Category Archives: The Romanovs

Foreign-Organized Bolsheviks Massacred the Tsar, His Family and His Servants 100 Years Ago: Four Weeks To Go

In four weeks’ time we will mark the hundredth anniversary of the massacre of Imperial Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and his Family. On 17 July 1918 their foreign-organized captors herded the family into a basement of a house in Ekaterinburg, at the meeting point between Europe and Asia. Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra, their daughters Olga (22) Tatiana (21), Maria (19), Anastasia (17) and Alexei (13) fell under a hail of bullets. In a ritual of evil the family’s corpses and those of three loyal servants and the family doctor were then stripped naked, mutilated, disfigured, burned with petrol and acid and secretly buried. So fell Christian Russia, which had for over 900 years resisted both the Mongol-Tartar hordes from the East and the Catholic-Protestant hordes from the West, keeping the balance in the world from these extremists.

Throughout the ‘Heartland’, from Kaliningrad to the Bering Straits, stretching nearly half-way around the northern third of the world to three Continents, and beyond that in oases of Holy Rus outside the Russian Lands, Russian Orthodox Christians this year celebrate. We celebrate the martyrdom of the last Christian Emperor and regret the fall of the Christian Empire after 1600 years. With Church services and conferences, monuments and museums, art galleries and films, it will be hard to forget the tragedy – except in the atheist West. Perhaps the lack of interest is due to being anti-Christian and so being Russophobic, since the essence of Russophobia is hatred for Christianity? After all, atheism is always negative, since it starts with a negation.

The so-called Russian Revolution was a coup similar to most other Western-engineered ‘regime changes’ before and since. Jacob Schiff, (1847-1920), the Wall Street banker who had financed Japan during the Japanese War against Russia (1904-1905), publicly boasted of his success in bringing about the coup, with the help of mainly aristocratic Russian traitors and apostates. Imperial Christian gold reserves weighed 1,311 tonnes: they went to the West and not to the people. In 1911 the St. Louis Dispatch had published a cartoon by Bolshevik insider Robert Minor. His published cartoon portrays Karl Marx with a book entitled Socialism under his arm, standing amid a cheering crowd on Wall Street.

Gathered around and greeting him with enthusiastic handshakes are characters identified as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, John D. Ryan of National City Bank, Morgan partner George W. Perkins and Teddy Roosevelt, leader of the Progressive Party. Western corporations moved in for the kill; Ford, General Electric, International Harvester, Caterpillar etc. Gulag slaves, whom Trotsky-Bronstein dubbed White Negroes, worked harder and cost less than those employed in the West. Over 1,000 Gulag camps were scattered across the bankster colony. The United States and Britain invested heavily in the blood-soaked Soviet regime.

The Romanov Dynasty was primarily made up of Europe’s royal houses. The blood of the martyrs was that of England, Denmark, Greece, Germany, Romania, Serbia and the Habsburgs, as well as that of Russia. The martyred Romanovs could lay claim to being of the essence of Europe’s royal houses, not so much a Russian as a European dynasty. There were 53 Romanovs living in Russia when Tsar Nicholas II was removed from his throne on 15 March 1917. Eighteen of them were slaughtered in heart-wrenching circumstances. 100 years on we now await the coming Tsar, the next Christian Emperor from the Romanov family, who alone can through Christ restore sanity in this world gone mad.

 

On the Martyrdom of St Gregory the New

The wicked shall do wickedly and none of the wicked shall understand; but those who are wise shall understand.

Daniel 12, 10

There exists over a century’s worth of ridiculous articles, books and films slandering the Orthodox elder, prophet and new martyr Gregory Rasputin. These hundreds of works are based on atrocious vilification and blatant lies, for the purposes of self-justification, which initially permitted the illegal seizure of power in Russia, and later of sexual titillation and lurid sensationalism in order to satisfy money-grubbing greed. As an example, one relatively recent work, claiming authority!, ‘The Last (sic) Word’, written by the Soviet playwright, Edvard Radzinsky and published in 2000 in this country, is just more pulp fiction mascarading as pseudo-scientific history. It too was duly translated into various Western languages to titillate those who want more salacious, tabloid-style stories and earn the publishers and author millions.

However, since 2000, serious works in Russian, the untranslated seven volumes by Sergey Fomin and the untranslated studies by Alexander Bokhanov, Yury Rassulin, Igor Evsin, Tatiana Mironova and Oleg Platonov, all serious historians and researchers, have disproved the conscious and unconscious slanders against Gregory Rasputin-Novy. The figure of St Gregory the New, venerated by the holy elder Nikolai (Guryanov), has now emerged and we are able to establish the details of his martyrdom. In this we have been helped, strangely enough, by two English writers, Andrew Cook (1), an investigative journalist, and Dr Richard Cullen, a former expert in forensics with the Metropolitan Police (2), who have both exposed the involvement of British spies in the torture and murder.

Although both non-Russian speakers and so both naively and ignorantly repeating the absurd background slanders against St Gregory, their interest has mainly been in official British involvement and the details of his appalling torture and murder, carried out by a ruthless British spy with the help of decadent Russian traitors. And that is new. Thanks to their investigations, we now know almost exactly how in the last hours of his life on earth Gregory Rasputin was tortured, who tortured and killed him and why. In reality, the first murder of the so-called ‘Russian Revolution’ was committed by a British secret agent. Let us sum up the still unchallenged and perhaps definitive findings of Cook and Cullen about Gregory’s last hours on earth in Petrograd, today’s Saint Petersburg.

According to eyewitnesses, Gregory was picked up from his flat at 64 Gorokhovaya Street in the then capital by the fabulously rich, Oxford-educated Prince Felix Yusupov around midnight on 16/29 – 17/30 December 1916. He left with him in a car driven by another plotter, the Polish Dr Stanislav Lazovert. He was taken to the Yusupov Moyka Place, having been enticed to a meeting in a basement dining room there, chosen as it was virtually soundproof and would muffle any noise. Apart from Prince Yusupov, a bisexual transvestite and occultist, also present were Grand Duke Dmitri Romanov, also a notorious and amoral loose liver (later known for a relationship with Coco Chanel), a vulgar, anti-Semitic politician called Vladimir Purishkevich, an army officer and friend of Yusupov called Sergey Sukhotin and a British spy called Oswald Rayner.

Rayner had been a close friend of Yusupov in Oxford in 1909. He had studied modern languages at Oriel College from 1907-10 and Yusupov had studied Fine Art for four years from 1909-1913 at nearby University College, where he had taken drugs. They may have been involved in a homosexual sex affair with each other, as is common in the British Establishment and is today the pride of its secret services (3). After Oxford Rayner was eventually to become one of four British spies working for the SIS (4) in Petrograd. The others were the head of the SIS in Petrograd, Samuel Hoare (later a discredited, Fascist-appeasing Conservative politician, who became known as Sir Samuel and Viscount Templewood), who was a friend of the equally unscrupulous Purishkevich, and two lesser British agents, John Scale and Stephen Alley, also involved in the plot to murder Gregory.

Once at the Yusupov Palace after midnight on Saturday 17/30 December, Gregory was given wine to drink and plied with cakes laced with tiny amounts of potassium cyanide. The dose was incompetently administered according to the study by Alexander Bokhanov and so weak that Gregory suffered at most a minor headache and stomach-ache. So he was tortured by the professional sadist Rayner, leading to ‘a slow, lingering and painful death’ (5) in the basement room. Firstly, he was attached with a garrotte around his neck, either seated or else spread-eagled against a wall (5). His face and body were then beaten with a cosh, with which his genitals were also crushed, which must have been agonizing. He was also knifed in the left side and at some point his right eyeball was gouged out, an injury probably caused by Yusupov’s shoe.

After these tortures, carried out at about 2.30 am and in any case not later than 4.00 am on Saturday 17/30 December, Gregory was shot three times. This was done at point blank range, from less than eight inches (20 cm). One shot went through his stomach and liver and the other was fired from behind the kidney. These were fired from two different weapons, possibly from a Browning by Yusupov and a Sauvage by Purishkevich (Grand Duke Dmitry swore an oath that he had not killed Gregory). These wounds did not stop Gregory from trying to make the sign of the cross (the fingers of his right hand were set in this pose) before a fatal third shot, from a .455 Webley, standard British issue, a smaller calibre weapon than those used for the first two shots, was fired at point blank range into his forehead. This killed the prophet Gregory outright. It was the feast day of the holy prophet Daniel, a quotation from whose book (Dan 5, 30) was later found in the house where the Tsar and his family and servants were martyred eighteen months later.

Gergory’s body was covered in a cloth, variously described as a curtain or a robe, the legs and arms tied with rope and then wrapped in Gregory’s beaver fur coat, which could not be disposed off otherwise. It was taken by the driver Lazovert, Rayner and probably other conspirators, either British spies or else Sukhotin, through the secluded rear entrance of the Palace and bundled into a car, no doubt the same one as before. This was driven to the nearby Bolshoy Petrovsky Bridge near Krestovsky island, where the body was thrown into a large ice hole, no doubt reconnoitred beforehand, in the Malaya Nevka river, which flows into the Gulf of Finland. On being thrown into the river, the body bounced off the fourth bridge support, which further injured the head, and an overshoe fell off onto the ice. The flow of the water should have carried the body away, ensuring that it disappeared for ever. It did not.

That it did not, that no weights were attached to the body and that human blood was found on the parapet of the bridge and an overshoe on the ice were all basic mistakes of the conspirators. In reality, thanks to the finding of the blood, the overshoe and the bad choice of site, the body was recovered by the river bank just two days later, on the morning of Monday 19 December 2016/1 January 2017, only some seventy yards from where it had been thrown in. In Western countries it was New Year’s Day 1917. Meanwhile, Purishkevich and Romanov stayed in the Palace, toasting one another, and cleared up the mess, also shooting a Palace dog. This was done so that the corpse of the dog would explain away the noise of the first three shots that had killed Gregory, in case they had been heard and any possible traces of blood. All the above is a reconstruction from the Russian autopsy and modern forensic investigation of evidence and photographs of the corpse.

All of this had been a carefully and cynically planned conspiracy, with everything being prepared beforehand over several weeks, if not months. After the murder, Yusupov and Purishkevich both lied about what had happened in their conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Both of them had prepared fictionalized and dramatized stories in self-justification. These fabrications were related soon after the events, carefully concealing any British involvement, which would have ruined relations between Great Britain and Russia. So why was Gregory murdered? The classic excuse was because Great Britain feared that Gregory was advising the Tsar to conclude a separate peace with Germany. This of course was pure propaganda in order to justify the British murder and later coup d’etat. Gregory had no political influence over the Tsar, who had totally ignored Gregory’s request not to enter into the War in 1914. And in any case, the Tsar had never had any intention of concluding such a peace, as the British full well knew.

The real reason for the murder was that Gregory stood in the way of the overthrow of the Tsar and his replacement by Anglophile traitors from the House of Romanov, like the Grand Duke Dmitry who as a Romanov guaranteed immunity from prosecution for the murder, supported by equally treacherous masonic politicians in the Duma. Great Britain’s interest in murdering Gregory was that with the Tsar at the head of the re-equipped and reinvigorated Russian Army, Russian victory was guaranteed in 1917. Such a victory, from a British viewpoint, had to be stopped. Triumphant Russian troops liberating Berlin and Vienna from tyrants, the consequent control of all Central and Eastern Europe freed from Prussian and Austro-Hungarian tyranny by Imperial Russia, the long-awaited restoration of Poland, once most of its territory had been freed from them, and the Russian liberation of Constantinople and control of the Dardanelles (as perfidious Britain had agreed to on paper), were not in British imperialist interests.

This is why Britain freed the evil Trotsky from a Canadian concentration camp in April 1917 (6) and sent him back to Russia, as later Germany sent back Lenin and others, and why the anti-Christian and pro-Bolshevik (7) British Prime Minister Lloyd George had openly greeted the overthrow of the Christian Emperor (6) as the attainment of ‘one of our war aims’. (It was similarly acclaimed in France and the USA, which, opportunistically seizing its chance, entered the War immediately after the coup d’etat in Russia, which US citizens had helped finance). Indeed, according to the French ambassador, Paleologue, and many others, the overthrow had been carefully plotted by aristocratic Russian traitors together with the British ambassador, Buchanan, at the British Embassy in Petrograd.

The conspirators all believed that if Gregory, the ‘Friend’ of the Tsar and Tsarina, could be removed, then they could persuade the Tsar to abdicate and Russian domination of the Continent could be prevented. This had been exactly prophesied by Gregory and of course it is exactly what happened, for two months later the Tsar was overthrown in a plot, orchestrated by cowardly generals, treacherous politicians and deceitful Romanovs. This would extend the bloodletting of the First World War from three years to four and a half, costing directly millions more lives, not to mention tens of millions of lives later under the Soviet Bolsheviks and the German Fascists, who would never have come to power without the coup d’etat against the Russian Emperor.

In reality, the liberation of Eastern and Central Europe was achieved not by the Christian Russian Empire in 1917, but in 1945 by the atheistic Soviet Union, the Frankenstein monster of Lenin and Stalin created by the meddling, anti-Christian West. The torture and murder of Gregory Rasputin-Novy and all that followed lies like an impermeable bloodstain on the British Establishment which ordered and carried out his execution, a crime only recently exposed and which has never been officially admitted, let alone expiated. In the Great Reckoning that is to come, it would be well if the British Establishment made a beginning to its repentance now.

Notes:

1. To Kill Rasputin, Andrew Cook, 2005

2. Rasputin, The Role of Britain’s Secret Service in His Torture and Murder by Richard Cullen, 2010

3. See for example: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/mi5-named-uks-most-lgbt-friendly-employer-in-annual-stonewall-ranking-a6820261.html

4. The SIS (Special Intelligence Service is the British agency that does the dirty work (torture and murder) for MI5 and MI6. It still exists and is active. One of its ex-agents, a South African, told me in private conversation in 2012 that it commits up to 100 murders per year.

5. Cullen, P. 197

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky

7. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lloyd_George#Prime_Minister_.281916.E2.80.931922.29

St Maria of Helsinki

‘All the tears that you have shed will glitter like diamonds on the robes of the Mother of God; for all your sufferings and trials God will especially bless you and reward you’.

Prophecy of the Holy Martyr Tsarina Alexandra (1)

There are a number of ancient Orthodox saints in Scandinavia: St Anschar (Oscar, + 865) in Demark; St Sunniva (c. 990), St Olaf (+ 1030) and St Hallvard of Oslo (+ 1043) in Norway: St Olaf (+ 1022), St Sigfrid (+ 1045) and St Anna of Novgorod (+ 1050) in Sweden. However, there is no ancient Orthodox saint in Finland as such, as it came to the Faith so late, already in Roman Catholic times, so it missed out on being in communion with the Church. However, in the renewal of Orthodoxy in modern times Finland does have a saint: Righteous Mother Maria of Helsinki.

Born on 16 July 1884 in Oranienbaum in Russia as Anna Alexandrovna Taneyeva into a family with Imperial connections, she was to become a lady-in-waiting and the closest friend of the Tsarina Alexandra. Snobbish and profoundly jealous aristocrats, rich but without nobility and imbued with selfish vanity and vulgarity, detested her. Typically for them, they dismissed here and slandered her as stout, unattractive, talkative, naive and unintelligent. However, children loved her and the pious Tsarina saw her pure, kind-hearted and childlike face and beautiful, tender eyes and valued her immense piety and generosity. Thus, the Tsarina befriended Anna, preferring her to the superficial and unspiritual court snobs, and in 1905, at the age of twenty, Anna was given a position at court. The three following years she went on holiday with the Romanovs.

In 1907 Anna Taneyeva married Alexander Vyrubov, an officer in the Imperial Chancellery. A few days before she had been warned by Gregory Rasputin that the marriage would be an unhappy one, but she had ignored him. The marriage remained unconsummated, for Anna’s husband did indeed turn out to be mentally deranged, having tried to kill her, and had to go for treatment in Switzerland. Within eighteen months the unconsummated marriage had been annulled. After the Revolution Anna’s mother told interrogators that her son-in-law had ‘proved to be completely impotent, with an extremely perverse sexual psychology that manifested itself in various sadistic episodes in which he inflicted moral suffering on her’.

Anna Vyrubova, as she had now become known, became one of Elder Gregory Rasputin’s followers and on orders from the Tsarina went to visit his home village of Pokrovskoe in Siberia in order to investigate rumours about him, which turned out to be baseless. Her importance grew at court and with the death of St John of Kronstadt Elder Gregory became more and more important to her. For some years she served as a go-between for the Tsarina and Elder Gregory at those times when his healing powers were needed. During World War I Anna trained as a Red Cross nurse and cared for soldiers along with the Tsarina and the Tsarina’s two older daughters, the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana. Her great generosity to the poor left her virtually penniless.

In January 1915 Anna was severely injured in a train accident between the capital and Tsarskoye Selo; the convalescent found herself crippled, but credited Gregory with saving her life through his prayers. In September 1916 she, Lili Dehn and Gregory went to Tobolsk to venerate St John of Tobolsk who had been canonized. Anna opened St Seraphim’s military hospital with the huge amount of 100,000 roubles she received from the railway company in compensation for her accident. She also planned to build a church dedicated to St Seraphim of Sarov on her property.

On the evening of 16 December 1916 Elder Gregory told Anna of a proposed visit to Prince Yusupov in order to meet his wife who was reportedly ill. The next morning Gregory’s disappearance was reported by his daughter to Anna. An investigation followed and the murderers Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri were placed under house arrest. Two days later Gregory’s brutalized body was found. On 21 December it was taken to be buried in a corner on Anna’s property adjacent to the Imperial Palace. The burial was attended by the Imperial couple with their daughters, Anna, her maid and a few of Gregory’s friends.

On 21 March 1917, very ill with the measles, the much slandered Anna Vyrubova was arrested for no reason by the masonic Kerensky dictatorship. Completely innocent, she underwent five months of harsh imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg that even included an unnecessary and humiliating medical examination to prove her virginity. The fifteen interrogations on her political role concluded that she was too morally upright, honest, sincere and childlike to have done anything wrong and she was released.

Anna’s memoirs describe her harsh treatment in the damp prison, her illness, the beatings, kickings, mockings and being spat upon, and her narrow escape from execution when, miraculously, she met several old friends of her father on a Saint Petersburg street who helped her to escape. This she attributed to St John of Kronstadt, who had already consoled her in a dream before her arrest. She endured much hardship and poverty avoiding the Bolsheviks, but only reluctantly escaped to Finland in early 1921.

Her memoirs, Memories of the Russian Court (2), published in Paris in 1922, provide rare and valuable descriptions of the home life of the Tsar and his family. No-one understood Gregory Rasputin and the Tsarina better than Anna. Condemned and slandered by the worldly as naïve and unintelligent, she had foreseen everything that would happen with the overthrow of the Tsar. The ‘intelligent’ politicians and aristocrats who had betrayed the Tsar had foreseen nothing.

In 1923 Anna became a nun at the monastery of Valaam under the name of Mother Maria. She lived under the spiritual direction of Valaam elders and lived in poverty as a pious Russian Orthodox nun. Unable to enter the convent of her choice due to her physical disabilities, she stayed in her own very modest house, living the strict monastic life of a secret nun. At first she lived with her mother and then, when she died in 1937, a loyal friend called Vera Zapevalova (+ 1984), poorly and reclusively.

Anna spent this second half of her life first in locations in Finland, then in Sweden and after the Second World War in Helsinki. For over forty years a nun, she died penniless aged 80 on 20 July 1964 in Helsinki, where her grave is located in the Orthodox section of the Hietaniemi cemetery. She had been born one day before the date of the martyrdom of the Imperial Family and reposed three days after it. In birth, as in death, she had been tied to them. So ended the life of one who was faithful to the end to the ideals of God, Tsar and Homeland.

‘In Finland you have a saint – Anna Vyrubova – said a hieromonk from the Trinity St Sergius Lavra. Turn to her in any need for help’. ‘Go to her grave in the Orthodox cemetery there, stand and pray. Feel how easy it is to pray there, how calm and peaceful your soul becomes’ (Bishop Arseny). (3)

‘May God help us all….to unite with one another in peace and love, offering our tears and ardent repentance to the Merciful God for our countless sins, committed before the Lord and the Tsar crowned by God…And only then will a great and mighty Russia rise up, for our joy and for the fear of our enemies’. (3)

Mother Maria

Notes:

1. P. 196 of ‘Vernye’ (The Faithful) by O. V. Chernova, Moscow 2009

2. http://www.alexanderpalace.org/russiancourt2006/chapter_I.html

3. P. 203 of ‘Vernye’ (The Faithful) by O. V. Chernova, Moscow 2009

The Real Gregory Rasputin

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men, in whom there is no hope.

Psalm 145, 3

As the Truth of God begins to be revealed, so everything in Russia will change.

Elder Nikolai (Guryanov)

Foreword

My interest in Gregory Rasputin was first sparked by a television programme fifty years ago on the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. Although, as a child, I could not investigate the claims made, I knew instinctively that there was something wrong with what was being said. I sensed a manipulation. Forty-two years ago I went to study at Oxford at the oldest college in Oxford, where Prince Felix Yusupov, the supposed murderer of Gregory Rasputin had studied and visited the ‘Yusupov room’ where the prince had lived. I still could not understand the story since, with the Soviet Union and the Cold War still in full swing, I could not access the necessary archives on either side. Others have since done that and their results, given below, provide long-awaited justice.

Introduction

‘Rasputin? A horse thief, a mad monk, a fraud with hypnotic powers, a priest-charlatan who manipulated stupid, hysterical women, a flagellant sectarian and pervert, a criminal who ruled the Russian Empire, dictating all policies and making all political appointments through bribery, a debauchee who organized orgies, a drunkard (like all Russians), a primitive barbarian, a Satanist, a German spy, the reason for the downfall of Russia, even his name means ‘depraved’. I know, I have read the book and seen the film’. So goes the view of the average ‘educated’ Western person, as also largely that of the average Soviet citizen. However, they are all the brainwashed victims of the same slanderer and we recall that the Greek for ‘slanderer’ is ‘o diavolos’, ‘the devil’.

In reality, not one bit of the above has been proved true, including that he was a debauchee and a drunkard, and most of it is patently untrue. It is all classic self-justifying Russophobia which says ‘Russians are primitive, we are superior, therefore we can do anything we like’. He was certainly not mad, never a priest, monk, thief or spy, never a flagellant sectarian or a Satanist, and had very little if any political influence. He was a pious Christian peasant, married with three children, who gave generous alms, understood the Holy Scriptures better than professors of the Bible, and was so pious that God gave him miraculous powers of healing. As for his surname, a nickname, it was common in Siberia and denotes someone who lives where roads meet, a crossroads.

On the other hand, what we do know, and this ever since the publication of the memoirs of Prince Nikolay Zhevakhov in the 1920s, is that he was murdered by British spies, with the co-operation of rich, decadent, jealous and apostate Russian aristocrats, one a transvestite prince who dabbled in the occult and savagely and ritually battered Gregory Rasputin’s corpse, as the sadistic freemason and decadent Prince Yusupov himself boasted of doing, one a more or less Fascist politician, another a Romanov prince of notoriously loose morals who betrayed his relative the Tsar. All of them through their murderous betrayal, indirectly, handed Russia over to the genocidal Bolsheviks and their imported alien ideology for three generations, 75 years of hellish torment.

What we also know is that he was much respected as a holy elder (‘starets’) and wonderworking healer by innumerable clergy and laity and that the incredible slanders against him were invented by corrupt sources, both just before the Revolution and immediately afterwards, when his body was dug up and incinerated by fanatics, frightened that veneration for him would grow. All these slanders and the mindless gossip that spread them have to this day been repeated by the sensationalist mammons of Hollywood, by Western and Soviet hack writers and by embittered émigrés who could not accept their responsibility for their self-punishment of exile. They only furthered their self-justifying lies and scandals, which they knew they could make money out of.

The Sources of the Slander

Recent research since the downfall of the Bolshevik regime a generation ago in 1991 has led to several new studies of Gregory Rasputin by professional historians and even veneration of ‘the Martyr Gregory’ by some, including by the Elder Nikolai Guryanov, with an akathist composed and icons painted. So far unchallenged and also untranslated, because Western publishers only translate scurrilous works like those of the Soviet novelist Edvard Radzinsky, and not professionally-written works or the unsensational lives of the pious, these new Russian studies of professional historians like the seven volumes by Sergey Fomin and the books by Alexander Bokhanov, Yury Rassulin, Igor Evsin, Tatiana Mironova and Oleg Platonov lead us to take a very different view.

All the myths about Gregory Rasputin were invented from 1910 on by those jealous of the Tsar – without much need for imagination, because they attributed to him what they themselves did, that is, they were talking about themselves and their own deeply-held and practised vices. They were jealous because they wanted the power of the Tsar and therefore wanted to discredit the legitimate holders of that power, the Tsar and his family, including his ill heir and his healer, and the Orthodox Christian society that he ruled over, which they so hated. And so these rich hedonists and decadents spread their lies and gossip in the worldly salons of Saint Petersburg, among the futile wealthy and aristocratic debauchees, and in the gutter press of the time.

These sources included the cunning Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich who, rather like the French and British generals on the Western Front, had led his troops to massacre and defeat, trusting in infantry and cavalry against machine guns, and had had to be replaced, the freemasons Maklakov, Dzhunkovsky and the hack journalist Amfiteatrov, the defrocked apostate Sergey (Iliodor) Trufanov, the conscienceless politician Guchkov, the atheists Milyukov and Gorky, the liar Rodzianko, the pervert and occultist Yusupov and the stupid Purishkevich. They were all traitors who wanted to impose their pagan Russia on Christian Russia. These were the very ones who accused Gregory Rasputin of their own sins, which is why their descriptions were so eloquent.

They accused him of lying, of debauchery and of interfering in the affairs of State – everything that they themselves either did or yearned to do. Belonging to the elite, they were in such a state of demonic delusion that they even convinced themselves that they were doing Russia a service by pandering to their own vanity and plotting against the Tsar and those faithful to him, including the healer of the Heir, and so seizing power. They believed their own slander and forgeries, when in fact they were talking about their own sins. Gregory Rasputin was the useful scapegoat invented by ‘princes and sons of men’ to justify their ruthless ambition. If they had not chosen him, they would have chosen another – peasant Russia was there only to be exploited by them.

Views of Those Who Knew Gregory Rasputin

If we look at those who actually knew him, we obtain a different view. Thus, Bishops Barnabas (Nakropin) and Isidore (Kolokolov) were close friends of Gregory Rasputin till the end of his life, trusted him completely and Bishop Isidore celebrated his funeral service, for which he in turn was much slandered. In his memoirs another, General Kurlov, wrote that he had been ‘struck by Rasputin’s profound knowledge of Holy Scripture and theological questions’ and characterized him as a good man who ‘constantly expressed the sense of Christian forgiveness for our enemies’. Such affirmations are confirmed by other devout and well-educated clergy and laity, impressed by Gregory Rasputin’s piety, and they naturally revered him as an elder.

In his memoirs the head of the Police Department, A. T. Vasiliev, wrote that the results of his many investigations confirmed his initial supposition that there was no compromising correspondence with Rasputin, no letters from the Tsarina. Indeed, why should there have been? Rasputin was only semi-literate, he would have had difficulty reading anything. Vasiliev wrote: ‘I also investigated to find out if Rasputin kept any documents, money or valuables in a bank. My investigations were fruitless, another proof of my conviction of the absurdity of the scandalous rumours about Rasputin’. But these witnesses are only the beginning. There are many others of integrity and indeed holiness who say the same, confirming the absurdity of the slanders.

Among these are of course the future saints Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, their five pious children, Archpriest Alexander Vasiliev, the spiritual father of the Imperial Family, the pious virgin Anna Vyrubova (later Mother Maria of Helsinki, who is venerated as a saint today), Prince N. D. Zhevakhov, Julia Dehn, other bishop admirers of Gregory Rasputin like the future St Macarius of the Altai, Metropolitan of Moscow, the pious Metr Pitirim of Saint Petersburg, and a great many other righteous, chaste, sober and honest men and women who loved Holy Rus. None of these believed in the Rasputin myth and this for a very simple reason – they knew him personally, had seen him working miracles of healing and prophecy and knew the motivations of the jealous slanderers.

Of course, there were others. There is the case of the young and naïve Bishop Theophan (Bystrov), who first enthusiastically introduced Gregory Rasputin to the Imperial Family. He only changed his mind because he believed slanders told him in confession. Later he was horrified when he discovered that he had been lied to. Then there was the case of the Grand Duchess, Abbess Elizabeth in Moscow. She too believed the slanders, although at the end her sister the Tsarina seems to have persuaded here that, since she lived in Moscow and had been fed slanders, she had been greatly misled. None of those who believed the slanders had met Gregory in person, they had no first-hand experience, they had simply taken part in a slanderous game of Chinese whispers.

Why the Slanders Have Been Repeated To This Day

Why are these slanders still repeated and believed today? First of all, because scandalous sex stories make many people rich and they are what the mob wants. Secondly, because those who believe and repeat them want to believe and repeat them because they are motivated by self-justification. The alternative would be to repent and most do not want to repent. The murder of the Russian Orthodox peasant Gregory Rasputin in fact began the Revolution, not a Bolsehevik Revolution but a Revolution long desired, since at least December 1825, by a jealous aristocracy and a growing middle-class, all apostates from the Russian Orthodox Church. The descendants of all those who thought they would benefit from the Revolution do not want to repent.

These include not just brainwashed former Soviet citizens, not only the descendants of émigré aristocrats in Paris and elsewhere, but also all the other Western victims of Russophobic propaganda who want to believe that the so-called ‘Tsarist regime’ (that is to say, the legitimate Christian Empire, founded by St Constantine) was corrupt, primitive, barbarian, depraved, drunken and plainly evil. Therefore, it was demonized and so could be overthrown by the ‘pure’ West and all was justified. Such Russophobia is in the direct line of the self-justifying propaganda of the secularism of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But what if Gregory Rasputin was the victim, the more or less innocent scapegoat of the machinations of traitors?

If Gregory was innocent, then they, the ideologues of the anti-Christian Western world, therefore most of the Russian aristocracy and the State Duma, most of the generals and even some clergy, most of the journalists and most of the people, as well as the Western-founded Soviet State, are guilty of slandering him, murdering him and are also guilty of the murder of the canonized Imperial Family. Guilty too are all who believed in the lies without question and all who continue to believe in these money-making (money is always a motive for evil) lies and myths and even spread them. After all, these are the people who three months after the murder, on Kerensky’s Masonic orders, dug up Gregory Rasputin’s corpse and on 11 March 1917 incinerated it.

Was this the act the act of Orthodox Christians or any other Christians? Was this the act of Christian patriots who loved the Tsar, the Little Father? Who could have carried out such a blasphemous act, but apostates, occultists and anti-Christian secularists? Even if all or just part of what they claimed had been true, would that have justified such profound hatred for a corpse? Nobody has done this or even proposed to do this with the corpse of the Bolshevik mass murderer and blasphemer Lenin, which, amazingly, still lies in its chemical soup in Moscow. Surely the only people who could have carried out this act were atheists and Satanists? However, in some sense, all who continue to spread these slanders are indirectly taking part in this same blasphemy.

Conclusion

Gregory Rasputin was a symbol of peasant Orthodox Russia, a useful scapegoat for those who wanted to seize power and whose slogan was ‘Demonize your enemies and then anything you do is justified’. His murderers symbolized all that was wrong with Russia – ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’, in the words of the martyred Emperor Nicholas II. Treason came from the elite class and intelligentsia which betrayed the Imperial Family and the Church to the Germans and the Western-financed Bolsheviks, cowardice came from those who were too weak to resist the elite and instead swam with the tide, and deceit came from the supposed Allies who also plotted against the Tsar. All of them slandered the Imperial Family and therefore also Gregory Rasputin.

Through Gregory Rasputin we see exactly who were the enemies of Russia and of the ideals of Holy Rus: all those who believed in and spread the slanders about him and the Imperial Family. The fact that many of these were treacherous and jealous members of the Romanov Family and other millionaire aristocrats makes no difference. Nor does the fact that among these were most of the generals and also senior members of the clergy like Protopresbyter George Shavelsky. The fact that, as Prince N. D. Zhevakhov, the deputy lay head of the Holy Synod, revealed over 90 years ago, Gregory Rasputin was murdered by British spies makes no difference. They could not have operated without the widespread and even popular support for such Russian traitors.

It is no secret that Gregory Rasputin had a gift of healing that medical science could only jealously acknowledge without understanding – it is a fact of history. That he had the ability to heal the Tsarevich Alexei, who could have become the greatest, most merciful and wisest of all Russian Tsars, is a fact of history. That he was a devout man of prayer and pilgrim to Jerusalem and the holy places of Russia who very well knew the Holy Scriptures, the Lives of the Saints and Orthodox services is a fact of history. That he made several prophecies about the future of Russia, the Tsardom, his own murder and the future of the world, all of which came true in detail, is a fact of history. For Gregory Rasputin knew the price of suffering, both moral and physical.

If he was innocent, then the untold suffering after December 1916 makes sense. The foreign Bolshevik yoke and its millions of victims, the murder of the Anointed of God, the second German invasion that began on the forgotten feast of All the Saints of the Russian Lands in June 1941, the taking of Vienna and Berlin on St George’s Day in 1945, which could have happened, without any such comparable sacrifices, in 1917 under the leadership of Tsar Nicholas II, the plagues of alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce after 1945, the collapse of what was effectively the Russian Empire in 1991 and today’s torment in the Ukraine are all part of the long and slow path of repentance still ongoing 100 years after 1916. The end to our suffering has not yet come.

The Russian Orthodox Church: Yesterday and Tomorrow

The Emperor and the Empress thought that they were dying for their homeland. But in fact they died for all mankind.

Pierre Gilliard, Swiss tutor to the Tsar’s children.

Foreword

Ten years ago, in 2005, debate raged in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) about our relations with the Church inside Russia. Was it at last free and so could we enter into canonical communion and work together, building the future? Such was the debate that a Pan-Diaspora Church Council was called in San Francisco in 2006 in order to answer the questions posed. At that time we had to counter some very false arguments which were advanced in favour of sectarian self-isolation, arguments that were shaped by the impurity of politics and psychology, and not by the purity of theology. Below are examples.

Yesterday

The human weakness of Metropolitan (later Patriarch) Sergius (+ 1944) and his followers, as revealed in compromises with the atheist persecutor Stalin, known as ‘sergianism’, was erected by some into a ‘theological’ heresy. In fact, it was just another form of erastianism, of placing the State above the Church, of which there had already been so many examples in other forms in the Old Testament and in 1900 years of Church history. There was nothing theological in this, for it was only human weakness on the part of one who had found himself under huge pressure from a militant atheist State. No-one is to judge him for his weakness, there is no place for phariseeism here, for God is the Judge of all.

Though there was nothing of a dogmatic or theological nature in such compromises, certain individuals, partly under the influence of North American political puritanism, even concluded that the present-day sacraments of the Church inside Russia had somehow mysteriously ‘lost grace’ on account of this compromise of three generations before. As a ROCOR priest, I first came across this astonishing piece of politics masquerading as theology in 1992 from someone who was under the influence of this North American error. In fact, of course, sergianism is not a heresy, whereas puritanism, with its inherent impurity of Novatianism, Donatism and Eustathianism, as seen in the light of the canons of the Council of Gangra of 340, most certainly is.

The political and diplomatic support which a few in the Church inside Russia sought from Roman Catholics and Protestants, and called ecumenism, was also condemned. However, it was a very curious idea that the opinions or actions of a handful of individuals could be held up as a sign that the whole of the Church inside Russia, 160,000,000 people, was therefore somehow tainted by the heresy of ecumenism! In reality, most of the faithful inside Russia had never heard of ecumenism and those who had were utterly opposed to it. This was all the stranger, in that by 2005 ecumenism had in any case come to mean something very different from in its political heyday between the 60s and 80s. Instead of concerning itself with politically-enforced syncretistic compromise, in fact heresy, it had turned to having good-neighbourly relations with heterodox, something that ROCOR, with the many mixed marriages among parishioners and regular need to use heterodox premises for services, had always cultivated.

The strangest argument heard at that time was that we could not associate ourselves with the Church inside Russia in any way because of the compromises of a few individuals in it. This was an appalling error, for it would have meant that we could not associate ourselves with the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors. True, we, in freedom, had canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors first, in 1981, 19 years before the Church inside Russia had been able to do so by freeing itself. However, many, including myself, had wondered why we in the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), living in freedom, had so scandalously not canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors long before, from the 1920s on. We felt shame for ourselves.

The sad reason for the delay had been because elements in ROCOR were themselves contaminated with politics. Indeed, I well remember how in 1981 certain parishioners at the ROCOR Cathedral in London, as also elsewhere, had actually been opposed to the canonization. And in any case, the ROCOR canonization had only ever been a first step, a beginning. As I wrote at the time: What has begun in New York must come to completion in Moscow. Moreover, for lack of trustworthy information we had canonized only some 8,000; the Church inside Russia, with greater access to archives, has canonized well over 30,000 and that number is increasing.

Others said that we in ROCOR could have nothing to do with a Church whose bishops belonged to the KGB. I would have agreed with this – if any had belonged to the KGB, such as, we suspect, the defrocked schismatic Filaret Denisenko, now the darling of the CIA. In fact, they did not. The senior bishops inside Russia merely had KGB code names – in the same way as Western secular leaders, whom we prayed for in our services as civil leaders, had KGB code-names. The Church inside Russia could just as well have said: ‘We will have nothing to do with ROCOR because you pray for individuals who have KGB code-names’. It would have been just as false an argument.

Some in ROCOR admitted that there were members of our Church, in good standing, who worked or had worked for the CIA and other Western spy services. They countered this by saying that there were members of the KGB in churches inside Russia. This was totally false: the only KGB members who attended churches there were those who went there to spy, to note down names of priests or young people and create problems for them.

Sectarian elements in ROCOR objected that if we entered into canonical communion with the Church inside Russia, we would then be in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church! I first heard this incredible argument, I think, in about 1999, when a ROCOR priest from London concelebrated with a priest of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. This had raised an objection from a sectarian priest trained in North America. In the Western European Diocese of ROCOR, where I had been ordained and celebrated until 1997, such concelebrations were perfectly normal and happened regularly. As a ROCOR priest, I was amazed at this sectarian spirit, which I had hardly met before. The logic of this argument would be that we in ROCOR were no longer in communion with Mt Athos, which is in the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Absolutely unthinkable! (Naturally, such sectarians later left ROCOR).

On a much more serious and practical level, there were those who pointed out that among representatives of the Church inside Russia in the Diaspora there were still corrupt and renovationist clergy at even the highest level, even though several had by then died out. This was a problem. Although these renovationists called us slanderers for telling the Truth and so shaming their false idols (as renovationists elsewhere still do), the problem was largely overcome in 2006, when most such clergy in England and France left the jurisdiction of the Church inside Russia in a schism which they created; since then, two or three other such individuals have simply been removed, so they can no longer cause scandal and can at last learn the basics of the Faith.

Finally, there were those who said that we could not work together with the Church inside Russia because the situation in Russia was not as it had been before the Revolution. Soviet practices had infiltrated Russian society, alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce were rife, the mummy of the Russophobic murderer Lenin still lay on Red Square, and the squares and streets of Russia were littered with his statues or named after his henchmen. They demandingly demanded in fact that the post-Soviet Russian State (in charge of such matters) behave as though it were part of the Russian Church! In the face of this argument we pointed out that pre-Revolutionary Russia had not been ideal either (otherwise there would never have been a Revolution), we asked for compassion for a people deprived for three generations of a free Church, asked for patience and said that with time the Church will influence the State, since repentance, which we too are in need of, changes people.

Victory

The above arguments were rejected, with repentance for ever having entertained them, by well over 95% of ROCOR, dismissed as the arguments of schismatic impurity, of a tiny, sectarian, inward-looking and politicized minority, which had been trying to take over ROCOR, holding us back and impeding us from fulfilling our universal calling together with the rest of the Russian Orthodox Church, the great majority. As we know, in 2007 the vast majority of the hierarchy, clergy and people of our little ROCOR were happy to enter at last into canonical communion with the vast majority of the rest of the Church, of which we had always spiritually been a part. The separation, caused purely by political events exterior to the Church, was over. We were sure that the Church inside Russia had freed itself, as had already been made evident by the Jubilee Council of 2000. At long last, our inward unity could become outwardly apparent and, impediments removed, we could progress together towards our common destiny and ever more urgent mission.

Tomorrow

A generation after the fall of State atheism in the Russian Federation, we see in Russia today most interesting developments, promising for the future. After the awful period of ‘law of the jungle’ capitalism in the 1990s, with its rule of seven bankers, ‘Wild East’ bandit privatizations and the appearance of pro-Western criminal oligarchs and liberals, Russia has largely seen through that alternative to Communism that was offered it by the consumerist Western world, which we too, living in the Western world itself, had already seen through.

Thanks largely to the chaos and misery that the Western Powers have been causing in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya, Syria and above all in the Ukraine, Russian society has seen through Eurosodom and Gomorrhica. If the CIA-installed Poroshenko junta, set up in Kiev, the Mother of Russian cities, wants the suicide of ‘European values’, it can have them. We will remain faithful to the values of St Vladimir and St Olga of Holy Kiev. Believing in Christ, Who trampled down death by death, we choose life. Believing in satan who tramples down life by death, they choose death. That is the difference between us.

Providentially, through the Western attacks on Holy Rus, Russian society has for the most part now come to understand that the West is not the solution. Russia must follow its own, historic, God-given way, the way that our saints and other lucid elements in ROCOR have always preached. As for Russia, it must heal itself and restore Holy Rus. Outside Russia, we can only pray and encourage, learning as we go, for our main task is to spread Orthodoxy outside the Russian Lands in faithfulness to Holy Rus. We are only humble disciples who follow the precepts of Holy Rus.

Interestingly, voices have been saying that Russian society today resembles 1917 Russia. However, unlike in 1917 the direction of today’s Russia is not 1918, but 1916. In other words, although the situation is delicate, Russia is not heading towards catastrophe as it was in 1917, but is heading back from it. Here is the difference. If, God willing, we continue on this God-given path, the Church of Russia will lead us to our destiny. What is this?

On account of the utter failure of imposed Western ideas there, we can say that Russia has seen the future and knows from bitter experience that it does not work. Today it is struggling its way back up from the pit, at the same time as the Western world, led by the United States, is hurtling headlong into it. Today, some of the more aware Western politicians and thinkers are going to Russia or following events in Russia in order to learn. Gerhard Schroeder, Nicolas Sarkozy, Phillippe de Villiers, Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, Franklin Graham and others all follow events in Russia closely or visit.

Russia’s mystical and historic role now is to act as an intermediary between East and West, between China and Western Europe. For the spiritual destiny of China is to enter the authentic Orthodox Christian world, becoming the Eastern provinces of Holy Rus, just as the spiritual destiny of Western Europe, with its roots in Orthodox Christianity, is to return to it, with the help of its ancient saints, by becoming the Western provinces of Holy Rus. True, the towering national pride of Europeans largely prevents this, for where there is no humility, there is no salvation. Indeed, Russia’s task is now not to save Europe from the USA, as some have put it, but to save Europe from itself. Just as Russia, and not the West, was to blame for choosing the Western ideology that created the Russian Revolution in February 1917, we do not blame others for the present misfortune that Europeans have chosen for themselves.

The key to universal salvation in these last times is atonement, in the restoration of Holy Rus and in Holy Rus becoming universal. Following the Holy Trinity, we are called on not only to be Guardians and Gatherers of Holy Rus, following the Father and the Son, but also Spreaders of Holy Rus, following the Holy Spirit. Those, in East and West, who want to work with the Russian Orthodox Church and so, by following the Tradition, build up new Local Churches are welcome to do so. If some do not wish to do so and set themselves against the prophetic and mystical Church Tradition in tired, old, secularist and humanist neo-renovationism, then God be with them. We shall do God’s Will without them. We force no-one to follow the Church; the Church sails ahead without those who reject Her.

In 1917 the last Christian Emperor, the Tsar, did not abdicate. In 1917 Russia and the whole world abdicated from him, from the Christian Emperor and Christian Empire, and so from Christ. Since then there has been no peace on earth so that we have all had to atone, each receiving our penance in order to learn humility. Inside Russia the people faced the penances of persecution and Nazi invasion, outside Russia those in the emigration faced the penances of exile and isolation. As for Europe, like today’s USA also, it has faced the penance of war and humiliating loss of power and greatness. As for the rest of the world, it has faced constant strife and war, ever since ‘he who restrains’ (2 Thess 2, 7) was in 1917 removed. All the suffering of the world since 1917 has been the opportunity of all to learn humility.

Our destiny, mystical and prophetical, is to preach Holy Rus, the message of the last Christian Emperor, to the whole world for repentance before the end. The time is coming when the world will at last be ready to hear of Holy Rus, of the universality of the Incarnate Christ, authentic Christianity, and not the two diluted isms shaped by Western heathenism, pagan Romanism and northern barbarianism, that is, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Afterword

My great-grandfather was born in the same year as Nicholas II, the last Christian Emperor who was martyred in Ekaterinburg in 1918. One hundred years after the Emperor’s birth and fifty years after his martyrdom, I, born on the anniversary of the day when the remains of the Imperial family were finally destroyed, received the message from the east that I was to learn and then go and speak of Holy Rus, Christ Incarnate, to those whom I met. This is not only my personal destiny, but also that of many others, as described so well in the poem ‘The Apostles’, written in exile in 1928 by the bard of the Tsar, Sergey Bekhteev:

Amid the darkness of the slavish world
We bear the spirit’s torch in victory
And we call loud to those chosen by God
To enter the hall where the Orthodox feast.

We walk along a road of thorns,
We soar above worldly vanity,
We are the apostles of Christ’s Faith,
We are the heralds of holy truth.

We call the races and the peoples,
Made scarlet with their brothers’ blood,
To the kingdom of true, eternal freedom,
To the kingdom of goodness, light and love.

The hopes and prayers for the future turn to Ekaterinburg, to restoration and coronation.

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (May 2015)

Q: Your writing seems to have become less apocalyptic and more optimistic in the last 10-15 years or so, why is that?

A: In the 70s, 80s and 90s, we thought that was probably it, that there was little hope for any revival of Orthodoxy inside Russia and that therefore outside Russia, little ROCOR would just have to hold on to the end, which could only be a few generations away at most. For example, I remember meeting in 1977 the elderly widowed matushka of the philosopher and inventor of ‘eucharistic theology’, Fr Nikolai Afanasiev, from Paris (she was much more Orthodox than he was). She told me despairingly, ‘Russia is finished’. Of course, many in her generation who had lived through the Revolution and exile thought exactly that.

Indeed, I too had great doubts as to whether I would see a revival in my lifetime. The 90s under Yeltsin brought little hope; it seemed as though after the obscenities of atheism Russia was just going to copy the West in terms of continuing apostasy. And yet we have, ever since the Jubilee Council of August 2000 and the canonization of the New Martyrs and Confessors, begun to see the long-awaited transfiguration. Everything changed on that day as was seen in the miracle of the Cross in the sky that appeared then. Russia is the key, if Russia is restored, then the restoration of the rest of the Orthodox world from decadence and Halfodoxy will follow. It is the signs of this process that we are so eagerly following now.

Q: Are you not over-optimistic? Look at all the problems in Russia, abortion, alcoholism, crime, mass nominalism, the Ukraine.

A: I have always said that the revival on Russia is on a knife-edge. Everything can still go one way or another. The Ukraine is a huge warning that shows just how fragile the situation is. What lies behind the civil war in the Ukraine is the spiritual crisis of nominalism which shows that fragility. So-called Orthodox Ukrainians are defending statues of Lenin, the monster who created the Ukraine! What sort of Orthodoxy is that? It is no more Orthodox than the Uniats who want to put up statues of Hitler.

Washington can still undermine everything, as we have seen in Constantinople since 1948 when its agents deposed the Orthodox Patriarch and replaced him with their puppet. Now, throughout the Balkans and the Middle East, Washington, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly through its EU vassal, is attacking the soft underbelly of the Orthodox world. Whether in decadent Syria, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, the Ukraine, it is trying to destroy the Orthodox Church as the last bastion against Antichrist, whom neocon Washington is aiming to enthrone in its Israeli client-state. Wherever there is decadence in the Orthodox Church, there Washington and its colonies are attacking and intimidating. We have to be strong and consciously resist – then they cannot attack us.

Q: Does this explain the present situation in Macedonia?

A: Yes. Washington was so angered when Russia freed Bishop Jovan from his Macedonian prison and when Russia proposed to send a pipeline through Turkey, Greece and Macedonia (since Washington had bribed corrupt Bulgarian politicians not to accept it there) that it decided to organize a coloured revolution in Macedonia using its Albanian mafia clients from Kosovo. That is what is happening there now.

Q: How is the Serbian Church reacting?

A: It is in a dilemma. The Americans had already vetoed the election of Metr Amfilochije of Montenegro as Serbian Patriarch, but not everything is going their way, just as in the Romanian and Greek Churches, despite their manipulations there. Notably in Greece, the veneration of the relics of St Barbara by hundreds of thousands is greatly irritating the Americans. Anything traditionally Orthodox annoys them immensely because it automatically shows solidarity with the Russian Church, which it is desperate to destroy, as its neocon leaders openly proclaim. However, they have been annoyed above all by the resistance of Ukrainians to their puppet show in Kiev and its mass murder. The Orthodox seem to be winning there. That is a miracle. We are hopeful that the prophecy of Elder Jonah of Odessa will yet come true. But like all prophecies, it will need mass repentance to come true.

Q: What prophecy?

A: That victory for Orthodoxy will come in the Ukraine, but only after a bloody Easter (in 2014) and a hungry Easter (in 2015), at Easter 2016.

Q: All of these events are happening far away, in the Balkans or the Middle East, surely it does not affect us here in the West?

A: Oh, yes it does. For instance, the Russian Church faces immense opposition to the establishment of even a single new parish in the Western world. On the other hand, the West supports the establishment of parishes of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Why? Because it fully controls them through freemasonry etc. This is the case locally in the east of England, as all over the Western world. Beware of the fifth column. Look at how many years we have had to wait for the new Russian Cathedral in Paris. The foundation stone has just been laid – five years late, twelve years after it was first mooted with sorts of delays, some created by the homosexual former mayor of Paris.

Q: How do you resist? How do you achieve anything against the establishment of a masonic Orthodoxy which has been promoted in the West? Why has an ‘Establishment Western Church’ not appeared, when so much has been done to create it?

A: Thanks to the immigration of real Orthodox from Eastern Europe, a ‘Eurochurch’ has not been formed. Immigrants have come to the West in the last 15 years and saved the situation, supporting us, the once small minority, on whom the Establishment used to spit and turn its back in contempt and condemnation. Real Orthodox can no longer be ignored in the West – much to the fury of the Halfodox. They had counted on establishing a kind of degutted ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, an ‘Orthodoxy Lite’, a Constantinople-controlled (that is, US State Department-controlled) Finnish Orthodoxy throughout Western Europe. This was to be built on protestantizing half-converted Europeans and on lapsed second and third generation Orthodox. This was as crazy as a chain-smoker trying to build an American Orthodoxy on half-converted ex-Episcopalians and former Uniats.

Q: Why is the West so opposed to the Russian Church in particular?

A: Precisely because we do not represent some sort of Establishment-approved Balkan folklore or masonic lodge, but the uncompromised Church of God. The devil is angry with us and so uses his agents against us. Wherever there is compromise in matters of the Faith, there is the devil. He does not want integrity. As the old proverb says, ‘the devil always builds a chapel next to a church’. This became crystal clear in 2006 when the British Establishment and media so vigorously approved the schism in the Sourozh Diocese in this country and launched a vitriolic campaign against the Russian Church. Their hatred was really quite shocking, all for a tiny and spiritually irrelevant schism! But the Establishment always defends its own, as it is always shaken when it is resisted; this world does not want any witness to the other world.

The same situation prevails in all other Western countries, where certain senior clerics, academics and laypeople of the OCA in the USA and of the Paris Jurisdiction in France work for those countries’ Russophobic secret services. We must never lose our freedom in the Russian Church, as they have. Once you have lost your freedom, you are spiritually compromised. And let us be frank, this also happened to a few individuals in ROCOR between the 70s and the 90s. It can happen anywhere. As the secret services say: ‘Every man has his price’. That is the cynical level they work on.

Q: So how do we resist?

A: As a new Catholic acquaintance said to me only a few days ago, ‘Orthodoxy? That’s an advanced form of Catholicism, isn’t it?’ I was struck by this view from the outside. What is certainly true is that there are individuals on the fringes of the Orthodox Church who do not at all confess ‘an advanced form of Catholicism’, but confess a modern Catholicism, i.e. a debased form of Protestantism, in fact, more or less secularism.

Q: So what do we have to do?

A: We have to reverse the processes by which the Church in the West was debased into Catholicism and then the processes by which Catholicism in turn became debased. That means going back to before 1054.

Q: Can you explain that in more detail?

A: Growing up in England, the one historical date I knew even as a small child, like all children, was 1066, the Battle of Hastings. I realized that it was very important locally, but did not understand its general context until some years later through the Church. Later placing that date of 1066 in its historical context as an Orthodox, I realized that it was all linked with the processes that had taken place during the eleventh century, through which Catholicism had been founded and, through it, a Western European world quite independent of and separate from the Church of God, with its own fake Christian institutions.

In other words, I discovered that 1066 was not some isolated date unconnected with everything else, it was part of a much wider process, of which provincial England was just a part. Locally, it meant the final debasing of England as an Orthodox country, but this was the same thing that had happened elsewhere before, in ‘Frankland’, Northern France and Western Germany, then in southern Italy and Spain, and happened elsewhere later, in the Crusades in the Middle East and with the Teutonic Knights in Eastern Europe. The aim was to turn the whole world into ‘Frankland’ – which is what Washington is now trying to do in the Ukraine and Macedonia at this very moment, 950 years later.

Moreover, the situation that developed in 1066 in England has lasted until today; we are still occupied by the Normans because there has been no repentance. Incredibly, 1066 is still marked by Establishment types as some sort of progress or victory, the birth of England, instead of its death! That is the result of a total lack of repentance. Lack of repentance always justifies evil. Look at the neocons in the USA today as examples of lack of repentance and justification of evil! Remember Madeleine Albright who said that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children was ‘a price worth paying’. The Nazis said the same sort of thing. Little wonder that the neocons support Neo-Nazis in Kiev. They come from the same stable.

And no repentance means no restoration. So what do we have to do to restore Truth? We have to deNormanize or, to express it in its general European and world context, deFrankize, in other words, we have to return to the Church and the Church way of thinking. That is absolutely vital if we are ever to found a Metropolia in Western Europe, the basis for a new Local Church.
Q: You mention 1066, behind which hides 1054, are there any other concealed dates in history like that?

A: Definitely yes and many of them. You see, a correct understanding of the Church is the key to understanding the past, just as a correct understanding of the Church is the key to understanding the future. What makes no sense in secular terms always makes sense when it is put into the light of the Church – or into the darkness of the absence of the Church. 1066 makes no spiritual sense until you understand that 1054 lies behind it, that it was all part of the same process of spiritual degeneration in Western Europe that had begun with Charlemagne and has still not ended. For example, today’s civil war in Syria makes no sense until you understand the spiritual degradation that went on in Syria before it. Another example, much closer and more obvious to us, is 1918, behind which hides 1914.

Q: 1918? Can you explain that?

A: 1918 marked the killing and martyrdom of Tsar Nicholas II, a date which changed world history because it created the Soviet Union and all that that entailed, including Communist China. There is no going back to before that until repentance and so restoration. Behind 1918 is concealed 1914 with the German (or rather Prussian – ‘Prussia ruined Germany’ as the Hessian princess the Tsarina Alexandra said in 1914) declaration of war. And that meant the spiritual suicide of Europe.

Q: On this subject, Western sources more or less all assert that the fall of the Romanovs was their own fault, for instance that it was Tsar Nicholas’ weakness that led to the Romanovs’ downfall. Is this true?

A: Of course not, this is all just self-justifying propaganda. Yes, it is true that Tsar Nicholas II came to the throne young and unprepared after the totally unexpected death of his father, Alexander III. It is true that in the first years of his reign he suffered much from the cabal of his power-seeking uncles, the corrupt Grand Dukes, who took advantage of his youth and great kindness. But the real reason for the downfall of Imperial Russia was the treason of the aristocracy and the generals, including, it is true, of a great many of the extended Romanov family and many Grand Dukes, because of their apostasy from Orthodoxy, which caused jealousy, greed, gossip, slander and the murder of the peasant Rasputin.

These aristocrats wanted to overthrow Tsar Nicholas, the legitimate authority, because they wanted power for themselves. Seeing Tsar Nicholas’ strong will and resolution, they slandered him and carried out a coup d’etat, accusing him of a weak will and irresolution. This was mere self-justification. Their agreement to a Revolution that had been prepared by Buchanan, the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg, who soon regretted his foolishness, created the nightmare. Of course, they punished themselves because they lost everything. It was their own fault. The best of them understood it and had time to repent for it in the Bolshevik Gulag or else in exile, in Berlin, Belgrade, Paris, London (like Fr George Sheremetiev) and elsewhere. Others never repented of the blood on their hands.

Q: So are you saying that the West was responsible for the Revolution?

A: Directly, through its agents, and indirectly, through the westernized aristocrats, yes. Fopr example, directly because of German funding for the Bosheviks (just as the Japanese had funded the 1905 Revolution and the British and Americans had stood behind the Japanese, using them as vassals – as the USA still does). Directly because the British wanted revenge on Russia because Russia had supported the Boers and the Americans wanted revenge because the Russians had supported the Native Americans (as they still do), so they sent Trotsky. Directly because the British did not want to see Constantinople freed by Russia in 1917. But also indirectly because of the treason of the Russian aristocracy, blindly anglophile like the murderous Oxford graduate the transvestite drunkard and parasite Yusupov, one of the richest men in Russia. His ideal was not Holy Rus, but Oscar Wilde! What hope was there with such as Yusupov?

Q: What was Russia’s aim in the First World War?

A: It was, as Tsar Nicholas said to the treacherous French ambassador in 1914, the destruction of German militarism. The Tsar actually predicted that if it was not defeated, there would be another war. Tsar Nicholas had already targeted it in his proposed Hague peace and disarmament conference at the end of the 19th century. Russia knew that once militarism was defeated, peace could prevail in Europe and thus worldwide. However, the West, especially Berlin but also London, did not want peace, and so slaughtered its youth. And nor did the bankers of New York want peace. However, with Russia taken over by the Wall Street backed Bolsheviks, only war could prevail, which is exactly what has happened ever since 1918, indeed since 1914. The world has not known peace for 101 years. That is not Russia’s fault.

Q: What are the temptations which could stop Russia’s revival today?

A: On the one hand, there is westernization, such as that which infected the pre-Revolutionary aristocracy and today infects the US-controlled puppet oligarch-bandits, the modern aristocrats, who actually are mainly Jewish. On the other hand, there is the threat of a narrow Russian nationalism, such as that which prevailed in parts of ROCOR between the 1970s and the 1990s. This could prevent Russia taking imperial responsibility for the rest of the Orthodox world, parts of which have fallen into such great decadence since 1918. All is still on a knife-edge. We make no predictions. All we can say is what we have to do is clear – to fight for the Orthodox Truth without compromise; as to whether we can be successful and so delay the coming of Antichrist in the near future, that is not clear. All we have is hope, faith and love.

The New Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Information about St Nicholas (Johnson) received from his great-great nephew

The future martyr Nicholas (Johnson) was born in Russia in 1878, the brother of two elder sisters, Elisabeth and Anna. He was the son of Captain Nicholas A. Johnson, an English guard at the Imperial Court, and Loiuse (von) Kreisler Johnson, who was German and a music and singing teacher at Court. Widowed, she later married a Russian doctor, moved to England and is buried in Weybridge in Surrey, where she died in 1924.

Nicholas was given the name Brian at birth, but took his father’s name Nicholas when he was baptised in the Russian Orthodox Church on 28 September, probably in 1878. A shared love of music with the Anglophile Grand Duke Michael, the younger brother of Tsar Nicholas, who like Nicholas was also a graduate of the Mikhailovsky Artillery School, led to a deep friendship with him. Nicholas is recorded as having kept his British nationality and he was given the nickname ‘Johnny’. However, he spoke English with a Russian accent and made grammatical mistakes, unlike the Grand Duke, whose English was perfect, as was that of Tsar Nicholas himself.

Nicholas is described as being ‘round faced, not very tall, and speaking three languages’; indeed, he was much shorter than the tall, thin Grand Duke. He was sociable, smiling, an accomplished pianist and would accompany the very musical Grand Duke, who played several instruments, notably the guitar. In late 1912 the Grand Duke Michael chose Nicholas as his private secretary and there are several good photographs of him in the possession of his great-great nephew. He devoted himself to serving his master and even in the face of certain death his loyalty never wavered. Thus, after the Revolution, Grand Duke Michael pleaded with his faithful servant to flee to Britain, but Nicholas refused to leave his side.

Arrested at Gatchina outside St Petersburg on 7 March 1918, both were soon exiled to the city of Perm. On Ascension Day, 31 May/13 June 1918, they were shot by a bloodthirsty rabble, probably by order of Lenin. As Nicholas lay dying, the wounded Michael went to his aid, begging the execution squad: ‘Let me say goodbye to my friend’. Moments later, he too was dead, killed at point blank range in the head. Their remains have never been found. St Nicholas was canonised with the rest of the New Martyrs and Confessors in 1981 and is mentioned in the stichira at lauds in the service to the Royal Martyrs on 4/17 July

Now a new icon is to be painted of him. This is based on a newly-revealed (2014) photograph taken soon before 1917, which gives a new and more accurate likeness of the New Martyr Nicholas, notably without a moustache.

Two More Prophecies of St John

Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia
Western European Diocese

8 avenue Douglas Haig
Versailles (S. et O.)

7 April 1960
No 804 / 248
Bright Wednesday

Decree to the Clergy of the Diocese

Today at approximately 3.00 pm THE GRAND DUCHESS KSENIYA ALEKSANDROVNA PASSED AWAY in England.

Born on the Feast of the Annunciation to the Most Holy Mother of God, she was a pledge of well-being and joy for the family of the Great Russian Tsar Alexander III the Peace-Maker and, together with them, for the whole of Russia.

Deeply pious and close to the spirit of the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, she bore the trials that fell to her lot after the collapse of the Russian Empire with strong faith and hope in God, suffering in her soul for Her ardently loved Homeland and the whole Russian people, firmly believing in their coming rebirth through the Orthodox Church.

Preparing herself for her repose she partook of the Holy Mysteries every day during the illness that preceded it and she offered up her soul to God in the Radiant Days of Easter Week , leaving behind her the memory of a devout Russian Princess.

Calling on all the clergy to commemorate her at every liturgy until Pentecost, we offer up prayers for her repose.

Archbishop John

(Notice the use of the term ‘Tsar-Martyr’ 21 years before his glorification and also the prophecy that Rus will be reborn through the Church. The Russian original of this prophetic decree, signed and stamped by Archbishop John, is to be found with other decrees and relics of St John in his church in Colchester, England).