Category Archives: Russia

Law protecting the religious feelings of believers must be passed, says Nikolai Valuev

When a country returns to the faith, it inevitably begins to protect in law the religious feelings of its citizens. This is one of the stages on the way to a country becoming Christian again, a process that ends with the restoration of the Monarchy. We are especially aware of this fact in this year when we commemorate the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan. When, on the other hand, a country deChristianises, then it stops protecting the religious feelings of the faithful. The article below is then significant. Once more it suggests that contemporary Russia is heading towards reChristianisation and dewesternisation, whereas the contemporary West is heading towards deChristianisation – two trains heading in opposite directions.

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/61583.htm

The Odour of the Apocalypse

Tsar Nicholas III, in a recent speech in St Petersburg, called for the right of all sovereign peoples to determine their own futures without outside interference…Imperial Russian Armies have now crossed the Caucasus and are heading in a two-pronged attack towards Constantinople and through Turkey and Syria towards Jerusalem.

From It’s Later than You Think, July 1991, from Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition

Introduction

Yesterday’s bombing in Boston was appalling and evil. Innocent bystanders, children included, were killed or maimed. However, there are events going on in the world today that are worse even than this. The difference is that those events are hardly reported by the Western media, which often appear to have little but contempt for those who are not included in its ethnocentric navel-gazing.

The Middle

Yesterday’s bomb in Boston is what Iraqis have had to put up with, only on a far worse scale, every few days for the last ten years. A million or more are dead, their country ravaged and in part destroyed, families maimed and killed, even water, gas and electricity in this once rich country are not available all the time. Sometimes, in this oil-rich land, no petrol can be had for cars. The result is that all who can are getting out and that half of Iraq’s almost bimillennial Christians are living in refugee camps and in exile, their lives ruined by a thoughtless and selfish invasion and occupation, which has brought little but misery.

Then there is the war in Syria, largely an invasion being waged by foreign mercenaries against the Syrian people on behalf of powers playing a great geostrategic game to divide and rule the Middle East, whose centre is in Jerusalem. Tunisia, Libya and Egypt have already been destabilised by those powers, their Christian inhabitants the first victims. The terrorists in Syria are fanatical Islamists, their ideology invented by the CIA. They are financed and armed by Afghan drug money, greatly increased since the invasion of Afghanistan, and by the despotic but oil-rich, feudal Islamist monarchies of the Gulf.

These have airlifted in thousands of tons of arms, mainly from Croatia and the Ukraine, to the terrorists who are being trained by US, UK and French Special Forces in the Jordan and Turkey. At stake are the huge untapped gasfields in the Eastern Mediterranean and pipeline routes to Europe. Turkey, for long a puppet, but once the centre of the Ottoman Empire, eyes territory and reserves. The Lebanon quakes, fearing the spillover into its territory. Israel hopes but trembles, seeing opportunities but also threats. The victims are the millions of Christians and other minorities, who mostly live in and around Damascus, Aleppo and Homs.

The West

Meanwhile, the Western world is riven by the problems which it created in 1917, when it exported an ideology of hatred to destroy the Russian Empire, the sole remaining bastion of the Orthodox Christian world, the Orthosphere. Since the fall of that Christian Empire, the world has known only instability. Over the last ninety years, the West has attempted to destroy the soft underbelly of the Orthosphere, installing its candidates as Patriarchs of Constantinople and attempting to undermine the other Greek Patriarchates in Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem and Local Churches in Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria.

In the last twenty years the Western world, directed from Washington or from its puppet in Brussels, has tried to further undermine those and other parts of the Orthosphere. First, it attacked Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo in a divide and rule policy, bombing Belgrade for Easter, deforming Serbian babies with ‘uranium-enriched’ warheads in Nazi atrocities. Then, having bribed Greece to join the EU, it bribed Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States, so bankrupting them. Finally, the West set about destabilising the Ukraine, Georgia, Syria and, last year, the final bulwark, the Russian Federation.

Western people are many-layered. In order for them to rebecome Christian, they have to remove every layer of their anti-Christian culture, which they deludedly imagine to be Christian. The layer of modern secularism has to go, then that of 19th century imperialism and rationalism (in fact anti-rationalism), then the darkness of the ‘Enlightenment’, then the protest of the Reformation (as if you could understand the Scriptures without the Holy Spirit), next feudalism, scholasticism and the crusades all have to be removed. Sadly, few are able to cleanse themselves of all the delusions of these layers of proud cultural prejudice.

The East

At the other end of Asia to the physically and spiritually bankrupt ‘Judeo-Christian’ West, there is the East. Today, this means the threat from North Korea, a gigantic Stalinist concentration camp, ruled by madmen, who appear to have nuclear weapons, like India, Pakistan, Israel and perhaps Iran. Yet, it is doubtful if this North Korea could exist without Capitalist-Communist China, which is so hard-working and therefore so rich that it also owns much of the Western world. Yet, paradoxically, it may be that it is this part of Asia which may bring solutions to the current world crisis of this time before Antichrist.

Two prophecies tell us that salvation will come from the East. St John of Kronstadt (+ 1908) prophesied that the deliverance of Russia would come from the East and, ten years later, St Aristocleus (+ 1918) prophesied that the real end of Russia’s errings would come through China. And errings there are. In Russia, which stretches from the East to the West and whose canonical Church territory includes China, current dissatisfaction is real and exists because of ingrained and systemic corruption. It is this dissatisfaction, in itself justified, which is so easily exploited by the dark forces of the West which seek to destroy Russia.

If we are worthy of these prophecies, Russia will be restored and with it the rest of the Orthosphere, which for now is captive to German economic power (able even to steal from private bank accounts) and American military power (able even to steal from private computer accounts). If we are worthy of these prophecies, we may yet also be able to gather together the remnants of the peoples of the whole world into the Church before the end. If we are worthy of these prophecies, it may be that the peoples of the East and West will be reunited once more, not by Babylon, but by Jerusalem.

Conclusion

The Christian Russian Empire, heir to the Christian Roman Empire, was crucified in its Golgotha of 1917. After three ‘days’ (generations) it rose from the dead. The giant is now beginning to speak to the world, East and West alike, of the Resurrection and what it saw when it went down to hades. Will the world, seemingly unaware of this odour of the Apocalypse, listen? We can only pray.

Note:

1. In 1973 the Abbess of the Convent at Gethsemane, Mother Barbara (Tsvetkova) spoke of the prophecy of Elder (now St) Aristocleus of Athos (1838-1918), who was then living in Moscow. The Elder told the future Abbess, then a young student, that ‘regeneration in Russia will begin after a most powerful explosion on the bank of a big river’. When in 1986 the atomic catastrophe occurred at Chernobyl, this prophecy came true.

The Vision of Mr Gibbes

A Talk Given at St Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church in Oxford on 23 March 2013 after the Memorial Service at Archimandrite Nicholas’ Grave in Headington Cemetery.

Photo of Mr GibbesCharles Sydney Gibbes, for short Sydney Gibbes, was born 137 years ago, on 19 January 1876. In the 19th century this was the feast day of St John the Baptist, the voice that cried in the wilderness. His parents were called John and Mary – more English than that you cannot find. His father was a bank manager in Rotherham, just outside Sheffield, in Yorkshire. Amusingly, this would later be recorded by a Russian civil servant on Sydney’s residence papers in Russia as ‘Rotterdam’.

With no fewer than ten siblings, Sydney grew up into a stereotypical, Victorian, Protestant young man of the educated classes. He received this education at Cambridge, where he changed the spelling of his surname to Gibbes, from Gibbs, as the adopted form is the older, historical one. This change was typical of his love of detail and historical accuracy. Sydney is described as: severe, stiff, self-restrained, imperturbable, quiet, gentlemanly, cultured, pleasant, practical, brave, loyal, honourable, reliable, impeccably clean, with high character, of good sense and with agreeable manners. e 2wasHe seems the perfect Victorian gentleman – not a man with a vision.

However, as we know from history, underneath Victorian gentlemen lurked other sides – repressed, but still present. For example, we know that he could be stubborn, that he used corporal punishment freely, that he could be very awkward with others, almost autistic, as we might say today, and he is recorded as having quite a temper, though these traits mellowed greatly with the years. Dmitri Kornhardt recalled how in later life tears would stream down Fr Nicholas’ face when conducting services in memory of the Imperial Martyrs, but how also he would very rapidly recover himself after such unEnglish betrayals of emotion.

Underneath the Victorian reserve there was indeed a hidden man, one with spiritual sensitivity, who was not indifferent to ladies and interested in theatre and theatricals, spiritualism, fortune-telling and palmistry, and one who was much prone to recording his dreams. Perhaps this is why, when after University he had been thinking of the Anglican priesthood as a career, he had found it ‘stuffy’ and abandoned that path. Talking to those who knew him and reading his biographies, and there are three of them, we cannot help feeling that as a young man Sydney was searching for something – but he knew not what. The real man would out from beneath his Victorian conditioning.

Perhaps this is why in 1901, aged 25, he found himself teaching English in Russia – a country with which he had no connection. Here he was to spend over 17 years. The key moment came in autumn 1908 when he went to the Imperial Palace in Tsarskoe Selo and became the English tutor of the Imperial children. In particular, he became close to the Tsarevich Alexis, with whom he identified very closely. Why? We can only speculate that there was a sympathy or else complementarity of characters; together with Sydney’s bachelordom, this may have been enough for the friendship to develop. In any case, he became almost a member of the Imperial Family and their profound and lifelong admirer of their exemplary Christian Faith and kindness.

In August 1917 Sydney found himself following the Family to Tobolsk. Utterly loyal to the Family, in July 1918 he found himself in Ekaterinburg, after the unimaginable crime in the Ipatiev House had taken place. He helped identify objects, returning again and again to the House, picking up mementoes, which he was to cling on to until the end, and still reluctant to believe that the crime had taken place. Coming almost half way through his life when he was aged 42, this was without doubt the crucial event in that life, the turning point, the spark that made him seek out his destiny in all seriousness. With the murder of the Family, the bottom had fallen out of his life, his raison d’etre had gone. Where could he go from here?

He did not, like most, return to England. We know that he, like Tsar Nicholas, had been particularly shocked by what he saw as the British betrayal of the Imperial Family. Indeed, we know that it was the scheming Buchanan, the British ambassador to St Petersburg, who had been behind the February 1917 Revolution and deposition of the Tsar. This had been much greeted by the treacherous Lloyd George as the ‘achievement of one of our war aims’. (We now also know that it had been British spies who had assassinated Rasputin and also that the Tsar’s own cousin, George V, had refused to help the Tsar and His Family escape).

In fact, disaffected by Britain’s politics, from Ekaterinburg Sydney went east – to Siberian Omsk and then further east, to Beijing and then Harbin. Off and on he would spend another 17 years here, in Russian China, Manchuria. In about 1922 he suffered a serious illness. His religiosity seems to have grown further and after this he would go to study for the Anglican priesthood at St Stephen’s House in Oxford. However, for someone with the world-changing experience he had had, that was not his way; perhaps he still found Anglicanism ‘stuffy’. Finally, in 1934, in Harbin, he joined the Russian Orthodox Church.

There is no doubt that he did this as a direct result of the example of the Imperial Family, for he took the Orthodox name of Alexis – the name of the Tsarevich. He was to describe this act as like ‘getting home after a long journey’, words which perhaps describe the reception into the Orthodox Church of any Western person. Thus, from England, to Russia and then to China, he had found his way. In December 1934, aged almost 59, he became successively monk, deacon and priest. He was now to be known as Fr Nicholas – a name deliberately taken in honour of Tsar Nicholas. In 1935 he was made Abbot by Metr Antony of Kiev, the head of the Church Outside Russia and later he received the title of Archimandrite.

Wishing to establish some ‘Anglo-Orthodox organisation’, in 1937 Fr Nicholas Gibbes came back to live in England permanently. He was aged 61. Of this move he wrote: ‘It is my earnest hope that the Anglican Church should put itself right with the Holy Orthodox Church’. He went to live in London in the hope of setting up an English-language parish. In this he did not succeed and in 1940 he moved to Oxford. In this last part of his life in Oxford, as some here remember, he became the founder of the first local Russian Orthodox chapel at 4, Marston Street, where he lived in humble and modest circumstances. In recalling the address of that first chapel dedicated to St Nicholas, we cannot help recalling that today’s St Nicholas church, where we speak, is off Marston Road, and not so very far away from Marston Street.

Not an organiser, sometimes rather erratic, even eccentric, Fr Nicholas was not perhaps an ideal parish priest, but he was sincere and well-respected. In Oxford he cherished the mementoes of the Imperial Family to the end. Before he departed this life, on 24 March 1963, an icon given to him by the Imperial Family, was miraculously renewed and began to shine. One who knew him at the time confirmed this and after Fr Nicholas’ death, commented that now at last Fr Nicholas was seeing the Imperial Family again – for he had been waiting for this moment for 45 years. He was going to meet once more those who had shaped his destiny in this world.

In the 1980s I met in an old people’s home in Paris Count Komstadius. He had met Fr Nicholas in 1954, but perhaps had seen him before, since his father had been in charge of the Tsarskoe Selo estate and he himself had been a childhood friend of the Tsarevich. I remember in the 1980s visiting him. In the corner of his room in front of an icon of the martyred Tsarevich there burned an icon-lamp. He turned to me and said: ‘That is such a good icon, it is just like him and yet also it is an icon’. Not many of us lives to see a childhood playfriend become a saint and have his icon painted. Yet as a young man in his thirties Fr Nicholas had known a whole family, whom he considered to be saints. Indeed, he had been converted by their example.

There are those who have life-changing experiences. They are fortunate, because they stop living superficially, stop drifting through life and stop wasting God-sent opportunities. Such life-changing experiences can become a blessing if we allow them to become so. Fr Nicholas was one such person, only his life-changing experience was also one that had changed the history of the whole world. For a provincial Victorian Yorkshire bank manager’s son, who had grown up with his parents John and Mary, he had come very far. And yet surely the seeds had been there from the beginning. To be converted we first of all need spiritual sensitivity, a seeking spirit, but secondly we also need an example. Fr Nicholas had had both, the example being the Imperial Martyrs. As the late Princess Koutaissova, whom many of us knew, said of his priesthood: ‘He was following his faithfulness to the Imperial Family’.

In this brief talk I have not mentioned many aspects of Fr Nicholas’ life, such as his possible engagement, his adopted son, his hopes in Oxford. This is because they do not interest me much here. I have tried to focus on the essentials, on the spiritual meaning of his life. Those essentials are, I believe, to be found in his haunted and haunting gaze. Looking at his so expressive face, we see a man staring into the distance, focusing on some vision, both of the past and of the future. This vision was surely of the past life he had shared with the martyred Imperial Family and also of the future – his long hoped-for meeting with them once more, his ‘sense of completion’.

To the Ever-memorable Archimandrite Nicholas: Eternal Memory!

The Romanovs – 400 Years

Romanov billboard

The above poster has appeared on billboards in the Ukraine in recent days. It says: Orthodoxy. Sovereignty. The People. Our ancestors lived according to their conscience. What about us? 1613-2013. 400 years of the House of Romanov. According to opinion polls of recent years between 25% and 35% of Russians would like to see the return of the monarchy. However, no-one knows of a suitable candidate.

The 400th Anniversary of the House of Romanov

Moscow, 6 March 2013

On 6 March, the 400th anniversary of the election of Michael Feodorovich Romanov to be Tsar, His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow and all the Russias celebrated the Divine Liturgy in the Patriarchal Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin.

Concelebrating with His Holiness were: Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, Chairman of the Church’s External Relations Department; Archbishop Mark of Egorievsk, Head of the Department for Foreign Institutions of the Moscow Patriarchate; Bishop Agapit of Stuttgart; Bishop Theophylact of Dmitrov; Bishop Ignaty of Bronnitsy, Chairman of the Synodal Department for Youth Affairs; Bishop Sergy of Solnechnogorsk, Head of the Secretariat of the Moscow Patriarchate; Bishop Panteleimon of Smolensk and Vyazma, Chairman of the Synodal Department for Church Charities and Social Services; Archpriest Vladimir Divakov, Secretary of the Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias for the City of Moscow; Archimandrite Tihon (Shevkunov), Superior of the Stavropegic Sretensky Monastery; Archimandrite Savva (Tutunov), Deputy Chancellor of the Moscow Patriarchate; Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, Head of the Synodal Department for Relations between Church and Society; Archpriest Vladimir Siloviev, Head of the Moscow Patriarchal Publishing House; Archpriest Michael Riazantsev, Priest in Charge of the Cathedral Church of Christ the Saviour; Archpriest Alexander Dasaiev, Dean of the Voskresensky District of Moscow; Archpriest Anatoly Kozha, Dean of the Paraskevo-Piatnitsky District of Moscow; Archpriest Anatoly Rodionov, Dean of the Vlahernsky District of Moscow; Archpriest Oleg Korytko, Head of the Review Department of the Moscow Patriarchate; Hieromonk Nikon (Belavenets) and other clerics of the City of Moscow.

Also present at the service were: the Head of the Russian Imperial House Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna, the great-great-grandson of Emperor Alexander III, P.E. Kulikovsky, the Chairman of the Association of Russian Nobility, Prince G. G. Gagarin, and the Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee of the Russian Federation for Public Associations and Religious Organizations, M.Y. Markelov.

The Moscow Synodal choir, led by Alexei Puzakov, and the choir of the Academy of Choral Arts, led by Alexei Petrov, sang at the service. Archpriest Artemy Vladimirov, the Rector of All Saints Church in Krasnoye Selo in Moscow, gave a sermon before communion.

At the Liturgy prayers were said ‘for the eternal repose of the souls of the departed servants of God, the ever-memorable rulers of Holy Rus, faithful Princes and Princesses, Tsars and Tsarinas, and all who were in authority and with diligence cared for the purity of the faith and ruled our land in the faith of the Christian law’, and the names of Tsars, Emperors and Empresses of the House of Romanov were enumerated.

After the Liturgy a short service of intercession to the Holy Royal Martyrs was celebrated: to Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra and the Royal Children, Alexey, Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia.

His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill gave a speech as First Hierarch to those who took part in the service.

This was followed by a procession to the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael – the burial place of many rulers of Russia, including Romanovs. A short memorial service was celebrated in the Cathedral for the repose of the souls of Russia’s rulers, ‘buried in this place of repose and elsewhere’ with the enumeration of the names of rulers from the House of Romanov. (Report from the Press Service of the Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias).

The procession to the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael was accompanied by ‘the solemn ringing of bells’, a peal used for processions. After the short memorial service in the Cathedral a triumphal royal peal of bells was performed – revived by the bell-ringers of the Kremlin and the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour on the basis of the peal of bells in the coronation scene in Musorgsky’s opera ‘Boris Godunov’. It was performed on the bells of the first, second and third stages of the bell-tower of Ivan the Great, using the ‘Reut’ bell, which hangs in the Dormition belfry. The ‘Reut’ is the oldest 1000-pood (over 16 tons) Russian bell, and was cast in 1622 by the master-founder Andrei Chokhov. The inscription on the bell mentions Tsar Michael Feodorovich Romanov and his father, Patriarch Philaret Nikitich Romanov.

http://www.pravoslavie.ru/news/59960.htm

The Sunday of the Last Judgement 2013

The Forces Behind Pussy Riot

Some eight years ago now I had the honour of speaking on the spiritual essence of Western Europe at a Conference in London, where also spoke Alexander Dugin. Having renounced a compromising past, he is today one of the foremost Russian philosophers, the founder of the contemporary Eurasian Movement and a very influential speaker and adviser. Here he explains what lay behind Pussy Riot, that synonym of sex and violence.

Obstacles to the Restoration of Orthodox Russia

Since the fall of Communism in 1991, work towards the restoration of Orthodox Russia has become the common task of all conscious Russian Orthodox. However, if this restoration is to happen, then three obstacles must be overcome. What are they?

The first obstacle is to overcome the Western fashions which have flooded into Russia since 1991. Consumerism, pornography, homosexuality, drugs and all that had accumulated in the West since the 1960s entered Russia after 1991. Such decadent egoistic fads lead only to primitive Western-style infantilism (for example, Pussy Riot) and the zombification of political correctness, spoilt infants demanding their toys or ‘rights’. Only once this Western individualism has been overcome, can Russia come to the second obstacle.

The second obstacle is full spiritual and so moral renewal. Without such a movement of mass repentance, because that is what these words mean, there can be no return to national roots and values. We speak of the restoration of Orthodoxy which is incarnate in Russia and so in tune with its history. Only such a restoration can create a new consciousness and understanding of national history beyond the deformations and divisions introduced by the Synodal period, the Soviet period and the Western period since 1991.

The third obstacle is political and so economic renewal. In Orthodox Russia, there should be no great divisions caused by excessive wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, as there is today and as there also was before 1917. Just as corruption came into Russia through a Westernised aristocracy, so today it comes through a Westernised oligarchy. There should be no corruption, but social justice and free access to educational and health care systems. Ultimately, this means the restoration of sovereign popular monarchy.

The possibility that Russia may overcome these three obstacles would have international repercussions, as Russia has responsibility both to the Orthodox world and to the world at large. We must wait and see in patience, if this potential is to be realised.

Quo Vadis, O Vaticane?

There are many views of Pope Benedict’s recent shock resignation. Some see just an old and failing man who cannot go on any longer, who is exhausted by ‘the heat of the day’. Others see more sinister forces at work. Some believe that his resignation came about as a result of pressure from various international groups, political and financial lobbies or pro-homosexual and pro-contraceptive lobbies. They believe that the Pope, ‘the infallible Vicar of Christ’, was forced to leave his post because he was resisting those secularist lobbies. There are after all groups who are working towards the New World Order, in which there is no place for sovereign institutions such as the Vatican, or indeed anyone who shows spiritual independence from the financial domination of a future Global Government. If this is all so, at present, it seems, these powers are operating a two-pronged attack, financial and political.

Firstly, they are setting the stage for a World Bank, required because of the present purely artificial financial crisis, a worldwide manipulation which is now in its sixth year. This was caused by indebtedness, which was long promoted by Western governments and banks, Secondly, these powers are sowing chaos in the Arab World, taking back Arab countries to the Middle Ages. The influence of these powers in Rome seems to be clear from the Vatican’s silence on Libya and its apparent abandonment of Egyptian and Syrian Christians, like Christians in Iraq before them and Christians in Serbia before them. Already on 5 September 2011, the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, himself of Jewish descent, openly announced to the Roman Catholic Maronite Cardinal of Antioch that, with the coming to power of Western-backed Islamists in Syria, Christians there would have to flee to Europe.

Interestingly, the Western Roman Catholic Press attacked this same Roman Catholic Cardinal’s denunciations of the West for its support of Islamist terrorism in Syria. The Vatican’s silence and even encouragement of Western interventionism, exactly as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, suggests that it may already have become the puppet of the New World Order project, which only further weakens its spiritual authority. The global elite behind the New World Order project is not so much saying, ‘If you do not go along with us, your country will descend into chaos’, but rather, ‘If you do not go along with us, we will ensure that your country descends into chaos’. It has already happened in fragmented Yugoslavia, and now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Now it is happening in Syria, with its ‘Somali-isation’, that is, division by bandit warlords into rival fiefs.

If all this is so, then the Cardinal-electors of the new Pope face a stark choice. Are they going to assert their independence from the New World Order, or are they going to fall for globalism and ‘global governance’, as it is called? This is very much their last chance to choose. After a thousand years of compromise with this world, this may well be the Vatican’s final choice. In today’s terms, it means a choice between the continued desacralisation of protestantisation and secularisation, begun fifty years ago with the Second Vatican Council, and spiritual resistance to secularisation by siding with Non-Western countries. Undermined and discredited by the pedophile scandal, which was completely of its own making, the Vatican may well choose secularisation. That would make it popular with the highly-controlled Western media. But that would also be its suicide, the end of the road.

The crisis in Rome is nothing new. In the past the Papacy has continually been manipulated by foreign and often atheist powers, from Medieval Monarchs to Napoleon and from Republicans to Fascists. Thus, only recently, there was a Polish Pope, elected to destroy Communism. And the present German Pope reflects the Western Schism of 1054, which occurred as the result of another carefully chosen German Pope, Leo IX. However, if the present crisis is the final crisis, one of its results will surely be the exile of Orthodox refugees from the West to Russia. After all, in her time Catherine II gave refuge to Serb, Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox from Turkish oppression and Tsar Nicholas I gave refuge to French citizens from Revolutionary oppression. Some of their descendants fought for Russia against France during the allied Western/Ottoman invasion of Russia known as the Crimean War.

Although the Russian Federation and Church seem to have defeated last year’s orchestrated media attacks from the West, the rest of the Orthodox world is in chaos, not least in the Ukraine and Georgia. The four Orthodox countries that were seduced by Western money to join the EU are now in crisis: Greece has gone bankrupt and Cyprus is going bankrupt amid elections; the Bulgarian government has just resigned amid demonstrations; poverty-stricken Romania is on the verge of bankruptcy – as also the depopulated Baltic States with their Orthodox minorities. Orthodox Syria is being divided and returned to the Middle Ages by 65,000 foreign Islamist terrorists, financed largely by Qatar and flown there by the USA under its divide and rule policy. The only light is the sight of Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria and Africa aboard a Russian warship in Dar es Salaam on 17 February.

Little wonder that eyes are turning with hope to a future when a restored Orthodox Russian Federation could once more become the visible centre of the Orthodox and so Christian world. At this moment when we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the House of Romanov and the 1700th anniversary of the Incarnational Edict of Milan, our prayers turn to a new Tsar, who could renew the monarchy of St Constantine. Soon the Orthodox Patriarchs will be gathering in Nish in Serbia to commemorate the Edict. As Orthodox, we should beware, however, of extremists on the left (disincarnate, liberal, ecumenist and modernist) and on the right (sectarian, nationalist and zealous not according to knowledge) fringes of the Church who have tried, try and will try to stop the restoration of Orthodox Russia to her inter-Orthodox calling. Only the Royal Way, the Tsar’s Path, will save us from such temptations.
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Russia Unprepared for Flood of Christian Refugees from Western-sponsored Islamist Winter

» 02/05/2013 10:18
RUSSIA
Syrian and Coptic Christians fleeing to Moscow, but Russia lacks shelters

by Nina Achmatova

http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Syrian-and-Coptic-Christians-fleeing-to-Moscow,-but-Russia-lacks-shelters-27050.html

Human rights activists denounce inadequate facilities for the reception of immigrants and the bureaucratic obstacles.

A Copt tells AsiaNews of death threats of the Muslim Brotherhood for failing to convert to Islam.

Moscow (AsiaNews) – A flow of refugees from Syria and Egypt is pouring into Moscow to escape from wars and violence in their country of origin bringing to light the inadequacy of facilities for the reception of immigrants in Russia.

The complaint has been made by a veteran in migrant assistance, the president of the ‘Civic Assistance Committee’, Svetlana Gannushkina. In the past week a family of 10 Coptic Christians, including a child a few months old, presented themselves in their office. The family say they fled religious persecution from Islamist groups taking place in Marsa Matrouh, near the border with Libya. “They threatened us with death if we didn’t convert and make our women and girls wear a veil,” Reda, 26, who fled with his 19 year old pregnant wife told AsiaNews.

“After the revolution many activists of the Muslim Brotherhood came – added his brother Viktor, 30, – who put pressure on us Christians to convert. Our problems started already in late 2011, but are getting worse. ‘Last year, after an argument with the principal of the school who wanted to force my daughter to wear the hijab, we were told that the presence of Christians in the city was no longer welcome. ” “We sought shelter with a local priest – he concluded – but his church had already been burned once and so he did not want to further expose himself to attack.”

Now all 10 Egyptians, plus Iraqis and Sudanese, are forced to live in a room of 20 square meters, with only a few chairs and a table, because there is no temporary accommodation center for immigrants waiting to receive refugee status in the city.

“Everyone is waiting for an answer from the Federal Service for immigration – Gannushkina , who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times told AsiaNews, – which must decide on their possible transfer to Ochyor, in Perm region, where there is one of only three reception centres for refugees in the entire country.”

The process, however, can last for weeks and the authorities have not thought of any temporary accommodation for these people, who do not have a place to live.”The problem is much worse for the Copts – said Gannushkina – because for them here, unlike Syrians, there is no large community or network of countrymen ready to open their homes.” “It is winter, and in these conditions they are likely to die of exposure – she added – so we are forced to accommodate
these people in our offices, but they are not adequate facilities.” The small child Cirillus, who arrived with his mother, father and sister also from Marsa Matrouh, is already sick and was visited by doctors from Doctors Without Borders.

Last year 700 people turned for help to ‘Civil Assistance’, including 80 Egyptian Copts. The new arrivals are in addition to about 30 Syrians who in January of this year already made a request to Moscow for refugee status. One hundred Syrians arrived in the last six months of 2012.

Reception centers for refugees fleeing persecution and war are provided in all countries that have signed the UN Convention on Refugees. In Russia – denounced the Gannushkina – formally, there are three centers, but in fact only one works, that of Ochyor for more than 80 people. “This integration does not exist and the sanitary conditions are very bad,” she added.

According to rumors circulating in the press and among NGOs, the Immigration Service is considering even closing it down. The other two centers are located one in the Tver Region and the other in the south of Rostov, but are not working at full capacity. “In a country as large as Russia three centers for immigrants is virtually nothing, if you think that Poland, which much smaller than us, has 11,” added Gannushkina, who has always declared that if she ever wins the Nobel she will allocate the prize money to building at least another refugee centre near Moscow.