example, Peter I’s decree of April 22, 1722, required every cleric (including bishops) upon entering holy office to swear an oath “to be a faithful, good, and obedient servant and subject to the emperor and his lawful heirs,” to defend the emperor’s rights and dignity, “not sparing even their own life if necessary,” and to report any damage or threat to imperial interests – including “theft, treason, or rebellion revealed in confession,” as well as “any evil designs against the Tsar’s honour, health, or family.”

In other words, the secular authorities demanded that Orthodox clergy violate a foundational canonical rule: the inviolability of the sacramental confession. In effect, the Church became a mere “Department of Spiritual Affairs,” heavily influenced by the Chief Procurator of the Holy Synod – a layman appointed by the Tsar.

As a result:

The Church in Russia was perceived as an extension of the state. And if the people’s hatred was directed at the state, the Church was inevitably caught in that hatred too – a sentiment that had been simmering long before 1917.

Prince Ivan Gagarin, who converted to Catholicism, wrote: “The Russian Church needs independence; it senses this itself.”

Understanding that the Church in Russia was inextricably tied to autocracy, Gagarin believed that an attack on the Tsar would inevitably strike the Church as well. Moreover, he saw the deepening schism with the Old Believers as another wellspring of discontent with autocratic rule. In his eyes, Catholicism could save Russia – because it had the spiritual freedom the Russian Church lacked. He famously wrote:

“Let us repeat: it is one or the other – Catholicism or revolution. The Russian Church is powerless; the Tsarist regime may only delay the explosion. The union of the schismatics with revolutionary movements becomes more and more inevitable. There is no time to lose. I see no other way to avert this threat than a national Russian-Catholic clergy.”

Thus, Gagarin understood that the Russian Church – having bound itself so tightly to the state – lacked the strength to confront the revolutionary currents rising among the Old Believers and even within the lower clergy.

Church and Revolution

Here is just a short list of well-known revolutionaries who came from clergy families:

  • Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–1889), a major theorist of Russian revolution, son of a priest in the Saratov Eparchy; educated in a religious school and seminary.
  • Sergei Nechaev (1847–1882), organizer of the underground group “People’s Retribution” and a symbol of fanatical revolution; son of a deacon from Nizhny Novgorod province.
  • Nikolai Kibalchich (1853–1881), member of “Narodnaya Volya” and chief designer of the bomb that killed Alexander II; son of a priest in the Chernihiv Diocese.
  • Mikhail Novomirsky (Tikhomirov) (1850–1884), activist of “Narodnaya Volya”; son of a priest.
  • Alexander Mikhailov (1855–1884), one of the leaders of “Narodnaya Volya” and its Executive Committee; son of a rural priest.
  • Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) – came from a clerical estate.

Besides, let us not forget the failed seminarian Stalin.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of names of priest’s children who became revolutionaries. And many of them did not merely sympathize with revolutionary causes – they actively took part in terror and assassinations.

Why?

Because they saw the hypocrisy and servility that had become entrenched in the lives of their fathers.

Because they understood: the Church, subordinated to the state, had ceased to be a spiritual mother and had become a cog in the bureaucratic machine. And if that machine needed to be destroyed – so did its parts.

A Fatal Union

Thus, the revolution in Russia was not just a popular uprising. It was, in many ways, the outcome of an unhappy marriage between Church and state. A Church bound hand and foot by the government was unable to serve as the voice of conscience. In the end, it remained silent – or even offered its blessing – as the old order was dismantled.

For example, on March 5, 1917, just two days after Tsar Nicholas II’s abdication, the Holy Synod declared:

“The Holy Church of Christ greets the recent events as a mercy of God upon our people… May the Lord bless the Provisional Government and grant it strength to perform the work of serving the people.”

As a result, those forces that destroyed the Tsar turned their wrath on the Church as well. And the reason is clear: when the Church becomes part of the state, people see it as a target – not as the Body of Christ.

What about today?

Yes, the current situation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church seems unbearably difficult to many of us. We are forbidden to pray as our ancestors did for centuries. Our churches are being taken away. The authorities are doing everything in their power to erase the UOC from Ukraine’s religious landscape.

But—

Perhaps this is, in fact, a blessing from God. A blessing that the Church should be free from all state dependence, so that it may possess the inner liberty necessary to fulfill its true mission – the preaching of the Gospel.

It may seem that without the “roof” of state protection or official patronage, the Church is weak and exposed. But maybe this is precisely the path Christianity calls us to walk – not to please power, but to serve the people.

And perhaps, painful as it is, a Church free from State dependence is walking a blessed path.

 

Three World Wars For Nothing?

‘It’s not peace, but a twenty-year long truce’.

Prediction of Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France, about the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919

‘If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation’.

Prediction in the book The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes, about the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919

Introduction: Lives Destroyed By Futile Wars

I was brought up in a world shaped by the results of two World Wars. The lives of my parents, uncles and aunts (the men fought, several of the women, one was a victim of the London Blitz, were spinsters – there were too few men left to marry) had all been deeply affected by the Second World War, those of my grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts (soldiers and spinsters) deeply affected by the First World War. They talked of little else, as their once peaceful and settled lives had been disfigured by the Wars. As for me I was born in the year of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, when the USA planted the last nail into the coffin of the British Empire, and Soviet tanks entered oppressed Budapest. Looking back today, as once more the Western world is at war against Russia, I cannot help seeing the continuity of these wars. However, I also see their futility, as they merely put off the inevitable rise of Russia, even though it repeatedly attempted suicide in its history in movements of spiritual apostasy.

Three ‘World’ Wars To Destroy Russia

We use the term ‘World Wars’ to describe the global disasters that were in fact European Wars, or more precisely Wars for the control of Russia. Thus, the First World War (1914-18) began after the Austrian annexation of Bosnia, the Second World War (1939-1945) began after the German annexation of Poland, and what I here call the Third World War (2022-2025?) began after the Western annexation of the Soviet Ukraine. All these wars were in reality the attempts by the ruling classes of Austro-Hungary and its allies, Germany and its allies, and the USA and its European vassals, respectively, to gain control of the territory (‘Lebensraum’) and natural resources of the Eastern half of Europe (from the Soviet-fixed borders of the Ukraine to the Volga, Stalingrad and Astrakhan). All have essentially been wars directed against the three different Russias, Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, caused by the desire of the Western world to exploit and plunder its wealthy neighbour, which occupies the Eastern half of Geographical Europe and all Siberia as far as the Pacific.

Moreover, all these wars were underpinned and propagandised by a racist ideology which believes that Western Europeans, the Germanic and Latin, so-called ‘Aryan’, peoples, are racially superior to all others. This infers the racial inferiority of Slavs (Serbs/Poles/Russians etc), Jews, Gypsies etc to Western Europeans and their white descendants in the USA, Australia, Canada and elsewhere. In the Second World War this ideology came to be called ‘Nazism’, though its racist nature was already apparent in the First World War, but not by that name. Nazism conquered or subdued all of Western Europe in the Second War. In the Third World War all the Western countries, once more deployed against Russia, sometimes openly share this same ideology. It is most obvious with the SS-inspired armed forces in what is the Soviet Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, but also in the EU, where many of the main unelected Eurocrats and representatives like von der Leyen, Kallas, Baerbock or Metreweli, the head of the foreign spy service of the UK, are the grandchildren of Nazis.

This myth of racial superiority has been a constant throughout the last millennium of Western European history. The Russians first experienced it in a letter from Pope Hildebrand (Gregory VII) sent to Yaroslav of Russia in 1075, demanding submission. Next came the Russian defeat of the invading Teutonic Knights in 1242. It is precisely this hubristic conviction of superiority which lies behind the continual defeats of the West. These defeats, Napoleon’s, Hitler’s and Trump’s, all come from underestimating Russian realities. Thus, Russia is ‘only a regional power showing weakness’ (Obama, 2014) or ‘a gas station masquerading as a country’ (McCain, 2015). Its losses, according to Western propagandists, are ten times its real losses and ‘it has no more missiles, tanks, bombs, shells or troops’, who are being sent to Ukrainian lines ‘to die in human waves’. These people live in Hollywood and have grown accustomed to believing their own lies. The lies are written by Western PR scriptwriters, exaggerated by the Kiev Ministry of Propaganda, and then believed by stupid politicians.

The First War is called a World War only because it involved British colonial troops mainly from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, as well as Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians and then Americans, and French colonial troops mainly from Africa, and also involved skirmishes with German colonial troops in Africa. The Second War is called a World War only because it also involved the same colonial troops as well as American troops and took place in the Anglo-German battle for the control of oil in the Middle East and the war of the USA and the UK against Japan for control of the Pacific. And the Third War can be called a World War only because it indirectly involves BRICS, notably China, India, Iran and North Korea, and its other supporters in ‘the Global South’ of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This is the first War in which the West is isolated and in a tiny and technologically weaker minority, it is the 10% against the 90%. Therefore, it has always been clear who will eventually win and clear that the West was made foolish by hubris to fantasise that it could win.

In other words, all these Wars began in Eastern Europe and involved failed invasions of Russia, which Western Europe wanted to take over and exploit. This had already been rehearsed before them in 1812 under Napoleon with his collective, multinational invasion of Russia by ‘the French and the twelve tribes’. (However, others like the Poles and the Swedes had tried and failed even before him and the Anglo-French had tried again in 1853-56). Thus, it can be said that all three World Wars were ‘Napoleonic’, that is, failed Pan-Western attempts to destroy Russia. Napoleon, Nazi and NATO – those three even begin with the same two letters. All of them had been prepared, for tensions between the European Powers had been brewing for years, especially in the Far East (1904-05) and the Balkans from 1908 on. And Germany had been preparing for war under Hitler since 1933. As regards today’s war, it began with the overthrow in Kiev in 2014, followed by covid (a US bio-war virus, backfired on it and its allies) and the threatened genocide by the Kiev puppet regime of Eastern Ukraine.

This full-scale physical and cultural genocide of Eastern Ukrainians, already prepared on a low level (nearly 15,000 men, women and children murdered in the Donbass, as well as in Kiev and Odessa) between 2014 and early 2022, had been programmed by NATO, of which the separatist Kiev regime was already a de facto member, for March 2022. This threat provoked the initially small-scale Russian intervention in February 2022 there, in what until 1922, exactly a century before, had been part of Russia. Once the Western Powers forbade their puppet-regime in Kiev to sue for peace with Russia in March-April 2022 under its envoy Johnson, this developed into a full-scale war against Russia by the Kiev regime proxies, Western-trained, Western-supplied, Western-informed, Western-armed, Western-biolabbed, and Western-financed. It is this Russian war to deSovietise the Soviet-established Ukraine which continues today, three and a half years later, with Russia and the BRICS world victorious. Western leaders officially deny it because on admission they would have to resign.

After The Three World Wars

Our question is what would have happened if the three interdependent World Wars, in fact Anti-Russian Wars I, II and III (like the preparatory Anglo-American-financed anti-Russian War, launched by their Japanese proxy in 1904) had not taken place. Would the situation of the world be any different today from it would have been without those Wars? Of course, no definitive answer can be given to this question – we shall never know, because the three World Wars did take place, with their fifty million and more dead in Europe alone. However, we can make some striking observations.

Inside Europe, in 1914 Germany dominated Western Europe economically, technologically and militarily, not only because of its heavy industry with iron and steel, but also through its advanced engineering, chemical, electrical and automotive industries. But this was exactly the situation at least until 2022. Then began the deindustrialisation of Germany, enforced by the US cutting off its energy supplies from Russia, and the end of a Germany which had been the engine of the EU, the heart of the EU economy.

In 1914 France played a secondary role in Western Europe, albeit a jealous, petulant and resentful role, as a result of its defeat at German hands in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. This is the role it still plays in Western Europe today. In 1914 the Imperialist British ruling class looked to its role overseas, outside Europe, especially to the USA and India. This is the role it still plays today, though today the roles have been reversed. The UK, its snobbish and arrogant, fantasy-driven ruling class, stuck in the past, paradoxically still not de-Imperialised, is in fact dependent on its former colonies, rather than they being dependent on the UK.

In 1914 Russia dominated Eurasia (Northern Asia, the vast area from Eastern Europe to China), as Tsar Nicholas had opened the Russian ‘Window on Asia’ by insisting on the completion of and inaugurating the Trans-Siberian railway. He considered that Siberia would be to European Russia what North America had been to Western Europe. In 1913 it was estimated by Edmond Thery, the French economist, that by 1950 Russia would ‘dominate Europe politically, economically and financially’. However, in 1914 there was the German-led War against the Russian Empire, a British-orchestrated Revolution through Russian traitors, Western invasions after 1917, a German-led invasion in 1941, murdering 27 million, and for several years after 1991 the plunder of the Russian Federation by the Western world, as a result of which millions died prematurely in mafia crime, starvation, suicide and alcoholism borne of despair.

Despite the present tragic, post-Soviet conflict, one of whose aims is to deSovietise the Soviet Ukraine and restore the real, historic Ukraine (Malorossija), the three generations wasted by Marxism meant that the Russian economy became the largest in Europe only in 2024, 74 years after the predicted 1950. And 74 years was exactly the period during which Russia was taken over by the idiotic Western ideology of Marxism (1917-1991), sent by Germany in the form of Lenin to contaminate the Russian Western-educated class, who also designed the absurd borders of the Soviet Ukraine. Nevertheless, by 2024 the Russian economy had at last become the largest economy in Europe, indeed the fourth largest in the world, just as it had already been in pre-Soviet, Imperial 1914. Thus, the Three World Wars had only delayed the inevitable and the development of the future deWesternised, but once more Imperial (but not Imperialist, as it is deWesternised) Russia.

Outside Europe, in 1914 the USA was trying to dominate Latin America (starting with its land-grab from Mexico in 1846), Hawaii (1893), the Caribbean (Cuba (1898)), the Philippines (1902), and the Pacific in general, in rivalry with Japan (1941-45). Nothing has changed, though its imperialist delusions of today, now embodied in the egomaniac Trump’s ‘Make Israel Great Again’ government, run by the fanatical Zionist Lindsey Graham, are ‘globalist’. This is the dream of planetary rule by infantile tantrum and protection racket bullying, salesman’s ultimatum and deadline. He is a man who deploys nuclear submarines because his social media comment was contradicted by a Russian politician! As for China and India, their role in 1914 was negligible, as they were then controlled by Western colonialism.  However, today they have returned to what they were before any Western colonisation, 300 years ago, becoming the greatest industrial powers in the world, China at No 1 and India at No 3, even according to distorted official Western PPP figures.

Conclusion: The New World Order

As a whole, the world is returning to the situation of before 1914, though only in the sense that the world then was multipolar, that is, it was being led by a concert of Great Powers, and not One Power. All that has changed is the names of the Great Powers. But perhaps they would have changed anyway, without all the bloodshed of Three ‘World’ Wars, of attacks to destroy Russia, which is what the EU foreign representative Kallas so ardently and publicly proclaims as her aim? (But then Kallas comes from a Nazi family). In so many respects these Wars form one continuous War, interrupted by long, but temporary ceasefires. Then the Great Powers were the now collapsed empires of Western Europe, together with Russia and the USA. Today there are the Four Great Powers of China, Russia, the USA and India, as well as countries from Latin America (Brazil), Africa (South Africa and Ethiopia) and the Muslim world (Indonesia and Iran). This is the New World Order which has already begun.