Category Archives: Russian Church

Holy Rus Lives and Calls: Now is the Hour

On 29 May 2014 the Eurasian Economic Union will be formed by the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and Belarus, with Armenia and many another country waiting in the wings. The implementation of this new Union has been greatly hastened by the tragic events in the Ukraine. The divide and rule instability provoked by the USA, helped by the EU, in the Middle East and Northern Africa over the last few years has now spread there too. Standing on the threshold of global events against the background of the separatist junta in Kiev which is still slaughtering its own people, it is clear that the importance of this new Union is now no longer only economic. It is being dwarfed by its political importance as a centre of security, independence and freedom from potential global dictatorship.

Naturally, this Union is opposed by the fifth column of the Western media, which is still strong in post-Soviet Russia, as above all outside Russia. However, such media do not represent the Russian Orthodox ethos which lies behind this Eurasian Union; they represent only their sponsors. They are angry and fearful, for this new alliance opposes US plans for global hegemony, which is why they censor and block the free Russian media. And that fifth column, liberals, ecumenists and modernists, is looking increasingly old-fashioned. Resurgent Russia, built on Christian civilizational principles and values, is now competing with the atheist West and the decadence it has tried to sow in once Orthodox lands, gathering together different lands of the world beneath the protecting veil of Holy Rus and its consistent belief-system and world view.

The US administration spent a lot of money ($5 billion) and 23 long years to try and split the Ukraine from the Eurasian civilizational world of Holy Rus. Instead, Russia is gathering it together and integrating it, starting with the Crimea. Little wonder that seeing the US losing the Ukraine altogether, two days ago John Kerry agreed with the Establishment-maligned British politician, Nigel Farage, and condemned the EU for creating the chaos in the Ukraine (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIvoq2oZZuU). What he did not mention, of course, was that it was the US that put the EU up to that chaos-creation, which it had itself financed and orchestrated, choosing even the leaders of the junta that seized power from democracy.

Details have their importance, but salvation is now in being together. Sticks can be broken one by one quite easily, but a bundle of sticks cannot. Post-Soviet Russia is turning into resurgent Orthodox Russia and so has begun fulfilling its historic and messianic role, which we have waited so long to see. It is showing an imperial understanding of the global situation – in the best sense of the word ‘imperial’; now the future has hope. We look forward to the moment when Russian leaders, who conquered atheism, address once cultured, educated and intelligent Western peoples, over the heads of their political and media elites who so despise them and feed them bread and circuses. Then they will denounce the lies of those elites about Russia and denounce also the elite’s own misdeeds, calling the Western peoples back to their spiritual roots and holiness. Holy Rus lives and calls. Now is the hour.

May: A Turning-Point?

The European elections of 22 May are fast approaching, falling just three days before elections in the governmentless and rudderless Ukraine, where a separatist, US-installed junta has seized power by violence. This time the European elections may present a real choice to their electorate. Do Europeans want to continue with the Fourth Reich project, a United States of Europe, a museum and graveyard of dead culture, a Europe without Christ, or do they want to stop the project now and even reverse the catastrophe before it is too late?

The true face of the European Union, a despised colony of the bullying, meddling US elite, who are now using Ukrainians as pawns in their giant geopolitical game, has been recognized by ever more Europeans. The former Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, has indicated how mistaken the EU elite is in meddling in the Ukraine. In Hungary the Jobbik National Party is openly supporting Russia against the USA; its leader, Gabor Vona, said in Moscow in 2013 that ‘Russia is defending European values, whereas the EU is betraying them’, and may join the Eurasian Union. In France Marine Le Pen of the National Front, with between 20% and 30% of support, is saying much the same. Even Nigel Farage, the leader of the Independence Party in the UK, says that he admires President Putin, and in the USA such paleocon (definitely not neocon) leaders as Patrick Buchanan and Ron Paul support the new Russia against the Western Sodom.

The European elites are worried. Despite the propaganda daily pumped out by their European Establishment media, ordinary Europeans are resisting. President Putin’s appeal is to the long hoodwinked, native peoples in the depths of Europe, who have for so long been oppressed by their know-it-all, ‘liberal’, Establishment elites. His appeal is to European roots, to those who wish to live in the Christian, Mediterranean civilisation of Europe, at whose roots lies Orthodox Christianity, which is also the only living belief-system in contemporary Russia.

The peoples of Europe do not want to be taken over by sects, either the Protestant variety – and all Protestantism, a splinter of Catholicism, is sectarian because it is humanist and individualist, based on a humanistic ‘Jesus’ cult, not on the God-man. Neither do they want to be taken over by the Muslim sect – and make no mistake Islam, a splinter of Arianism, is also a sect. This is against a sombre background. In just a few days’ time the Vatican machine is intending to canonize two recent popes, John XXIII and John-Paul II. Both of them represent the protestantising current of modern Catholicism and therefore the canonization of that current. This is the current that denies the Divine, the presence of the sacred. Characteristically, they are being canonized by a Jesuit Pope who venerates the awful mass-murdering Uniat Kuntsevich as a saint and is encouraging Uniat aggression in the Ukraine.

It is now for the Orthodox Churches to reject the personality cults surrounding contemporary and recent philosophers of Orthodox academic ‘theology’ and their associated freemasonry, simony and decadence. It is for the Russian Orthodox Church in particular to show Europe what Church Christianity, and not Christian sects, actually is. For decades Europe has been riding a bicycle in the wrong direction. It is time to stop, turn round and go back to recivilization. If it does not, it will suicidally leap, like a mass of lemmings, into the abyss of its own making.

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: What phenomena?

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

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

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Which are these injustices?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Why have they stopped?

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

Q: So there are no more converts?

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

Q: How are people being converted today?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q: Which are?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bright Monday 2014

The Mission of Orthodox Civilisation

Following the 1917 Western-organised coup d’etat, before which the Russian Empire had stood on the brink of victory in the Great War and of freeing Constantinople, and after the imperial martyrdoms of 1918 and the lost Civil War, by 1920 it seemed to many White Russians that all was over. The old Russia appeared to be finished, as the new Soviet Russia set out on the path of the atheist materialist ideology which had been imported into it by ‘sealed’ train. The ideals of Holy Rus, preserved in their integrity in the Church Outside Russia, seemed to have no future in the Russian Lands themselves. And so began many a lonely decade of exile, bitter repentance and isolation in the Church Outside Russia, while we hoped and prayed that the Church Inside Russia might not only survive persecution and captivity but also revive, and then we could join together with it.

True, from 1941 there began something of a revival, though it was beneath yet another colossal and tragic onslaught from the hordes of Western Europe. But by 1945 it could be seen that though in many respects the worst was over, there was still far to go. The next two generations were to be years of frustrating stagnation. Then in 1991 there came another tragedy. Through the utter incompetence of the last atheist leaders what remained of the Russian Empire (most of it) was divided. Under the new Communist/Capitalist opportunists, it appeared that the Russian Lands were to face the final phase of Westernisation, wholly losing their identity under the tide of American consumerism. It seemed as though this might be the end even for the remaining Orthodox cultural values, a heritage which had ironically been preserved by the cultural emptiness of Communism.

Thus, the West could impose the ‘restructuring’ (‘perestroika’) in Russia that it wanted. This would involve the destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, which geopoliticians like Brzezhinski knew is the source of resistance to the West, of the ideal of Sovereign Holy Rus. The end, it appeared, was near. Then, in August 2000, with the Jubilee Council of the once captive Church and the canonisation of the Imperial Martyrs, the New Martyrs and New Confessors, there came hope. Just as Orthodox Russia had defeated Napoleon and Hitler, so it could defeat apostasy again. Outside Russia the processes of apostasy in the USA and its Western European colonial satellites (NATO), set on the New World Order which destroys national, family and personal identity, go forward. And although Russia since 2000 has not yet reversed those processes of apostasy, it has stopped them.

The fifth column of the anti-Russian oligarch-thieves, most of them not Russian and living abroad, who stole the people’s assets through ‘privatisation’, criminals protected by the West with its myth of democracy ( = aggressively atheist, elected dictatorship), has been defeated inside Russia. Inspiration came from the spiritual treasury of both parts of the Russian Church, from figures like the ever-memorable Archbishops Seraphim (Sobolev) and Averky of Jordanville and Metropolitan John (Snychev). They all knew that Russian Orthodox Civilisation is founded on the ideal of the Church of All Rus, on Holy Rus, the spiritual foundation for the rebirth of the Orthodox Empire. This is the only remaining bulwark of the unadulterated Christian Faith anywhere, which alone can fight against the evil of apostasy that now walks abroad. Such figures explained that Holy Rus is:

Spiritual integrity – the uncompromised Orthodox Faith lived out in daily life; the primacy of the spiritual and therefore of the moral over the material; the incarnation of this Faith in State life, that is, in social, political and economic life; the Sovereign, Imperial ideal of the people’s monarchy; the kingdom of heaven incarnate on earth in a multinational and multilingual Orthodox Empire. Here, as all the authentic representatives of Holy Rus have explained, we are not talking of Russian nationalism, but of the united patriotism of the many different peoples of Holy Rus. All who identify themselves as Russian Orthodox, regardless of nationality, belong to this world, the Orthosphere, and to the uncompromised service of the spirit and aims of the Church. The rebirth of Holy Rus as a Spiritual Empire is our ideal, the ideal of all Russian Orthodox Civilisation.

In this we are quite different from Western civilisation. Its ideal is progress, defined as material development based on science and technology. Its purpose is to increase human physical comfort and material wealth. On the other hand, Russian Orthodox Civilisation has as its ideal the transfiguration of the human will and soul and mind, which is only possible through spiritual and moral progress. Material progress denotes only that the human-being becomes a thing, part of matter, part of the material and biological world. Hence Darwinism, in which man is promoted as an animal, a mere biological and physiological entity, without an immortal soul, and whose only aim is the acquisition of things, or consumerism, as it is now called. This is the opposite of the spiritual and moral values of the New Testament and therefore of Russian Orthodox Civilisation.

It is thus clear that progress, in the Western material sense, is a movement to apostasy, to the end of the world, to the Last Judgement. This is the opposite of the spiritual and so moral transfiguration of humanity, which is the ideal of the Gospel and of Holy Rus. In the words of the great ecclesiologist and New Hieromartyr St Hilarion (Troitsky): ‘The ideal of Orthodoxy is not progress, but transfiguration…The New Testament does not know of progress in the European sense of this word, in the sense of moving forwards in the same dimension. The New Testament speaks of the transfiguration of nature and consequently moving not forwards, but upwards, heavenwards, Godwards’. This must also be the ideal of the Orthodox State, which is to restrain evil and apostasy by taking on the values of the Church. This is the alternative to the way of the world proposed by globalised capitalism.

The aim of Orthodox Christian economic life consists not of making a profit, as in crude monetarism, but of better ordering our spiritual and so moral life. Instead of Western economics, based on the race for profit through stripping finite natural resources and egoistic consumerism, Russian Orthodox Civilisation proposes sufficiency, but no more, for all. Economic development is to be regulated not by money-lending banksters and speculators on stock exchanges, but by the Lord’s Anointed. Private enterprise is not for individual profit, but for public well-being. Instead of futile and parasitic consumerism, based on the exhaustion of natural resources and the sullying of God’s Creation, we would then have a just distribution of natural wealth and social contentment. For this to happen, we need a State founded on the values of Orthodox Civilisation.

The Atheist War Against the Multinational Orthodox Church Continues

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

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

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

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

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

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

Euroatlantic Aggression Against the Unity of Holy Rus

To speak of a new Cold War between the Western secularist world and the Russian Christian world is absurd; the Western aggression of the Cold War never finishes and has been going on for centuries, at least since the age of Daniel of Galicia (1205–1255) and St Alexander of the Neva (1221-1263). True, sometimes that Cold War heats up, as in the thirteenth century, as in 1612, 1812, 1854, 1914 and 1941. Or, as in recent years, with the attempted US-funded and EU-backed Georgian invasion of Russia in 2008 and now the US-funded and EU-backed seizure of power by mainly Catholic Neo-Nazis in the Ukraine in 2014.

The roots of this aggression, ‘the ‘Cold War’, were sown over a thousand years ago, when what had been the western part of the Church assumed the ideology of papism. This ideology, known as the filioque and stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Pope of Rome, meant that what had been the western part of the Church became a papocaesarist State, its self-proclaimed task to conquer the whole world. This globalist imperialism was in the sixteenth century inherited by a new vital force in the West, Protestantism, which asserted that all male believers are popes, not just one, so ‘democratising’ the filioque.

Today and since its long-awaited appearance in the 1960s, there is the new vital force of atheist secularism, which asserts that all, believers or not, are popes, so further democratising the filioque and making faith completely irrelevant, for the Holy Spirit proceeds from all human nature, not just from white males, but also from atheists, pagans, homosexuals, transgenders etc. So the process of apostasy that started in Rome long ago spread outside it. Rome was only the carrier of the virus that will lead to final apostasy and the end of the world.

In today’s Ukraine we see how all these forces, Catholicism (in its Uniat form), Protestantism (in the new self-appointed President), secularist atheism (in the ideology that rules all these puppets), and also schismatic and apostatic ‘Orthodoxy’ under the married ‘monk’ Denisenko who concelebrates with Catholics) the apostate front is complete. All the filioquists are together, all united, all ready to accept the rule of Antichrist, as long as the West rewards them with their toy of Ukrainian nationalism.

Yesterday in Brussels President Obama, himself the apparently lapsed Muslim leader of the collected atheist and agnostic heads of Western European states, made a clear statement of naked aggressive intent against the Christian world. He called for the stationing of more NATO troops throughout Eastern Europe, asserted that Might is Right and that a big bullying power (the USA) has the right to take over a small, bankrupt country (the Ukraine), using the puppet junta that it has put into power there. Thus, in a speech full of historical lies, the US President denied freedom and democracy, the right to self-determination, of tens of millions of Little Russians and Carpatho-Russians, now under the yoke of the Euroterrorist junta in Kiev.

To sow discord between Orthodox Christians using nationalism as the sword with which to rule and divide has always been the Western technique. Thus, in the Balkans, almost a century ago, it began to divide off the small and weak, if ancient, Greek Orthodox world from the rest of the Orthodox world, experiencing success in Anglican-subsidised Constantinople and British-controlled Greece, Cyprus, Alexandria and Antioch. Then under the masonic Patriarch Myron, it tried to pluck Latin Romania from the Orthodox Christian orbit. Today it works ardently in the same direction in EU Bulgaria, in bombed, much divided and bribed Serbia and at this very moment in puppet-regime Ukraine.

Thus using the weakness of nationalism to divide the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Orthodox world (for which nationalism the West then reproaches it!), the West hopes to disrupt the Inter-Orthodox Council which may take place as early as 2016. Now is the time of testing. If semi-modernist, Western-financed representatives of Local Churches at that Council do not return to the fullness of the Orthodox Christian Tradition, regarding for example ecumenism, the liturgical calendar and other practices, it will turn out not to have been a Council at all, merely a failed Conference. It will then be for the Russian Church to organise a real Council, attended by all the bishops of all the free Local Orthodox Churches.

Euroatlantic aggression against the unity of Holy Rus means a clear choice between Western Secularism and Orthodox Christianity. Whose side are you on?

Gathering the Russian Orthodox World Together

As the American-installed Galician junta in Kiev continues its campaign of economic suicide for the Ukrainian people according to IMF and EU criteria, it is also censoring Russian television – an act unheard of even in European Union countries. Meanwhile, the Ukraine’s former leader, the American-backed Julia Timoshenko, back from Germany, yesterday called for Russia to be obliterated by nuclear weapons and the 8 million citizens of the Ukraine who hold Russian passports to be murdered by ethnic cleansing.

The junta is currently shutting off water and electricity to the newly liberated Crimea. And in Transcarpathia (eastern Carpatho-Russia / Ruthenia), Neo-Nazis have kidnapped the heroic national leader of the Rusin people, Fr Dmitry Sidor, and taken him to an unknown destination. Many fear for his life. The kidnapping has gone unreported in the editorially censored Western media. In the south, north and east of the Ukraine, notably in Odessa, Kharkov and Donetsk, local people have asked for Russian intervention to free them from the tyranny and intimidation of the Uniat junta in Kiev.

It may be that this will not be necessary since the junta is now in a violent feud with members of the far right, anti-Semite ‘Right Sector’ clique which brought it to power. The junta is trying to replace it with US mercenaries, paid for by Washington. The Ukrainian Secret Police has indeed reported that Greystone Limited, a commercial military company, will take charge of suppressing protest movements in the Ukraine. According to a source cited by ITAR-TASS, the junta believes that it is unable by itself to suppress protests and neutralise leaders and activists of the pro-Russian movement among the 83% of Ukrainians who speak Russian in their daily life. In particular, the source said, the junta boss, the Protestant Aleksandr Turchinov, is of this opinion, ‘Therefore, they decided to hire foreign mercenaries, who would serve as political police and State security protection’.

The source stated that the idea of hiring mercenaries came from oligarchs Igor Kolomoisky and Sergei Taruta, the self-appointed junta governors of Dnepropetrovsk and Donetsk provinces. Not so long ago, during a meeting with Turchinov, they discussed a plan to stop the protest movements when Kolomoisky noted, ‘Why reinvent the wheel if there are real people who understand how and how much to pay?’ According to open source information, Greystone Limited is a subsidiary of Backwater, renamed Academi. This well-known company has ties with the CIA and the US Defence Department and its employees participated in the American Afghan War and in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

In Moscow in the ‘Church and the World’ programme on the Rossiya-24 TV channel, none less than Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokalamsk has in a radical change of mind complained of the behaviour of the Uniats and their leaders, notably Archbishop Svyatoslav Shevchuk, in supporting the violent protestors who overthrew the democratic government of the Ukraine in February. He said that those leaders had not only supported joining the EU, but had also campaigned for the active meddling of Western countries in the Ukraine’s internal affairs. He pointed out that Shevchuk had even been to the State Department in Washington together with the schismatic married ‘monk’ and semi-Catholic Filaret Denisenko and asked for US intervention in the Ukraine. The Vatican, he said, had refused to intervene to discipline the Uniats.

Thus, in its crass policies in the Ukraine, the Vatican is now losing its very last friend in the Russian Orthodox Church. We may conclude that is clear that the worldwide task of gathering all faithful Russian Orthodox together will now continue all the more intensively and that even those who formerly had illusions about our ‘friends’, both in the Orthodox Church and outside Her, are rapidly losing them.

The West Further Isolates Itself: Russia Faces its Eastern Destiny

US global influence outside the club of the world’s seven most insolvent nations – the now irrelevant G7 – has declined dramatically in the last few months. Firstly, there was the Western threat to bomb Syria, which failed when it was proved that the poison gas attack in Damascus had been carried out by Western-backed terrorists. Secondly, there were the bullying Western threats against the democratic and bloodless decision of Crimeans to return to Russia after the frightening Neo-Nazi coup d’etat in Kiev, which has so frightened so many other Ukrainians. Russia had already warned the tyrannical West several times that sanctions against the self-determination of the Crimea would be counterproductive and now three geopolitical shifts are afoot.

Firstly, with the United States and much of the US-controlled European Union rejecting Russia, it is turning east for business, contracts and alliances. The US-staged and funded (5 billion dollars) coup d’etat in the Ukraine has already brought Russia and China together, encouraging bilateral trade and in the future possibly marginalising the dollar. With China refusing to vote against Russia over the Crimea at the UN (it has Taiwan in mind) and suing the bankrupt Ukraine for $3 billion for a loan repayment, the Chief Economist of Russia’s largest bank has stated that ‘China’s yuan may become the third reserve currency in the future’. If such a joint, commodity-backed reserve currency bypasses the dollar, Russia will become independent of Western financial markets.

While Europe seeks alternative sources of energy, in case Russia stops gas exports to it (the imminent rise in gas prices to the Ukraine by 40% is of great concern), Russia is preparing to announce a huge natural gas supply deal with China that is apparently close after years of negotiations. If it can be signed when President Putin visits China in May, he will be able to hold it up to show that global power has shifted eastwards and that he does not even need the West for exports, so binding Russia and China in an axis. It should be noted that China has already overtaken Germany as Russia’s biggest buyer of crude oil thanks to oil supplies via the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline and another crossing Kazakhstan.

Secondly, as if pushing Russia into the embrace of the world’s most populous nation was not enough, there is also the second most populated country in the world, India. The Russian government has taken the time to thank it too for its understanding over the Crimea – saying that India had shown restraint and objectivity. President Putin has called the Indian Prime Minister to discuss the crisis, suggesting that there is room for Russia’s ties with traditionally non-aligned India to flourish. Russian moves to regain the Crimea were seen very favourably by the Indian Establishment, which suffered enough from British colonialism and has little time for Western bullying and patronising.

Thirdly, the neo-conservative oligarchy that governs the Western world has also managed to undermine the European Union’s once good relations with the Russian Federation. Since, as they see it, Russia stands in the way of their New World Order hegemony and so has to be destroyed, if the Eurozone has to be destroyed in the process, then that too can be done, as Victoria Nuland has so ineloquently put it. Relations between the European Union and the US are, to say the least, cool, apart from with the UK government, which alone has always played the role of poodle to the US. The elite that runs the European Union has never been so unpopular with the peoples it dictates to and it risks being rejected in the May elections.

It should be noted that China and India are the two civilisations which have always resisted Westernisation and its Frankish Catholic/Protestant filioque ethos. If China and India should draw close to Russia, it may be that Russian Orthodoxy will at last become free to play its destined role in both those countries, bringing many souls to Christ. Having in its quest for global hegemony attempted to destroy Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the neocon elite has in the Ukraine now declared war on the Russian Orthodox world, where it has no power to appoint masonic patriarchs, as elsewhere. In so doing, it has further isolated itself from the Church of God and is setting its Sodom against Jerusalem. That is to play with volcanic fire. Frankly, the Western elite seems to have been so blinded by its hubris that all it is doing now is re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic.

Why the Transformation Now?

We who were born in the dark years of the Cold War and who hoped against hope for the restoration of Orthodox Russia suffered much. Three generations of an atheist regime in the former Russian Empire was followed by one generation of decadence, of ABCDE – alcoholism, abortion, corruption, drugs and emigration. But now, in 2014, and even before this, in 2007 with the reconciliation of the two parts of the Russian Orthodox Church, we have in recent days, weeks, months and years begun to see the light. Why has the wait been so long and the suffering so great?

We suffered because the treachery that brought about the ritual killing and martyrdom of God’s Anointed, Tsar Nicholas II, hung like a curse over the whole former Russian Empire and the world. For this reason those politicians and economists, Russian, European and American, who just over a hundred years ago predicted a brilliant future for the Russian Empire, that by 1950 it would dominate the world, were wrong. Equally wrong were those Western and Westernised liberals who predicted a brilliant future for Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – and for the same reason.

What has changed today? Those who read the Old Testament know what has changed. It does not require a higher degree in mathematics to understand it. Let us turn to the Book of Exodus: ‘Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me’ (Ex. 20, 5). Calculating a generation as 25 years and starting in 1914, we came to the end of the third generation of apostasy in 1989. Today we are at the end of the hundred year period, of four generations. Simple arithmetic indicates that we are now seeing the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. Restoration is at hand.

Reconstruction Begins (1914-2014)

1914 – 1939 – 1964 – 1989 – 2014. The hundred-year nightmare of four generations of decivilisation is coming to an end. The generational change is becoming apparent and the cycle of historical injustices is being broken. True, we are now witnessing only the first timid signs of this transformation, but there is the promise of much more to come. After the recent expression of the free choice of the people of the Crimea, we are now witnesses to a historic moment throughout the Russian Federation and indeed throughout the Eurasian Union. The attempt to westernise, that is, to secularise, Christian Russia by violence, that which began 100 years ago in 1914 by dragging the then Russian Empire into the contagion of a decivilising Western imperialistic war, has failed.

The attempt to destroy the millennial underlying belief system which held together the East Slav and other peoples of the Russian Empire had begun with the influx of Western materialism among the upper classes long before 1914. What was new in 1914 was the spread of Western materialist ideology in a most extreme form. First, from 1914 a foreign invasion (as in 1812 and 1854) led to weakness. However, this time the weakness became so great that in 1917, just as the Russian Empire was on the brink of victory, it led to the overthrow of the legitimate government by upper-class traitors, orchestrated from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg (just as the recent overthrow of the legitimate government in the Ukraine has been orchestrated from the US Embassy in Kiev). lmmediately, after a good many deaths, this ‘bloodless’ revolution took the legitimate ruler captive and pressure was put on the Church to compromise and accept the coup d’etat.

This first coup d’etat was followed some six months later by the seizure of power from these upper-class incompetents and traitors. This second coup d’etat was operated by a group of extreme and violent materialists, the brainwashed heirs of Voltaire, Darwin and Nietzsche, imported into Russia through and by Germany in a train (not sealed, as the myth would have it). lmmediately, the Church, which had always supplied the belief-system of the Russian Lands, came under bloody and unheard of persecution and the former ruler and his family were slaughtered. The materialists abolished the Russian Empire and founded the Soviet Union. There followed a generation of the most violent persecution, sweeping away millions of innocent lives, including 600 bishops, nearly 200,000 priests, monks and nuns and millions of faithful Christians. Mass shootings, artificial famine in Russia and the Ukraine to enforce collectivisation (on the model of the ‘Enclosures’ in England and the ‘Clearances’ in Scotland), torture chambers and concentration camps were the rule of the day. The Western world, birthplace of the ideology behind this holocaust, was mainly silent and eagerly traded with the new country.

This generation of violence ended in 1941, when the contagion that had yet again started in Western Europe, this time in 1939, also spread to the Soviet Union with yet another invasion, the fourth bout of anti-Russian Western imperialism in the five generations since 1812. On the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands, expansionist Nazi Germany invaded the former Russian Empire, causing 27 million mainly civilian victims, the greatest holocaust and genocide known to the history of humanity. However, it was also this holocaust that began to bring the new rulers of the Soviet Union to their senses. lt was a very slow and extremely painful process that lasted two generations and although direct persecution of the Church more or less ceased, indirect persecution continued most viciously. However, during that period, most stopped believing in atheism – when they had believed in it at all – and even their atheist rulers began to realise that their ideology was bankrupt.

It was in 1989, exactly two generations after the Second European War of 1939, that the signs of imminent collapse became obvious. This culminated in 1991, exactly two generations after the most recent Western invasion of the Soviet Union, that the atheist regime collapsed and the country fell apart. The West was triumphant and now, having divided, it tried to rule through its present ideology. So there began that disastrous period when Western materialism, now in its liberal consumerist form of individualist egoism, spread anarchically into the newly divided countries of the old Soviet Union. The spiritual and so moral decivilisation of the West took over. There was a decade of shame, when capitalist oligarchs (the old nomenklatura, the new aristocracy) stole the public assets and the poor were created. ABCDE – alcoholism, abortion, corruption, drugs and emigration – prevailed. Many of the best left, many of the worst seized assets and power. Only in recent years have we begun to see light, culminating now in the freedom and return home of the Crimea.

Four generations, one hundred years, since the attempt to destroy the Russian Orthodox world began in 1914, its geographical reunion has started. Christianity, in its original form and not in the apostate and compromised forms of the second millennium, is rising up against the whole tide of atheist secularism that seized power in Saint Petersburg in 1917 and in Kiev in 2014. lf those who are apostates and those who are compromised do not wish to join this movement, they are free not to do so. Thus, if the Roman Catholics of former Poland, now the far west of the Ukraine, wish to leave the Ukraine for the Poland of the secularist and bankrupt EU, let them do so, taking their Galicia with them. But let them leave the rest of the Ukraine, the other 80%, alone. As regards the rest of the smaller and weaker Orthodox Christian world in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it can now look to the Russian Orthodox Church to lead it away from the mess of pottage of the European Union and the USA, back to Orthodox Christian roots and the free and uncompromised calendar and practices of the Orthodox Tradition in the coming Inter-Orthodox Council. The Restoration, Reconstitution and Reconstruction of the world that was lost in 1914 are in the air. Our vision is clear.