Category Archives: Russia

Answers to Questions from Letters

Below are some answers to questions in recent correspondence.

Q: In your recent article ‘Truth and Mercy’, were you expressing prophecy or just wishful thinking?

A: As usual, I wanted to make people think outside the restrictive box that the secular media offer and also to comfort the weaker from the despair that is offered by those media. In both these respects from feedback it is clear that the article was successful. That article describes a possible and spiritual outcome of present world events.

Obviously, I am not a prophet, but it is clear that what is being played out in the world today, in Gaza, with massacres by US-armed Zionists, in Iraq and Syria, with massacres of Christians by Qatari-financed terrorists, and in the Ukraine, with massacres of Ukrainians by CIA-organized terrorists and mercenaries (all these events are very closely interconnected) is of vital importance. This year we are reaching another huge turning point in history, as great as that of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

However, there is a prophetic element. That article, ‘Truth and Mercy’, was based on prophecies of several holy people, of St John of Shanghai, Schemamonk Aristocleus, Blessed Pelagia of Ryazan, Fr Paisios the Athonite, Elder Jonah of Odessa and others. However, we must remember that all prophecies, theirs too, are conditional on repentance – and repentance is not certain. What I am saying is that if we do not go in the direction of ‘Truth and Mercy’, then we will go in the direction of the end of the world. There is no middle way, no compromise, as people of fantastical Anglican culture always imagine that there is. Today, we are going either towards repentance, or else, to Sodom and Gomorrah and unspeakable catastrophes before Antichrist. I want to give people hope. Catastrophe is not inevitable.

Those who think with worldly criteria do not understand that article, they find it fantasy. This is because they think in secularist, political terms only, which by definition exclude Providence, the Divine and the miraculous, from their thought processes. This is because their thought processes are not Orthodox, not Christian, they are deceived, for processes in the real world are not directed by secular forces. In reality, human affairs are directed by spiritual forces, either Divine or else, as we can see around us and throughout the history of the last 100 years, Satanic. The Divine is possible, but the Satanic, what in the Old Testament is called ‘the wrath of God’, is also possible. It is our choice. Such is human freewill.

Q: You mentioned St John of Shanghai. Why does he stand out as THE saint of the emigration?

A: Firstly, because he was a saint. That in itself is exceptional, especially with all the pseudo-saints and pseudo-elders of the Russian emigration, with false claims and personality cults, developed by themselves and then, much worse, by their disciples after their deaths. Secondly, because he was universal. He affected all Continents and spoke to all nationalities, Eastern (Chinese, Japanese and Filippino) and Western (European and American). And thirdly, because he was a monarchist, a ‘Tsarist’ to the core.

Q: Why is that significant?

A: Because that is the litmus test for the understanding of Orthodoxy today. The restoration of the monarchy in Russia for the benefit of the whole Orthodox world and indeed for the benefit of the whole world is the only direction in which we can go. Those who have not understood this have not really become Orthodox. They are disincarnate, semi-Protestant, they do not understand that Orthodoxy is the religion of the Incarnation, of the last two fingers when we make the sign of the cross. They think that Orthodoxy, and religion in general, is just a private matter, a personal theory, without any practical and public ramifications. That is a heresy. I wonder if they know how to make the sign of the cross properly. They may be full of doctorates, but I am sure they do not hold the last two fingers, representing the Divine and human natures of Christ, together. They would do well to learn from the last illiterate village greybeard in Moldova, or for that matter in Galilee.

St John is the guide to this as he possessed the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. So many converts treat Orthodoxy as ‘comfort Orthodoxy’, a kind of part-time hobby or ego-trip. Christ, that is, Orthodoxy, is not that. A hobby or ego-trip is starters, comfort eating; what we have to do is to get to the main course, the meat dish, which is in the arena. Only when we have been in the arena with the wild beasts that attack us, as they do because they are our main course – can we get to the sweet, dessert, which is paradise. As they say, you cannot get to paradise in a Rolls-Royce.

Q: What is the situation among new Orthodox (those who have been baptized in the last 20 years or so) in the Church inside Russia? Have they come to what you have called ‘the arena’, ‘the main course’?

A: That is an interesting question and the answer varies. I can remember how in the 1990s, many newly-baptized in Russia (and they numbered tens of millions) read books by Metr Anthony of Sourozh and other Russian purely intellectual and theoretical writers who wrote for Non-Orthodox in the West. In other words, they read what was appropriate for outsiders and beginners, introductions. Fortunately, a great many in Russia now, especially because of the influence of authentic monasticism (that is so sorely and disastrously lacking in the West) have got past that stage. They are no longer outsiders, converts, but insiders, Orthodox. Now they read the lives of the saints and of elders like Fr Paisios, Fr John Krestiankin and Fr Nikolai Guryanov. In other words, they have indeed got to the main course. This is encouraging.

Q: A historical question regarding the Tsarism of St John: Why did the White Counter-movement fail after the Revolution?

A: It failed precisely because it was not White. It had no single and unitive leader (that could only have been a Romanov) and it was not even firmly monarchist behind Tsar Nicholas. Even individual Whites like Wrangel and Kolchak were compromised by people around them, who were not white. Few had a pure motivation and so the White movement failed. Archbishop Averky writes very clearly about this, as several other Church writers too.

Q: Some say that St John would have been against the Church inside Russia. What would you reply?

A: The Slavonic service book that I have always used is that published under Metr Anastasy, the second First Hierarch of ROCOR. According to it, in the great litany we pray for ‘all the Orthodox Patriarchs’ before we pray for our own ROCOR bishops. This was the real Church’s position before sectarianism started creeping in through US old calendarism in the 1960s (I strongly suspect that that old calendarism was financed by the CIA), which tried to surround, abduct and divert spiritually the noble and venerable Metr Philaret, before being partly rejected by Metr Vitaly (who was then surrounded, abducted and diverted literally by it), and then rejected completely by Metr Laurus.

This traditional ecclesiological position was also the position of St John. One whom I knew, Fr Vladimir Rodzianko (later Bishop Basil), recorded St John’s words: ‘Every day I pray for Patriarch Alexis at the proskomidia. He is the Patriarch. And our prayer is still the same. By force of circumstance we have been cut off from one another, but we are still one liturgically. The Russian Church, like the whole Orthodox Church, is united in the eucharist, we are with Her and in Her. Administratively, for the sake of our flock and well-known principles, we have to take the way that we have taken, but this in no way breaks the sacramental unity of the whole Church’.

You see pre-2007 ROCOR had two parts – the main patriotic part (those who loved Russia because she is called to be Orthodox and to save the world) and a smaller, but powerful political/ideological part (nationalists who always put their personal advantage and interests, financial or political) above the Church. Remember how it was that political wing that actually put St John of Shanghai on trial in San Francisco in the early 60s.

As a result of the actions of this political, ideological wing, many left ROCOR in England, for example, in the 70s, 80s and 90s. The sectarians tried to take over in London and elsewhere. We lost at least four priests at that time as a result of them – and that was just in one small diocese. The older generation were squeezed out; the situation by the mid-1980s was dire.

Q: Were you affected by that situation in England personally?

A: Very much so. We emigrated as a result of it. I came to ROCOR not through the situation in England, but through Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who had nothing to do with the old calendarist nonsense that had come over from America. He had remained faithful to the Tradition, to the ecclesiology of St John, who had preceded him in Western Europe. Like St John, he received by chrismation. Vladyka Anthony said that we must belong to a ROCOR that did not concelebrate with Moscow, but only as long as the Church inside Russia was not free. But he and his clergy concelebrated with everyone else, with all other Local Churches. Before he died 20 years ago, I know that one priest from inside Russia had already concelebrated with him, while remaining in the Patriarchate. Vladyka Antony, like St John, was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev, whom both had known in Belgrade. They are my spiritual lineage, my spiritual ancestry, that of Universal, and not sectarian, Orthodoxy. Metr Laurus belonged to the same spiritual family.

Such were the views too of hierarchs like Bp Alexander (Mileant) and Bishop Mitrofan (Znosko-Borovsky) of the generation before, whom I met. They were ardent patriots, not of Russia, but of Orthodox Russia. And that was the reason why we could not be under what was then called the Moscow Patriarchate, which outside Russia was dominated by individuals who displayed Soviet patriotism, which came from fear, and so was alien to us. All of us thought like Dostoyevsky – that a Russian who is not Orthodox is not a Russian. So there was no indiscriminate nationalism for us.

Q: What happened to the political wing?

A: It left the Church over a period of 20 years, from 1986 on, mainly leaving for various sects, including various old calendarist sects. I would remind all that both St John and Archbishop Antony had parishes under them on the new calendar (for the fixed feasts). In St John’s case, they were Western rite parishes.

Q: What about St John and the Western rite? Surely his support of Western rite means that we too should support Western rite today?

A: People who say such things have completely forgotten the historical context. St John’s Western rite worked with former Catholics (not with Anglicans and other Protestants) and he did this before the revolution of the Second Vatican Council, before, in other words, before the Protestantization or rather Americanization of Catholicism. At that time, in the 1950s, there still was a Western rite. That is the fundamental difference between then and now. St John was striying to save those who were at the end of a culture and bring them to Orthodoxy. Today that culture is all but dead – it only exists among a few upper class people or the very elderly and dying. There is no future to it, which is why the Western rite is also elderly and dying, where it is not actually dead.

For fifty years there has not been a living Western rite and you cannot renew and then modify a rite that is no more. This is why all Western rite experiments, though motivated by pastoral concerns, the best of intentions, have ended in failure. There is only one living rite today and that is the Orthodox rite. I know. I have seen the Western rite failure in France.

Q: How and why does the Russian Orthodox view of Catholics and Protestants inside Russia differ from that in the Church Outside Russia?

A: There is not a great deal of difference, but there is a difference. I would say that the view inside Russia is more pro-Catholic, but more anti-Protestant (indeed Protestants there are called ‘sectarians’). The reasons for this are as follows.

The Russian (not Ukrainian) experience of Catholicism is that of a pre-Vatican II, Eastern European confession which has a hierarchy, monastic life and sacraments, clergy who dress as clergy, believes in the Mother of God and the saints and even venerates icons. It therefore sees in Catholicism an admittedly provincialized and primitivized but still potentially Orthodox Church. It has no experience of the reality of the protestantized and infantilized Catholicism of the post-Vatican II world, as it is in Western Europe. When it discovers that, it is in a state of culture shock.

On the other hand, the Russian experience of Protestantism is that of sects which are rabidly anti-Orthodox and can hardly be recognized as Christian at all. This experience was much reinforced by aggressive American evangelical preachers who came to Russia in the 1990s and tried to bribe Orthodox into joining them. Clearly, the experience was entirely negative and hence in Russia Protestants are called sectarians.

Q: So who is right?

A: The Church inside Russia is right in Eastern Europe. The Church Outside Russia is right in its domain, in Western countries, among Western people. Catholicism and Protestantism are so variable, they are not monolithic; we have to look at the local realities of both before we decide on our attitude and the use of economy or akrivia.

Q: In various Local Churches you can find heterodox customs. How can we tolerate them?

A: We can tolerate them because we are not sectarian, but tolerant! However, that does not mean that we observe such provincial customs ourselves. We do not cultivate the fringes, but the broad mainstream of the Church. For example, I remember an ex-Anglican Antiochian priest (in England they are all ex-Anglicans, virtually without training), wanting to introduce little girls to serve in the altar because he had seen a bishop in Syria doing this! I told him that just because others had adopted Uniat customs out of pan-Arab nationalism, that did not mean that we have to. The same goes for so many customs, from certain Carpatho-Russian chants preserved in their emigration in the US and which are pure old-fashioned Catholic chants (which the Catholics have now lost), or Bulgarian icons, which are not iconography, but folk art, or beardless Ukrainian clergy as in the OCA (another Uniat hangover) etc. In other words, we do not prolong decadence, but let it die out by itself.

The lack of discrimination is typically Anglican. It is the inability to distinguish between the essential Tradition and eccentric local customs which may have nothing at all to do with Orthodoxy. Thus, in one community of the Rue Daru group in England an ex-Charismatic, ex-Anglican priest, also untrained, has his converts calling out names for commemoration during the service! It would be better if he joined the Pentecostals, especially since he maintains that he is better off without a bishop (who is in distant Paris), so that ‘I can do whatever I want’.

In general, Rue Daru claims to be of the ‘Russian Tradition’, but that was thrown out of the window there 26 years ago in 1988. If you are of the Russian Tradition, then you must be part of the Russian Church, observe the Orthodox calendar, have confession before communion, wear Russian vestments, have women wear headscarves, keep the canons and traditions of the Russian Church. As one correspondent in France wrote to me, the Russian Tradition never stayed a single night in the vast majority of the tiny convert Rue Daru communities, which Russians simply boycott because there is no Orthodox Tradition there. Once you have seen and above all experienced the real thing, you know what is false as soon as you see it.

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

The title is an expression used in an inspiring conversation with the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus at the ROCOR Council of San Francisco in 2006. Below are a number of recent conversations, both actual and also from correspondence by e-mail, regarding current Church matters, all of which illustrate the search of all conscious Orthodox for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy in the Light of the Resurrection.

Q: What recent changes have marked the Church inside Russia?

A: A generation has now passed since the commemoration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988 and the world-changing events that followed it, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of the passing of that generation, in the last few months there have been major changes, with the retirement in Kiev and St Petersburg of both Metropolitans Vladimir and in Minsk that of Metr Philaret. Thus, all three most senior Metropolitans in the Russian Church inside Russia have retired through age and ill health. This is the end of the old generation of those who were connected with the highly controversial and politically-minded Metr Nikodim (Rotov) of the Soviet period.

Those of his disciples who are still alive have all had to adapt since the Jubilee Council of 2000 with its rejection of sergianism and ecumenism and canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs, and then the acceptance of the reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia in 2007. In other words we are now entering the second generation since the collapse of secularist-atheist ideology in the Russian Lands and so the resurrection by the purity of Holy Orthodoxy of the crucified Church inside Russia. These three senior posts that have changed hands are symbolic of a more general generational change, as Lazarus’ grave-clothes have fallen off.

Q: What do you mean by ‘Lazarus’ grave-clothes’?

A: I liken the resurrection of the Church inside Russia to the resurrection of Lazarus. This was an incredible and astounding miracle, but we should not forget that Lazarus’ grave-clothes did not smell good because the decomposition of his body had already begun. These grave-clothes are represented by the deathly, Soviet and post-Soviet (not yet Russian), phenomena and problems that have accompanied the resurrection of the Church inside Russia.

Q: What phenomena?

A: For example, inside Russia in the 1990s they were so short of priests that they ordained very easily. There were several disasters here with clearly unworthy ordinations and subsequent defrockings, sometimes for sexual misdemeanours, sometimes for financial misdemeanours. I have met such priests – I know what I speak of. Then there was the confusion between Stalinism and the Church and the total misunderstanding or even rejection of the Royal Martyrs – all as a result of the brainwashing from old Soviet propaganda and lies. Then there have been the phenomena of pro-Catholic clergy (like the assassinated Fr Alexander Men, a suspected Uniat) and the events surrounding Paris-style Russophobes, including the modernist, pro-Protestant Fr George Kochetkov, suspended at one point by Patriarch Alexis as a ‘neo-renovationist’, and the recent scandals concerning Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev and Professor Zubov (a close friend of the late Olivier Clement), who both had to be sacked. These are all people who to some extent still live in the Soviet thought world. They have never managed to shake off the spiritual and intellectual impurity of the past and so make the transition from that old-style Soviet conditioning, paradoxically mixed with a superficial Orthodoxy, to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

The same thing happened outside Russia, where the Church inside Russia had several unworthy and scandalous representatives, uncanonically ordained, or other representatives who are now very elderly as they were appointed in Soviet times. Fortunately, the unworthy ones have mostly died out or been moved, some very recently. According to the 2007 agreement the Church inside Russia has to prepare its parishes outside Russia (except in China and Japan, which is part of its canonical territory) for their canonical handover to ROCOR. His Holiness understandably wants this process to go smoothly, without hurting anyone’s feelings, especially those of the elderly. Therefore it will take a generation before it is completed and all moves to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

A: ROCOR had from the start two wings. One was the political wing whose identity was nationalistic, cultural and anti-Communist rather than simply Orthodox; the other wing, which could be called the ‘Johannite wing’, as represented by St John of Shanghai, was the mainstream of ROCOR. Our view was and is Christian. I can remember how the political and nationalist wing dominated in certain parishes, for example at the former ROCOR chapel in Paris or at the old London Cathedral, as it used to be, when it had several members who worked for MI5. Significantly, those parishes have not survived, but died.

This was because the politically-minded elements refused reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007 or even before. As one of our archbishops said before 2007, reconciliation with the repentant Church inside Russia, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, would lead to a ‘purification’ of ROCOR. That is exactly what happened. Spiritual impurities such as extremism, phariseeism, sectarianism and fanaticism could not bear reality and love others or the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, and so that political wing left the Church for various sects. Several of the small communities concerned in North America were dominated by individuals who worked for the CIA or the Canadian Secret Services.

Q: What do you make of current political changes in the Ukraine?

A: Two weeks ago the US removed the gold reserves of the Ukraine. Then the CIA took over a floor in the offices of the Ukrainian Secret Police in Kiev and the head of the CIA, John Brennan, went to Kiev on Lazarus Saturday. The head of the CIA does not visit a foreign country without a very good reason. It was no doubt with the intention of hoping to further destabilise the Ukraine and then run it, just as it did countless Latin America banana republics and Italy and Greece after the Second World War.

Sure enough, just after that, the CIA began issuing black propaganda, sheer lies, for example about alleged persecution of the Jews in the eastern Ukraine or that President Putin had tens of billions of dollars in private bank accounts in the West, implying that he was a thief. Naturally the Western-media were fed those lies and naturally reported them. The Times of London (part of the Murdoch tabloid empire) was especially keen to report these slanders and lies.

For instance, as regards the Jews, everybody knows that the Jews were massacred by the Uniat Ukrainian SS in Galicia, the western Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler and where earlier anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place. These are facts of history. Many members of the Ukrainian (= Galician) SS, with Polish nationality, came to live in the UK and especially the US, after World War II. I know; I met some of them 30-40 years ago; some of them were frightening and admitted to killing Jews.

Today, at least 150 US mercenaries, probably being paid for by the CIA, are active against the people of the Ukraine, given that most Ukrainian soldiers and police refuse to use violence against their own people – indeed 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already asked for Russian nationality. Other soldiers in the eastern Ukraine have simply joined the insurrection of the Ukrainian people against the junta. We cannot see this crucifixion of the Ukraine, orchestrated in Washington and Brussels and carried out by their paid puppets in Kiev, as being successful.

Q: Why not?

A: First of all, the Ukraine is bankrupt, which is why the bankrupt US called on the world to ‘save the Ukrainian economy’. But it is too late. Prices are doubling. The poor people of the Ukraine, exploited and impoverished for 23 years by corrupt oligarchs, are spontaneously rising up against the unrepresentative, US-installed, separatist Kiev junta and its terror tactics. That regime seized power from the democratically-elected government in Kiev by violence and murder; now it is facing opposition from the Ukrainian people, who are using the same techniques as it did, in order to seize back power from it in turn. As it is written, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But there is chaos.

Q: Does any of this have any significance in Orthodox terms? Is it not all political?

A: All of this is highly significant for us. Today’s Russia is at last just beginning to position itself as a spiritual power, opposing the secularist atheism of the Western elite. This was Russia’s traditional role – to protect Christian civilisation both from Western barbarians and from Eastern hordes. Thus, it repelled the Mongol-Tartar yoke, encouraged moderate Islam, repelled the Charleses, Napoleons and Hitlers, liberating both Paris and Berlin, and supported the Church in the Holy Land, the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Outside Eurasia Russia has always helped the peoples of the developing world, aiding them to throw off the yoke of colonialism, as did Tsar Nicholas II during the Boer War in South Africa and also in Tibet, Thailand and Ethiopia. Even the Soviet Union merely continued these policies in Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), Asia and Latin America.

The Russian Orthodox civilisational model, the Christian one, is quite different from the Western Catholic/Protestant model, which calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. Thus, the ‘civilised’ Judeo-Christian West and ‘Western values’ destroyed the native peoples of the Americas and Africa, enslaving them, massacring them like wild animals, sending them into concentration camps (‘reservations’), as the British were still doing in Kenya and Malaysia in the 1950s. Christian Russia, on the other hand, spreading across Eurasia into Alaska, left the native peoples in peace, not enslaving them or systematically exploiting them, but making them into equal allies. Today Western ‘civilisation’, which has reached its final stage of degeneration in Europe and the USA, has come to a dead end by trying to subjugate the whole world to its ruling transnational atheist elite and its corrupt New World Order pseudo-democracy. That, in fact, only gives a false choice – between one atheist oligarch and another.

Only Russia can potentially deliver the world from this civilisational dead end by providing a Non-Western and spiritual alternative. This is a geopolitical challenge and a historic turning-point. The US military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower’s terminology, has bankrupted itself with its lust for global hegemony and us finally meeting its match in the resurgent Russian Lands. The New World Order, the near-millennial and ever accelerating movement of the Western world to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem, has been stopped for the moment.

The Russian Lands (Rus) are, it seems, returning to fulfilling their destiny as the last restraining force in the world, the last bastion of True Christianity. The Ukraine is a litmus paper, an acid test of this. If the Ukraine were to fall, that is, to lose its Orthodoxy, that would lead to the enthronement of Antichrist. The situation is on a knife edge, which is why so many icons in Russia and the Ukraine are at this moment giving off myrrh. We have to understand that today’s division in the Ukraine exists as the result of two historic injustices, which have to be righted

Q: Which are these injustices?

A: These two historic injustices are the events of 1054 and 1917, which are interconnected. In 1054 semi-barbarian, provincial nationalists, filled with the pride, greed and ambition of Roman paganism, rose up in heresy against the Church of Christ, the Christian Roman Empire, and declared that they were the true Church! And persecution followed 1054, with 1204, the sack of New Rome by barbarian Catholics, which in turn led to 1453, the fall of New Rome, not to mention the Western Crusades against the Russian Lands (including today’s ‘Ukraine’), and all the anti-Church horrors that followed, including Uniatism.

The second historic injustice was in 1917 when the descendants of the same provincials performed a coup d’etat in St Petersburg, overthrowing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed on behalf of traitors, cowards and deceivers from inside the country who had lost their Faith. This atheist coup resulted in the martyrdom of the Christian Emperor and the destruction of his Empire, which had been about to end the First European War and liberate Constantinople (so preventing the Armenian genocide), Vienna and Berlin.

The atheist coup of 1917 also culminated in 1991 in the destruction of the legacy of the Christian Empire which had been built up over centuries by the Tsars and their peoples. That 1991 collapse of the legacy of the former Orthodox Empire, the Soviet Union, was inevitable because its atheism had denied the Faith of a Faith-based Empire. Today, in 2014, we are merely seeing the attempt to deepen that geopolitical fall, again using provincial nationalists, this time from the far west of the Ukraine, as its pawns. All that is happening now was prophesied by Solzhenitsyn in 1998. Thus, as he said then, the US and its EU colony want to dismember and separate the Ukrainian part of the remains of the Orthodox Empire, the Empire’s weakest link.

Q: Why is the Ukraine the weakest link of the former Orthodox Empire?

A: The word Ukraine is composed of two ancient Slavonic words meaning ‘at the border’ – though interestingly it could also be translated as ‘on the edge’. It was first recorded in the 12th century in this sense of a narrow strip of borderland and there exists an interesting academic article on its origins and uses for many geographical areas, including the area near Kazan. However, in its modern and non-historical sense – and so a sense completely unknown to the greatest ‘Ukrainian’ writer Gogol – the word ‘Ukraine’ was invented only in the late 19th century by the Hapsburgs. Then it was reused by the Soviets and the Nazis, and today by the US and the EU – by five empires all thoroughly hostile to the Orthodox Church. Indeed, decades ago I met old Ukrainian emigres, adults before the Revolution, who told me that they had never heard the word ‘Ukraine’ until the 1920s, when the atheists brought it in.

The contemporary Ukraine is the weakest link because at present it includes and is now run by never denazified, ultra-nationalist, Uniat Galicia, which until 1939 was part of eastern Poland. This is a schismatic, Catholicised area, which lived under foreign and anti-Orthodox – Polish and Austrian – rule for centuries. The majority of its population, just like that of the rest of Western Europe, now has no concept of uncompromised, unsecularised, non-1054 Christianity, that is, of Orthodox values. Until that area returns to Poland, or else becomes independent, it will continue to create chaos in the rest of the ‘Ukraine’, the 85% of it which is known to history not as ‘the Ukraine’, but significantly, going from east to west, as New Russia, Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia.

Q: So does this mean we should support President Putin?

A: He is only a politician and, like all politicians, he makes mistakes. The Ukraine, in some form or other, has a right to exist as an independent state, just like Belarus. It is an integral part of threefold Rus – Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus are the primary territory of Rus, the three Russias. I suspect that President Putin thinks the same thing. The last thing he wants to have to do is to send in tanks. However, he has to defend his country and Russian people against extreme Western aggression – which is what he did when he restored the Crimea to Russia amid the jubilation of its people. Otherwise the Crimea would have been invaded and occupied by the US military and its ports would have become NATO naval bases, closing off the Black Sea to Russia.

Our objection is not to an independent ‘Ukraine’, but to its domination and division by an anti-Orthodox and unrepresentative, US-installed, puppet clique in Kiev, which would mean that the Ukraine would become just another bankrupt and pillaged Western colony, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya etc. Divide and rule is ever the Western policy. Our support should go to the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, as he was the last ruler of All Rus, and not to politicians. We support the saints – politicians only count inasmuch as they support the saints. Again we fight for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, not for politicians.

Q: Why has the BBC been so incredibly biased in its reporting of events in the Ukraine?

A: Since the Second World War the UK Establishment elite has become the poodle or colony of the US ruling elite (a relationship that the UK Establishment has flattered itself into calling ‘the special relationship’!) and it has taken no account of the peoples of these islands. The BBC, even more than other Western media, is biased because it is an inherent part of that Establishment elite, in the pay of a secularist-atheist regime and its secret services. It is therefore hostile to Christianity, especially to uncompromised Christianity, that is, Orthodoxy, just as it is hostile to the people, from which it is ever more distant.

The BBC has become particularly subservient to the Establishment since it dared to criticise the Blair regime’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, for which the Blairites sacked the BBC Director General and intimidated BBC journalists. Now the BBC just seems to parrot whatever MI5 and MI6 tell it. I know two BBC journalists who have also worked for the secret services, which infiltrated the BBC from its inception in the 1920s; there must be many more of them.

Thus the BBC talks of the Neo-Nazi Uniat Galician terrorists in Kiev, who overthrew a democratically-elected government as ‘heroes’, but calls the Ukrainian citizens who are rising up against foreign oppression and US mercenaries in the south-west, south, east and north, ‘pro-Russian activists!’ Nor has the BBC reported on the wave of dissatisfaction in Kiev at the doubling of many prices and the very large anti-junta demonstrations in Kiev….

Q: Some would say that your views on the Ukraine are political and that Orthodoxy should be apolitical. What would you say to this?

A: Precisely by saying that they are ‘apolitical’, such people are making a political statement. For them Orthodoxy is, like Protestantism, just a personal belief, a private affair, a mere theory or hobby, which has no public and practical ramifications, no Incarnational consequences. This is a denial of the Incarnation of Christ. What they are saying is that Christianity should have no influence at all on society, including on economics and politics, and should just be a set of private opinions or personal fantasies for futile discussion and theoretical debate.

In the meantime, they say, we should just swim with the secularist-atheist tide of US/EU apostasy, to which such people, some of them nominally Orthodox, are spiritually enslaved. However, our Faith, if it is real, has practical consequences. This is what these secularists refuse. For those who are secular-minded, religion has no importance, but for us what counts is the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The many icons now giving off myrrh in Russia and the Ukraine only prove the spiritual significance of these current events.

Q: With the events in the Ukraine and the new puritanism of political correctness, will there be a witch-hunt and persecution of Russian Orthodoxy in the West?

A: Not yet. We have not yet come to this point; that will come later. Then we may need Russian passports and in any case have to take refuge in Russia in order to get baptized and practise our Faith. But we are not there yet.

Q: So much for the contemporary situation of the Church inside Russia. What is the situation of the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR? Some say that it no longer has any reason to exist, since the Church inside Russia also has parishes outside Russia. What is the role of ROCOR in this new reality?

A: The Orthodox diaspora, whether in Europe, the Americas or Australia, and of all nationalities, has experienced two temptation or deviations in the last 100 years or so. The role of ROCOR is to avoid them. These are the deviations of the superiority complex and the inferiority complex.

The first deviation is that of the nationalist ghetto, of the superiority complex. This means that the Orthodox Faith is preserved as if in a museum, without any reference to the surrounding world (because of the superiority complex towards it), to the reality in which the children and grandchildren of the immigrants go to school and grow up. This ethos can be called the ‘three-generational syndrome’, since after three generations such a faith dies out, as it no longer even speaks in a language comprehensible to the descendants of the original immigrants. ‘Three generations and you are out’. I have seen countless Russian parishes in France and England disappear completely because of this mentality. It was the fate of the old London ROCOR Cathedral (but this will not at all be the case of the new parish that has risen phoenix-like from its ruins), exactly as was foreseen by many in the 1970s and 1980s, but also of many parishes abroad under the Church inside Russia, which are not independent of Russia, as is today’s ROCOR.

The second deviation is that of the conformist ghetto, of the inferiority complex. This means the ‘let’s swim with the tide’ mentality. Again I have seen countless examples in France and England. ‘Let’s give communion to Catholics, after all they are Christians’ (Paris jurisdiction). ‘Now we are in England, we baptize our children in the Church of England’ (as one well-known Russian academic in Cambridge did). ‘After all, we really do not want to be different from the others’. ‘The English do cremations, so we’ll do them as well’ (the old Sourozh jurisdiction). ‘The Protestants have pews in church, so shall we’ (Greeks and Antiochians). This is the deviation of those of weak faith, the ecumenists, liberals and modernists, who do not really believe in Orthodoxy, just like the Uniats. Indeed, the atmosphere in modernist churches (as sometimes in Finland, for example) is exactly that of Uniat churches.

It is to be noted, however, that, initially at least, both these deviations are psychological, and not at root theological, though in a second phase, they are then justified theologically, clearly by a false theology. ROCOR must avoid both these deviations.
Q: So what is the role of ROCOR? What is authentic Orthodoxy in the Western world?

A: Authenticity is faithfulness to the best, and not to the worst, in both attitudes. This means being both traditional and open, both strict and merciful, but without excesses and extremes, which would mean being unfaithful. We must be faithful to the incarnation and to the spiritual, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Our calling, the establishment of authentic European Orthodox culture, as also of authentic American and Australian Orthodox culture, means being both faithful and international = fruitful. ROCOR has an opportunity to do this, depending on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, that is, inasmuch as we can be both faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and also be incarnate, settled and permanent here (unlike most parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia). At least, this can be the case, for as long as our spiritual existence is tolerated in the increasingly intolerant West.

Q: Do you have examples of these deviations in the specific situation of Orthodoxy in the UK?

A: Here in the UK we have two ‘renewed’ jurisdictions, those of the Romanian and Russian Churches, which in recent years have increased in size from one parish or a few parishes to many parishes, simply by immigration. However, we also have the older jurisdictions like the Greek, which used to be the biggest but is now beginning to die out, just like the Russian in the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians immigrated in about 1920 and so after 50-60 years, in the third generation, began to die out. The Greeks (more precisely Cypriots) mainly immigrated here in the 1950s and 1960s – 50-60 years ago – and so too are now dying out. This is the ‘three generational syndrome’, which I mentioned above.

There are also two tiny ethnic English jurisdictions under the Patriarchate of Antioch (anti-Greek, anti-Russian, Antiochian’, as some Anglicans say) and the Paris Exarchate (the old Bloomite Sourozh jurisdiction). These are deaneries because they are both only a few hundred strong and mostly composed of ex-vicars and converts from Anglicanism. The Exarchate is particularly weak and small and is tending to die out. They failing to pass on their ‘Anglican-Orthodox’ Faith to children and grandchildren and so are dying. Their possible possible survival can only come from attracting Greeks, Romanians and others, not from attracting Anglicans.

Here I am much more optimistic about the future survival of the Antiochian Deanery, which is rapidly becoming Romanian. However, it still has to ordain clergy who are not ex-Anglican vicars. Here there is a very useful lesson to learn: all ethnic jurisdictions die out – including ethnic English jurisdictions. In other words, successful parishes – of all jurisdictions – are non-ethnic, that is, they live if they accept those whom God sends to them, without ethnic ghettoism, including Anglican or ex-Anglican clubbishness. In other words, they live only if they put the Faith above nationality, only if they put the Kingdom of God first.

Q: Does this mean that the convert movement in the UK has stopped?

A: The convert movement (I would prefer the word ‘trickle’) in the UK was only ever basically in England and it was always very small, concerning at most 2,000-3,000, many of whom were received by various jurisdictions without preparation and soon lapsed. There is still at least one ex-Anglican priest, like the late Metr Antony Bloom, who perhaps is his model, who receives within one week! You can imagine that his turnover is large. In 18 years he has not grown. It is true that the convert ‘movement’ has declined as the old generation of converts dies out, but it has not stopped. What it happening today is that Anglicans have largely stopped joining the Orthodox Church and trying to become Orthodox, which actually they often did not succeed in doing in any case.

Q: Why have they stopped?

Firstly, because Anglicanism is itself dying out, so there are even fewer Anglicans than before. Secondly, because those who are interested generally find Orthodoxy ‘too hard’ and either do not try to become Orthodox (if they try at all) or else give up very quickly, especially if they have been received prematurely by one of the ethnic English groups.

Q: So there are no more converts?

A: There are still converts, but they come more and more from the vast majority of English people who are not Anglicans. However, though there are fewer converts, they are now generally more serious. They are refreshing, blank sheets, without the cultural prejudices and baggage of Anglicanism. Here there is a future. English Orthodox culture could only be born when that prejudiced Establishment Anglican culture was dead. Authentic Orthodox culture could never be built on a compromised, semi-Orthodox, semi-Anglican faith.

Q: How are people being converted today?

A: There are two ways. One is through information about Orthodoxy which is today on the internet and then brings them to Church services. The other is through Orthodox wives whom they marry and who convert them. Orthodox wives are often very good missionaries.

Q: You have not mentioned those who did not support the reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church in 2007 and left to join various sects which existed already. How do they fit into the picture? Do they suffer from the superiority complex of the nationalist ghetto? Surely they do not suffer from the inferiority complex of the conformists?

A: They do not belong to nationalist ghettoes, as much as to ideological or psychological, sectarian, ghettoes, usually very Russophobic and very right-wing – such was the case even before they left ROCOR. In the USA, from what one of their bishops proudly writes and tells me, they seem to be linked to the CIA. There are among these people, and most are converts from Anglicanism or other forms of Protestantism, some very sincere and pious people, but also some with psychological problems. It is tragic. Sects are always based on hurt pride which then turns to hatred.

Such protest sects make themselves irrelevant, not only because they are tiny (often fewer than ten in number over the whole country), but also because they have played into the hands of this world by painting themselves into irrelevant corners. They have no influence because they focus so much on small and often ritualistic detail and individual opinions, with a negative, ‘anti-everything’ mentality. What they lack is a conscious, logically consistent and integral Orthodox world view, an overview. That is very important and all Orthodox need to develop such a world view.

Q: Do you think that the Inter-Orthodox Council will actually take place in 2016?

A: On paper, no, especially since the amazing, absurd and pretentious claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Ukraine, as described in the statement of Patriarch Bartholomew on Palm Sunday, which was surely written by the CIA. In the 1970s there could be no Council because the Russian Church inside Russia was controlled by the KGB; now we have Constantinople controlled by the CIA. That statement alone has surely set everything back until after the death of Patriarch Bartholomew.

However, everything is still possible – if the Greek Churches can overcome their vanity and inferiority complex, which the American State Department so plays on and exploits, and if they and the other Balkan Churches can overcome their phyletism (nationalism). Thus, at present three problems are outstanding and until they are solved they will stop this Council taking place.

Q: Which are?

A: Firstly, there is the territorial dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Secondly, there is the dispute between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and, thirdly, that between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).

These three problems all have to be solved before even a proper agenda (rather than the old, secularist, Protestant-style 1970s one) can be agreed. So 2016 is possible, but the Patriarchate of Constantinople will first have to liberate itself from outside political interference from the US government, which is forcing it to interfere in the Ukraine and Mt Athos, and from the Vatican. So Constantinople must demonstrate that it is free and independent and can actually speak with an Orthodox voice and not a Greek nationalist and Uniat voice. Metropolitans Andrew and Seraphim of the Church of Greece have already warned it about this quite clearly in their 89-page letter asking for the repentance of Pope Francis.

Q: Do you think in this context that the Church inside Russia could take back the autocephaly of the OCA in order to ease negotiations with Constantinople?

A: I think that for the Church inside Russia the OCA is a bargaining counter. We all know that there is a problem with the autocephaly of the OCA, the brainchild (not heartchild) of the highly controversial Fr Alexander Schmemann. Firstly, it was granted during the Cold War by the self-same, highly controversial Metr Nikodim (Rotov), whom we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, and whom the Roman Catholics claim to have been one of their cardinals. So it was dubious from the start.

However, secondly and much more importantly, how can you give a jurisdiction autocephaly when it has been in schism from you for decades (as was the pre-OCA Metropolia) and, above all, when it only includes a minority of the Orthodox who live on the same geographical territory? However, the Church inside Russia will not cede these points if Constantinople does not first abandon its own anti-canonical errors elsewhere, for example on Mt Athos, in the Ukraine, Estonia, Finland and Paris, returning Russian Church property to the Russian Church.

Q: What could happen to the OCA, if Constantinople did stop such anti-canonical interventions?

That would be a miracle, so who knows? I suppose one solution would be to take back the OCA’s autocephaly and grant it autonomy instead. Alternatively, you could wait until the present generation of OCA bishops, many of them in difficult and compromised situations or retired, die out. Then, after that generational change, you could pick up the pieces and reincorporate the ex-OCA into the Russian Church in North America, though letting ultra-liberal, dissident pieces which are perhaps beyond redemption (St Vladimir’s Seminary?) join Constantinople or simply go back to the Episcopalians. The OCA too can only survive if it moves towards being a group based on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Bright Monday 2014

The Atheist War Against the Multinational Orthodox Church Continues

The seizure of power in Kiev by a tiny minority of extremist Galician Catholics (Uniat Ukrainians from the far west, formerly eastern Poland) had been carefully planned. Through the violent overthrow of the democratically-elected Ukrainian government with generous US financial backing ($5 billion) and EU support last February, it opened a Pandora’s Box. Now the three parts of the Ukraine, the small Polonised and Neo-Fascist Galicia, central Malorossiya (Little Russia) and purely Russian southern and eastern Novorossiya (New Russia) are divided. The vast majority of the inhabitants of the Ukraine do not recognise the unrepresentative Kievan junta.

The nature of the modern Ukraine as an artificial construct, a nationalist divide and rule Western project, has been revealed. This is despite the empty and pathetic sabre-rattling by the head of NATO, which is still licking its wounds from its defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Ukraine is a puppet made in Austria just over a century ago and founded on xenophobic pride and hatred. Its puppet leaders, whose ancestors fought with Hitler and have been handpicked by the US politician Victoria Nuland, are incompetent and cannot control their peoples. Russia now waits while what remains of the ‘Ukraine’ goes bankrupt, its gold reserves yesterday transferred to Switzerland and the USA in the final act of twenty-three years of asset-stripping by corrupt oligarchs.

The events in the Ukraine must be seen as part of the whole, Western-orchestrated, geopolitical war against the Church of Christ. That began in North Africa, spread to the Middle East, especially Syria, the only place on earth where the language of Christ, Aramaic, is still spoken, and has now been spread to Little Russia, the south-western corner of the Russian Lands, Rus. This attempt to divide historic Rus by the Western atheists uses Ukrainian nationalism, so recently founded on a provincial identity and a regional language from the Polish borderlands (‘Ukraine’ in Russian). All this is in order to cut off this potentially rich area, where natural gas has just been discovered, from its kindred Russian Lands and their peoples.

Western atheism is outraged that the Russian Lands are united, their unity founded not on ethnicity, but on over a thousand years of Christianity, the common and multinational Russian Orthodox Faith, thus making those lands into Holy Rus. It has not forgiven its peoples for throwing off Western atheism in its Soviet form. This is why Western atheism has now set out to use its puppet Patriarchate of Constantinople to undermine the Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, the majority of whose members are Carpatho-Russians – another part of Holy Rus. However, in failing to recognise the Czechoslovak episcopate and even absurdly daring to call itself its ‘Mother-Church’ (!), that sorry Patriarchate has indicated that no Inter-Orthodox Council will be held in 2016. Such a Council could only take place if all the Local Churches are represented there, and not just the ones that the CIA allows.

Holy Rus is by definition multinational and not nationalist, the heritage of the Roman Christian Empire, and not some provincial localism. It unites 62 different nationalities. Unlike Ukrainianism (or for that matter Hellenism, Montenegrinism and Macedonianism etc – other artificial Western constructs from the 19th century on), Holy Rus does not put a regional national identity and language above the Universal Church of Christ. In the Second World War Hitler instructed his occupying administrators to set up a separate church in each village of the Ukraine. This is still the Western project, so coloured by Protestant separatism, today. It will not succeed.

Some are concerned that the Russian Orthodox Church and those with it, the Georgian Orthodox Church, the Polish Orthodox Church, the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, and supporters in Alexandria, Antioch, Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, will be isolated by Western meddling. They should not be concerned by this. We recall how the ‘democratic’ majority shouted out ‘Crucify him, Crucify him’; we are happy to be ‘isolated’ from that majority. Today the Russian Lands are rising from the ashes of the past. A generation has passed since the dissolution of Soviet atheism. Now that the Church is being reborn, its values are beginning to be embodied in social, political and economic life and so the Russian State is also being reborn, returning to Orthodox roots and traditional values.

The Second Generation of our Revolution Begins: 1989-2014

A new survey by the independent Levada Centre in Russia shows that the proportion of the population of the Russian Federation identifying themselves as Orthodox Christians has risen by 400% in the past 24 years. The poll of 1,603 people found that 68% said that they were Orthodox Christians, up from 17% in 1989. The proportion of Muslims has also risen from about 1% in 1991 to 7% today. The number of Russian Catholics and Protestants remained roughly the same, at about 1%. 19%, stated that they were not religious, compared to 75% in 1989, when atheism was still the official State ideology. However, only 4% say that they attended services once a week and only 8% said that they took communion a few times a year.

Levada ran the poll on 15-18 November 2013 in 130 cities, towns, and villages across the Russian Federation and does not include the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the 58 other countries in the world which spiritually belong to Rus. The poll shows how far Russia has come in one generation, but also how very far there is still to go: The spiritual revolution has only just begun.

24 December 2013

RIA-Novosti

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131224/185903098/Orthodox-Christian-Belief-Rises-among-Russians–Poll.html

Cromwell and Stalin

I have always detested the statue of Cromwell erected in 1899 outside the Houses of Parliament in London. I have always said that if it were legal to destroy it, I would take great pleasure in doing so.

Let us recall that this regicide Cromwell was the monster responsible for the deaths of roughly 190,000 English people out of a total population of about five million, some 60,000 Scottish people from a population of about one million and some 616,000 Irish people from a population of about one and a half million. These estimates indicate that England suffered a 3.7% loss of population, Scotland a loss of 6%, while Ireland suffered a loss of 41% of its population.

Thus, today’s statement by President Putin that Cromwell and Stalin are indistinguishable as ‘bloody dictators’ makes sense. (I have always considered that Lenin was a parallel to the mass murderer and destroyer of monasteries Henry VIII, also for some strange reason widely ‘celebrated’ by the heritage industry in England). Indeed, statistically Cromwell was far worse than Stalin.

Thus, it does indeed make Western leaders and media representatives look utterly hypocritical when they, with their statues, ‘relics’ and tourist souvenirs of Henry VIII and Cromwell, Napoleon and Disraeli, Leopold of the Belgians and Churchill, complain that in Russia there are still statues of Lenin and Stalin. However, the hypocritical celebration of evil in the West still does not excuse the celebration of evil in today’s still impure, post-Soviet Russian Federation.

Refugees to Russia?

There is nothing new in European religious refugees. From the eleventh century on, all who opposed the iron grip of Papism and the blood-soaked Inquisition, fled to remote places. Then, after the Reformation, French Protestants, Huguenots, were forced to flee from Catholic intolerance to many countries, both inside and outside Europe. In the 17th century religious refugees from England, known as Puritans, fled from the local State Religion to America. After 1789 French Catholic refugees made for Russia and other countries, fleeing atheist persecution. After the export into Russia of Western materialism, known as Marxism, in 1917, Russian refugees in turn fled from atheist persecution, settling all over the world, creating a global diaspora. And in the near future, within the next few decades, it seems as though EU citizens and others may yet flee from the dictats of their unelected Eurocommissars, also for religious reasons.

Although the present struggle for the freedom of the Ukraine from these Eurocommissars, whose bribed imported supporters, it is said, were paid 30 euros a day by the CIA to parade in favour of the EU, is looking victorious, the situation elsewhere looks grim. Thus, the peoples ruled by the EU dictatorship and their bankrupt and corrupt puppet governments in Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and elsewhere, are becoming economic refugees all over the world. Elsewhere in the EU, intolerance of Christian values is now such that many faithful Christians in Western Europe are beginning to look with hope elsewhere. But where?

To look to the USA, Latin America or Australia would be senseless, for the wave of intolerance of Christianity, Christian family life and Christian patriotism is just as strong there, as we saw in the recent attacks by 500 abortionists on a Catholic church in Argentina, or the almost daily attacks on Christianity by the secularist authorities and mocking, atheist media in other Western countries. Other parts of the world, either Non-Christian or else poisoned by the history of Western colonialism and all its abuses, are not places where Western people are welcome. The tolerance of sin and evil is in fact intolerance of good, of the spiritual and the traditional. Already the EU has refused to mention Christianity in its Constitution and it continues to attack those who hold dear national identity and national sovereignty all over Europe.

Where then will traditional Christians from Western Europe, even if they are not yet all members of the multinational Russian Orthodox Church, head? The situation may within the next generation reach a point that those last freedom-loving Europeans who still profess spiritual values may feel that the only solution is emigration to the Russian Federation. It is true that there is still much to do here to enlighten Western peoples and relieve them of their prejudices, as they have been zombified for generations by implicit Establishment theories of Western racial superiority and therefore anti-Russian propaganda, for many years cleverly masked as anti-Soviet propaganda. Even recently there was the statement by the warmongering Hillary Clinton that Vladimir Putin did not have a soul; though, true, this only made her look even more ridiculous than she already did.

The struggle against dehumanisation is on. Those who believe that the human-being is made in the image and likeness of God, who believe that each nation has the right to its own identity and sovereign existence, and stand against the forces of globalisation which wish to liquidate the diversity of civilisations, are starting to look to Russia as the source of support and freedom. It has been said that we should live in a multipolar world; it seems that rather we may be heading for a bipolar world; the West and the Westernised (that is secularised) world versus the renewed and free Christian Orthodox Empire centred on the Russian Federation and its free Eurasian Union allies, who, unlike the Western consumerists, affirm that man does not live by bread alone.

Those with traditional moral and spiritual values, family people, farmers who refuse to grow genetically modified crops, teachers who believe that there is a difference between right and wrong, doctors and nurses who refuse to administer abortion and euthanasia, artists who believe that art has a spiritual and moral aesthetic mission, aristocrats who seek to conserve traditional forms of life, architects who want to build structures fit for human-beings and not ants and robots, workers who seek social justice, would all be interested. However, it is also true that although the post-Soviet world has come a long way, it still has far to go to reform itself and restore what Western materialism destroyed after 1917.

Only when it has itself gone further down that path, not only showing resistance to the greedsters and banksters of the New World Order, but also reversing the damage that that Order has done there, especially in the last 25 years, will the Russian Federation attract numbers of religious refugees from the now militantly secularist Western world. We seek freedom for traditional spiritual and moral values and ways of life, incarnate in just, honest, unbureaucratic and uncorrupt economic structures, where family life can then freely prosper. The formation of such structures is only hesitantly beginning in the Eurasian Union. We will have to wait and see if the present tiny trickle of Western religious refugees to the Russian Federation and her allies will yet become the mighty stream, the Moses-led exodus, as has been prophesied.

The World That Was Lost in 1917

Tell them that the evil that is in the world will grow, but it is not evil that will triumph, but only love.

Holy Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II

The Emperor and Empress thought that they were dying for their Homeland. In fact, they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard

Introduction: 1917 the Turning Point

It is often said that the world was lost with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This is not accurate. In fact, the world was lost in 1917 and since then has been plunged into suffering and continual warfare. For the real aim of the First World War, the aim of the Satanic Manipulator behind all the petty aims of his human puppets, was not to find a solution to the tribal, territorial disputes of kindred but rival peoples at the tiny, western end of Eurasian Continent, but to destroy the vast Eurasian Russian Orthodox Empire and its Tsar. This Heartland-Empire stood for the averting of wars, spiritual life, unity and balance; therefore it had to be slandered so that it could be destroyed. It alone stood in the way of what the technologically advanced but spiritually dwarfed Western peoples chose to describe as ‘universal progress’. This ‘universal progress’, since 1917 unchecked by the Russian Empire and its Tsar, is the history of all the wars and catastrophes of the last 100 years.

Above East and West

The symbol of the vast Russian Orthodox Empire, the double-headed eagle, combined East and West. This was and is the symbol of Christ worldwide. Thus, with its western borders peaceful and stabilised for many years, the Tsar and the Empire embarked on the Great Asian Plan to secure the Pacific coasts of Siberia, ensuring the security of Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea and fragile China against rapacious Japan with its British and American financed military machine and British-built Navy. It was this Japan that stabbed the Empire in the back, as, ironically, it later did America and Britain. Elsewhere in Asia the Empire supported the sovereignty of Afghanistan, Tibet and Siam (Thailand), and in Africa, Ethiopia and South Africa. And, most importantly, it supported the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and especially the Holy Land. The Empire stood above and united East and West; it was universal, which is why our own salvation is in her salvation.

Above Left and Right

The Sovereign Monarch towered above the petty combats of self-interested political parties and the vainglorious personality politics of corrupt parliamentarianism. Only the Anointed Sovereign had a vision beyond left and right and saw the whole. Only he was strong-willed and independent enough to reign and responsible to God for the well-being of the Empire. He had to fight both against leftist terrorists and decadent and hugely wealthy aristocrats, including members of his own extended family. These latter, because they already had immense riches which their hard hearts would not give to the poor, wanted the power of the Sovereign for their own futile and vainglorious ends, and so overthrew the whole Empire, whose destiny was also that of the betrayed Tsar. Thus, they handed all to the ruthless and terroristic atheists, who thought that they could create a paradise on earth if only they could seize power by violence, however many millions they might have to kill in the process.

Above Provincialism and Degeneration

The best of the Church of the Russian Orthodox Empire was international, stretching around the world into the Americas and Western Europe. It stood above petty Balkan nationalism and its provincial Greek phyletism, not to mention the warring tribalism of Western Europe, which the Empire had tried to overcome with peace-making at the Hague. The Orthodox Rus’ of the Empire was international. The aims of the First World War that had been imposed on the Empire became to free others, Germans, Poles, Czechoslovaks and Serbs, from centralised tyranny, and to gather all the Orthodox Christian lands, including Constantinople and Carpatho-Russia, together. The Royal Family, European and Orthodox, stood above such provincialism and the spiritual and so moral degeneration linked to it. The family life of the Sovereign was exemplary and showed elegance, purity and beauty, a model for family life today; they prayed together, they became saints together, an icon of the family.

An Unbalanced World led to the ‘Balance of Terror’ of Left and Right

In 1917 the traitors took Russia out of the First World War and so the world became unbalanced. The old hope of Nicholas II of allying Russia, Germany and France in peace was for ever lost. And the immediate results were the USA entering the war, taking over decadent Europe, and Zionism triumphing with the support of the bankrupt British government. This has since ensured permanent warfare between the West and the Muslim world. The result was then the disaster of Versailles, which directed its vengeance against the misled German peoples, who had lost their homelands, instead of the centralising Prussian elite. Europe did not learn the lesson of its attempted suicide and so the Second World War was made inevitable. The world became divided between Left and Right, East and West, Communist and Fascist, and even after the Second War, it went on to live for almost another fifty years in terror of being obliterated by nuclear warfare, the costs of which were bankrupting.

Provincialisation and Degeneration

Two sayings state that ‘united we stand, divided we fall’ and ‘divide and rule’. The ‘Balkanisation’ of division has been exactly the policy of today’s anti-Orthodox Powers. Thus, Constantinople, like other ancient but tiny Patriarchates, has since 1917 become a Western-controlled puppet and the once Orthodox or partly Orthodox Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria, Baltic States, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland have now lost their sovereignty and enslaved themselves to EU colonialism and economic, spiritual and so moral degeneration. Today the heavily Polonised, heavily Uniatised, Galician-centred westernmost borderlands, the western 20% of the ‘Ukraine’, for the moment belonging to the real Europe of Orthodoxy, seek slavery to the same, false, anti-Orthodox ‘Europe’ of the US-founded ‘European Union’. The broken family life of the provincial and degenerate EU is anti-exemplary and shows vulgarity, impurity and ugliness; it is an anti-icon of the family.

Conclusion: Treason and Cowardice and Deceit

The Tsar-Martyr, from whom the elite and then the people abdicated, said: ‘All around – treason and cowardice and deceit’. These are the anti-Trinity that destroyed the Russian Empire and led to his triumphal martyrdom and that of millions of Russian Orthodox Christians. Tsar Nicholas faced the treason and cowardice of unprincipled, anti-Orthodox aristocrats, who had lost their faith, and of left-wing terrorists, and the deceit of the Western Powers who, Allies on paper, rejoiced at his downfall. However, all have been punished: the left-wing terrorists betrayed and killed each other; the faithless, anti-Orthodox aristocrats were shot, exiled and chose schism; and the Western Powers, colonised by their colonies, deceived themselves and are now dying powerless. None of the above three groups has so far been able to recognise the Tsar as a saint, for to do so would mean repenting for all their errors and lies of the last 100 years and more – and they are too proud to do that.

50,000 Antiochian Orthodox to Become Russian Orthodox?

The Russian government is considering granting citizenship to some 50,000 Syrian Orthodox from the Qalamoun region, after they issued a joint request to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In statements issued in the past few days, spokesmen for President Putin and the Ministry have confirmed that the highest Russian authorities are examining the request.

The Syrian Christians wrote: ‘This is the first time since Christ’s birth that we, the Christians of Saidnaya and Maara Saidnaya, Ma’loula and Maarun have been threatened with expulsion from our land’. The letter was full of praise for Russia which it described as a ‘powerful factor for global peace and stability’. However, its remarks about Western countries were less flattering: ‘The aim of the Western-backed terrorists is to eliminate our presence in our homeland. They use the most abhorrent methods to achieve this, for example, murdering ordinary people’.

Archpriest Nikolai Balashov of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Department for External Affairs, commented that Middle Eastern Christians ‘had known for centuries that no other country would look after their interests in the same way that Russia would’. To reaffirm the ties between Russia and the Churches in Syria, on 14 October the Russian authorities decided to erect a statue of Christ on a mountain in Syria which is home to the Orthodox shrine of the Mother of God of Saidnaya. Arab Orthodox pilgrims come to this shrine from all over the Middle East.

To express his concern for the Christians ahead of the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Patriarch Kyrill had already sent President Obama a letter, asking him to listen to the cries of religious leaders who unanimously opposed proposals for military intervention against President Assad. In his message, the Patriarch talked about ‘the threat of mass extermination or exile’ faced by Christians in the Middle East. He urged others to join Russia’s diplomatic efforts and make the most of the opportunities that opened up for a diplomatic solution to the conflict.

With atheist Communism dead and atheist Europe a poodle to the USA, Russia is reinstating itself as the protector of Middle Eastern Christians, as in the 19th century. The Russian Orthodox Church has strengthened its relations with the Middle East’s battered Orthodox Churches by giving significant financial help. Last August, it donated $300,000 to the Patriarchate of Antioch to help those in need as a result of the Saudi and Qatari-financed anti-Syrian war. In July, First Hierarchs and representatives of Middle Eastern Churches met President Putin in person during their visits to Moscow for the 1025th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus. Patriarch Kyrill was the last great foreign Christian leader to be received by Bashar al-Assad in Damascus back in November 2011.

See also:
http://vaticaninsider.lastampa.it/en/world-news/detail/articolo/russia-rusia-medio-oriente-28944/