Category Archives: Russia

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/

The Struggle for Holy Orthodoxy: Secularism, Nationalism and Nominalism

Introduction

‘The struggle for Holy Orthodoxy’ was a phrase of the ever-memorable Metr Laurus. No doubt the many who knew this saintly hierarch much better than us could speak more about how he used it. The phrase, however, is very apt to describe those who seem to be crashing onto the rocks around the Church, without ever attaining Her. Today Holy Orthodoxy is threatened by two external threats, but above all by one internal threat. Only by struggling against all three of them can we win the struggle. What are these threats?

Secularism

The first threat is symbolised by the recent announcement that the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, a pan-European group, has passed a resolution condemning circumci-sion of children as a violation of human rights. The resolution was passed a few days ago with 78 votes in favour to just 13 against. 15 abstained from the vote. This wave of anti-Semitism against all Semites, Jews as well as Arab Muslims, may seem to some Orthodox Christians not to be our concern. However, it is.

Now, as we have seen with the furore around the practice of homosexuality, all faith is under threat from Western secularism, which is being spearheaded by the EU. This ‘secularism’, in fact just another name for atheism, threatens the catholicity, integrity and freedom of the Orthodox Church. Today it is against Jew and Muslim, tomorrow it will be the banning of Orthodox baptism, which will mean that the prophecy of St Seraphim of Vyritsa (+ 1949), that Europeans will be forced to go to Russia for baptism, will come true.

Without the sense of catholicity, integrity and freedom the Local Orthodox Churches are threatened by the development of personality cults, which we saw developing when the Russian Church was not free under the Soviet yoke; then those who did not want the Russian Church to be reduced to a personality cult, left for freedom. But when the personality in question died, those who had created the cult also left, for their only attachment to the Church had been the dead personality whom they had culted.

Without the sense of catholicity, integrity and freedom, the Orthodox Churches are also threatened by homosexualisation, the result of the lack of monastic life. We saw this with the notorious Archbishop German Aav in Finland in the 1920s and the ensuing ‘Finlandisation’ of many parishes there, which have still not recovered. We have seen similar problems in the recent past in the USA and today the horrible problems created by homosexual plotters in the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, who slandered and ejected their Metropolitan.

Nationalism

Nationalism anywhere is a spiritual danger. Nationalism in the Church leads to the ethnic religion of the narrow and self-centred cultural ghetto, the petty religion of the pharisee and the sectarian. It belongs to a primitive world of isolation, for it says that one’s tribal group is above Christ. Soviet nationalism, still infecting Russia, is a good example of this. However, this is also a generational phenomenon which does not last, because it is incapable of bearing fruit in the next generation, which rejects it, unable to bear its constricting narrowness.

We well remember at the end of the 1970s studying at St Serge in Paris and the views of the late rector, Protopresbyter Alexei Knyazev, on the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the very Patriarchate to which he belonged. Having suffered in the 1960s from that Patriarchate’s three-year long abandonment of his diocese, he had been to the Phanar and asked for proof that the Patriarch there really did have universal authority among the Local Orthodox Churches as he claimed and was not simply, as he put it, ‘a petty Balkan bishop’.

He did not receive any proof and so in the 1970s tried to bring his jurisdiction back to the Russian Orthodox Church. Today’s paranoid misreport in the ‘EU Greek Reporter’ (http://eu.greekreporter.com/2013/10/21/conflicts-in-the-orthodox-ecumenical-council/) says indeed that the Patriarchate of Constantinople missed its unitive vocation during the Cold War through its nationalism. The article confirms that petty nationalistic jealousy on the part of the US-run Greek Patriarchate is delaying the convening of an Inter-Orthodox Conference.

The political jealousy of the Phanar with regard to Russian Orthodox Ukraine, which it recently tried to take over with US and EU backing, with regard to Russian Orthodox missionary work carried out for well over a century in Japan, China and the USA (as also in Poland and Czechoslovakia) and with regard to Russia’s present vital role in the Middle East in supporting the now Arab-run Patriarchate of Antioch against American interventionism, is not conducive to inter-Orthodox co-operation.

Nominalism

Despite the external irritants of Secularism and petty Nationalism – and not only Greek – the real enemy of the Church is internal. It is called Nominalism. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as three visits to church per lifetime, for baptism, marriage and funeral. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as a fifteen-minute visit on Easter Night. This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as a thirty-minute visit once a month to ‘listen to the choir’.

This is the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as belonging to the 80% who sometimes attend but do not contribute, and not the 20% who take an active part in Church life and without whom the Church would not exist. This is also the spirit that decides that membership of the Church is defined as living the consumerist lifestyle of this world; the Church is a supermarket, from which the consumer is free to choose whatever they like, that is, only ‘the nice, comfortable parts’.

Such a consumerist distortion of Church life in particular affects the demographics of any country that has fallen to nominalism, including once Orthodox countries. There, a large family is considered to be a burden, even a curse, by the consumerist. They say: How can you ‘enjoy’ life when you have a large family? Thus the world has fallen to the greatest holocaust in human history, greater than that of Hitler, Stalin and Mao; this is the holocaust of abortion, the greatest genocide and suicide in history.

All the once Orthodox countries have been infected by this holocaust. Thus, Russia cannot populate its expanses; China will do it instead. It has been calculated that if the atheist Revolution had never taken place, Russia would today have a population of over 600 million. How then can it be that in such a country the prophecies of rebirth will come right? Those who ask this question forget that prophecies are always conditional on repentance. Even so, it is true that Russia may not have quantity, but it may at least have quality.

Conclusion

Today Europe has finished its history. By its own choice it has nothing more to say; so it is no longer a civilisational choice. As for the USA, it has, like its films, only technology, the ‘shock and awe’ of special effects. As for other lands, they have people and productivity, but their cultures, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Animist, have lost the original impetus that came from faith and have only nationalism or violence. Only the multinational Church of Rus still bears a creative civilisation. The world will choose that – or die.

On Recovering the Lost Provinces of Western Europe

In the fifth century the westernmost provinces of Europe were lost by the Christian Empire to barbarian Germanic invaders. However, in the sixth century St Justinian the Great was Emperor in the Christian capital in New Rome from 527 to 565. The last Roman Emperor to speak Latin as a first language, Justinian sought ‘renovatio imperii’ or the restoration of the Empire by recovering the lost western provinces. This ambition was expressed by reconquering the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa as well as the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and restoring Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy and Rome to the Empire after more than half a century of barbarian control. His forces then reclaimed most of southern Iberia, establishing the province of Spania. Unfortunately, this recovery was to be all too short-lived

At the end of the sixth century, seeing that physical recovery was impossible, in Old Rome, itself provincialised, Pope Gregory the Great set about the spiritual recovery of the provinces, starting with Britain. This recovery succeeded and spread, but was fragile. Already towards the end of the eighth century the Germanic leader Charlemagne had changed the Creed and fallen into iconoclasm. Although he soon died, in the mid-eleventh century the Germanic iconoclasts not only returned to power, but took over the Roman see, creating the definitive Schism of 1054. No help could come from those who had remained faithful in New Rome, so oppressed were they, and indeed in 1204 the Christian capital was sacked by the barbarians, finally falling in 1453, its leaders having compromised themselves with the barbarians.

At this, the task of the spiritual recovery of the lost Western provinces fell to small and oppressed Russia as the only free country in the still Christian world. It, however, was faced with the hostility of the rulers of Western Europe and it was not until the nineteenth century that Russia was able to begin to preach the Christian Faith to the captive peoples of the Western provinces. However, the leaders of Western Europe became even more aggressive and invaded Russia in 1812, 1854 and again in 1914. This last invasion led to the fall of Christianity there in 1917, which came about through the treachery of the westernised upper classes, who betrayed their own ruler. In 1941 Western countries again invaded now fallen Russia, but with the sobering result that it began a fifty-year process of return to Christianity.

It is since 1991 then that Russia has been undergoing a long period of regeneration, painfully striving to re-establish at least something of Christianity. Although this process is far from complete, it provides hope that the spiritually sensitive in the lost Western provinces can return to the Church of Christ, especially if Russia is regenerated in full. This return can neither be on the basis of an uninteresting nationalistic form of Russian Christianity, nor on the basis of a minimal and opportunistically compromised form of Russian Christianity, as among some in North America, Paris, Finland and Estonia. It can only be on the basis of the maximal Christianity, the fullness of Orthodoxy. In this way, the lost provinces of Western Europe, including our own East of England province, can reintegrate the Church of God.

On Saving the Peoples of the West from their Elites

Time and again in recent weeks, we have heard it said, ‘Thank God for President Putin’, often adding, ‘though I never thought I’d say this’. They refer to two issues: the new Russian child protection law that forbids the spreading of homosexual propaganda among minors and the Russian stand on Syria. On these issues suicidal Western elites, who also stand behind mass abortion, deludedly proclaim that they represent ‘the international community’, have earned the hostility of Western peoples and the real international community. Today, the one voice that is standing up to these suicidal elites – political and media – is coming from Russia. That voice is standing up for Christian values, which are being persecuted by Islamist fanatics in Syria and by secularist fanatics in the Western world.

It is to be noted that both the above positions taken by Russia are immensely popular both inside and, it seems, outside, Russia. Once again it proves how democratic Russia is, in that its official policies reflect the will of its people, and how undemocratic Western countries are, in that the policies of its bullying elites do not reflect the wills of their peoples. Thus, as regards attacks against war-torn Syria, it appears that about 90% of American people are against, the figures only slightly lower in the most pro-American European countries, France and Britain. As regards the rest of bankrupt Western Europe, in Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland etc, support for attacks on Syria is invisible. Indeed, twelve NATO countries have already declared that they will have nothing to do with such aggression and murder.

Similarly, the peoples of many countries in the Western world would support the introduction of child protection laws just as in Russia. (This does not include over thirty countries in Africa and Asia which actually have anti-homosexual laws). Such a gap between elites and peoples can only exist because Western elites, supported by huge PR spending and voted into power only by minorities of the electorate, are cut off from the peoples whom they supposedly represent. In reality, huge numbers boycott Western ‘democratic’ elections (which in any case only offer a choice between two individuals), for lack of any convincing candidate to vote for. The gap between elites and peoples must be the result of the Western cultural Marxism, called political correctness, which the elites profess.

In reality, the Soviet-style, decivilising Western elites, their heads turned by political power and banksters’ gold, have lost contact with the roots of Western civilisation, Christianity. The latter still commands at least the cultural respect of whole sections of Western societies. This is why that part of the Western world, which is still faithful to the roots of its civilisation, has become reliant on Russia to speak on its behalf. This is the only country which, having fallen into the delusion of Western political Marxism, rejected it. Having done this and so also seen off Western cultural Marxism, it has returned to its own Christian roots. Today once-atheist Russia is calling on the once-Christian Western world to return to its roots, with the dire warning of what will follow if the Western elites do not heed it.

Why did Western Europe Invade Russia Four Times in 130 Years and why does it Carry Out an Information Cold War against it Today?

Introduction: The Aggressive West

‘Peace-loving’ Western Europe invaded Russia four times in five generations, in 1812, 1854, 1914 and 1941. The three main Western nations, France, Great Britain and Germany were all involved in these invasions, together with many smaller Western nations. Thus, twelve nations were involved in the 1812 invasion of Napoleon I, who ‘filled Europe with graves’; in 1854, France led by Napoleon II, Great Britain and Sardinia invaded together with the Ottomans; in 1914 the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as the new Prussianised Germany invaded; and in 1941 representatives of a large number of European countries led by the Nazi Fascists. What made the West so aggressive? We cannot help but trace back its aggressiveness to its origins as a unique and distinctive phenomenon, born together with the filioque ideology under the upstart ‘Emperor’ Charlemagne in 800.

The leaders of this new Western Europe and its newly devised Old Testament version of Christianity, called ‘the filioque’, could not bear to see the original form of Christianity, Orthodoxy, as a rival to it; therefore, as Satan had done to the Father, it had to be rebelled against, slandered, if possible compromised, and if this were not possible, destroyed altogether as in the ‘Crusade’ of 1204. Today, modern, post-Christian Western secularism, the result of the ever-degenerating filioque ideology, hates Orthodoxy for being authentic Christianity in exactly the same way as its Catholic/Protestant predecessors hated it. Nothing has changed. And yet, Russia saved its aggressors twice. Thus, in 1914, Russian military sacrifices saved Paris, operating the ‘Miracle on the Marne’ by diverting German divisions to the Eastern Front, and in 1941 Moscow saved London. How?

How Moscow Saved London and was Rewarded with the Cold War

1941 was the critical turning point year of World War II for Great Britain. Isolated and bankrupt, it was cornered, dependent on food and supplies coming across the U-boat-infested Atlantic Ocean from North America. Starved into submission, it would eventually have been forced to negotiate with Nazi Germany. At this point, alone and facing Hitler’s might, it was saved. How? After all, by 2 December 1941 German forces had advanced to within a few miles of Moscow and could see the towers of the Kremlin.

However, the Wehrmacht was not equipped for winter warfare. Frostbite and disease caused more casualties than combat, and dead and wounded had already reached 155,000 in three weeks. The bitter cold also caused severe problems for guns and equipment and weather conditions grounded the Luftwaffe. Newly built-up Soviet units near Moscow now numbered over 500,000, and on 5 December, they launched a massive counterattack which pushed the Germans back over 200 miles. It was the beginning of the end.

The invasion of the USSR cost the German Army over 210,000 killed and missing and 620,000 wounded in 1941 alone. A third of these became casualties after 1 October and there were an unknown number of Axis casualties such as Hungarians, Romanians and Waffen SS troops, as well as co-belligerent Finns. This failure resulted in the salvation of Great Britain and ultimately in the end of the Third Reich. However, after this fourth failed invasion of Russia came the Cold War, which still continues today in its anti-Putin propaganda – nearly seventy years of aggression without ceasing.

This Cold War gives a completely distorted view of Russian history, whether it concerns the blood-soaked invasion of the Teutonic Knights (which the West sees as good), Ivan IV (whom jt sees as bad, miscalling him ‘the Terrible’, though he was a hero compared to the far bloodthirstier English Henry VIII who ruled at the same time), the Polish invasion of 1612, Peter I (whom it miscalls ‘the Great’), Paul I (who is seen as bad and was in fact murdered in a plot organised by the British ambassador), Catherine II (this bloodthirsty foreigner it calls ‘the Great’) and more recent figures such as Rasputin ( a devout, married peasant, murdered by British spies with the help of an Oxford-trained Russian transvestite).

Above all, this distorted view includes the much denigrated figure of the heroic Tsar Nicholas II and the twisted story of his death. During the reign of Nicholas II the Chinese Eastern Railway and the South Manchuria Railway were built, plans were laid for the electrification of the whole country, an oil pipeline from Baku to the Persian Gulf was planned, and the White Sea-Baltic Canal was designed. Major industrial zones in the Urals and the Far East were planned and the Baikal-Amur Railroad trunk-line was proposed. The Bolsheviks implemented these great plans afterwards and passed them off as their own ideas. Western sources blindly repeat these same Bolshevik myths. Why?

The Murder of the Imperial Family

The report of the Russian investigator N. A. Sokolov, the book by the English journalist Robert Wilton ‘The Last Days of the Romanovs’, the book by the heroic Russian General M. K. Diterichs ‘The Murder of the Imperial Family and Members of the House of Romanov in the Urals’, and the books by the contemporary modern Russian historian Piotr Multatuli all tell us that the deaths of Tsar Nicholas II and his family and faithful servants were ritual murders. Indeed, in 1905 year a group in Brooklyn in New York had already condemned Nicholas II to death.

Shortly before 17 July a mysterious man with a jet-black beard arrived in Ekaterinburg. This man was seen by many. And shortly before 17 July the Commandant of the House of Special Purpose (the Ipatiev House) Yankel Yurovsky completely changed the guard of this house. In the early hours of 17 July 1918 the Imperial Family was sent to the basement of the Ipatiev house. A squad of murderers arrived – their leader was the mysterious man. The murderers stabbed the family with bayonets and a special ritual knife. The aim of the murderers was to let the blood of their victims.

On the wall of the basement a kabbalistic inscription was left: ‘Here by the order of dark forces a Tsar was brought as a sacrificial offering. All nations are informed of this’. Also on the wall a fragment of a poem by Heinrich Heine was left: ‘Belsatzar ward in selbiger Nacht / Von seinen Knechten umgebracht. (Belsatzar (Belshazzar) was on this selfsame night killed by his servants). The original reads ‘Belsazar’ but here it is ‘Belsatzar’, which refers to ‘bely tsar’ (‘the white tsar’) –an epithet for the Tsar among the Russian people. After the murder, the bodies of the family were loaded onto vehicles and taken to a mineshaft called Ganina Yama.

Here the heads of Tsar Nicholas, the Tsarina Alexandra and the Tsarevich Alexey were ritually cut off and put into jars preserved in alcohol. The three jars were put into suitcases and taken to Moscow where they were shown to the Soviet authorities. What happened to them afterwards is unknown. After cutting off the heads, the bodies of the family were dismembered and then covered in sulphuric acid and burned. As there was not enough sulphuric acid, cars were sent to Ekaterinburg for new batches. Red Army soldiers stood on guard by the fire and would not let anybody near.

The fire burned for two days, after which the remains of the family were reduced to powder. This is why there are no remains of the Imperial Family. In the 1930s there was more mass repression in the Soviet Union, including in the Ipatiev House and on the site of the fire near Ganina Yama, where people were shot. Remains found there are the remains of Soviet citizens shot then. Thus, the remains which were buried in Petropavlovsk Fortress in Saint Petersburg in 2000 are not the remains of the Imperial Family. Soviet archives which are even now secret must be opened in order to find out about what happened to the heads.

Apart from this mystery of the three heads, vanished materials of the Russian investigator N.A. Sokolov must be found and still secret French, British and American archives must also be opened – they contain materials on the murder of the Imperial Family. We should also recall that, like others, Piotr Multatuli, the renowned Russian historian and author of five books on Tsar Nicholas II, writes that that no abdication ever took place. In reality, the Tsar did not abdicate. As the esteemed Russian elder, Fr Nikolay Guryanov, said: ‘There is not a sin of abdication on him’.

In reality, in February 1917 year a group of conspirator-generals, organised by the British ambassador Buchanan, went to the Tsar who was being held prisoner in his train, and demanded that he abdicate. But as an Orthodox Christian and the Lord’s Anointed, the Tsar refused. Then an ‘abdication’ was typed out and a signature was falsified. On 15 March 1917 it was announced that the Tsar had abdicated in favour of his brother the Grand Duke Mikhail Aleksandrovich. The latter believed it and on the next day, 16 March 1917, he abdicated in favour of the Constituent Assembly.

Conclusion: Know Your History

Nicholas II was a moral politician and he weighed his policies using the morality of the Gospel as his benchmark. He wanted his subordinates to exercise the same judgement in their care for the destiny of their Motherland. He cherished all the people of the enormous Russian Empire – the best proof of this is that the Russian population grew by 50 million people under his rule. The Tsar was faithful to Orthodoxy, while Orthodox self-consciousness was absent in the uprooted Russian governing élite, which toyed with various substitutes, such as mixtures of Western freemasonry, socialism, mysticism, occultism, esotericism and Eastern religions such as Hinduism. Therefore the discrediting of the Tsar’s name discredits the name of Russia and legalises and justifies the amoral, Western-created, Bolshevik lawlessness that engulfed Russia in the 20th century.

Thus, the discrediting of Nicholas II is part of the self-justifying propaganda war waged against Russia by the ruling factions of the West against the people, both of the West and of Russia. Tsar Nicholas II must be discredited because it was the Western elites themselves that deposed him and ordered his murder. That is why the West, with the assistance of some Soviet story-tellers, circulates tons of slanderous pulp-fiction (e.g. the works of E. Radzinsky), pretending to be new ‘biographies’. Public opinion is still full of deceitful myths about Tsar Nicholas and certain elements inside Russia consciously support these myths. They do not want their people to know the truth about their history. As we know, it is impossible to manipulate a nation that knows its history – and these words need to be taken even more to heart in the West than in Russia.

Six Days in Moscow: Thoughts from Outside In

‘…On the days of their commemoration tens of thousands of the faithful, come to the scene of the sufferings of the holy passion-bearers, have asked for their help for our people in its spiritual rebirth, in the straightening of its historical paths.

Let us be firm in the hope that the Lord will make us worthy to overcome all the consequences of the tragedies, controversies and crimes of the 20th century, raising up Holy Rus from strength to strength.

May God fulfil the words of St John of Shanghai over Her, when in the menacing year of 1938 he said: Blessed art thou, O Russian Land, cleansed by the fire of suffering! Thou hast passed through the baptismal waters and now thou art passing through the fire of suffering and then thou wilt enter into thy rest’.

His Holiness Patriarch Alexis of Moscow
Nativity Epistle 2008/9

Introduction

As I prepare to go to Moscow from London, I wonder about the love-hate relationship between Russian and English people and between Russian and British governments respectively. As the Grand Duchess Olga, sister of the martyred Tsar, commented over fifty years ago, and hundreds of others before and since: ‘Many of my best friends are English and I love them dearly, but as for the policies of successive British governments towards Russia, they are contemptible’. As an Englishman, I can say the same. From the assassination by the then British ambassador’s friends of Tsar Paul I to the assassination of Rasputin organised by the awful Lloyd George, who then greeted the Revolution in public, or of attitudes of successive, contemporary British regimes, the role of successive British governments in trying to destroy Russia has been appalling.

Monday 27 May 2013

One of the first impressions of Moscow, beyond its ultra-spacious, ultra-clean and ultra-orderly airports, is shortage of space, dirt and disorder. The individualism that entered Russia from the West after the brutal and disastrous, Western-engineered collapse of Communism in the 1990s is such that most here today are interested only in their own lives and own well-being. This perhaps sounds good, almost like responsibility, but it ill conceals ill-concealed social ills and decomposition, discourteousness and cheating, lack of basic health and safety, packs of abandoned dogs that bark the night through and ubiquitous corruption – even more ubiquitous than in Western life. And, believe me, it is ubiquitous in Western life – even though the Western media like to deny that – no doubt because they are the most corrupted of all.

Self-interest is revealed in the contemporary Russian contempt for public life, traffic rules and parking (through the ironic lack of provision of parking space in by far the largest country in the world), contempt for the state of its Krushchev-era trains, post offices (parcels six months late!), roads, pavements, public land and forests where piles of rubbish are dumped, contempt for lifts (if they work) and the entrances to blocks of flats, where the masses live. Civic pride in Russia today must be at an all-time low. Potholes and mud, flooded roads when it rains, hot water that is suddenly cut off for days on end ‘for pipe cleaning’, wooden railway platforms out of Africa, the almost Third World appearance of many public buildings, the smoking at garages and tram stops, the drunks – often youngish – lounging by the side of the road, all witness to this.

Worse still, the contempt which the disabled are held in and the pocket-money pensions offered to them and to pensioners, who are humiliated and forced to beg to survive, speak of the contempt of the State for those who are not able to slave for its needs. It is no good that some political websites and nationalistic media sources suggest that all is well in Russia, whereas in the West, with its gay parades and empty and vandalised churches (all a reality, it is quite true), all is decadent. Such statements show a mixture of boorish xenophobia and provincial ignorance. If they were true, then there would not be the clamour in contemporary Russia to introduce ‘European standards’, which is more than just a desire to imitate, but discloses a real need and a real frustration at the lack of provision, that is, lack of pre-vision, that is, lack of planning.

All this dirt and disorder is real, but such criticisms are superficial and come from the spoilt inasmuch as they show no analysis or understanding of the deeper and essential problem of contemporary Russia. The real question is why all this exists and yet at the same time why the airports are superb (much better than most in the West), the airlines and the high speed trains excellent, why you can go to wonderful Tsaritsyno, the former estate of Catherine II on the southern outskirts of Moscow, or to Tsarskoe Selo, the beautifully restored estate of the martyred Tsar Nicholas II outside St Petersburg, and you can truly say that this is the best in the world. And I mean not in the Third World, not in the Second World, not even in the First World (a title so arrogantly and egoistically invented by and for the Western world), but simply the best in the world.

The answer to the above question lies, it seems to me, in what Russians often say of themselves, sometimes rather shockingly, that, ‘Russians need the knout’, that is, the whip. In other words, they say of themselves that we need to be whipped in order to make something of us, to ‘lick us into shape’. In other words, they are saying that ‘we are natural anarchists and need a strong man or woman (perhaps the historically-minded may think of a Varangian?) to rule over us’. However, this answer is, I believe, very badly formulated and shows a real lack of seriousness. In reality, only those with no self-discipline and no self-control need a whip. Those who can control themselves, who have self-discipline, need no whips. The problem then is how first to discipline and control ourselves, and not others. And that is a spiritual question.

Tuesday 28 May

I wrote yesterday that contemporary Russia is characterised by the absence of authority (in Russian, ‘bezvlast’e’, a word which suggest chaos, disorder and anarchy). Why is this dirt and disorder, this absence of authority so real? After all, the Western media’s favourite current myth is to insinuate that Russia is not a democracy, but a tyranny run by a dictator called Putin. I would suggest that this absence of authority is so real precisely because of the absence of legitimate authority. Yes, President Putin was elected by a majority of Russians – even allowing for local corruption, a majority greater than any Western politician could dream of having, and he is still more popular than any Western politician could dream of being, especially in a country where the street lights do not always work. However, in one sense, he does not have ‘legitimate’ authority.

The truth is that, despite such real popularity among a real majority (and real unpopularity among a real minority), and despite his PR machine, President Putin is only a man, a weak man. Spiritually and mystically, we must not forget that the President does indeed have no legitimate authority. We speak now about him not in the vulgar Western sense of him having ‘no legitimate authority’; Western hatred of him is based only on envy, the desire to steal Russia’s natural wealth, land, oil, gas and timber, the same that fatally attracted Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and today the USA. We speak of the President’s lack of authority spiritually and mystically. There is only one legitimate authority in Russia and that is the authority of the Tsar, interrupted by the coup d’état of March 1917 and assumed temporarily by the Sovereign Mother of God.

The Holy Lady is patiently waiting for that time when Russia will through repentance be worthy of an earthly Sovereign, a new Tsar. Then there will no longer be this dirt and disorder, this absence of authority. Then there will be no need for the knout, there will be respect for an example set from on high – not just by a Tsar, but by the knowledge that, unlike in the PR-driven, media-driven and mob-driven pseudo-democracies of the West, above the Tsar reigns Almighty God. If the people are not worthy of a Tsar, then he will be taken away from them – as before. And instead there will either be bezvlast’e, primitive pagan Slavic anarchy, or else the knout, as was in the past imposed by Communism, or else in the future will be imposed again by some other equally awful ‘ism’, imposed from the West by fools, just as Communism was in 1917.

I go on now to think of the recent atrocity in London in which an off-duty soldier was horribly slaughtered in a revenge attack by two Islamist fanatics should serve as a lesson to the British government. Engaged today in the same policy as in the 19th century of supporting and arming fanatical Muslims against Christians (then in the Balkans, today in Syria and elsewhere), the risk is that the policy will rebound – as it has recently done. I think of this in Moscow because today a process similar to that in London over the last fifty years is taking place here too. Moscow is being invaded by Dagestan is, Chechens, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Tadzhiks and others from the mainly Muslim Republics of the former Soviet Union. It is already facing racial tension, attacks by Muslims armed with knives or guns, and threats of mosque-building.

It is said that the Muslim immigrants, many of them here illegally through ubiquitous corrupt payments made to government ‘officials’, are doing the jobs that Russians do not want to do – or will not do without strong doses of vodka. The answer is simple: pay sober Russians proper wages for doing real jobs instead of £200-£300 per month, so that they can live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and then they will do the work that needs to be done without vodka. Why is it that the Russian ‘authorities’ (as they inappropriately call themselves) cannot learn from the errors of the West? When every other citizen of Stuttgart, Hamburg, Marseilles, Lyons, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Oslo, London and Bradford is called Mohammed or Fatima and every other church has been converted into a mosque, it will be too late. Learn now, not later.

Wednesday 29 May

What I wrote yesterday is not racist or Islamophobic; it is merely a pragmatic statement of reality. Christians and Muslims do not mix; the only way in which they can live together is separately. The Middle East knew this for centuries before the then Catholic West invaded peaceful but parallel communities of Orthodox Christians and Muslims in their jihadist Crusades, giving the Muslims the idea of using their old word ‘jihad’ in the Western sense of ‘Crusade’, that is to say, the sense of barbaric slaughter of all who are not of your own religion. Since then the now Protestant West has continued its barbaric slaughter, so that Iraq has now been all but deserted by its ancient Christians and is now on the verge of Somali-isation and Yugoslavisation – like Afghanistan and now Syria. The consequences are incalculable, that is, not apparent to the calculating, but obvious to those with common sense.

Moscow – and Russia – will be saved by not committing suicide. That sounds obvious, but in a world in which common sense is in short supply, it needs saying. This is the world that daily commits suicide through lack of common sense. When the mass of Muscovites – and the mass of Russians – go to church like Christians and so start treating each other like Christians, with courtesy, then the new Muslim immigrants will leave. In any case, by that time the Russian birth rate, instead of the Russian abortion rate (i. e. suicide rate), will be such that the work of even a single Muslim will no longer be needed. The same could of course be said of the West; but here it is probably too late because, unlike in Moscow, there are not enough faithful to stand up and speak common sense, let alone be heard by the few who are left with any common sense.

Recently I read how the stories of how the Red Army raped its way to Berlin were invented by Dr Goebbels. Then they were enthusiastically adopted by the Americans and British, some of whose warmongers were quite willing to continue the Second World War in 1945 by trying to take it to Moscow, just as Hitler had nearly done just before them. The West has always believed its own propaganda. But historians look at facts. The German Army, breaking into Russia in their unprovoked attack in 1941, raped as they went – one in two Wehrmacht soldiers claimed to have raped. Even worse, they usually murdered their victims after raping them. Millions of Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian women and girls so became martyrs. It is reckoned in contemporary Russia that only 100,000 children were born from these rapes. The others were murdered in their mothers’ wombs.

Compare this to what happened in the West. In the occupation of England by the friendly American forces, over 10,000 rapes of English women took place. The half-American Churchill had this hushed up. When the Allies invaded Western Europe, rapes took place all over. The British, as a nation of calculating shopkeepers, paid for their sad pleasures in the suddenly swollen brothels of Brussels. The rapes of the Americans in Stuttgart and later in West Berlin are well-known. The French too took part. Yes, some Russian troops raped on entering East Prussia and Germany. In one three-month period 72 cases were discovered among a million soldiers of the Red Army. Many of these soldiers were shot as a punishment. In reality, by far the worst cases of serial rapes committed were the revenge attacks by freed Soviet POWs, whom the Germans had treated far worse than animals.

‘The Church inside Russia is just like the Church Outside Russia in that it is rich. I know I have been to two Cathedrals in Moscow and one in Washington’. The crass ignorance of such a statement sends us into fits of laughter. The concept that the Church Outside Russia is rich is in itself hilarious. But not only among us. I can think of one young priest not far from Moscow, married with two children, who is paid in chickens and eggs (which come first I do not know). Without his plot of land where he grows his own and without some part-time work (like the rest of us), he would not survive. No doubt, with time, he will build up his parish (like the rest of us). Maybe after thirty years or so (that is how long it has taken me), he will even be able to live as a priest without working on the side. The point is that you cannot ask for money from parishioners who are even poorer than you are. I don’t.

Thursday 30 May

Such were my thoughts yesterday on those twin human instincts – the instinct for survival (the gathering of the means to live), which is so often perverted into the amassing of money that you cannot take with you, and the instinct for the continuation of the race (sexual reproduction), which is so often perverted into sexual disorder. In the West, after, it is true, generations of hypocrisy, sexual disorder began to become acceptable fifty years ago. However, within a generation it had become perverted into the allowing and even encouraging of sodomy. Today, another generation on, the wild and seemingly almost untameable sexual forces that have been unleashed are set on pedophilia, the crime for which Christ said that it would be better not to be born than to commit, for it is the ultimate violation of holy innocence.

Today I am heading for Dmitrov, an ancient town some fifty miles to the north of Moscow. On the train I see my second and last Russian with a tattoo and red dyed hair; people here dress as in the West in the 1970s. (May Russia never ‘catch up’ with the West in this respect). It is important to see outside the capitals, to see reality. Otherwise you may end up with the same false impressions of those who visit London for a few days and imagine that they have seen England! Here you can see poverty, though you can also see prosperity. One of my first impressions is of the two statues on the central town square. One is of that Judeo-Russian monster from the Volga, whose corpse still wallows in its chemicals in Moscow, the other is of the Anglo-Russian founder of this town and also of Moscow, Yury Dolgoruky. They face each other. I just hope that Yury will cross the square one night and cut off the other’s head.

After visiting the slightly forgotten but beautiful little Cathedral in the town kremlin (fortress) with its huge earthen ramparts and lilac trees now out of flower, I visit the museums around it. In one of them there is an ancient wooden chalice from the Cathedral. It is tiny. I am reminded that Russia’s downfall came about precisely because of attitudes which led to the use of such tiny wooden chalices. They signify that in such towns as these, as all over Russia, Romania, Greece and elsewhere, Orthodox tend to be inert, passive, asleep. They say: ‘We are all Orthodox, therefore we won’t bother to go to church, to confession and to communion’. Yet it was this very attitude that led to the abolition of the Patriarchate, to icons being unnecessarily covered in gold frames and heavy, luxurious and uncomfortable vestments while the poor starved – and that led to Revolution.

Why is it that in Dmitrov, a pleasant town of 60,000, there are only three churches, though, true, the Cathedral does have three altars, though again one of the churches is only now being restored? The capacity of these three smallish churches cannot be much more than 600. This suggests that only 1 in 1,000 is practising here. That is few, but, honestly, it is enough to make the difference. Then I think of the state of the town. Why is it that in the largest country in the world, so it seems, all new blocks of flats have to be twelve or more storeys high? Why not limit them to, say, five floors? Or why not simply encouraging the building of traditional wooden houses with their own plots of land to grow and buy and sell food? Russian land is very fertile. Why not set up a modern railway network around Moscow instead of the desperate and archaic 1950s system they have at present?

In such a way overcrowded Moscow could begin to empty. Towns within a 200 kilometre (120 mile) radius of Moscow could be revitalised, 21st century railway infrastructure bringing them within an hour of Moscow. A whole region, two thirds the size of England and one third its population, could be renewed by an express train service. This would require investment from central government. And why does the government not send out official and incorruptible (good salaries and very harsh sentences for law-breaking) government inspectors to check on local authorities to see that they are implementing laws, abolishing dirty Soviet relics, their insignia and names, keeping public buildings clean and painted, renovating the archaic post office system and avoiding the dirt and disorder so common? Of course, those in small towns like this might pass the test fairly well, whereas in Moscow itself…

Friday 31 May

The one thing that marks out Russia today and gives hope to all is the New Martyrs and Confessors, led by the martyred Tsar and the holy Patriarch. Their resistance – and so our resistance through our veneration of them – to ‘the new world order’ is the only thing that stands between us and the end, that draws nearer every day. Here we each bear a heavy responsible for our canonical territory. For the Church inside Russia this means the vast territories and peoples of almost all of the old Russian Empire, together with China and Japan and probably in fact several other countries such as North Korea, Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Thailand, Iran, the Persian Gulf, Cuba, and Alaska, as well as witnessing to those in the canonical territories of the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem and of other Local Churches.

For the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia ‘canonical territory’ means the whole Western world, that is, Western Europe, the Americas, Australasia, and those in countries under their influence like Pakistan or Indonesia. Here two extremes must be avoided. The first extreme is that of setting up national ghettoes. This was done in the Church Outside Russia in the past, for example, in countries in Africa and also in Western Europe. Once Russian people left those countries through emigration or else died out, the churches died – for they had put down no roots among the native peoples. The second extreme is that of many a parish of the Church inside Russia, uncanonically outside its canonical territory, for example in France, England and North America. This extreme was of identifying so closely with the host country that the essentials of the Faith were forgotten.

The results were – and are to this day – in schism or in tiny parishes which have lost all their roots, so desperate was the Patriarchal Church to have any presence outside Russia during the Cold War. Today a heavy price is being paid for such errors of the tragically politicised past. Fortunately, in our own day, most Orthodox services are accessible, faithfully translated into several local languages. This means that there is no reason to be unfaithful. Moreover, inasmuch as those translations are mainly made idiomatically, there is no reason either why local people cannot enter into authentic Church life. Of course, parishes with such services are few, but they still exist and with God’s Will in time they will grow and spread. With time, God’s own good time, there is no reason why we cannot move forward together, spreading the word of authentic Orthodox Christianity in our canonical territory also.

All extremes are to be avoided. On the one hand, whether inside Russia or outside Russia, we have to be open to the world around us without creating some kind of closed ghetto. On the other hand, we must never abandon our principles, the essentials that make up our Faith. Especially at this time, this tension is both creative but also difficult. We have to avoid a closed nationalism, since we bear responsibility for the whole world, given that the other Local Orthodox Churches are basically mononational. As we have said already, faithfulness to the sacrificial blood of the New Martyrs and the declaration of faith of the New Confessors are essential here. There is no room for politics of either left or right, for any ism, only for God’s Gospel Truth, suffered and died for by the hundreds of thousands of the faithful New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Lands.

Of course, were I not an Orthodox Englishman, all this would sound hypocritical. After all, I live in a country where Henry VIII and Elizabeth I are still not everywhere recognised as the monsters they were and the statue of the English Lenin, the murderous bloodsucker Cromwell (1 million dead in Ireland?), stands outside Parliament in London. However, I am an Orthodox Englishman. Only today I have read that on Mt Athos, Greek monks are now praying for the restoration of a Tsar in Russia. I am reassured; I feared that I and a few priest-friends and faithful scattered in our network across Europe were the only ones. Russia is on a knife edge, it can go either way; but perhaps you have, by God’s Providence, to experience dirt and disorder, material poverty, so that you can make the right choice, the one that the spoilt West therefore cannot make.

Saturday 1 June

The recent visit of Patriarch Kyrill to China, a country forbidden to the Pope, shows a possible way forward all over the East. The fact is that the East has rejected the Christianity of the West. The Muslims will never forgive the Catholics for the Crusades. The Hindus will never forgive the British Protestants for their exploitation of them. As for the Chinese with their philosophies, Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist, they may yet learn the new Philo-Sophia, the love of the Wisdom of God, from Russian Orthodoxy. They will not learn from mononational Churches, like the Greek or the Romanian or the Serb. They will not learn from strange sects, Old Ritualists or the just plain wrong ‘True Orthodox’ – it is time to gather in, to harvest, not to crawl away into sects – but they may learn from our great, multinational Russian Orthodox Church.

Who knows, perhaps we shall yet see the Patriarch in Tibet. Tibet has a fine and venerable monastic tradition – what it lacks is Christ to fill the empty space there. Let us recall that had it not been for the bloodshed of Revolution, the Russian Church today would number one twelfth of humanity, instead of one forty-second. Of course, the challenges are huge. The East has rejected the West; therefore unless it falls into rabid and fanatical nationalism, like the Muslims and the Hindus often do, or into a blind imitation of the West, like South Korea and Japan often do, the only way forward is to adopt Orthodoxy, which looks both East and West. Orthodox Russia had to fall because its mere existence prevented the powers from establishing their new world order. But suppose we can re-establish our old world order again? Is it not also written that the salvation of Russia will come from the East?

Dirt and disorder or Holy Russia because where there is Orthodoxy, there is no dirt and disorder. That is the choice that Russia faces. Just try and imagine the streets of Moscow clean, with orderly traffic, without layabout drunks, without smoking, cursing, beggars and chaotic parking, without posters offering ‘credit’ glued up on every wall. The choice surely seems clear. Some Russians have definitely already chosen Holy Russia – and you can recognise them in the street at once. Most have still to decide on how they want to live. However, there is something even more disturbing than all this. This is that people in the West also have to decide which Russia they want to see. And let me make it clear to all Western people now; there is only this choice: dirt and disorder or Holy Russia. And there is something even more profoundly disturbing than this.

This is that there are many in the West who would prefer to see dirt and disorder in Russia. And there is here another serious point. This is that until the West itself recognises that Holy Russia is the only choice, it will itself not heal, but slide ever more rapidly into its own depravity and degeneration, into its own spiritual dirt and spiritual disorder. This recognition that its well-being depends on the well-being of Russia is called repentance for a thousand years of error; it is the repentance of the once Catholic West that time and again, through mercenary Teutonic Knights, Poles and Jesuits, has tried to destroy Holy Russia; it is the repentance of the once Protestant West that time and again, though British sectarians and US Evangelicals, has tried to destroy Holy Russia; it is the repentance of the once atheist West that time and again, through Napoleon, Hitler and today, has tried to destroy Holy Russia.

The ‘new world order’ is a propaganda myth. The Polish-American propagandist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, put it truthfully, when in February 2012 he spoke not of ‘a new world order’, but of ‘The Greater West’. That in truth is all the slogan of the ‘new world order’ is about – vulgar and greedy imperialist expansion. And we Russian Orthodox can also put it truthfully: The world is divided between two Romes, two models; pagan Rome characterised by the classical temple and masonic portals of the eighteenth-century White House in Washington (not a church in sight) and Christian Rome, characterised by the golden domes of the Kremlin in Moscow (only churches in sight). The choice is between pagan and Christian, Babylonian and Jerusalemic. But I would remind all in Moscow that the word Jerusalem means ‘City of Peace’.

Conclusion

The West never expected the Resurrection of Russia and has done its best to deny it, to hush it up. Just like the readily bribable Roman soldiers of old who were paid to ‘say that his body had been stolen by his disciples in the night’, its media have silenced the story of the Russian Resurrection. They did not expect Russia to rise from the dead after it, like Pilate, washed its hands of Russia in 1917 and through cowardice allowed its Crucifixion and indifferently looked on. And yet the Resurrection is here, however much it still has to be announced. During the dark hours of the 1940s, St Seraphim of Vyritsa – and I tell you this now, so that you will remember it then – looked out on the Gulf of Finland and saw many ships sailing in from many lands and prophesied: ‘The whole world will head for Russia to repent’. This means that there will be Orthodox priests of many nationalities giving the sacraments there.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Somewhere over the Baltic