Category Archives: Russia

The Falls of Romes

Historiography, that is, the writing of history, has generated literally hundreds of theories to explain the fall of Old Rome. Some blame it on political divisions, others on economic factors, others on the invasions of Germanic peoples, others on environmental factors, others on a demographic crisis, others on moral decadence etc. However, whatever the reasons for the fall of Old Rome and its provinces in the Western corner of Europe, the Roman Empire itself did not fall. Long before the fall of Old Rome to barbarian tribes in 476, the Roman Empire, which had long ago expanded eastwards, had become Christian. And therefore, its capital had moved to a more central position in the world, away from isolated Old Rome and its outlying Western provinces with their heavy pagan history in order to become a Christian city. And by becoming Christian and moving, the Roman Empire ensured its survival there for another 1,000 years, long after the fall of Old Rome.

So was founded the Second Rome, positioned between Europe and Asia, where Christ had been born. Later called Constantinople, this Second or New Rome sadly became prey to narrow Greek nationalism, losing its original multinational character. However, when it in turn fell, first to greedy and murderous Catholic looters in 1204 and finally to Muslim invaders in 1453, the Roman Empire simply moved north to Moscow and survived there. This became the Third Rome and developed the Christian Empire which came to cover one sixth of the planet. However, although it expanded to China and even across the Pacific, it too fell in 1917, during a war against invading Germanic tribes, to rapacious Westernized materialists. These were opposed to the existence of the multinational Christian Roman (Romanov) Empire, opposed to its uncompromised Faith and values, for they desired to exploit its vast territories and rich natural resources.

Whatever the many reasons for the fall of the First Rome in 476, of the Second Rome in 1453 and then of the Third Rome in 1917, one of them was undoubtedly the loss of belief in the Christian Faith and the consequent loss of the spirit of self-sacrifice which underpinned the Christian Roman Empire. Thus, by 476 few believed in Old Rome any longer and as a result it was undermined by many factors – its use of mercenaries in its army, its expenditure on bread and circuses for the masses, its demographic crisis, its reliance on slaves to do its work, the debasement of its currency, its political divisions, its continual wars, the revolt of its subject peoples, its proud over-reach. Interestingly, all these nine factors exactly parallel those in the fall of today’s Western world, the American Empire, whose Neo-Roman legions are dispatched from its Neo-pagan (‘Neo-Classical’) White House in Washington to its colonies worldwide, just like those of Old Rome.

As regards the Second Rome, its leaders also lost faith, betraying Christianity to narrow nationalistic interests, finding full support in the alien ideology of Roman Catholicism, which had recently been invented in the West and was centred in pagan Old Rome. And, similarly, the Third Rome was also betrayed by a fifth column of narrow-minded traitors, deceivers and cowards, uprooted from multinational Christian Orthodoxy. However, the fall of the First Rome and that of the Second Rome both came about because of foreign invasions and occupations, by barbarians and Muslims. Although it is true that later the Nazi barbarians tried to invade and occupy the Third Rome, which after apostasy had become the Third International, they failed miserably in this. Unlike the First and Second Romes, the fall of the Third Rome came about because of internal treachery, when a large part of the elite wanted to seize power for itself by overthrowing the anointed Christian Emperor.

Here is the vital difference. The first Two Romes were invaded and occupied by aliens, by Germanic barbarians and by Muslims, but the Third Rome was betrayed by the enemy within. And when the enemy within the Third Rome is finally defeated, then the Third Rome, unlike the first and unrestorable Two Romes, can be restored. It is this process of restoration, led by the Church which is called on to Christianize the paganized Russian State, that has been under way for many years now. If the Third Rome is finally restored, it will again be able to challenge the forces of this world. Over the centuries their Satan-led centre has moved ever westwards from the Middle East to California, manipulating governments, sowing enmity and starting wars among the peoples of the world, controlling the media and brainwashing the masses for their one end – which is to drive the world into the arms of Antichrist. The challenge of the renewed Third Rome to those forces is now our only hope.

The Origin of Western Hypocrisy

The puppeteers who created jihadists and ‘radical Islam’ – groups of criminal fanatics and psychopathic/sociopathic terrorists like Al-Qaida and Islamic State – are regretting it. Originally created, trained and armed by Washington to fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, then against the Russian Federation in the Caucasus, then against the Syrian government – the jihadis of radical Islam are wicked genies who have been let out of their lamps. In this century radical Islam has already attacked the USA in 2001, London in 2005, then spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East, from Iraq to Nigeria (9,000 dead last year alone) and Libya to Syria. Now radical Islam has rebounded again, this time in France. Quite predictably, it has dared to attack typically intolerant Western secularist ideologists who praise outrage and blasphemy, pouring oil on the fires of Islam.

When radical Islam attacked countries outside the West and Western interests, in Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, in Chechnia, in Beslan, in Libya or in Syria, it was good, but as soon as Western troops began dying because of it in Afghanistan and Iraq and Western civilians in New York, London and Paris, it was bad. In exactly the same hypocritical way, those who deplore barbaric deaths, including those of anti-religious and anti-Tradition blasphemers in Paris, do not deplore the unreported genocide of thousands of religious and traditional Ukrainians by the State terrorism of the Western-installed arms-dealer Poroshenko. Yet, he came to power through overthrowing a democracy and marches in Paris at their sides as an honoured guest on behalf of the freedom to outrage millions. The West has an intolerant compulsion to annihilate everything outside itself. Why these systemic double standards?

The history of Western hypocrisy stretches back into the millennial past and even beyond. Europe, and later its settlements around the world, was built on the systemic violence which started with Charlemagne, called ‘the Father of Europe’, on massacres, invasions, ‘crusades’, inquisitions, persecutions, burnings and feudal wars, on the systemic killing, enslaving and looting of the peoples of the planet, from Saxony to England, from Jerusalem to Constantinople, from the Americas to Asia, from Australasia to Africa. Gold and slaves were taken in the name of the idol of ‘progress’, concentration camps (‘reservations’ and ‘detention camps’) set up in a process called ‘spreading Western civilization’, the price of which is a billion Western and Westernized prosperous consumerists, a billion modest, three billion poor, three billion desperately poor and a planet on the verge of ecological catastrophe.

The history of Western hypocrisy goes back then to that point in history when the elite of the peripheral Western European provinces arrogantly appointed itself as the centre of the world, usurping even the authority of God through its new ideology called the ‘filioque’. This asserts that all the power and authority of God (‘shock and awe’) comes from fallen human nature, which takes the place of God and, worshipping itself, calls itself ‘humanism’ and ‘rationalism’. Thus, the elite then usurped the legitimate Christian Empire, making the pagan vestiges of Old Rome into its model and plundering the Christian capital in New Rome with its barbaric, military might. Today this is still apparent when Western people refuse to become Christians, that is, refuse to join the Orthodox Church, because they prefer their ‘Judeo-Christian’ (deformed Christian) culture, for they put their culture before the Church.

Western culture is then filioquized, that is, it claims the supreme authority of God for the fallen human nature of the Western and Westernized (‘filioquized’), thus idolizing and absolutizing that nature. Hypocritically, Western culture claims to be multicultural. It is not. It is strictly monocultural. Its cultural arrogance, utter intolerance and blasphemous disrespect are breath-taking. Only when any religious belief is reduced to folklore or psychopathological schism, degutted and castrated, is it acceptable to the West. Any, including perhaps especially Western people, who seriously reject and challenge Western atheism in favour of authentic and consistent Christian beliefs, are ostracized, mocked, despised, condemned as ‘eccentric’, ‘backward’ or ‘retarded’ and their faith blasphemed. The West may be at the very centre of apostasy, but spiritually it is hopelessly provincial, as it always has been.

This is why, like its model, the pagan Roman Empire, the egocentric and formerly ethnocentric modern West lives in moral degradation amid suicidal depopulation, too selfish even to reproduce, relying on cheap immigrant labour to function. This is the grave that Western ‘civilization’, with its aggressive atheism, has dug for itself. The only Christian alternative to Western totalitarian disrespect for spiritual belief is centred in Russia, at the heart of Christian civilization. Viciously attacked by Western materialism and atheism in 1917 and left for dead, it has risen from the tomb. Although it is now facing a new propaganda onslaught from the atheist West, which is also arming the Nazis in Kiev, its new Vietnam, it is the only strong centre of faith in the Risen Saviour, around which the last spiritually healthy forces of Europe and of the world can gather as the storm clouds of 2015 loom.

The Church is Irresistible

The Second World War in Europe ended on 6 May 1945 – according to the Orthodox calendar the combination of Easter Day and the feast day of the military saint St George the Victorious. (In their embarrassment the Soviet atheists deliberately delayed signing the peace treaty until just before midnight on the eve of 9 May in order to avoid this conjunction that was so obvious to all Russian Orthodox faithful

As for the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, to the embarrassment of the same atheists when they realized it, he went into space on 12 April 1961, the feast day of St John of the Ladder, who taught us how to get into heaven through the ladder of virtues, though Soviet atheism ridiculed its innate primitivism by declaring that ‘Gagarin had flown into space and not seen God’.

The Soviet Ukrainian atheist leader and persecutor Khrushchev, who promised to eliminate the Church by 1970 was overthrown on the Feast of the Protecting Veil, 14 October 1964, himself dying on 11 September 1971, the feast day of the Beheading of St John the Baptist, who denounced all tyrants. Meanwhile, by 1971, the Church was alive and reviving.

More recently, terrorist attacks in New York also occurred on 11 September 2001 and in London on 7 July 2005, both feast days of St John the Baptist, who called for repentance and denounced the iniquity of Babylonian towers and powers.

And on 11 January 2015, over two million – but only in the secularist Western world – protested against the murders of 17 people, most of whom had been assassinated on Orthodox Christmas Day, 7 January. 11 January was the Orthodox Feast of the Holy Innocents, when we also recall the millions of people who are murdered in abortions around the world every year – millions of abortions fully supported by Charlie Hebdo, whose present blasphemous and outrageously disrespectful journalists have still not learned that when there is a fire, you do not pour oil onto it, but water.

Those who protested in the Western world on 11 January claimed that the cartoonists and writers who were murdered were upholding the ‘Western value’ of freedom of speech. However, they also trampled underfoot the ‘Western value’ of respect for others, of tolerance for their religious beliefs and for the values of traditional family life and marriage, supported not long ago by mass demonstrations of over one million other French people. However, these people whose beliefs have been outraged by the atheistic French State did not interest the equally atheistic Western media.

We wonder if the present hysteria in France and in Western Europe in general will not be considered as an excuse for a new unwarranted war, just as the attack of 11 September 2001 led to the unwarranted war against Iraq, which caused a million victims of Western arrogance and imperialism.

Seventeen people were barbarically murdered in France. But when Western-trained, financed and backed Muslim terrorists slaughter tens of thousands in Afghanistan (Al-Qaida was founded by the CIA), Chechenia, Syria and Libya, when Israel slaughters 2,000 in Gaza (with Western bombs, shells and bullets) and when the Western-installed Nazi kleptocrats in Kiev slaughter thousands in eastern and southern Ukraine, all that is quite acceptable. Why? Because those genocides are Western crusades. So everything they do is justified. The Western condemnation of terrorism is always selective, for it never condemns Western terrorism itself.

However, this latest Western Crusade against the Church of God in the Russian world and Eastern Europe is in serious trouble. The CIA-installed Kiev junta is bankrupt and begging for billions more subsidies from deaf Western ears. Poland and Romania are more tempted by much-coveted parts of the Ukraine than by EU bullying. EU-abused Serbia, Hungary, Slovakia, Greece, Cyprus and Turkey are looking with hope towards Russia. Businessmen and politicians in Italy and Germany are fed up with the swaggering cowboys from Washington who are killing their EU vassal with their anti-Russian and so anti-EU sanctions. In Macedonia the much persecuted Bishop Jovan has been released from prison at Russian insistence. In Russia itself there have been renewed calls for the Russian Federation to return to the Orthodox calendar, so overthrowing some of the last remnants of Western-imported Soviet atheism. And meanwhile the anti-ecumenical and anti-globalist St Paisius the Athonite (+ 1994), who prophesied many of the current events, has been canonized. The project to enslave Orthodox Europe is unravelling

The New Year

Every day in the world thousands die from disease (far more die in Africa every day of easily curable malaria than from ebola); every day thousands of bodies of the freshly murdered are burned in the abortion incinerators of the Western world (who said the Nazis did not win?); every day hundreds are murdered at the hands of Western-armed terrorists in Syria and Iraq, every day eighty people die from guns in the USA; every day 24 US ex-servicemen commit suicide because they cannot live with their consciences after Iraq and Afghanistan; every day several Ukrainians die at the hands of the Western-installed Nazi junta in Kiev. Amid all this death comes the present hypocritical hysteria and gross manipulation in France.

‘Charlie Hebdo’, owned by a billionaire Jew, was not a satirical magazine at all (15 years of living in Paris taught me that), but a pure piece of anti-clericalism and pornography, which was so intolerant that it never mocked either itself, nor Judaism, nor Israel, but weekly blasphemed against Christ, the Mother of God and also Islam. It is indeed the twilight of Europe. The forces that rule the world have been so swift to manipulate these barbaric murders in Paris that slightly crazy conspiracy theorists have even begun to write that the whole atrocity was deliberate and the psychopaths manipulated.

Because of this atrocity they say that now Western Europe will become a militarized police state as the USA has become since 2001; that now Western Europe will never criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza again; that now Western Europe (especially France) will never lift anti-Russian sanctions – just when it was beginning to drift away from American policies and join the Beijing-Moscow axis; that now Western Europe will become a mere slave of Washington, debilitated by a continual civil war between Muslim and Non-Muslim, between jihad and McWorld. In any case, preparations for the coming of Antichrist are clearly under way in Western Europe.

Whatever the truth behind mass manipulation in France and Western Europe, one thing is clear: 2015 opens with the continuation of the present World War that the West began last year. The present phase of this World War that has clearly broken out in Iraq, Syria and the Ukraine, but is simmering from Paris to Nigeria and from Afghanistan to Hong Kong, has also given rise to the economic scorched earth policy of the Russian Federation. Provoked by last year’s NATO invasion of the Ukraine, that policy is to retreat, heading economically eastwards towards the Eurasian Economic Union and China, and when the time is ripe to counter-attack economically against NATO.

It was this same scorched earth policy, though in its military manifestation, that brought first retreat eastwards and then Russian troops to liberate Paris in 1814 and Berlin in 1945. It is the same policy that may bring the Russian Federation to liberate Western Europe from its mass hysteria now. The information attack against Russia through pathetic Western propaganda for the naïve and brainwashed mob, the economic attack against Russia through sanctions, the currency attack against the Russian rouble, the resources attack against Russian oil by encouraging Muslim fanatics in Saudi Arabia to pump oil, all continue. The EU, vassal of Washington, is bankrupting itself. It is now a question of time as to who will win.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Western world has gone mad, its millennial aggression no longer held in check by any opposition. Now, on the ruins of the discredited atheist Soviet Union and the ruins caused by the Western materialism of that Soviet Union and to the anger of Western secularists and atheists, we can see the return to the world stage of a reborn Imperial Russia and its Orthodox Christian culture. Russians lived through the murderous consequences of Western atheism and so rejected it; the Western world is now entering through its own will into that atheist culture, wilfully ignoring the lessons learned by Russia from it.

‘Russia is a land that borders on God’, wrote the poet Rilke. And the Baltic German Walter Schubart added: ‘Only Russia is capable of making spiritual mankind, which has sunk into materialism and has been ruined by the thirst for power’. Now, at Orthodox Christmas, from Mt Athos one of the foremost elders of contemporary Russia, Hieroschemamonk Raphael (Berestov) has written that we must strengthen ourselves in the face of the sufferings of the present World War. However, Elder Raphael has also consoled us, affirming that during this War the coming Russian Orthodox Tsar-Conqueror will appear and all Orthodox hearts will recognize him. For when he is anointed, all Orthodox minds will be enlightened. St Seraphim of Sarov will witness to him and he will receive his orb and sceptre from the Mother of God who has held them since 1917 and there will follow a great cleansing. May it be so!

Descendants of White Émigrés Address Appeal to EU Leaders

Over 100 descendants of the White Russian nobility residing in EU countries have called on EU nations to stop irrationally alienating Russia and give an unbiased appraisal to the Ukrainian crisis. On Thursday Rossiiskaya Gazeta published an open letter, written from Paris by Prince Dmitri Shakhovskoy and his wife, Princess Tamara, and signed by over 100 people representing the first emigration. Prince Shakhovskoy wrote:

“The aggressive hostility that Russia faces now lacks any rationality and the double standard policy simply exceeds all limits. They accuse Russia of all sorts of crimes, they pronounce it guilty a priori and without any evidence, whilst they show other countries surprising leniency, in particular, where human rights are concerned. We can’t put up with daily slander targeting modern Russia, its leaders and its President, who are slapped with sanctions and smeared with dirt, in contradiction to basic reason”.

The émigrés also said that the fact that EU officials and media consistently silenced the facts about the cruel shelling of civilians in the eastern Ukraine conducted by the junta military with support of paramilitary groups brandishing Nazi symbols outraged them. Another disturbing fact was the full blockade of the Donbass region by the Kiev junta, which seeks to destroy a region that it still claims to be part of Ukrainian territory.
The letter stated that junta forces are also allowing numerous attacks on Russian Orthodox churches, condoning acts of violence against Her, even extending to the murders of priests, the destruction of church buildings and staging repressions against Russian Orthodox believers. It said, “We can’t remain indifferent and silent in the face of the planned elimination of the Donbass population, open Russophobia, and hypocritical approaches that contradict the interests of EU nations themselves. We hope that the countries that in their time had shown hospitality to our families will again set out on the path of reason and impartiality”.

Earlier, the Russian Federal Assembly suggested that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe launch an international panel to investigate crimes against humanity in Europe, such as the tragedy in Odessa or mass executions of civilians near Donetsk in Novorossiya. The proposal mirrors an address to international organizations and national parliaments and governments, calling on them to investigate crimes against civilians in the warzone in Novorossiya, passed by the Russian Parliament in October this year.

25 December 2014

http://rt.com/politics/217551-russia-emigrants-letter-history/

The Russian Federation – Defending Christians Worldwide

After meeting the Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dačić, Russian Foreign Minister S V Lavrov said that Russia was offering to host a Conference next year to combat Christianophobia, saying, “In the coming year, we are proposing to organise a Conference to combat Christianophobia within and through a series of meetings, similar to those which took place this year on anti-Semitism and Islamophobia”.

19 December 2014

At a meeting with His Holiness Pope and Patriarch Tawadros Sulaymān of the Coptic Church, Foreign Minister S V Lavrov stated that one of the Russian Federation’s main foreign policy objectives was to see that no-one limited the rights of Christians, saying, “Relations between our churches go deep into history and became one of the foundations for the development of relations between Russia and the Middle East and North Africa. This is our common heritage… however, regarding culture and history, the present and future of this region is alarming”. Lavrov noted that Russia appreciates Patriarch Tawadros’ contribution to efforts to prevent a disaster in the region and to his work in preserving inter-religious peace, saying, “We’re delighted to hear your assessment of the political efforts to calm the situation in the Middle East and North Africa. One of our foreign policy objectives is to see to it that no one limits the rights of Christians”. In turn, Patriarch Tawadros observed that he long dreamed of visiting Russia, as he had read Russian theology and literature, saying, “I learned a lot from Orthodox theology, Russian literature, and fairy tales. I’m grateful for Russian leadership in supporting Egypt”. At the same time, he said that the situation of Christians in some Middle Eastern countries is dire, pointing up, “Some groups use violence against the people. Christians are victims of violence in these countries. However, the situation in Egypt changed significantly for the better after 30 June”.

29 October 2014

http://itar-tass.com/politika/1659495

What Path for Russia? Crown, Sceptre and Orb

What path for Russia? To become once more a tyrannical State that attempts to westernize its people by terror and force, as under Peter I or Stalin? Or to become a CIA-controlled banana republic, reigned over by a junta of puppet oligarch-thieves who exploit the country and people, treating them as their private property, as in Latin America? This latter path is what Washington originally planned for Russia. Indeed, in the anarchic 1990s, under the drunkard Yeltsin who gave away large parts of Russia to pro-American bandits, masking themselves under the name of oligarchs, the country was undermined and was starting to become just another banana republic colony. So far, however, Washington has got its way – and only for the time being – only in the provincial Ukraine, not in Russia.

In fact, the oligarch-traitors used by Washington as its puppets in Russia are yesterday’s men. They are now openly seen for what they always have been, over-wealthy and ambitious traitors who want to seize power for themselves, like the aristocrats who in British-organized plots assassinated the Emperor Paul I in 1801 or who deposed his descendant the Emperor Nicholas II in 1917. The 1990s are over and since the year 2000 and the first steps towards freedom and restoration in Russia, we have seen panic, hatred and fury from Washington, with varying plans either to finance traitor-oligarchs to undermine the Russian Federation, as in Latin America, or to create an economic war by enforcing so-called ‘sanctions’, as in Iran, or to declare war and bomb, as in Yugoslavia.

The fact is that what Washington has for the moment achieved in the Ukraine cannot be achieved in the Russian Federation. Unlike the Ukraine, the Russian Federation is one eighth of the world with vast natural resources, but above all is the centre of a unique and uncompromised Christian civilization, respected by many. It has a special vocation, a historic and worldwide mission which, however, can only be achieved through the symphony of Church and State. This was the key element that was missing for over 300 years, ever since the Russian Church was beheaded by Peter I’s tyrannical, Protestant-style State and the German Catherine closed 700 monasteries and stole Church lands. Inded, it was that missing symphony that was responsible for the catastrophe of 1917.

Now when Washington hears of symphony between the Russian Church and the Russian State, it shudders and turns to the torturers of the CIA to attack both its Church and State through such rigged events as ‘Pussy Riot’ and a host of other pathetic propaganda operations. Washington realizes that if Russia is restored to Christianity, its whole Western Sodom and Gomorrah construct will fall. Therefore it has declared economic war through imposing illegitimate sanctions, supposedly to punish Russia for the democratic choice of the Crimean people to return home after separation from their homeland for 60 years. The rouble has lost 40% of its value, prices of imports, including Western consumer goods, are rising dramatically, Russians have to tighten their belts.

But Washington knows that it plans for global dictatorship are still threatened by Russia. They had already been threatened when Russia repelled the US-backed Georgian invasion of Russia in 2008, when Russia rejected US plans to bomb Syria in 2013 and when Russia foiled its plans to make the Ukraine into a NATO base in 2014. This is why Washington is now enacting its new Cold War, forcing all its colonies and vassals, from the EU to Japan and Australia, into a coalition to enforce a media and economic war. EU countries, notably Germany, France (forbidden to sell naval ships to Russia), Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria (forbidden to allow the South Stream pipeline) and Greece, have been bullied into enforcing ‘sanctions’ and breaking contracts against their own interests.

The vassal Saudi Arabia has also increased oil production in order to decrease the oil price, on which the Russian economy is to some extent dependent. However, this has been to the detriment of the USA’s own shale oil industry. Moreover, Russia has fought back, renewing alliances, developing the Eurasian Economic Union, turning successfully east to China and India, west to Latin America, and south to Turkey. It is also trying to find alternatives to international payments with the US dollar, paying in goods, in local currency or in gold. The strength of this Russian reply to the economic Cold War declared by the US explains why warmongers in the US are now threatening a Hot War, which they see as the only way they can succeed in turning the whole world into their empire

This is a huge risk, for attacks on Russia have always been defeated, Western invasions of Russia ending up in history with Russian troops liberating Paris or Berlin. Moreover, although sanctions are definitely hard for Russians, they have also brought positive results. Thus, the Russian government and people are turning ever more to the national-patriotic ethos of their history, turning against the pro-Western ethos of the last generation. Moreover, this is uniting people and elite and has marginalized the tiny US-subsidized minority of the ‘democratic’ (= oligarch-bandit) opposition, composed of ‘liberal’ (= neocon) self-seeking, fifth columnist Russophobes. They who with Western support were foolishly preparing a ‘coloured revolution’ in Russia have all been revealed as traitors.

That was not the West’s intention. This is ‘blowback’. The fact is that some in Russia are beginning to understand that some things are more important than the dubious material ‘blessings’ of Western consumerism, which often turn out in fact to be curses. They have understood that what is more important is the return to Orthodoxy, the ancestral spirit of self-sacrifice for faith, home and the peace and future of the whole world. What path for Russia? There is a third path, neither a westernizing tyranny, nor a CIA banana republic. On 8 December it was reported that a simple blacksmith from Donetsk, Viktor Mizalev, has from the scrap metal of junta missiles, launched against civilians, forged a crown, a sceptre and an orb. The Sanhedrin in Washington has no answer to this.

Resisting and Delaying Antichrist: The Prophetic Vision of the Russian Orthodox Church Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence and Conversations

Q: What do you think from an Orthodox viewpoint of the recent G-20 meeting in Brisbane, where much was made of the war in the Ukraine.

A: In Brisbane Western politicians – not world leaders, as they pretentiously call themselves – made much of the civil war in the Ukraine. This was because they caused it and are continuing it. At Brisbane a clear message was given to the Western bullies by the free world, led by Russia: If the West continues to destabilize, overthrow democracy by bribing mobs and destroy the sovereignty of the Ukraine, then Russia will extend its sanctions against the Western world, possibly closing Russian air space to it. The Obamas, Bidens, Camerons, Hollandes and Merkels of the West face self-imposed isolation.

The Russian Federation, the Eurasian Economic Union, China, India, much of Latin America, nearly one half of the world, are working towards a new world order and will not tolerate arrogant Western bullying. That has already caused so much bloodshed and chaos in genocidal bombing, invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan and in CIA-organized ‘coloured revolutions’ in Libya, Syria and the Ukraine. Libya was the last straw, but even now there are aggressive individuals in the US, whose minds are so power-crazed that they openly talk of starting a Third World War against Russia and China.

Q: Do you think there is any hope that heads of some countries in the European Union will speak out against this US-centred bullying?

A: The EU has more or less become an island off the western coast of the USA, in other words, a US colony or ‘protectorate’, in effect its next state, and is governed by puppets and economic thugs, as we saw in Greece and Spain. The US has isolated Europe from its own roots and its own interests. Until the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis is restored, as in the early 1900s, there is no hope for Europe. Remarkably, however, the leaders of some small countries in the EU have protested, notably the leaders of Hungary and the Czech Republic. They have of course been condemned for that by the US-run EU media.

Q: What about the leaders of once Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania and Non-EU Serbia and Montenegro?

A: Apart from Serbia, where Orthodoxy is still to some extent a political force, the elites of all those countries have betrayed the Orthodox Faith and their own peoples. We can expect nothing of such elites. They can only think of payments from Brussels into their Swiss bank accounts.

Q: When you say ‘the US has isolated Europe’, what do you mean by the US?

A: The US means the plutocratic financiers, industrialists and arms-merchants who saw their opportunity and immigrated to the US from Europe, from where they had already financed slavery, over 200 years ago and now run the US. I do not of course mean the American people. Until the end of the 1950s there was still among many ordinary Americans a small-town, Bible-based culture, however deficient and partial. That has been more or less destroyed by the plutocrats and is lamented by such popular American singers as Don McClean and Johnny Cash in nostalgic songs like American Pie and Family Bible. Americans were the first victims of the plutocrats, the first victims of the ‘US’, as we saw already in the US Civil War. There is nothing that Satan loves more than wars where brother kills brother, whether in the US or the Ukraine.

Q: Has not Russia suffered from the Western sanctions imposed because of the Ukraine?

A: There are naturally problems resulting from them, but the main result of Western bullying because of Russia’s protection of the Ukraine, so-called ‘sanctions’, has been for Russians to refind their identity. Providentially, the Ukraine, the cradle of Russian Orthodoxy, is preparing Russia for the future, preparing it to overcome the confusion and decadent westernization of the last 25 years, to realize that Russia has its own identity, path and role. If the Western elite really wants to start a Third World War, it must now realize that Russians will no longer simply lie down and agree to lose that War, their country and, above all, their Christian Faith to Mammon.

This is the same situation as in the thirteenth century when the Mongols invaded Russia. Until then Russians had been divided; everything changed afterwards as they found unity against the common enemy and petty squabbles were forgotten. So today Russia was divided before the Western invasion of the Ukraine, now it is finding unity once more. Today’s extraordinary consensus of national unity around President Putin has not existed in Russia for exactly 100 years, since the First World War, when Russia also united against aggressive Western enemies.

Q: To move on, there has been talk recently of the forthcoming All-Orthodox Council in 2016 and much worry has been expressed about it. Do you share in those worries?

A: No. To worry about this is really to show a lack of faith in Divine Providence and in the Church, which is not a mere human institution, but a Divino-human organism. First of all, nobody knows if there will be a Council, let alone whether one is forthcoming; remember that ‘man proposes but God disposes’. True, a meeting of several Orthodox bishops is planned in two years’ time, but a meeting is not in itself a Council. And no-one knows with the situation between Constantinople and the Czechs and Slovaks if even that meeting will take place. And who knows who the Patriarch of Constantinople will be in two years’ time.

Even if a meeting does take place and politics takes over, it will remain an ineffectual without any consensus. However, if a ‘Council’ takes place, why should that be bad? Surely a Council – rather than a mere meeting – will proclaim the Church and our Orthodox Faith to the whole world, anathematizing all isms, atheism, consumerism, ecumenism, globalism etc. How can that be bad? Remember that only canonical Orthodox will attend, those of disputed canonicity like the OCA, those in schisms, as in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia, those in sects like the old calendarists, as well as heterodox, will not take part.

Q: So why do some worry?

A: I think that those who are worried, for example old calendarists, have a psychological and not theological motivation. They are really just seeking to justify their schisms. For example, they point to the decadence inside the Patriarchate of Constantinople but then forget that Mt Athos and many faithful clergy and people outside the convert fringes are under that Patriarchate. The old calendarists want a Pharisee-like, black and white world, in which they are white and everyone else is black. Such a world does not exist and has never existed. The wheat has always grown alongside the tares. Look at the twelve apostles: most of them betrayed Christ, one did not even repent, but still eleven of them became saints. Old calendarist criticisms are psychologically-motivated self-justification.

Q: But we know there are many real problems between the Local Churches, for example there is the problem of the new calendar.

A: I can recall reading the words of St Justin (Popovich) in the 1970s who denounced the concept of a Council then because the vast majority of Orthodox were living under the yoke of Communism. Then he was right of course, but now the situation is quite different. Today most Orthodox, some 85% of all, are free. True there are some 15% who are not free, who live under what may be called ‘CIA Churches’, but they are a small minority.
Who knows, if this meeting does take place and does become a Council, this may mean that the new calendar hierarchies will repent and return to the Orthodox calendar, giving up the Roman Catholic calendar. Mt Athos gave up that calendar decades ago and now the Polish Church has done so. Others will surely follow. And remember too that the CIA Churches, subject to all manner of Uniatizing and Protestantizing manipulations, are mainly small and their senior representatives elderly. Most of the free Local Churches are young and follow the Tradition. Time is on our side.

Q: What do you mean by ‘CIA Churches’?

A: Those whose leaders are appointed by the CIA, or bribed by the EU and masonic circles, which amounts to the same thing.

Q: What is the role of the Russian Church among the other Local Churches?

A: As three-quarters of the whole Church, we have a special responsibility: our vision, mission and task are prophetic. Our vision, mission and task are resistance and delaying tactics in order to oppose the coming of Antichrist, towards whom the world has been hurtling for the last hundred years and especially for the last fifty years. You remember how Reagan called the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’? Well, where did the demons who had entered the Russian Empire by 1917, tipped the balance against it and created that evil empire go? They did not disappear back to hell, but, seeing their battle largely lost in Russia, they went to infest the West, where, tragedy of tragedies, they were shown no resistance and even made welcome.

Here is the message of Russia to the West: After 1917 demons took over in Russia but we eventually fought them off because of the prayers of the New Martyrs and Confessors, because of the strength of the Orthodox Faith and Orthodox culture. Russia says to the West: Follow our example, return to the Orthodox Christ and you too can shake off the demons. But of course the West is so blinded by its towering racial and nationalistic pride that it cannot even see that is being tormented by demons. Indeed, it does not even believe in demons and it rejects the sweetness of the Resurrection of Christ, Whom it considers to be an ‘uneducated Asiatic’.

Q: To say that the Russian Church’s role is to oppose the coming of Antichrist is a very serious statement, with many implications.

A: Yes, it is very serious because it means that the Russian Orthodox Church is a sort of litmus test. The world can be divided into two parts, on the one hand those who are with us, our friends, those who are also resisting and delaying the coming of Antichrist, and, on the other hand, those who resist the Russian Church and, consciously or, more usually, unconsciously, are working for Antichrist’s coming. Those who unconscious and naively think they are working for ‘freedom, democracy and humanity’ etc are pawns in Antichrist’s game. They would be shocked if they realized it and then they would repent.

In that respect the Pussy Riot incident, so completely and so obviously stage-managed by the West, was highly symbolic. There we clearly saw who is for Antichrist and who is against. Those who supported Pussy Riot, words which are simple code for the sex and violence of modern Western ‘culture’, including fifth columnist, nominally Orthodox intellectuals, some of them even clergy, modernist heterodox, the Western media and so-called human rights activists, are all working for Antichrist.

Q: You say that to resist and delay Antichrist is the task of the Russian Church. But what practically can the Russian Church do that the other Local Churches cannot?

A: The Russian Church alone is able, when the time is ripe, to set up the infrastructure for Metropolias in the Americas, Asia, Australasia and Western Europe and also help the Patriarchate of Alexandria to become the true Church of Africa and stop being a Greek colony run by the EU-controlled Greek Foreign Ministry in Athens. The other Local Churches are too small, too weak, too nationalistic and, in the cases of the CIA Churches, too unfree, to do this.

Q: This sounds like papism, setting up a worldwide Church?

A: Not at all. Papism is about empire-building and centralization, which, true, has become the ethos of many in the modern Patriarchate of Constantinople and also in its time affected careerist, nationalistic State appointees in the Russian Church before the Revolution. Today the Russian Church is about setting up Metropolias as foundations for new Local Churches, as has already happened in Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and as is under way in Japan and China. These countries are parts of its canonical territory, but will remain so only for as long as the Churches there are too small to gain autocephaly.

The aim is not empire-building, which is centralization, but decentralization, through laying the foundations for and then establishing new autocephalous Local Churches, as His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II said in 2003 when speaking of a future Metropolia in Western Europe. We have as our model not the manmade, papist, unionist, filioquist, rationalist god of Western philosophers, but the real Christian God of the Holy Trinity revealed in all Power and Glory in the New Testament, unity in diversity.

Q: Do you think that other territories will be added to the canonical territory of Rus apart from China and Japan?

A: Certainly. I think that eventually in Europe Hungary may be added, and outside Europe in South-East Asia, with the Russian Orthodox missions already there, Thailand and Laos, and I think perhaps one day Iran too.

Q: So the rest of the world, except for Africa and the other territories in the jurisdiction of the other 13 canonical Local Churches, can be covered by the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR)?

A: Yes. The Church Outside Russia actually means the Church Outside Rus, outside the Russian lands. And Rus at present only covers lands of the former Soviet Union – except for Georgia – including the Ukraine, Estonia and so on, and, as we have said, China and Japan. ROCOR can cover the rest, except those countries that form the canonical territories of other Local Churches.

Q: But those countries ‘outside Rus’ often have Orthodox populations which are under other Local Churches. So how can they come under ROCOR?

A: They cannot ‘come under’ ROCOR, I said, ‘can be covered by ROCOR’, not ‘come under’. ROCOR is the Church Outside Rus. Unlike the Church inside Rus, which has a canonical territory, the Church Outside Rus has no canonical territory. However, we do have a shared territory, a territory which we can cover, and where we can have a canonical flock.

Q: What do you mean by canonical flock?

A: All those of all nationalities who live outside the canonical territory of Rus and freely belong to and confess the Russian Orthodox Church and Tradition. And at present nobody, including the US and EU elite, can stop us from belonging to ROCOR.

Q: With such a definition, where does the ‘Orthodox Church in America’, the OCA, come? That after all is in North America, on a territory covered by ROCOR, and the OCA was founded through the Russian Church.

A: I don’t know where the OCA comes. You must ask its members. The OCA was a temporary Cold War creation of Soviet times, largely made up not of descendants of subjects of the Russian Empire, but of descendants of subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For nearly 45 years now its canonicity has been disputed and it has been torn by internal dissensions. Like all conglomerates, its different parts are torn in different directions.

I think that instead of sitting between two (and sometimes more than two) chairs, one day it will split apart, with a small majority, especially but not only in Alaska, ‘Russian America’, returning to the Russian Church and spiritual freedom and integrity, and a large minority, under the influence of sectarian American nationalism and possibly under the direct influence of the US administration, going off to liberal, ecumenistic convert groups, the US-run Patriarchate of Constantinople and some to the Uniats.

Q: And what about the Paris Jurisdiction? It claims to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’. Where does that fit into such a definition?

A: It too left the Russian Church and therefore our affairs do not concern it. As regards its claim, as someone in Paris said to me earlier this year, although the Paris Jurisdiction may claim to be ‘of the Russian Tradition’, the Russian Tradition has not even ‘stayed overnight’ in most of its communities. When you live, as some do, on the Roman Catholic calendar, want the Roman Catholic Easter, have no iconostasis, wear Greek vestments, abbreviate the Liturgy, give communion to Roman Catholics, write against and condemn the Russian Church, refuse to venerate Her martyrs and belong to Her, what sort of ‘Russian Tradition’ is that? That is Uniatism, not Orthodoxy. Apart from in a few last outposts, that claim is a fiction.

Thus, it is very interesting to think back before 2007, before ROCOR and the Church inside Russia entered into canonical communion with one another. Then the Paris Jurisdiction – and its members who colonized the OCA in North America – used to condemn ROCOR as ‘a sect’ for not concelebrating with the Church inside Russia because ROCOR considered that the bishops of the Church inside Russia were not free and therefore could not act canonically. However, as soon as freedom came and ROCOR and the Church inside Russia did start concelebrating, the masonic ethos of the propaganda of the Paris swung around 180 degrees. Then representatives of the Paris Jurisdiction started condemning ROCOR precisely for concelebrating with the Church inside Russia, which they then said was not free!

So they went from criticizing ROCOR for being anti-Moscow to criticizing ROCOR for being pro-Moscow, never recognizing the transformation and liberation of Moscow. It is clear that the point of view of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction is mere self-justification, which is the same psychology for all extremists, whether for the Paris new calendarists or for the Greek old calendarists. In other words, their views are a political manipulation, conditioned by anti-Russian Western political propaganda, whether sent out to manipulate weak hearts and irrational minds by the CIA or by the Vatican, and has nothing to do with spiritual values.

Q: What was it that brought ROCOR and the Church inside Russia into canonical communion?

A: The August 2000 Jubilee Council of the Church inside Russia, which met all three conditions of ROCOR, the canonization of the New Martyrs, the condemnation of collusion with the atheist State, known as sergianism, and the complete rejection of the branch theory, known as ecumenism.

Q: In that case why did ROCOR not enter into communion with the Church inside Russia straightaway in 2000?

A: Very simply because it is one thing to proclaim something at a Council, but quite another to put it into practice. For example, even after the Jubilee Council, at the London Cathedral belonging to the Church inside Russia they still refused to put up icons of the New Martyrs, on the pretext that they had no space on their bare white walls! They also forbade the sale of books written by Fr Seraphim Rose, which were at that time so popular inside Russia. In England ROCOR had to wait for the death of one individual in 2004 and then the departure of other modernists in 2006 to the Paris Jurisdiction before a new Orthodox bishop could be sent from Russia, a bishop chosen on ROCOR’s recommendation, and so we could have local unity.

Many representatives of the Church inside Russia but who lived in the West had been betraying the Russian Church and Tradition for decades, they were compromised. This is partly why ROCOR was so popular. I can remember nearly forty years ago when on a Sunday 600 Russian emigres would be standing in the ROCOR Cathedral in London and at the Patriarchal Cathedral there would be perhaps 200, over half of whom were naïve Non-Russians and visitors who knew no better. In Brussels and Paris the Patriarchal churches were also no more than house chapels. Russians and those who knew the Tradition did not go there.

Remember how, just before the Church Outside Russia and the Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, in 2006 a small convert part of the foreign representation of the Church inside Russia in England and France abandoned Her. Why did this betrayal of the Church which, ironically, was just about to be reunited, take place? Because of two local personality cults, mainly among unintegrated converts, who placed those peculiar cults above the Russian Church and unity with Her. The individualistic mantra of cults and cultishness came before the Church of Christ.

The manipulative leaders of the naïve and misinformed who left had been doing a disservice to the Church inside Russia for decades while Moscow, paralysed by an illegitimate, militant atheist regime, had been able to do nothing about it. The lesson we learn from this is that those who are not integrated into Church life, but have their own agendas, always disintegrate. Interestingly, those who left in England were ardently supported by a rabidly Russophobic British press and, naturally, the State-run BBC.

In other words, locally, it took years for the decisions of the Jubilee Council to be implemented. There were similar situations in other parts of the Church inside Russia, where Soviet-minded individuals and their followers had to leave the scene for the decisions of that Council to be implemented. That is why fundamentally it took seven years for us to progress.

Q: But that was not the only reason for seven years’ delay. ROCOR too had committed faults on its part too, didn’t it?

A: Of course, individuals in ROCOR and in the ROCOR hierarchy had made their mistakes too. This mistake was the confusion between the Soviet Union and Russia. Emigres who had been mere children before the Revolution or who had been born outside Russia or who had been born inside the Soviet Union before 1945 and been cruelly persecuted for the Faith, often could not tell the difference between the post-Stalinist Soviet Union and Russia. In reality, despite the anti-Russian Bolshevik ideology, imported from the West, the Soviet Union had kept much of Orthodox culture.

1917 was not a light switch when the light went off – there was continuity. The victory over Fascism in the Second World War, the education and medical system, the reflexes of justice for the poor and for the Third World, the qualities of generosity, hospitality and mercifulness – they were not Soviet, they are Russian, and come from the Orthodox world view and Orthodox reflexes. On the other hand, the materialistic philosophy of the Soviet Union, the vicious persecution of the Church, the Gulag, all that was of course profoundly evil, satanic. Communism was Orthodoxy without God, just as Mammonism is Protestantism without God.

The mistakes made by some in ROCOR were why the ROCOR hierarchs and those of the Church inside Russia asked each other forgiveness before 2007. Being human, we all make mistakes. No-one is perfect. As a result of mutually asking one another for forgiveness, since 2007 the Church inside Russia has become ever more ‘de-Sovietized’ and ROCOR has become ever more ‘de-ghettoized’, more open and more international. Both parts have benefited enormously, making great strides forward. To ask for forgiveness is always beneficial, creative and dynamic. God gave us all grace for repentance.

The failure of the Paris Jurisdiction to admit its mistakes, unlike the two parts of the Russian Church inside and outside Russia which admitted theirs, is precisely the essential problem of those who control the Paris Jurisdiction. This is due to the unrepentant arrogance usual for intellectuals. In Paris the heirs of those who caused the Revolution through treachery in 1917 are still justifying themselves and their ancestors. For those who are in control in Paris are the heirs of the degradation of the Westernized Russian intelligentsia before the Revolution and their mercilessness. For example, the sins of individual representatives in the Church inside Russia were the sins of political hostages, not of free men. And if you refuse to recognize the repentance of such, you make yourself like the elder brother of the prodigal son, a merciless mountain of towering pride, refusing to take part in the banquet of the loving Father.

Q: So you distinguish between those who ‘control the Paris Jurisdiction’ and its members?

A: Of course. I have been an eyewitness of the process of return of many from the Paris Jurisdiction to both parts of the Russian Church since the 1980s. Sadly, the process of Uniatization that began there, above all from 1981 on, and which I personally tried to combat, has gone much further since then. I personally know of eight priests and deacons and four parishes which have returned from the Paris Jurisdiction since the late 1980s, when they saw through the betrayal of those in control and understood their underlying lack of love for the Russian Church.

Q: Why did Uniatization speed up there from 1981 on?

A: The disintegration of the Paris Jurisdiction began in 1981 after the repose of the ever-memorable Archbishop George (Tarasov), the last Archbishop who had been an adult before the Revolution, indeed a Russian pilot on the Western Front in the First World War. Those who returned after that to the Russian Church in order to keep their integrity, despite the slander that they faced, had realized that the Paris Jurisdiction would not return en masse as a group to the Russian Church, understanding that there were forces in it which were profoundly politicized and Russophobic, the very forces which proudly claim to be ‘apolitical!’ In fact, they are not apolitical, but simply disincarnate, ‘useful’ only to the enemies of the Church, such as the Vatican and Western spy agencies. Indeed, one of those who was in control in the Paris Jurisdiction in the 1980s has recently been proved to have been a senior agent of the French Secret Services. The exodus from there has been such that there are now only two ageing priests left in the Paris Jurisdiction who were brought up in ROCOR and so have a sense of the Tradition

Those of the Paris Jurisdiction who have now departed this life, Metr Evlogy and Vladimir, Archbishops George (Tarasov) and Sergiy (Konovalov), Bishops Methodius (Kulmann), Roman (Zolotov) and Alexander (Tian-Shansky), Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, Archpriests Alexander Rehbinder and Igor Vernik and a mass of others, clergy and people, would have returned to the Russian Church, if they were now alive. Some of these people I knew personally and I am convinced that they would be outraged by the attitude of those who refuse to return to the Russian Church today, 25 years on after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Q: Why?

A: Constantinople had for them only ever been a temporary refuge. It had always been their intention to return to the Russian Church, once She was free, just like us in ROCOR. Today there is no spiritual justification for staying in what is largely not just a Non-Russian, but an anti-Russian jurisdiction. And what is left of that jurisdiction? By and large, apart from a few unintegrated converts in each of a few dozen temporary premises and tiny chapels scattered across France and in neighbouring countries, there are only Rue Daru, mainly populated by those from the ex-Soviet Union, a tragically bankrupt St Sergius Institute, some four small Russian chapels in Paris, two convert groups in Paris, the crumbling church in Biarritz, which undemocratically has not been allowed to return to the Russian Church, and the convent in Bussy. Perhaps 5,000 people in all, and most of them arrivals from the former Soviet Union who have nowhere else to go. Since the 1980s the vital forces have left the Paris Jurisdiction. One priest who left, dear Fr Nikolai Soldatenkov, even took out Russian nationality, partly in order to be able to leave.

Q: Can you give other examples of those you mentioned above who you think would have returned to the Russian Church by now?

A: Yes. Take Metr Evlogy – he himself repented and returned, on paper, to the Russian Church twice, in 1934 and 1945, but was prevented by the freemasons in the Paris Jurisdiction from actually doing so. In the 1960s and 1970s both Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev actively tried to return to the Russian Church and suffered for their efforts. As for Bishop Roman (Zolotov), he was a Cossack by family – we had no doubts about him. As for dear Fr Igor Vernik I remember how he used to support the Russian football team against the French football team! And Archpriest Alexander Rehbinder refused to move to the USA in the 1950s because he knew that his many children would lose the Faith in the land of mammon. Archbishop Sergiy (Konovalov), whom I knew when he was a priest, was about to persuade the whole Paris Jurisdiction to move to the Church inside Russia when he died. His Holiness Patriarch Alexey II had hoped that his jurisdiction would become the foundation stone of an autonomous Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Western Europe.

Q: Let us get back to ROCOR. Why did only 95% of ROCOR enter into communion with the Church inside Russia in 2007? What about the other 5%?

A: When I left Moscow after my second visit to Soviet Russia in 1976, I promised myself as a Russian Orthodox layman that I would not return until the Russian Church was free from an atheist leader and regime. And indeed when I did return, thirty-one years later, in 2007, it was to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, where I concelebrated as a priest of the Church Outside Russia, together with a great many others, with his Holiness Patriarch Alexei II and in the presence of the Orthodox President of the Russian Federation. When in 2007 some 95% of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the by then free Patriarchal Church inside Russia entered into communion with one another, true, some 5% of ROCOR did not follow precisely because they were in denial of the huge changes in Russia between 1976 and 2007. Some simply abandoned the Church, but others fell away into pro-CIA, schismatic sects based in the Ukraine, Russia and Greece. Why?

Firstly, there were the naïve idealists and the good-hearted but misinformed who were hoodwinked and have mainly since returned. Secondly, there were those who put personal grudges against individual ROCOR bishops, who had misunderstood their non-integrated convert ideas, above their own salvation. Thirdly, there were those who were on an ego trip, seeking a career. And finally, there was most of the 5% or so who left and have not since returned, who did so because they were politically-minded, as they were anti-Communist rather than pro-Orthodox. Among them were some extremists who had consciously and freely sided with Hitler in the 1940s.

It must be said that many of the ringleaders here were actually employees of the CIA or the Canadian Secret Service, just as there was at least one case of an employee of the French Secret Services in the Paris Jurisdiction. So politics and salaries paid by Western spy services, presented by the ringleaders as ‘freedom’ and an ‘apolitical stance’, were the real reason for their schisms. When Communism fell, such people had no further reason to frequent the Church, as for them the Church had mainly been only an expression of nationalistic anti-Communism. They ended up being anti-Russian, as they had not understood that anti-Soviet could also mean anti-Russian. They were unable to discern the Russian through the fog of the Soviet.

This was because fundamentally they had little loyalty to the real Russian Orthodox Church and her international ideal of Holy Rus, but rather to narrow-minded political nationalism. Their behaviour had always been the greatest discouragement to Non-Russians joining the Church. Many of us who came to the Church seeking bread were indeed actually told to go away by them and in no uncertain terms, in other words, we were given stones. As one ROCOR bishop, speaking of one well-known to me ROCOR parish in the 1980s, told me recently, ‘those people were not Christians’. As is usual, their lack of love towards others ended up by driving them themselves to leave the Church in 2007 and even before, starting in the 1990s. Today we are still here in the Church; they are the ones who have abandoned Her.

Q: To come back to the idea of a Metropolia for Western Europe that you mentioned above, how important is that concept for Western Europe itself?

A: It is vital. I know that I am about to give an absurd example because it touches such a tiny detail, but I have to tell you it because it is symbolic of the degeneration of Europe. Two weeks a Russian woman in Germany wrote to me and told me that for many Germans a woman wearing a skirt is seen either as a Russian or else as a prostitute. What I am saying through this perhaps ridiculous symbol is that even the culture of Christian vestiges that was alive in Europe 50 years ago in the normal way that people dressed then is now dead.

Young Western people whose souls are at least still alive today turn to strange subcultures or even Islam and even fight for Islamic State, since that counters the spiritually empty West of today. Their disaffection and alienation are so great that even such bizarre and lethal choices seem more logical to them than the deathly conformist consumerism, hellish vampires, aliens, monsters, drugs, drink, sex, obesity, depression, mental illness and suicide that is the modern West. Europe has zombified and infantilized itself by accepting Americanization, it has been robbed and stripped naked of its own culture and is on the point of spiritual death. Europe is the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho was robbed and left for dead. Only a Good Samaritan, one from outside the West but still linked with its roots and understanding it, can save Europe; no false priests can do anything for it, for they pass by on the other side.

How can Europe be regenerated without the Church and Her prophetic vision? It is not possible. Europe desperately needs to be raised up from the deathly spiritual filth of its vulgar, fleshly, bread and circuses consumerism, the tyranny of its Babylonian culture of death, the fruit of its thousand-year apostasy, to the vision of spiritual beauty, to spiritual purity and the culture of the soul, to the nobility of human destiny, to the heavenly Jerusalem, which are offered by the Russian Orthodox Church. We are talking here about salvation, about life and death.

Now I am reminded here of the events of 200 years ago, on 11 April 1814. This was when liberating Russian Orthodox troops celebrated Easter Night on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, where a field church had been set up. Having defeated Napoleon, who had taken a burned-out Moscow only some 18 months before, Tsar Alexander I stood in that great square, where the King of France had been beheaded less than a generation before, in 1792, and where the crowned Napoleon had stood in 1804 in front of a five-pointed red star, and heard thousands of Russian troops answering the priests’ ‘Christ is Risen!’ with the words ‘Truly He is Risen!’ This was the spiritual victory over the degenerate heart of atheist Europe which followed the physical victory over atheist Europe. This spiritual victory needs to be repeated in today’s atheist Europe. Otherwise geriatric Europe will go under completely, swept away by its own atheism and the tide of Islamic immigration.

Q: Why instead of subcultures and Islam do Western young people not choose Orthodoxy, when Orthodoxy is at the roots of the West, in its first millennium?

A: Firstly, because modern Western people have been cut off from those roots, their own history has been concealed from them, they can often mentally go no further back than 1945, let alone 1,000 years. And secondly because it is so difficult to find authentic Orthodoxy in Western Europe.

Q: Which countries would a Metropolia in Europe consist of?

A: Only those in Western Europe. Slovenia and Croatia already come under the Serbian Church. The Baltic States already come under the Russian Church. Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia already have their own autocephalous Churches. As for Hungary, given the fact that its first faith came in the tenth century from the East and not from Rome, then to my mind it too should one day have its own Local Church, just like Poland and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, which also originally received their faith from the East. Even today Hungarian Catholicism, as in certain neighbouring countries, is coloured by Orthodox values and, for example, the veneration of icons.

Twenty Western European countries are left, all post-Roman Catholic or post-Protestant, and where the Russian Church, in one or both its parts, is already present. They are: Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland; Ireland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria; Portugal, Spain, France, Italy. They, together with the tiny Andorra, Liechtenstein and San Marino, would form the territory of this Metropolia.

A: Why can’t those countries have individual Local Churches?

Q: That is a hopelessly insular, narrow and nationalistic idea. It is the sort of thing that narrow, nationalistic ex-Anglicans dream of. Western Europe is a whole and individual countries in it are far too small to have their own Local Churches. Western Europe was the territory of a single Orthodox Patriarchate. We will never divide it. A Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe is the foundation for the restoration of the single, historic Local Church on this territory. We wish to keep that historic unity. Here in Sweden, for instance, you have two great saints, St Olaf and St Anna, and they are precisely part of the whole history of Europe, not narrow, nationalistic symbols, cut off from the rest, but linked in their cases with England and Russia

Q: What is the realistic hope for the foundation of such a Metropolia?

A: Officially today there are said to be 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox in Western Europe. That is far more than the four ancient Greek Orthodox Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem combined, more than the Georgian, Polish, Cypriot and Czechoslovak Orthodox Churches put together, let alone the 30,000-100,000 who make up the OCA. Yet the infrastructure for us is pathetic. We still do not have the new Cathedral in Paris and we really need a large, purpose-built Cathedral in central London.

Altogether in Western Europe I doubt whether there are even 200 church buildings and 200 priests for these 7,000,000 Russian Orthodox. That is scandalous; at most one church and one priest for every 35,000 people! As I have said many times before, we need a huge church-building and infrastructure programme across a network of at least 500 cities and towns in Western Europe. Today, wherever you go in Western Europe, even in small towns, the flood of immigration has been such that you will meet at least one Russian Orthodox. Provision has to be made. Let every Western European town and city of over 100,000 have its own full-time bilingual Russian Orthodox church and let there be at least chapels elsewhere, so that nobody, whatever their origin and native language, is more than 50 kilometres from their own bilingual Russian Orthodox church and centre.

Q: Who is to blame for the present situation?

A: First and foremost, we are ourselves to blame for this situation. We have to make our own Church. The Church works from the grassroots. We should never blame others for this. However, it is true that if we can first show that we are motivated, then we can attract the attention of the hierarchy. Then we can attract help from above and, in terms of our Russian Orthodox world, that means help from Moscow. Economic refugees and their children, who make up the bulk of the 7,000,000, are by definition not the wealthiest people in the world. And how are Western Europeans, already Russian Orthodox or potentially Russian Orthodox, to be integrated into the Russian Orthodox Church in Europe, if there are so few churches, so few centres of Church culture?

Q: How do you see such a Metropolia?

A: For nearly a decade now I have belonged to an informal group of Russian Orthodox priests in some major towns and cities in Western Europe. We look at Western Europe as a whole, we want to draw the Orthodox Cross over Europe. We have a love of and an attachment to the Russian Orthodox Tradition but also a knowledge of local languages and local heterodox culture. We want to create bilingual oases of a Russian Orthodox Europe, where all can feel at home.

This is the opposite of the policy of the Paris Jurisdiction, which suffers from a lack of love of and a lack of knowledge of the Russian Orthodox Tradition, but instead an attachment to local languages and local heterodox culture. However, you cannot be Orthodox and at the same time have an attachment to heterodox culture. This is not Local Orthodoxy. Local Orthodoxy is created by integration into the Orthodox Faith, not by integration into heterodox culture, which disintegrates. The latter is salt that has lost its savour. Local Orthodoxy cannot grow by being attached to heterodoxy.

Q: What does this mean in practical terms?

A: All my adult life I have fought for the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, Who is a mother gathering her chicks, like Jerusalem. I see a time, though it may still be far off, when there will be a Russian Orthodox Metropolia in Europe, whose church buildings and infrastructure will initially be financed from Russia, but whose clergy will be paid entirely locally by the faithful, thus remaining free and independent. But we need to form a grassroots Europe-wide Russian Orthodox Brotherhood or Russian Orthodox Union, blessed by our local bishops, to advance this process.

Q: You still have not answered my question: what is the realistic hope for such a Metropolia?

A: I have answered it, but here is my answer more directly. It is in a new consciousness, both here Europe-wide and in Moscow, at the grassroots and at the level of the hierarchy, a consciousness of the international calling of the Russian Orthodox Church. Here our Europe-wide unity is vital. And what is that unity based on? Our unity is based on our love for the Russian Church, just as disunity is in a lack of love for Her. We should have a patriotism for the Church, which by principle of the Incarnation spreads to every country inasmuch as that country is part of the Church.

In other words, Holy Rus is to be made global. For this we need spiritual purity, the pre-revolutionary Church purified – we must not forget that the pre-revolutionary Church had careerist traitors in Her who supported Kerensky. We must not forget that disunity is always caused by narrowness, whether sectarian or nationalist, as today in the Ukraine, Macedonia, Montenegro and Estonia. Disunity is caused by the primacy of fallen, human, political concerns instead of the primacy of the Faith and the lack of a coherent Russian Orthodox world view. We need unity around the Church.

Q: Who are you grateful to for this vision of Europe-wide Russian Orthodox unity that you have?

A: Four people in particular have inspired me and to them I will always be grateful. Firstly, to the ever-memorable Archpriest Lev Lebedev, whom I first met in Krasnodar in Russia in 1976, and, despite his later illness and tragedy, was one of the finest thinkers in the Russian Church; secondly to the ever-memorable Baroness Maria Rehbinder (Cattoire) of the Paris Jurisdiction, a young woman before the Revolution, a daughter of a New Martyr and a fine Russian European, whom I first met in her little flat in Passy in Paris in 1983; thirdly to the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva of ROCOR, born in Kiev, a Belgrade disciple of the great Metr Antony of Kiev, once a priest of the Patriarchate and whom I first met in 1986 and who ordained me. And finally, to His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill, whom I met in Moscow in 2012 and who strengthened in me the understanding of the need for this Metropolia. Thank you to them all.

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Representative of the ROCOR Missionary Department for Western Europe,
Halland, Sweden, November 2014

Civilization of Life or Civilization of Death?

The twentieth century was patterned by a Civilization of Death, by generations of genocidal wars and suicidal revolutions: the satanic First European War (the Kaiser’s War) from 1914 on, the satanic Second (Hitler’s War) from 1939 on, the social and moral revolution, including the abortion holocaust and the pre-planned protestantization of the Vatican, from 1964 on, and the pre-planned collapse of Communism from 1989 on. All these transformations were financed by and benefited the same bankers of debt and merchants of death. The last transformation has been accompanied by the attempt of the global elite, headquartered in the USA, to create through terrorism a totalitarian World Dictatorship, known by it as ‘The New World Order’. This has seen manipulated wars (‘the war on terror’, actually the war of terror), genocide and revolutions worldwide, with millions of victims, which have attempted to destroy the sovereignty of every single nation in the world, except that of the USA, ‘an exception’.

In Western Europe we have seen the EU become a vassal, satellite, puppet and poodle of Big Brother in the USA. Together with the Anglosphere, the US/EU, 10% of the global population, have pretentiously called themselves ‘the international community’. National sovereignty and patriotism have been mocked, discredited and suppressed against the will of the peoples; any supposedly futile resistance, as in the UK (England and Scotland), Greece, Cyprus or Hungary, faces ferocious opposition by the elite. Abortion, euthanasia, suicide, child abuse, homosexual ‘marriage’, gay ‘pride’ parades, sects, cults and satanism are legitimized. Politicians and journalists are bought, the media reports the same censored news and propaganda internationally, the public is brainwashed (remember ‘weapons of mass destruction’) into mass depression or else hysteria, the internet and phone calls are spied on. Opponents are assassinated, as in several cases in the UK, if not physically, then in their character (Assange/Snowden). Such is this Civilization of Death.

In reality the ‘legitimacy’ of any government is now defined not by international law, but by the degree of its feudal subjection to this meddling World Dictatorship; Japan, South Korea and now the NATO-annexed Ukraine are among many examples of this. Many nations have resisted, in the Muslim world, in India, in China, in Latin America and also in the Russian Federation. In this respect the resistance of the Russian Federation is unique, but not because it wishes to keep its sovereignty against Euroatlantic dismemberment and colonization, since that is true of all the others too. The difference is that the Russian Federation is not a sect, but part of a global Russian Orthodox World, the only power with a historic role and responsibility founded on the Church of Christ and its Civilization of Life. That role is to restrain the final triumph of Death, organized evil in the world, as the epistle to the Thessalonians says. It is in this context that we clearly see that the ‘New World Order’ is in fact the project to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem.

It is therefore necessary for the Russian Federation to show its sovereignty and independence, national, political, economic and spiritual, from this World Dictatorship and its Civilization of Death. For doing this it has already been subject to the Dictatorship’s terrorist economic sanctions, which contradict both international law and free trade; these were imposed notably for respecting the overwhelming democratic will of the people of the Crimea against the Western-imposed Fascist tyranny in Kiev. In reality, the self-destructive and self-isolating sanctions seem to have hurt the aggressors more than Russia, especially the bullied countries of Central Europe and the Balkans. Now the Russian government will have to remove the fifth column of ‘liberals’ (= Fascists) from the Russian media, politics, education, subsidized by CIA front organizations, which attempt to undermine the government and economy from inside, making it into a Western colony, and replace them with patriotic politicians, economists and journalists.

It is clear too that Russian foreign policy must be decolonized, as we have begun to see since 2013. The shamefully passive attitude of the Russian Federation of the past to the terroristic US-led and financed massacres in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria can no longer exist. Russian Orthodox Christianity (unlike heterodox Christianity, long since under masonic control, and increasingly some smaller Local Churches, inclined to Halfodoxy, two of which are now led by CIA-imposed Patriarchs) is a Civilization with its own vision of the authentic freedom of humanity. This is now menaced by anti-Christian totalitarian ‘liberalism’. This can be seen most clearly of all in the Ukraine where Orthodox resistance fighters are dying for the freedom of the world against slavery to the World Dictatorship, its bandit ‘Civilization’ of Death and its satanism. Orthodox choose Life and want to remain free, for we recognize only the supremacy of spiritual and moral authority, not the supremacy of the satanized mob.

The whole territory of the Russian Orthodox World, all Northern Eurasia, stretching from the Carpathians to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic to Central Asia, together with its allies in the still free parts of the rest of the Orthodox Church and in little oases worldwide, Patriarchal embassies, consulates for Christ, is being called on to show all humanity the only viable alternative to the World Dictatorship, as it has been established over the last generation since 1989. Now at the generational turning point of 2014, the coming years will show us whether we shall be able to cast off the shackles of that Dictatorship and its Civilization of Death and return to spiritual freedom, or whether it is too late. In the latter case we shall find that too much of the world was brainwashed into slavery while it slept in its nightmares and is now no longer able to listen to our lone voice of spiritual freedom of uncompromised Orthodox Christianity. For we are the Civilization of Life crying in the wilderness created by the Civilization of Death.

Imperial Russia: 1894 – 1914

Our children and grandchildren will not be capable of even imagining the Russia where we once (that is yesterday) lived and which we failed to appreciate and understand – all that might, complexity, wealth and happiness…

Ivan Bunin, Russian émigré author and Nobel prize-winner

Preface

One of the myths of Western propaganda, faithfully copied in every detail by Soviet propaganda, heir to the materialist West in all things – only more consistent than it, is that Imperial Russia was backward. In reality, everything that was good about the Soviet Union, its educational and health systems, literacy rates, absence of unemployment, low crime rate and thirst for social justice, was part of the heritage of the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II; what was bad about it, its atheism and persecution of Orthodox Christian values, came from the West. Some imagine that as Russian Orthodox we must be anti-Soviet; in reality, since we are anti-atheist, we are anti-Soviet only to the extent that Soviet ideology persecutes the Orthodox Church and imposes atheism. We are not anti-Soviet as regards the values which the Soviet system inherited from the Tsar’s government.

Thus, there was a time when we Russian Orthodox in the West supported the anti-atheism of the West. However, as soon as, a generation ago, that anti-atheism began to turn into Russophobia, we began to take another view. Today, the situation is the opposite of the past. The West, led by Washington and faithfully obeyed by its unthinking poodle Europe, part of which it has occupied since 1942 (the ‘friendly invasion’ of Great Britain by 2 million US troops) and another part since 1944 (the D-Day invasion), has become the most virulent centre of atheism in the world. At the same time, today’s Russian Federation has in many respects returned to Orthodoxy. We still, as is only logical, oppose atheism and if that opposes us Russian Orthodox to today’s apostate West and makes us protective of the West’s ancient Christian roots, that should be no surprise. We are consistent.

Introduction

100 years ago Imperial Orthodox Russia stood on the verge of becoming the world’s greatest Power. Only the three European Powers, Great Britain, Germany and France, especially the former with its paranoid Russophobic ‘Great Game’, stood in the way. Indeed, the multinational and territorially continuous Russian Empire had made huge progress since the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in 1894 in all domains, in astronomy, radar, radio (Popov), rocketry (Tsiolkovsky), monorails, ice-breakers (all in the 19th century), petrol and diesel engines, cars, lorries, trolleybuses, trams, diesel tractors and tank designs (both the world’s first).

In the field of aviation the Russian Empire invented helicopters (Igor Sikorsky was the grandson of a priest), the world’s first four-engine aeroplanes, monoplanes, seaplanes, aerodynamics, (in 1914 263 of the world’s approximately 850 warplanes were Russian), airships, parachutes (the world’s first), submarines, electric railways (Russian railways were the cheapest and most comfortable in the world), telegraphy, telephones, television (the world’s first), chemistry (Mendeleev), medicine, physiology (Pavlov was a priest’s son), zoology, geology, oil pipelines and hydroelectricity.

Freedom from a Military-Industrial Complex

On the one hand, the Japanese had almost gone bankrupt as a result of the 1904-5 war which they launched against the Russian Empire as a result of their militarism, which had led to very high military expenditure. This had been encouraged by Western politicians, industrialists and bankers, to whom the Japanese had indebted themselves (but this all rebounded on the West which was to suffer in the Second World War as a result of its greed in arming and selling technology to Japan). On the other hand, Russia’s military expenditure was very low (explaining initial setbacks in both the war against the Japanese invasion and again ten years later in defending itself and Serbia against German and Austro-Hungarian militarism).

Not being dominated by a military-industrial complex like Western countries which relied on it for their economic development, the Russian Empire’s overall military expenditure was less than a third of Britain’s and France’s, less than half of Germany’s and some 25% less than that of Austro-Hungary’s and Italy’s, As regards its naval expenditure, it was a quarter of Britain’s, just over a third of Japan’s and two-thirds of the USA’s. It had proportionately less than half of France’s, Germany’s and Italy’s population under arms and slightly less than Austro-Hungary’s. Its police force was also very small. In 1914 there were seven times fewer policemen than in Britain and 5 times fewer than in France. Crime was also lower. In 1905-6 there were 77 criminals per 100,000 head of population in the Russian Empire, 132 in the USA, 429 in Britain and 853 in Germany.

Thanks to its freedom from the tyranny of a military-industrial complex, Russian productivity increased fourfold between 1890 and 1913; in 1901 it produced 51% of the world’s oil and by 1909 it was the world’s greatest producer of cereals. Between 1892 and 1913 its wheat production had increased by 78% and in 1913 its wheat harvest was 28% higher than that of the USA, Canada and Argentina combined. In 1913 it exported 50% of the world’s eggs, 70% of its butter and 80% of its flax. It also produced over 25% of the world’s wheat, oats and potatoes, 40% of its barley and over 50% of its rye.

Between 1890 and 1910 the Russian Empire’s average rate of growth was over 9%, greater than that of the youthful USA. In 1913 it had the lowest direct taxes in the world, four times lower than in France and Germany and 8.5 times lower than in Britain, and incomes had increased sixfold between 1893 and 1913. In the same period, the length of railways had doubled, as also had its grain harvest. Russian manufactured goods outclassed British and Japanese goods in the Far East – they were both cheaper and better quality.

International Affairs

Internationally, it was Tsar Nicholas who in 1898 had called for an International Peace Conference to be held in the Hague in order to ban, or at least limit, arms. Although this proposal was to become the foundation of the International Court, the League of Nations and then the UN, sadly for the victims of the First World War, the initial proposition was rejected outright and even mocked by aggressive and imperialistic Britain, as well as militaristic Germany, France and Japan

The Russian Empire opposed colonialism and would not allow foreign capitalists there to exploit native peoples or massacre them, as the Western Powers had done in the Americas (putting ‘Indians’ onto ‘reserves’, or concentration camps, a technique today copied by Israel in Palestine), in Africa (massacring peoples born there, as in the Belgian Congo, French North-West Africa, the British Sudan and South Africa, or German South-West Africa) and committing genocide, as in Tasmania. The different peoples of the Russian Empire were respected, not massacred, which is why countries like Hawaii, Siam (Thailand), Tibet, Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and the Boers sought Russian protection or even Russian nationality.

This anti-colonialist policy was later continued by the Soviet Union, which did not invent it, as some imagine from its propaganda, but simply prolonged it. Thus, in 1899 the Russian Empire opposed the seizure by force by the USA of Hawaii, a territory which had previously voluntarily asked to receive Russian protection and even nationality in order to protect it from Western imperialism. In 1900, the Russian Tsar similarly protected Tibet from British imperialism and massacres, placing it under Chinese tutelage. In 1912 he set up the Balkan Union of Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece in order to counter Turkish imperialism and also the provincial nationalism/phyletism of the governments of those four countries. Sadly, the treacherous German King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, egged on by the German Kaiser, soon broke the Union and attacked Serbia.

International Orthodoxy

Between 1894 and 1912 7,546 new Orthodox parish churches, not including chapels, were built and 211 new monasteries were opened. 17 churches were also built in major European cities as a witness to Orthodoxy, some with the Tsar’s own money, as in Nice and as also with St Nicholas church in New York. Tsar Nicholas made generous personal gifts to Local Orthodox Churches and others, including the Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, Montenegrin, Constantinopolitan (Mt Athos), Antiochian, Alexandrian and Abyssinian (Ethiopian) Churches, as well as to the Holy Land (Jerusalem).

By 1914 there were 117 million Orthodox in the Empire, with 48,000 parish churches, some 25,000 chapels and churches in monasteries and other institutions, some 50,000 priests and deacons and 130 bishops in 67 dioceses. The Church had over 35,000 primary schools and 58 seminaries. (By 1917 there were 163 bishops, 51,105 priests and 79,767 churches, including 25,593 chapels and churches in 1257 monasteries and other institutions).

By 1895 there were 22,000 Orthodox in Japan and a seminary. In 1897 an Orthodox mission was established in Seoul in Korea. In 1898 the Nestorians of Urmia in Persia joined the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1903 86 Russian schools were opened in Syria. In 1913, there were 3,812 Orthodox in China and a seminary. Apart from his zeal for the glorification of new saints, in March 1905 Tsar Nicholas proposed himself as Patriarch, which would effectively have restored the Patriarchate almost immediately, if only his offer had been accepted.

Western Russophobia

Western newspapers, often owned by imperialistic bankers, industrialists and arms merchants, loved to attack Russia for the ‘pogroms’. In fact, these did not take place in Russia itself, but above all in Catholic Vienna and Berlin and among settlements of Jews in the Russian Empire (who had taken refuge there centuries ago from Western anti-semitism) namely in Catholic Poland, Catholic Lithuania, Catholic Galicia and Romanian Orthodox Bessarabia (Moldova).

Between the four years of 1903 and 1907 1,622 people were killed in the ‘pogroms’ in the Russian Empire, of whom however only 711 were Jews (the same number of Jews as were killed every four hours and the same number of Soviet citizens as were killed every hour by the Western Nazis between the four years of 1942 and 1945). The other victims were Catholic and Orthodox. Indeed, many of the pogroms were started by Jews, but the Tsar’s government had to constantly intervene between the two sides, usually Catholics and Jews, being as even-handed as possible. Despite the pogroms, the Jewish population rose considerably, in spite of massive emigration, mainly to the USA.

Another object of propaganda was the war launched by Japan, a proxy armed to the teeth by the West against Russia. Thus, the Japanese attack on Port Arthur, in no way different in its treacherous unexpectedness from Pearl Harbour, was greeted with joy by British and American newspapers, since the Japanese Navy had been built and armed mainly by Britain, all part of Britain’s ‘Great Game’ to control the whole world. Although Russia’s much smaller and older Navy did lose naval battles against Japan, its army was beginning to win on land and, if it had not been for the Japanese and Western-fomented troubles which began in 1905, there is no doubt that Russia would have won the war within another year, crushing Japan, as it did in 1945.

Western Support for the Enemies of Russia

The open support for the enemies of Russia can also be seen in the ‘Hull Incident’, when Russian battleships bravely sailed around the world, west to east, to fight against the superior Japanese Navy. Arriving in the North Sea, they were provoked, probably on purpose, by Japan’s British ally and the Russians fired on a British trawler in error. Once the Russians had arrived in the Far East, their small fleet was defeated at Tsushima by the Japanese fleet, twice as numerous and powerful. Breaking the 1899 Hague Convention, nearby Japanese ships refused to allow two Russian hospital ships to pick up wounded Russian sailors and seized the ships as prizes of war instead.

Another instance of extraordinarily biased propaganda occurred when Western newspapers deliberately misreported the tragic events known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. This was during the Western-financed 1905 troubles in Russia, when on 9 January a crowd led by the renovationist Fr George Gapon (who later committed suicide after it was discovered that he was in fact a secret agent), led a crowd to the Tsar’s Palace with a petition, knowing full well that the Tsar was absent, and terrorists in the crowd, hiding behind icons, opened fire on the troops who defended the Tsar’s residence. Many died in the crossfire, possibly as many as 128.

When the Tsar heard of the events, he personally generously compensated the families who had lost members in the crossfire between terrorists and troops. He at once instituted a commission to investigate workers’ needs. However, in comparison, in the next two years several thousand were to die at the hands of terrorists, of whom only a few hundred were captured and punished, many of them fleeing to Western countries, such as Britain (Lenin), the USA (Trotsky) and Switzerland, where they were deliberately protected by the authorities. Even the Edwardian British children’s book ‘The Railway Children’, written by E. Nesbit, sentimentally supported the protection of anti-Russian terrorists in England, which was a reality, for example the formation of the Bolshevik Party in London.

Social Achievements

Free from domination by a military-industrial complex, by 1897 the population of the Russian Empire had reached 129.1 million and the annual rate of increase was then 1.6 million. Some 12% of people lived in towns and cities. The birth rate was 48 per 1,000, whereas in the rest of Europe it was between 22 and 41. By 1902 the population had reached 139 million and by 1913 170 million, an average rate of increase of 3.7 million per year, twice as high as in the decade between 1892 and 1902. Growth had become the highest in the world and it is estimated that by 2000 the population would have reached 600 million.

Education was made free at the start of Tsar Nicholas’ reign in 1894 and between 1893 and 1913 expenditure on education increased by 628%. Between 1902 and 1913 the national education budget was four times higher than the defence budget – a proportion which the Soviet Union was unable to maintain. On the eve of the First World War half of all students at the University of Moscow were educated for free, another quarter received grants. There were then over 39,000 university students in Russia and more women in higher education than in any other country in the world. By 1912 nearly two million children were being educated in over 37,000 Church schools, but there were 130,000 schools altogether, given that since 1908 10,000 schools had been opening every year.

In 1908 70 million books were published in Russia. In 1914 150,000 new titles were published worldwide, of which 32,238 were published in Russia, 25,531 in Russian, the others in other languages of the Empire. This was as many books as in Britain, France and the USA combined. In 1914 there were nearly 150,000 libraries in Russia and by 1920 literacy would have reached some 90%. Unlike in the bureaucracy of the later Soviet Union, the number of civil servants in Russia in 1914 was 336,000 – in much smaller France it was already 500,000. The merciful Tsar Nicholas II never signed a single death sentence during his reign and pardoned a great many who had been sentenced by the courts.

By 1913 medical treatment of the poor was free and virtually every hospital had free wards for their treatment. In 1897 the working day had been limited to a maximum of eleven and a half hours and ten hours if on a night shift (in France the maximum was 12 hours, in Italy the maximum was 12 hours, but for women only, in other countries there was no limit at all) and Sundays were non-working days. There was no unemployment in Russia – just as later in the Soviet Union. By the law of 1903 injuries caused by industrial accidents were generously compensated after more than three days of incapacity. If workers were incapacitated by a serious accident, they were paid a pension two-thirds of their salary. In 1912 the US President Taft publicly declared that ‘your Emperor has created the most perfect labour legislation, which not a single democratic state can boast of’.

Conclusion

Satan has inspired the jealous secularist Western Powers to destroy the Russian Empire in their greedy, anti-Christian bid for world hegemony, whether through their export there of atheist Communism in 1917 or through the export there of their atheist Capitalism in 2014. The only difference is that then it was Great Britain which led the war against Russia. Today it is its younger brother, the USA, which eclipsed Britain, making into its colony in 1942 under Churchill, who was half-American. And ever since the British Establishment has loyally followed orders from Washington, wagging its tail at every one, its prize – crumbs from the master’s table. As can be seen above, most of the achievements falsely claimed by the Soviet Union were in fact the real achievements of the Tsar’s Russia and built on its firm base.

During the reign of Tsar Nicholas, the length of the railways increased by almost 150%, production of coal by 430%, of sugar by 400%, of iron ore by 140%, of oil by 100% and gold reserves grew by 250%, despite the Japanese and then Austro-Hungarian and German aggression in their anti-Russian wars. In 1912 a French newspaper predicted that if the European nations continued to progress between 1912 and 1950 as they had between 1902 and 1912, then Russia would dominate Europe, politically, economically and financially by mid-century. A review in the November 1914 issue of the American ‘National Geographic Magazine’ called Russia ‘the land of unlimited opportunities’. It is to this that today we wish to return. If today’s Russia is faithful to Orthodoxy and Orthodox values, then it will indeed become once more ‘the land of unlimited opportunities’.

Orthodox England

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