Category Archives: The Ukraine

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 (October 2015)

Q: What is happening in the Serbian Orthodox Church at present?

A: As far as I can see, the Western neocon elite, which has been trying to manipulate the Serbian government ever since it bombed Serbia, is continuing the same old Communist policy of divide and rule. Just as the Communists separated Macedonia and set up an ‘Orthodox’ nationalist sect there in the 1960s, so Washington and its allies have since separated Montenegro and Kosovo from Serbia and are trying to set up nationalist sects there through their local puppets. Opposition is coming from the people. In Montenegro the people do not want to become another NATO base and in Macedonia they do not want to become another Muslim republic like Kosovo. This political opposition creates opposition to the nationalist and schismatic sects, as people realize that is what they are.

This is the very policy that the US is trying to implement in the Ukraine also. There, three different small, foreign, politically-concocted sects, one of which has a very aggressive leader, Denisenko, who has visited the State Department in Washington as an honoured guest, are trying to undermine the vast majority. They belong to the only Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is led by Metropolitan Onuphry.

Q: Isn’t it strange that the Yugoslav Communists fifty years ago under the Croat Tito and today’s neocons follow the same policy?

A: Not at all. The Yugoslav Communists were put into place by the Western Powers during World War II, with Churchill switching sides to them from the Orthodox Serbs and supporting them. The Communists and the neocons share the same basic materialistic ideology. The only difference is that the Communists promoted the materialistic concept of amassing State wealth, the neocons of amassing personal wealth. State Capitalism or individualist Capitalism, Mammon is the same everywhere.

Q: What can be done?

A: I am an outsider, so it is difficult for me to say anything about the Serbian Church. That is an internal matter. However, it does seem vital to me that in general all of us, whatever Local Church we belong to, must keep to Orthodox canonical principles and resist US/EU, or any other, political interference and, at the same time, we must advance non-nationalist, confederal structures. This is what the Russian Church did over 20 years ago, granting extensive autonomy to its local parts, for example to the Ukrainian Church, the Moldovan Church, the Latvian Church and the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). If this is not done, there will be new schisms or else old schisms will continue.

Q: On the subject of schisms, who were the small groups of dissidents who went into schism from the two parts of the Russian Church at their reconciliation in 2007?

A: As I have said before, there were two groups. The first left English and French communities officially dependent on the Church inside Russia. Their leaders (and their naïve followers who knew no better) were renovationists, who had been poisoning Church life in the Diaspora for decades, in obedience to their by then mainly dead Paris-School ideologues. They left for the US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople, where freemasons, semi-Uniats and anti-Russian political or nationalist dissidents seem to be made welcome. The second group left ROCOR and were a strange mixture of operatives of the CIA and other Western spy services, right-wingers of the Peronista type in South America and ideologically-minded old calendarist converts who did not love the Russian Church and persecuted those of us who do.

Q: Looking back on your own life in the Church, do you regret the things that happened to you in the 70s and 80s?

A: If the things that happened to me had not happened, I would not know now what I have learned from bitter experience, however painful. So, in a sense how can I regret anything? Everything was necessary to learn a little wisdom and see through the myths of the ‘Orthodox’ Establishment. However, if we are to daydream (!) and I had known then what I know now, I would in 1971 have joined the London ROCOR parish. Then, having finished studies at University in London in 1977, I would have asked to go to Jordanville in 1977.

I greatly regret not only that in those pre-internet days I was given no facts, no guidance, but instead was given active misinformation and misdirection. Such was the spiritual corruption and prejudice against the Russian Church at that time. The scribes and pharisees of the Establishment did not want a Church outside its control, a free, uncompromised and spiritually independent Russian Orthodox Church, free of both left-wing renovationism and right-wing politicking. They wanted an impure, spiritually degutted and compromised Establishment organization. This is why they did their best to undermine us from both outside and, through their agents of both left and right, from inside.

Q: How do you see the future for the Russian Church in the East of England?

A: In recent years we have encouraged the establishment of both what became the little rural mission with Fr Anthony in Mettingham in Suffolk and of St Panteleimon’s skete outside Clacton in Essex. This latter is under Fr Sergei, whose simplicity is an example to us all. Now, with God’s help and that of many kind and generous benefactors, we are buying property for a church in the city of Norwich and hope to have a man ordained for the new parish in God’s good time. Perhaps this is all we can do; certainly we need more clergy in order to expand. One or two candidates now seem to be appearing at last, but we need more.

We can dream of parishes in the county centres elsewhere in the east: a church building for Suffolk in the county centre of Bury St Edmunds, a church dedicated to Sts Peter and Paul in Peterborough for Cambridgeshire, a church of the Resurrection in Bedford for Bedfordshire, a church dedicated to St Alban in St Albans for Hertfordshire, a church dedicated to St Nicholas in east London, a church dedicated to Sts Constantine and Helen in York for Yorkshire and a church dedicated to All the Saints in Canterbury as the centre for Kent. However, realistically, if that is not God’s will, none of this will happen.

Q: Why is it important to have property in central and populated places?

A: Because if we do not, the communities will die out as property promotes continuity. This is a law. When you have your own property, then you also have spiritual freedom. I have seen dozens of parishes closing in England and France over the last forty years. Why? Because they had no property. It is just a fact of life. And communities must always be in centres, in cities and large towns, where the people are. You do not open a church where no-one lives. Church buildings follow the people, for they are the Church. It is not the other way round. That is common sense.

Q: Some people fear the coming Pan-Orthodox Council in 2016, calling it the ‘Eighth Oecumenical Council’ that was denounced in the prophecies. What would you say?

A: There is a certain hysteria and paranoia among some who seem to know very little of Church history with respect to this meeting, which is most certainly not the ‘Eighth Oecumenical Council’. It is pure fantasy to call it that. The Inter-Orthodox meeting next year is not a Council, but a meeting of a minority of Orthodox bishops, about 25% of the total. It will discuss administrative and canonical issues; all the dogmatic issues have already been decided for all time by the Seven Universal (‘Oecumenical’ is a misleading translation) Councils.

No meeting can become a Council if its resolutions are not received by the faithful, but sadly we the faithful have never been consulted about the discussions leading to this present meeting. The whole thing is happening behind closed doors in Calvinist Geneva (of all places), a situation unheard of in Orthodox practice, and I think this is why a certain hysteria and paranoia is growing up in some circles. They are inevitable, given the near-total lack of transparency.

The faithful are the guardians of the Faith, which is why a meeting can only become a Council if its decisions are received by the faithful. If a meeting is a Council, then it means that the Holy Spirit is present there, as He is among the faithful. At present it seems that some of the 1960s-style liberal Protestant agenda being promoted by the Phanariots and which frightened us in the 1970s, has already had to be dropped at the preparatory meetings. That is good. We do not need any more old-fashioned modernism. However, there is no agreement among representatives of the Local Churches who are preparing this meeting on several important issues. Moreover, with the latest condemnation by Constantinople of Metr Rostislav of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, this meeting may never even take place, for it cannot if one of the fourteen Local Churches is absent. So Greek nationalism may yet put an end to the meeting altogether.

More generally, the situation is so highly politicized that one wonders if anything meaningful can take place even if these bishops do meet. Let us recall that no fewer than three patriarchs of Local Churches are now US appointees (against the canons of the Church) and they repeat the policies of the State Department, that is, of Obama, who may be an atheist or may be a Muslim (no-one is sure), of the abortionist Biden and of the warmonger Kerry. Parts of the Church are simply not free to meet. Just as St Justin of Chelije called for a boycott of any such Inter-Orthodox meeting in the 1970s because so many Local Churches, notably the Russian, were then enslaved by the atheist SU, so today other Local Churches are enslaved by the atheist US.

Q: So can any meaningful meeting take place?

A: I think that in the longer term it may be irrelevant whether a meeting takes place or not. I see a different outcome. As the number of bishops in the Russian Church climbs inexorably to 400 and more, and the total will soon exceed 50% of the total number of Orthodox bishops, the meeting in Constantinople is becoming irrelevant. It may be that the Russian Orthodox Church, as the one and only obvious Centre of Orthodox Civilization, may soon hold an episcopal meeting together with the other free Local Churches, Antioch, Georgia, Poland, Czechoslovakia etc.

Such a meeting of over 500 bishops would be far more representative that that the Geneva-prepared one in the Phanar, and would be more likely to become a Council. It could take place at the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow, which is now nearly fully restored. This is what the Russian Church intended the Monastery for in the seventeenth century, as a centre of World Orthodoxy, but was prevented from becoming by the interference of the Russian State both then and since. Such a Council could speak freely, without reserve ‘for fear of the Jews’, that is, unintimidated by the Soviet-style censorship of political correctness.

Such a situation would reflect the reality of the Church today, not the situation of a thousand years ago when Greek ruled the roost. It is time to catch up with reality. The Greek-ruled Churches, mostly with flocks of scarcely a million and nationalist outlooks, are simply unable to cope with the reality of today’s global world. In order to respond, the Church today must also be global. Only the Russian Church is that.

Q: Some would call that ‘Russian Imperialism’.

A: Imperialism of any sort is to be condemned because it is nationalism. What we are talking about is an Imperial Church, the Church of the Christian Empire. Imperial means multinational unity in diversity, with new autocephalous Local Churches being born through missionary activity, whereas Imperialism means nationalism, central control and the ‘one size fits all’ mentality of the papist model, which, sadly, now exists in Istanbul.

Q: What is the situation after the latest round of episcopal consecrations announced by the Russian Church on 23 October?

A: The news that Fr Tikhon (Shevkunov) is now a bishop is most welcome, and the news that Italy now has for the first time ever a resident Russian Orthodox bishop in Bishop Antony (Sevryuk) is historic. It seems that we are at last seeing the appearance of a young generation of bishops, all at least trilingual (the local language, English and Russian), resident in the country, with an understanding of the local culture and politically free. We also noted that Fr Gennady Andreyev of the Sourozh Diocese in Manchester has been nominated bishop.

But there are other welcome events. Despite vigorous French political opposition which much delayed the project, the cupolas are now on the new Russian Cathedral in Paris and all should be finished within twelve months. We are moving ahead at last.

And as regards the veneration of the local Western saints, 60 years after St John, we are now moving forward to their inclusion in the Russian calendar inside Russia and perhaps even elsewhere. It is not just a case of better late than never, this represents real repentance on the part of those who resisted, reproached and actively persecuted us for venerating them for over 40 years. It is sad that several of the persecutors are now dead and therefore cannot repent, so we will have to pray for them, for Christ calls us to pray for our enemies, regardless of whether they are dead or alive. It is the same situation as with those who refused to venerate the New Martyrs and Confessors and put icons of them in their churches. They have all been proved wrong as well.

Q: Many people are very pessimistic about the situation in Russia and criticize it. What would you answer them?

A: There is a huge amount to criticize in post-Soviet Russia, the old classic of ABC – Alcoholism (nearly as high as in Finland), ‘Bortion (abortion) (near Asian levels) and Corruption (about the same as in Italy), to which could be added D for both Divorce (nearly as high as in the USA) and Drug-taking (not yet at the levels of Western Europe). However, the Russophobes and their propaganda deliberately omit the vital fact: the direction Russia is going in is right, whereas the direction that the West is going in is wrong. It is a huge historical irony that in proportion as Russia is deSovietized (a process well under way despite the propaganda, opposition and fear of the West), the West is being Sovietized.

Q: Who are these Russophobes who criticize?

A: There are two groups. Firstly, there are the neo-colonial Western ideologues who, still living in the imperialist arrogance of the nineteenth century, are convinced that ‘West is best’ and as for ‘the rest’, they can go to hell. These people are in reality mere primitive racists and extremists, like the Russophobe Senator John McCain who has now been photographed at a meeting with Islamic State, so anxious is he to be anti-Russian! (Here is the proof that the Westernists are at one with Islamists, whose movement they founded in Afghanistan in the 1980s and who have always supported the murderous regime in Saudi Arabia with its beheadings, crucifixions and massive bombings, with US warplanes and British bombs, of civilians in the Yemen. The extremes always meet, in the same way that the British imperialist and Jewish convert Disraeli backed the Ottoman massacres of Bulgarian Christians in the 19th century).

Secondly, there are the Russian Westernizers, many of them oligarchs, Jews or homosexuals. They are often to be seen at the US embassy in Moscow. They represent the same aristocratic, military and industrialist class (senior Romanovs among them), and also renovationist career clergy in the Church, that betrayed Russia in 1917 (when they were to be seen at the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg), overthrowing the Tsar because they wanted power (and even more money) for themselves.

They have their exact parallel in the Ukraine today, where the legitimate and democratically elected Yanukovich government (whatever its many shortcomings) was overthrown by the nationalist Galician Uniat minority, led by oligarchs like the Jewish Poroshenko and other billionaire industrialists who sold their souls to the CIA in exchange for its backing. Elected by 25% of the people, and that was only achieved with harsh Secret Police repression and US PR propaganda, these people are ruthless because they are completely without principle. That is why they hate the Ukrainian people and Orthodoxy. Unlike them, we Christians have principles.

In fact, it would be more exact to call such individuals Orthodoxophobes than Russophobes and Ukrainophobes, because that is the essence of their hatred, hatred for Christ, however deludedly they may claim that they are for Christ. As with the Bolsheviks in Alexander Blok’s revolutionary poem, ‘The Twelve’, they think that they are following Christ, but in reality they are following Antichrist. And he will lead them to the perdition of their souls in Gehenna. That is how serious their situation is.

Q: What is happening to the ‘British Orthodox Church’?

A: The so-called ‘British Orthodox Church’, in fact neither British, nor Orthodox, was a tiny group of vagantes and other eccentric Anglo-Catholics, whose leader used to call himself ‘the Patriarch of Glastonbury’(!). However, they were received and ordained by the Coptic Church some 20 years ago. In 1999 they had one bishop, 18 vicars (clergy) and 72 faithful! In early October this year they left the Miaphysite Church and, apparently, have now gone back to being vagantes. The problem was that the ex-Anglicans in question could not accept the inherent anti-Chalcedonianism which is now once more coming to the fore among the Copts in what I think is an outburst of nationalism. (Anti-Chalcedonianism goes hand in hand with local nationalism, which to a great extent caused it).

I am told that the group now has one bishop, 2 priests and about 100 faithful, mainly Establishment ex-Anglicans, mainly, I am told, elderly, though I am not sure if that is true. What the group will do now is unclear. Sadly, I doubt that they will wish to join the Orthodox Church because that would mean accepting catechism and being received as laypeople. I very much hope that I am wrong in this pessimistic view of their clericalism. There is one ex-Anglican group which they might join; it ordains ex-Anglican vicars almost immediately and virtually without training. Who knows? I think it will make little difference because it is such a tiny group, not even one normal parish.

Q: Given its critical situation, it has been suggested that the Rue Daru jurisdiction be directly governed by the Patriarchate of Constantinople and join the local Constantinople dioceses, like that of Metropolitan Emmanuel in Paris. What do you think of that?

A: I agree. I think that this is so logical that it is inevitable. Once all those who love the Russian Tradition have left Rue Daru, as they have been doing over the last thirty and more years since the repose of the saintly Archbishop George (Tarasov) and the fall into decadence after him, what will be left? Freemasons and naïve converts, new calendarist modernists and ecumenists. Obviously, they should all be together in Constantinople’s local diocesan structures and lodges. On the other hand, they should first have the honesty to hand back Russian Church property, which they are effectively occupying.

Q: What do you make of the recent Roman Catholic Synod in Rome?

A: Catholicism is now at a turning point. Will it keep the remnants of Catholicism (which date back in one form or another to Orthodoxy), or will it become completely Protestantized, a process that was initiated by wealthy US, German and other liberal cardinals over fifty years ago at the Second Vatican Council. With the present Jesuit Pope, for whom the means seem to justify the ends and who seems to agree with everyone and no-one, it is impossible to say what will happen, but that is what is at stake. This is important because Roman Catholicism is the very last Western European institution with an Orthodox past to survive. However, today Roman Catholicism, Uniatism included, looks so weak, so Americanized, that is, so Protestantized, that there seems little hope for it. I have always believed that only Orthodoxy can fill the spiritual abyss left by it.

Its situation is symbolic of Western Europe in general, whose cities now seem to be on the verge of disappearing beneath the tidal wave of the Muslim invasion. This was brought about by Western interference in the Middle East and North Africa, the notorious CIA-orchestrated ‘Arab spring’, which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands. Will Western Europe survive at all? That is now the question. However, I would like to disagree with the Western xenophobes, who blame ‘Arabs’ or ‘Muslims’. These wretched people are not the cause of the problem. The cause of the problem is Western apostasy, the fact that Western people have abandoned Christ. As nature abhors a vacuum, so it is being filled – and by Islam. If Western people had not abandoned Christ and Christian culture, there would be no spiritual vacuum and no Muslims here to fill it.

Q: How should we look at the situation in Syria?

A: We live in times when the prophecies are being accomplished before our very eyes – in Iraq, in Syria and in Turkey. The present catastrophe began in 1991 with the beginning of the fall of Babylon (Iraq) in the first Gulf War. This was accomplished in 2003. In 2000 Iraq had nearly 2,000,000 Christians, now there are fewer than 200,000. Even someone as obtuse and deluded as Blair is just now beginning to admit that he is partly responsible. As for Syria, it is next to Armageddon. The third player is Turkey, whose fall is also prophesied. Then will come the drying up of the Euphrates. Before that I think we shall also see changes in the Ukraine next year.

Following Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya have all called for Russian help. It is difficult to know whether Russia will be able to put out all the conflagrations started by incredible Western hubris, but we shall see. It is not easy to be the world’s fireman when you face American arsonists.

Q: What lies behind this hubris which is inherent in the West?

A: Historically, it is a mixture of the imperialist superiority of the pagan Romans mixed with the ruthless plundering of the barbarian Germanic peoples being harnessed by Satanic powers. Thus, what is at the origin of the British Establishment? It is the Norman mentality, in other words, the mentality of a Viking warband, which is what the Normans were. When they came to England in 1066, having already destroyed the older Christian traditions of pre-Norman Normandy, they came to plunder the gold and riches of a Christian kingdom and destroy its half-millennial Church.

The gleam in Norman eyes then was the same as that in the eyes of the gold-hungry Spanish conquistadors five centuries later, and the same as that in the eyes of Texan oilmen when they got their greedy hands on Iraqi oil five centuries after that. Even modern Western science fiction talks of asset-stripping and strip-mining other planets in exactly the same way. Exploit the mineral resources of a country until they are exhausted and then move on to the next country, or planet, and strip it bare too, plunder and pillage ruthlessly – all under the pretext of freedom and democracy. As the imperialist British Prime Minister Palmerston said 150 years ago, Britain has ‘no friends and no enemies, only interests’. In other words, the Western Establishment is nothing but a Viking warband intent on plunder and pillage, intent on its own interests, and without any principles whatsoever.

Q: What would you say of the general situation? Doesn’t it make you despair?

A: No. The world, as ever, is divided into three groups: God’s, Satan’s and the undecided. This means: the real Orthodox (those who are willing to die for Orthodoxy); Satan’s people (including so-called ‘Orthodox’ apostates); and the rest, including many nominal Orthodox, who have not made up their mind whose they are. Some among the rest are two-faced and agree with everyone, but among the rest there are also those who one day will be willing to die for Orthodoxy. It is in the hope of the repentance of all that the world continues through the mercy of God.

I think in dealing with the things of the world (political events etc), we have to be in the know, but not despair. Be as gentle as doves and wise as serpents, says Christ. We must always remember that though man proposes, God disposes. Satan’s forces do what they want, but it does not mean that they will win. They will not. We know that for a fact. The scheme of the prince of this world and his over-educated minions is obvious – their great plan is to restore the Temple in Jerusalem so that they can enthrone Antichrist there. But it may be hundreds of years till they achieve that, even though there are days when it seems that it is going to happen within just a few years.

God, not man, disposes. Do not despair. We have already seen one miracle – the fall of militant atheism in the old Soviet Unionand the beginning of the restoration of the Christian Empire there. Other miracles are possible. Never underestimate either the wisdom of God or the foolishness of man. Never doubt God’s power.

Who is Speaking in New York?

‘Do not take the path that we took. We tried it and it is the path that leads to destruction’.

Patriarch Kyrill of Moscow and all the Russias,
speaking to the West and referring to atheism

On Thurs 24 September the reputed BBC Newsnight programme called President Putin – ‘the Leader of the Free World’. This was an astonishing turnaround given the usual caricatures, stereotypes and character assassinations vomited forth by the Establishment-run BBC towards the political leader of the Christian world. Somehow these words must have escaped the tight State censorship system that binds the BBC. Having said that, the statement was wrong. Why? In order to answer this question, we must take a look at some history over the last 100 years or so.

First of all, this statement was made by a BBC journalist in the context of the disastrous US policy of deliberately creating chaos in the Middle East. This has notably been in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and throughout all the countries where the CIA-orchestrated ‘Arab Spring’ took place. The fact that this divide and rule policy has resulted in two trillion dollars of US debt, hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of mainly Muslim refugees, of whom 10,000 a day (3.65 million per year at that rate) are now entering the EU, is beginning to dawn even on the Western media. The refugees pass as swiftly as possible through the EU-created employment desert and poverty of Greece and Eastern Europe and head for Germany and Scandinavia. With the threat of the collapse of the Western-installed oligarch regime in the bankrupt Ukraine and millions more refugees, the message is getting through even to Western politicians that something must be done by someone who, unlike them, is competent.

Fresh from the Russian diplomatic triumph in Iran, President Putin is now doing in Syria what the West should have done from the start – supporting the lesser evil against the greater evil, supporting President Assad against IS. Having completely lost control of the Middle East through its anarchic and murderous meddling, the West is lost. By backing savage terrorists and fanatics against popular Arab leaders like Assad, Khadafy and Hussein, once all feted by the West itself, it is now left to Russia, backed by Non-Western countries all over the world, to clean up the mess. The West has always backed traitors and murderers, imagining them to be its friends, and so lost its real, if critical, friends. Thus, in the same way it has supported President Poroshenko against President Putin, creating its own nightmares.

This was exactly the case with the Western-organized Russian Revolution. At the beginning of 1917, mainly through the poisonous British ambassador Buchanan, the West launched a coup d’etat in Saint Petersburg through treacherous Russian aristocrats and generals. This coup d’etat, overthrowing the legitimate government, just as the West overthrew the legitimate Yanukovich government in the Ukraine last year, was fanatically and blindly welcomed by Lloyd George and the French and US leaders of the time. By deposing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed in 1917, the West thought that it could prevent the rise of Russia, poised to conquer Vienna and Berlin and so control European destinies, and set up a puppet government there. Instead, the tiny minority of incompetent pro-Western buffoons within seven months lost control, ran away to Paris, and the Bolsheviks led by Lenin, took over.

The same is happening today throughout the Middle East and in the Ukraine, where extremists, whether from IS or from the Right Sector, are poised to take over from feeble Western puppets. The West has created IS, which already controls large parts of Iraq and Syria and is ready to take over derelict Afghanistan, where bankrupt UK governments wasted 450 British lives and £35 billion in trying to support its puppets. In the Ukraine the hope is that the Ukrainian people will rise up against the Poroshenko/Waltzman mafia and its CIA henchmen, freeing themselves from US-armed Right Sector Fascist terrorists. In some areas of the Ukraine they have already found freedom against Western-imposed tyranny; it remains to be seen whether the junta will survive another winter.

The West has understood nothing. The Russians have understood everything. Why? Because Russia went through 75 years of atheism and its ideology of death and saw through its destructive myths, whereas the West has consistently refused to heed the Russian experience and has now imposed atheism. This can be clearly seen in the CIA-organized Pussy Riot obscenity in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Some previously unknown sick young women were paid to blaspheme standing by the holy of holies in a Cathedral rebuilt by the donations of the Russian people. It was rebuilt on the site of the Cathedral which had been built to commemorate the people’s victory over the Western invader and blasphemer Napoleon and had then been blown up by the Bolsheviks, who had come to power through Western meddling in the name of Western, Marxist ideology.

The hysterical young women of Pussy Riot were in Russian eyes simply latter-day, Western-sponsored Bolsheviks, beloved by Western liberals and pro-Fascist Senator McCain alike. Such an anti-Christian provocation, paid for and feted by the West, shows that the modern West is in fact anti-Christian. The spirit of Bolshevik atheism is alive and well in the new Satanic, Western hatred of Christ and of mankind, in the cult of egoism and careerism, in the cult of the ‘human right’ or ‘freedom’ to blaspheme in the Cathedral of Christ or in Charlie Hebdo, in homosexual ‘marriage’, in the persecution of all who disagree with atheism, in suicidal abortion and euthanasia on demand and in the totalitarian, terroristic tyranny of political ‘correctness’. In its atheism the new West has adopted the civilization of death that the Bolsheviks once espoused.

However, today’s Russia is returning to its Christian roots and values, which are the values of St Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor. These values are not nationalistic, for ‘Russia’ is not simply a nation, but it is a spiritual concept, a state of mind, in the same way as the Christian Empire of St Constantine was not some mere nationalistic project, but a multinational reality. Indeed, when the Empire degenerated into a nationalistic project on two occasions, in Germanized Old Rome and in Hellenized Constantinople, it collapsed. After the collapse of the Second Christian Empire in 1453, undermined first by barbarian Western ‘crusaders’, then by Muslim fanatics and then by internal pro-Catholic traitors, the Christian Empire was transferred to Russia for its third and final incarnation. Overthrown in 1917 by ‘treachery, cowardice and deceit’, both external and internal, the Empire is now reviving.

Today’s Russia is amazed by the Bolshevikization of political ‘correctness’ of the contemporary West and by the Islamization in its ever-larger ghettoes. This is what happens, they say in Russia, when you lose your roots – as we nearly did under atheist Communism. Has the West learned nothing from our experience of 75 years of Marxist atheism and the Cold War? In 2007 I spoke to a deputy of the Russian State Duma on this very question and he answered me: ‘No, the West has learned nothing because the West is too proud to take lessons from others, so it will have to undergo its own atheist persecutions before it can understand. Just as a child who refuses to obey its parent who tells him not to put his finger in the fire, and learns the hard way, so too will it be with the West’. Russia underwent the culture of death, but has come back to life; now the West is undergoing the culture of death and refusing life, refusing to learn from Russia’s experience.

Today, the USA and its vassal nations in NATO is ringing the Christian Empire with ships, planes, tanks, weapons, including nuclear weapons of mass destruction, troops and military exercises only a few hundred metres from Russian borders. Russia is protecting itself as the last bulwark of Christ and mounting defensive military exercises in return. Icons of the Mother of God are weeping in the Crimea as the Kiev puppet regime tries to starve the free Crimean population into surrendering to its tyranny. However, the flag of the double-headed eagle is flying over the Eastern Ukraine, liberated by its population who have risen against the oppressors. Today, Western-created, sponsored and financed terrorists in Syria have to face Russian arms. The West presents Russia as its enemy. This is hypocrisy. The West has only one enemy: itself.

However, I have still not directly answered the question as to why the BBC journalists are wrong to call President Putin ‘the Leader of the Free World’. They are wrong because he only represents the constant truths of Russian Foreign Policy, Eternal Russia, the Eternal Christian Empire. The reader of any survey of the foreign policy of Tsar Nicholas II (1) will know that what is now being done in today’s Russia is merely continuity with the past. 1917 merely put off the inevitable, the worldwide spread of Christian values by the Christian Empire which the Russian Federation is now becoming once more. True, the Christian Empire was interrupted by the Soviet period, especially under Leninism and Trotskyism and especially until 1941. Then the West, this time in its Nazi Barbarossa format, though much inspired by the Kaiser’s Prussian format, once more invaded Russia, thus ironically ensuring not the destruction of Russia, but its inevitable revival.

In 1917 the anti-Christian West did not stop but only delayed the development of the Christian Empire. The more sensitive, politically free and spiritually awakened in the rest of the Orthodox world, in the Local Churches of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, of Serbia, Georgia, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus and on Mt Athos and elsewhere, have also known it for a very long time. In the monasteries and parishes of the Church Outside Russia, renewed in recent years both by a new emigration from the Russian Lands and by Western people who have seen through the lies and joined the Russian Church, we too have known it for a very long time also. We who in the Russian emigration, scattered across the face of the world, prayed and waited for decades for this moment of revival, rejoice. The historic injustice of 1917 and its Western-orchestrated coup d’etat is slowly being righted – even within our lifetimes.

Who is the Leader of the Free World? Who supported the Boers and the Tibetans, the Thais and the Ethiopians, the Mongols and the Moroccans, the Christians of Syria and Palestine? Who would have had peace in the Jerusalem instead of riots of Zionists and Muslims on the Temple Mount? Who was welcomed as the ‘White Tsar’ by Muslims and Buddhists alike? ‘While he was alive, millions of Arabs lived in peace and security. When the news reached the Middle Esat that they had killed the Tsar in Syria, the Lebanon and Palestine, mass suicides began. Arabs even then considered that with the death of Tsar Nicholas human history was at an end and that life on earth had lost all meaning’. (2). Who is the Leader of the Free World who speaks before over 100 world leaders at the 70th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations through his representative Vladimir Putin? It is the peace-loving Tsar Nicholas II, who founded the predecessor of the UN in the Hague in the century before last. Of the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, we, like V.V. Putin, are merely servants and it is he who speaks at the UN through our voices.

Notes:

1. For example:

The Reign of Tsar Nicholas II, by S. S. Oldenburg, several editions. (In English: The Last Tsar: Nicholas II, his reign and his Russia, S. S. Oldenburg, translated by Leonid I. Mihalap and Patrick J. Rollins)

The Last Grand Duchess: Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna, by Ian Vorres, 1964. (Translated into Russian in 1996)

The Foreign Policy of Tsar Nicholas II by P. V. Multatuli, Moscow 2012 (in Russian)

2. Vernye (The Faithful, on those who did not Betray the Imperial Martyrs), by O. V. Chernova, Moscow, 2010, p. 30 (in Russian)

Towards Palmyra

From Recent Correspondence – August 2015

On Current Events

Q: At present there is great concern about financial events in China. What do they mean?

A: I cannot say, I am not an economist, but it seems to me that there are two things to be said which are no doubt apparent to many. First of all, it is significant that because of stock exchange turmoil in China, the Western world is panicking. This marks a turning point, for it shows that the Chinese economy is now the most important in the world. This was unthinkable even five years ago, let alone twenty-five years ago. Secondly, and as a result of this, I think there is behind this crisis some artificial manipulation to stop China becoming even more important and to protect the US dollar as a reserve currency and so as a global control mechanism. For the powers that be, China must not be allowed to become independent of their global control. This speculation is artificial. I cannot help wondering if the recent massive and deadly explosion in the Chinese city of Tianjin is also connected. Could that have been sabotage? I don’t know.

Q: What is happening in the Ukraine now?

A: It is very difficult to know what is happening there. There are many rumours. I would not pretend to understand, since reports are so mixed and chaotic. I would much rather quote what a well-informed person has said about the reason for the crisis and civil war in the Ukraine – and also in China. Thus, in an interview with ‘The Saker’, Paul Craig Roberts has explained this and also the general hatred towards Russia among the governing elite in Washington:

‘While the US was focused on its Mid-East wars, Putin restored Russia and blocked Washington’s planned invasion of Syria and bombing of Iran. The “first objective” of the neocon doctrine was breached. Russia had to be brought into line. That is the origin of Washington’s attack on Russia. The dependent and captive US and European media simply repeats “the Russian Threat” to the public, which is insouciant and otherwise uninformed.

The offense of Russian culture is also there – Christian morals, respect for law and humanity, diplomacy in place of coercion, traditional social mores – but these are in the background. Russia is hated because Russia (and China) is a check on Washington’s unilateral uni-power’.

I think that it is clear from the Ukraine, not to mention the Middle East, that although Washington is not insane in its single-minded and ruthless logically thirst for world power, it is morally insane. We already saw the beginnings of this moral insanity after World War II, first in the Korean War and then in the Vietnam War, but since the fall of the Soviet Union it has become blatant. Who can forget the first Gulf War, an artificial provocation, in which thousands of US troops were affected by ‘Gulf War syndrome’, poisoned by their own side.

On White Russia

Q: Does the White Russian Movement today have any meaning almost one hundred years after it began?

A: The words ‘The White Russian Movement’ are meaningless! It is rather like the phrase ‘The Catholic Church’. You can find Catholics of all sorts, many very far from Orthodoxy and some very close to Orthodoxy and a great many inbetween.

So, in the same way, firstly, you must define ‘The White Movement’. The White Movement was very varied. Sadly, only about 10% of those who fled for their lives from the Soviet Union continued to live in the Church and supported the Tsar. The majority were not interested in Church life and indeed had not been when still in Russia. They were simply anti-Bolshevik for political reasons. That is not the same as Orthodox. This was clearly pointed out by St John of Shanghai in his report to the Second All-Diaspora Council of 1938. Such ‘White Russians’ were soon assimilated into Western society, as they had no interest in Russian Orthodoxy, the source of their identity. An English example of this is the notorious secularist and former Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, whose grandmother was ‘White Russian’, but there are many others.

Yet other so-called ‘White Russians’ went into schism, leaving the Russian Church altogether and joining the Patriarchate of Constantinople. These modernist aristocrats and intellectuals of the Paris schism supported renovationism, both the primitive, pseudo-Protestant sort and the sophisticated, pseudo-spiritual sort, which was inspired by perennialists like Rene Guenon, Frithjof Schuon with their Hindu and Muslim concepts. The first group was and is purely secularist, but the second group was and is equally secularist – through its spiritual impurity which flattered and flatters the immense, narcissistic vanity of such intellectuals.

Therefore, if we wish to speak of the true White Movement today, then we can only mean today’s Church Outside Russia, ROCOR. However, since the Church inside Russia has been free, those who are Churched there share identical views with us. So true ‘White Russians’ are all who follow the Church and support ‘the White Tsar’, regardless of whether we live inside Russia or outside.

Q: What do you mean by ‘those who are Churched there’?

A: The Church inside Russia is huge and you can meet all sorts of individual viewpoints, shared by those who are at various stages of being Churched, who have not yet moved on to ‘Churchliness’ (tserkovnost), the understanding of the Church and Church life, who belong to the mainstream. For example, inside Russia there are small numbers known as ‘kochetkovtsy’, who are modernistic and ecumenistic, but at the other extreme, there are those who are called ‘Orthodox Stalinists’ i.e. nationalists who imagine Stalin to have been a supporter of the Church! There are extremes of all sorts on the fringes of Church life. Then there are those who are corrupt, who exploit the Church to enrich themselves, a few clergy among them. Clearly, such small, unChurched groups do not belong to the mainstream of the Church. ROCOR has nothing to do with them, but with the mainstream inside Russia.

The Crisis in Europe

Q: What is to be made of the present migration crisis in Europe, as hundreds of thousands of refugees come here from the Middle East and North Africa?

A: How interesting that since the word ‘immigration’ has brought the Establishment into disrepute, they have changed the word to ‘migration’! It is the same in France. The elite has changed the vocabulary in the hope that the people are stupid enough not to understand what is happening. Newspeak!

I would say this of the tragedy, in which hundreds are dying, usually by drowning, every week.

Each of our actions has an inevitable consequence, there is always a price to pay. For example, why was the First World War fought over Belgium? Because Belgium had to pay for the genocide that it had allowed its King to carry out in the Belgian Congo, where he slaughtered between five and ten million people and maimed millions of others, according to even conservative estimates. And why did Hitler carry out his genocide of 50 million precisely in Europe? Because Europe had to pay for the racist genocides it had carried out in its colonies in the Americas, Asia, Australasia and Africa. What Hitler did to the Slavs, Jews and others in Europe, was no more than what Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Portugal had already done outside Europe. As one cynical comment has it, if the Jews had been black, the USA would have been on Hitler’s side. The First and Second ‘World’ (= European) Wars simply brought Europe’s crimes back to Europe.

Today, irony of ironies, European secularization, the anti-Christian spirit responsible for Europe’s exploitation of its colonial empires, is leading directly to mass immigration, that is, European Islamization. Europe is to become ‘Eurabia’. Today Europe has to pay the price for inventing the crazy borders of countries like Libya, Syria and Iraq. It has to pay the price for invading, or supporting the invasion of, and creating the present chaos in Yugoslavia (from where the immigrants are entering the EU), Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and standing by and doing nothing during the massacres of Christians in those countries as well as in Syria, Nigeria, Eritrea and Turkey. This wave of immigration (‘migration’ as Western governments now camouflage it as) is the consequence of Europe’s meddling in other countries or else its fiddling while they burned.

Germany is paying an especially high price. Why? Because it brought Eastern Europe into the EU in order to exploit those countries and Germany played the main role in destroying Yugoslavia. These immigrants are not stopping in Macedonia or Serbia or Hungary or Slovakia (which says that it only accepts Christians), they are heading for Germany first.

A: So Europe is in crisis. What is to be done?

Q: Europe has been in crisis since 1914, more especially since 1918 when the members of the Russian Royal Family were slaughtered. Do not forget that the Russian Royal House was European. Tsar Nicholas II was Russian in spirit, in his soul, by racial origin he was almost entirely a Western European, as was the Tsarina. Tsar Nicholas was an immensely cultivated man, with two degrees, who spoke five languages, including his mother’s Danish. To kill the Russian Royal House was suicide for Europe, which is why the order for their slaughter came not from Russia or from Europe, but from New York. Until European nations realize this and assert their sovereignty, they will for ever be US colonies and vassals. Europe must repent.

Today, nearly 100 years after those events, Europe sits between secularism and Islamism. Therefore, the present struggle is for the very soul of Europe. I fear that Europe may disappear, that it is lost, too late, for there appears to be no repentance. The European struggle is between dark and light, between Europe’s spiritual identity and its spiritual nonentity, for its very survival. Can the peoples of Europe survive against the unprincipled venality of their elites, their Establishments? I am increasingly pessimistic.
The spiritually conscious in Europe seem to be sailing to Russia on the wreckage of the European Titanic, fleeing the Dead Sea of Sodom.

Q: Are you thinking of the British Establishment, when you speak of the ‘venality of their elites’?

A: We now know, as was long suspected, that the British Establishment, like the Ancient Roman, is corrupted by pedophilia, but the other Western Establishments are in general no better. I know the murderous French Establishment in particular.

Q: So, do the Churched members of the Russian Orthodox Church, what you would perhaps call ‘the true White Russia’, have a message for Europe in its present spiritual crisis?

A: The Russian Orthodox Mission to Europe is to save the best of Old Europe, that which is compatible with the Orthodox Faith and Church, compatible with Holy Rus. This means that our Mission is to Resurrect Holy Europe – the Saints of Europe. It is the Saints of Europe, the best of Old Europe, who speak to Holy Rus, for our ideals are the same.

The West fell into hedonism and hedonism has become bestiality; the West fell into the cult of comfort and comfort has become the end of culture, moral ruination. The two first Romes, Rome and Istanbul, cannot help here, because they are only relics, albeit very important and historic ones. They Have both been nationalized, one by the old pagan Roman mentality, the other by Hellenism. Only a New Rome with a strong State and Faith and multinational spirit can resist. Thus, our Mission is to give Europe the commandments of Holy Rus in order to save her.

Q: What are these commandments?

A: These commandments are to keep:

1. Orthodoxy, uncompromised as is in the best of Holy Rus, what we may call the true White Russia, regardless of whether it is inside Russia or outside Russia.

2. Sovereignty, the sovereign spiritual identity of each European people and tongue.

3. The People, respect for each people and culture of Europe by showing them that we do not live by bread alone.

If the West ignores these commandments and offers no spiritual resistance, its future is Palmyra.

The Path to Unity

The Path to Unity

Woe unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord…And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries where I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase.

Jeremiah 23, 1 and 3

The Path to Disunity

Since 1917 and the Western-organized fall of the Christian Empire, the Third Rome, the forces of this world have contrived to divide the Confederation of Local Churches which forms the Orthodox Church. This they have done in three stages.

Their first aim was to attack, paralyse, dupe and so divide those in the key Church, by far the biggest, the most multinational and missionary-minded and that on which the others largely depended, the Russian Orthodox Church. If extremists of any sort, whether modernists, nationalists or sectarians, could be brought to divide this Church, its territory being one sixth of the planet, then its influence there and all over the world could be destroyed. Thus, the forces of this world provoked Protestant-minded, renovationist modernists, both inside Russia (the Communist-sponsored Vvedensky and those with him, including the present neo-renovationists) and outside Russia (the Protestant-sponsored YMCA Paris Schism), nationalist groups (Ukrainians – Galician autocephalists and the present careerist Philaretists, Belarussians – autocephalists, misled Carpatho-Russian Americans – autocephalists) and tiny right-wing sects (Suzdalites, Agathangelites, Tikhonites (from Tikhon Paseka), Diomidites etc). It did not matter to them what ism they used in order to attack, paralyse, dupe and so divide, whether Marxist Communism, Hitlerite Fascism or liberal-consumerist Capitalism. More directly they also used other isms, Catholicism and Protestantism, sending in the 1920s Catholics (D’Herbigny) and in the 1990s more Uniats and US Protestant sectarians to try and divide the Russian Church.

Although the struggle continues, against all that the forces of this world planned, the Russian Church and so Orthodox Russia are gradually being restored. The forces of this world have largely failed and will fail, as long as the blood and seed of the New Martyrs and the tears and sweat of the Confessors who are rebuilding the Russian Church oppose them.

The forces of this world then set out on the second part of their campaign. This was to attack, paralyse, dupe and so divide those in the other, smaller Local Churches by introducing modernism and its symbol, the Catholic-Protestant calendar. They started in the weakest link in the chain, Turkish-occupied Constantinople, and began replacing its Patriarchs with Western puppets. This of course created schism. The forces of this world expanded their activities, interfering in the other four Greek Churches (the Church of Greece, its autocephalous offshoot in Greek Albania, the Church of Cyprus and the Patriarchate of Alexandria) as well as in the Latin Church (Romania, where they have yet again recently meddled in the appointment of a Patriarch), in the weakest of the Slav Churches (Bulgaria) and in the Arab Patriarchate of Antioch (where they have created a terrorist war), as well as trying to subjugate the Czechoslovak and Polish Churches. Everywhere they tried to introduce the Catholic-Protestant calendar and other modernist practices. Thus, altogether 20% of the Church was contaminated.

They have succeeded only in part and only temporarily.

The 20% contamination by modernism left the other 80% of the Church, in the Russian Lands, Serbia, Georgia and Jerusalem, all but uncontaminated. As they could not be allowed to remain intact, the forces of this world proceeded to the third and most recent part of their campaign. They have attacked the Serbian Church (dividing its territory, handing over some to Catholic control, some to Muslim control, some to Macedonian and Montenegrin nationalist schismatic control, and then trying to divide its episcopate), the Georgian Church (supporting a pro-modernist and anti-patriotic coup d’etat, calling it ‘regime change’ and trying to introduce consumerist sodomy), the Patriarchate of Jerusalem (where the previous Patriarch strangely languishes in prison and a schism has been established via the former US ambassador in Qatar, who allowed US premises to be used for services outside the canonical territory of Jerusalem on that of the Patriarchate of Antioch) and again in Russia (a coup d’etat by Western-backed Catholic nationalists from Galicia who have started massacring the Ukrainian Orthodox people. Everywhere they have also used the tiny, US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople to sow discord and division against the Russian Church, whether in Finland and Estonia (age-old territories of the Russian Church), using dissidents in the Russian emigration in France, North America and England, or more recently in Czechoslovakia (refusing to recognize its autocephaly and dividing its episcopate) and the Ukraine (where the Patriarchate’s US masters are tempting it to recognize politically-backed, uncanonical schismatics, as they have already done in Estonia)).

Here too, in this still continuing third part of their campaign, what the forces of this world have forgotten is that though they propose, God disposes. For only He lives in eternity and shows His loving and visionful Providence, whereas they live in their visionless spiral of infernal hatred, which they are trying to establish as an earthly kingdom.

The Path to Unity?

We do not know the future, how God will dispose. That is in His hands. But we can already see where the forces of this world may lose their way:

In Syria, as a result of the US-fomented war, contrary to what was proposed, the Patriarchate of Antioch has recognized who its friends are. Recognizing that it has no support from Constantinople, which is in the hands of the US-backed, anti-Syrian Turks, the Patriarchate of Antioch is now looking to the Russian Church.

In Africa, the Patriarchate of Alexandria and All Africa, once run as a colonial department of the Greek Foreign Ministry, is too poor to expand very much. It needs Russian help and such help would inevitably be anti-phyletist. In such a case the Patriarchate could be taken over, as would only be just, by native African bishops, just as the once-Greek colony of Antioch was taken over by native Arab bishops with anti-phyletist Russian help.

In another Greek colony, Jerusalem (as also in Constantinople), most of the faithful are now Russian. And in Jerusalem Russians support, as is only just, native Arab candidates as future bishops.

Many in the Churches of Greece (and so also in the Church of Greek Albania) and Cyprus (here the US-backed Turks were allowed to invade and occupy the island, which made anti-US feeling even stronger), their economies brought low and their peoples impoverished by joining the neo-feudal EU vassal of the US, are now looking to Russia for help.

The Church of Serbia still looks to Russia and adheres to the Orthodox calendar despite EU-backed political interference in its internal affairs and the now US-owned media.

The Churches of Romania and Bulgaria, in difficulty as the old generation of monastic elders has died out and members of the spiritually impoverished and so pro-Uniat middle generation, which grew up in the simoniac Communist period, has come to power, still have spiritual power in the monasteries and among many in the younger generation.

The Church of Georgia still has excellent relations with the Russian Church, despite US attempts to destroy them by encouraging the 2008 Georgian invasion of Russia-protected territory, where the US-run regime slaughtered 2,000 civilians in half an hour in an unprovoked and compassionless attack by its puppet government.

The Churches of Poland and Czechoslovakia are allied to Russia, the latter all the more so after recent US-backed Greek meddling there.

The Church of Constantinople looks ever weaker, as the rest of the world begins to recognize that it has since 1453, quite literally, been wearing the Emperor’s (new) clothes, that the real leader of the Orthodox world is the Russian Patriarch and that they have to talk to him if they want to talk about serious problems. More and more members of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and not only on Mt Athos, can see this themselves. The illusion of the absurd but vanity-consoling US interpretation of Canon 28 of Chalcedon is transparent to nearly all. Even some in the US are wondering whether it is worth spending more money that they do not have in Istanbul in order to maintain the vain illusion.

In the Diaspora, the Russian Church, recovering from paralysis, has begun to take responsibility and bring unity. And in the Ukraine itself, where the forces of this world thought they could destroy the Russian Church, their plans are backfiring. Most are now talking about the disintegration and dissolution of the purely artificial Ukrainian ‘State’, a conglomerate creation of four imperialist tyrannies, the Habsburg, the Leninist, the Stalinist and that of Washington. Its collapse is for many now just a question of time (according to some, months, though others reckon a few years). 84% of the Ukrainian people are now publically asking for their country to be run by President Putin – far better than continuing under the tyranny and poverty of the corrupt and unrepresentative Kiev puppet junta. This is completely reliant on US subsidies for survival, at great expense to the EU, whose members are suffering bitterly from its anti-Russian, or rather anti-European, sanctions.

Some 55% of the Ukraine, the east and the south, together with Transdnestria, may well return after nearly 95 years to Russia (some of it, the Crimea, already has done so by democratic referendum). 25% of it, centred around Kiev, may become once more the ancient Malorossiya, a southern variant of Belarus. The only part, some 15%, that is really Ukrainian and where the various dialects of Ukrainian are spoken, the largely Catholic Galician borderland, which is what the word ‘Ukraine’ means, may mostly return to Poland. It was from here that the Georgian tyrant Stalin tore it away in 1939, earning the undying and understandable hatred of its people. The two small remaining parts of the present Ukraine, some 5%, may return to Romania (the Orthodox calendar intact, so again helping the Romanian Church to return to the Tradition) and Hungary. And the part that may return to Hungary, that which the Kiev bureaucrats still call ‘Transcarpathia’, even though they are the only Transcarpathians, as they are the ones who live across the Carpathians, could become the kernel of a fifteenth Local Church, a Hungarian Orthodox Church.

Given the excellent relations between Hungary, which has a democratically-elected anti-EU government, and the Russian Federation, which supports all National Resistance and Sovereignist movements against the tyrannical EU, this could happen. Only a few years ago the Russian Church won its legal battle for control of the Budapest Orthodox Cathedral – all is set for a new Local Church to be born. Thus the 500 parishes of ‘Transcarpathians’, that is Carpatho-Russians (or Ruthenians = Latin for Russians), would be at the heart of another Local Church. For it is they who are at the heart of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, they who have contributed to the Polish Church, one of whose constituent peoples is the Lemkos (north-western Carpatho-Russians), and it is they who through their noble and illustrious son from Presov Rus, Metr Lavr (Skhkurla), contributed to Diaspora unity between the Russian Church and one of its constituent parts, the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). The vast majority in the latter had only been waiting for freedom at the Centre of the Church to be reconciled with Her.

Of course, nothing is certain; the above are all possible scenarios, only some of which may actually happen. Nevertheless, they are possible, whereas only a few decades ago, when we lived oppressed and isolated by all the forces of this world, they seemed impossible. The visionless who thought short-term, unlike St John of Shanghai and those like him, whose world-view they should have been trying to live by instead of studying philosophy, failed to see that the world would change. Today, we live in a different world from the past. Now a small minority of countries that have stopped being Christian huddle together in a bankrupt union of less than a billion, a union of Eurosodom and Gomorrhica. And the three largest Christian countries, Brazil, Russia and China, are bound together in a union with others, covering half the world’s population.

What the forces of this world were proposing only three or four decades ago, and which made those who had no faith in the Holy Spirit despair, today seems ever less probable. Then the Establishment-compromised, who had in their youth taken the easy, Establishment-approved path and refused to take up the Cross of the Russian Church, mocked us, denounced us and despised us. Now, older, they have only to take up the Cross and they too will walk. Unlike the Donatists and Neo-Donatists, we will welcome them back with open arms, as the loving Father did the Prodigal Son of old.

A Unique Opportunity

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

Matt. 10,34

In its hubris the Western world, Euroamerica, has most foolishly been destroying its own power base. Having carefully taken over Eastern Europe, including Non-Catholic/Protestant Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria, not to mention bombing Serbia and trying to operate coups d’etat in Georgia and now Moldova, Macedonia and Armenia, it has had mixed success. It has tried to prise the present territory of the Ukraine, inhabited by 80% of Russian speakers, from its national and historical identity through a violent coup d’etat, installing a corrupt puppet regime there and then starting a bloody civil war.

Now Euroamerica has set Greece against it by bankrupting its people and humiliating them. Backed by their spiritual leaders on Mt Athos, the Greek people have staged a democratic revolt against its feudal Western leaders. They want freedom. And the only way of obtaining freedom, whether in the Ukraine or in Greece, is by allying themselves with the Russian Federation and so the Eurasian Economic Union and BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. For it is these countries which have now set up their own International Bank against the Western run IMF and also rejected universal sodomy as preached by the Western freemasons.

In other words, we may now be seeing the end of the EU Fourth Reich, the end of post-Cold War US hegemony and its promotion of sodomy. The US and the EU between them have thrown both the Ukraine and Greece into the arms of the only country in the world that can recreate the only Christian Empire, which the West firstly overthrew in New Rome in 1204 (which led directly to its final fall in 1453) and secondly overthrew in the Third Rome in 1917. The West did not expect the Christian Roman Empire to make a comeback; the resurgence of the Third and Final Rome was not part of the pagan Western script.

The pagan Western script said that after the fall of Communism, Russians would become so Westernized, so zombified by bread and circus consumerism, that they would give up their Christian Civilization. Therefore, pro-Western bandits, disguised under the names of privatizers and oligarchs, would steal the riches of the country and its drunkard President would ensure its penetration by Protestant robot-missionaries, freemasons and ‘Non-Governmental Organizations’ (= CIA fronts). As for Greece, in decadence ever since the Western overthrow of the Christian Empire in 1917, it was already falling like a ripe fruit, showing the way to the fall of Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and the other fringes of the Christian world.

However, the pagan Western script failed to take into account the sword of the monasteries, the parish clergy, the people and their Faith. Yes, it is possible to install pro-Western patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops and bishops, oiled with sufficient sums of money, false diplomas, new palaces and flash cars, shave their beards and dress them as fallen Christians, but the Church does not depend on a corrupted elite; it depends on the Holy Spirit Who inspires and informs the Faith. And for this reason Greece, like the Ukraine, now have a unique opportunity, to escape the clutches of the US and its vassal EU and return to their destiny as vital parts of the restored Christian empire, centred in Moscow, Roma-Nova. The West proposes but Almighty God disposes.

From Recent Correspondence (June 2015)

Q: From the Church point of view, what do you find newsworthy this month?

A: What a difficult question! There has been so much and the month has not ended yet. There has been the declaration by the Pope of Rome that he may consider returning in repentance to the Church Easter (true, his declaration was very vague and there are other, less repentant interpretations), his meeting with President Putin (despite violent US opposition) and the Pope’s approval of the Russian struggle against the anti-Christian European elite. There has also been the tragic EU-manipulated Synod of the Church of Serbia. And then there has been the inevitable closure of the St Sergius Institute in Paris at long last – over 30 years in the making – after its Archbishop asked it to return to Orthodoxy and it refused.

Politically, there has been the G7 meeting in Hitler’s villa outside Munich and the realization that the G7 is now a rather irrelevant US-led Western ghetto, a little huddle with their backs to the wall, unable ever to pay off their own debts, all the more irrelevant since India has now signed a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union. Then there is the Greek debt crisis (Greece’s debt is only about half of US debt per capita) and the possibility that Greece will at last free itself from EU slavery, after so naively and foolishly joining it thirty years ago. Perhaps economic pain is what Greece needs to lead its people to repentance, just as atheist oppression led Russians to repentance.

However, although it is a very minor event internationally, I would like to mention the transfer of the dismissed Metropolitan Jonah of the group known as ‘The Orthodox Church in America’ (OCA) to the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR). Even ten years ago, let alone thirty years ago, such a move would have been unthinkable, even impossible. The only similar event was in 1976 when Metr Antony (Bloom) requested a transfer to ROCOR. (Ironically, that was at the same time as Metr Antony (Bloom) had himself so wrongly refused to receive the then Fr Kallistos (Ware) into the Russian Church from Constantinople.) Metr Antony’s request was quite rightly refused by Metr Philaret for very good canonical reasons. However, in this very different case Metropolitan Jonah has been accepted by the ROCOR Synod in his retired status.

Q: Could this be the beginning of a movement towards ROCOR?

A: Not necessarily, I think it is a personal choice, but it is still symptomatic of a movement of repentance. The OCA is canonically adrift. Where is it going? What is its identity? What is its future? It is a fragment of the Russian Church adrift for the understandable historical reasons of former Uniatism and for political reasons. It used to be a hotbed of modernism. But today if you look at the most solid parts of the OCA, in Alaska, in Canada and in Pennsylvania around St Tikhon’s, it is clear that it is part of the Russian Church, but, for historical reasons, it is not yet part of the canonical and universally recognized Church Outside Russia. And yet that is clearly what the majority of the OCA is, part of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. I think this event marks the beginning of healing for the OCA.

Q: Surely part of the original problem was ROCOR itself?

A: There was once a problem with politically-minded, nationalistic individuals in ROCOR, but that is in the past. We have moved on and that generation has left or else died out. Today we are in a completely different situation. Indeed, the last two Metropolitans of ROCOR have been Non-Russian, one a Carpatho-Russian Slovak, the present one a Canadian of Ukrainian origin. This means an opening to the whole multinational Russian Orthodox world outside the Russian Lands. ROCOR is moving towards our ultimate aim, to our universal mission, to prepare the path, as St John the Baptist of old.

Q: You ask questions about the identity and future of the OCA, but surely the same questions can be asked of ROCOR?

A: I disagree with you. Our identity is clear, it is in our name. We are that part of the Russian Orthodox Church that is Outside Russia, that is, outside the Russian Lands. On the one hand we have to be absolutely faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and its Tradition, on the other hand, we have to express ourselves in the language of the country where we live and through the culture of that country, as seen through Russian Orthodox eyes. That is our missionary witness. And that is our future.

Q: Is that not what the OCA has done?

A: The best of it yes, but sadly some in it have lost, or never even had, the Tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church. For example, only a quarter of the OCA parishes keep the Church calendar, others in it have misunderstood and imagined that just because they live in another country and culture, they can therefore compromise our Faith. Instead of looking at the world through Russian Orthodox eyes, they tend to see Russian Orthodoxy through the eyes of the world. That is very clearly the path of apostasy.

Q: You mention the Synod of the Serbian Church. What is the problem?

A: The problem is the new persecution of the Serbian Church. It is worse than the Communist persecution. The episcopate of the Serbian Church is being herded like a flock of intimidated sheep into a corner, threatened by the EU wolf, behind which stand the USA and the new threat of NATO bombing, uranium-tipped shells and even nuclear war. And do not judge, until you have faced persecution yourself.

Q: Why do Serbs not stand up to defend their Church?

A: Because there are too many ‘Serbian Orthodox’, but not enough Orthodox Serbs.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: I mean that any country only has value inasmuch as it is Orthodox or has values which are accepting of Orthodoxy. As Dostoyevsky said: ‘A Russian without Orthodoxy is rubbish’. That is the same for every country in the world. When I read of drunken British yobs on a stag night in Prague, do I think that they are English? Of course not. Sadly, the same disease is affecting every country in the world. It is the disease of apostasy. And nominal Orthodoxy is not enough to resist that disease.

Q: What has happened to the St Sergius Institute in Paris?

A: It has closed. A lot of money has disappeared. Archbishop Job is trying to restore Orthodoxy there after thirty years of weak bishops who allowed anarchy by promoting the anarchists. It may never re-open. It is another nail in the coffin of the Paris Exarchate.

Q: What is the situation in the Ukraine?

A: The civil war goes on as the puppet junta in Kiev kills the Ukrainian people. The US State Department is now bribing the Patriarchate of Constantinople to involve itself in schismatic groups in the Ukraine, thus compromising next year’s potential Council. But we have hope that by next year the war will all be over and the Ukraine will be free again. Sadly, however, I do not see any sign of repentance on the part of the US and the EU which, as one British politician rightly said, has blood on its hands in the Ukraine.

Q: And in Syria?

A: There too the war goes on, financed by fanatics in Western-backed Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who have created millions of refugees. In Libya Western intervention has also once more proved to be catastrophic and now 65% of Libyans want to flee, looking back on the Khadafi period almost as paradise, rather as many in impoverished and colonized Eastern Europe now regret the Soviet bloc with all its obvious faults. Today, for instance, a decent salary in Romania is 150 euros – per month – if you can get a job at all. This is all the fruit of Western meddling, divide and rule by reducing to poverty. The result of such meddling is mass migration and the break-up of families. The West has caused this. Rule Number One is that you do not destroy something until you have something better to replace it with. But that is exactly what the West did to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as also in Syria, Iraq, Libya etc.

Q: As regards Syria, surely it is the Muslims who are themselves to blame? They are killing each other?

A: When children argue and those children follow a religion which, like Judaism, has no concept of forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, you do not give them expensive arms to kill each other with. But that is precisely what Saudi Arabia and Qatar (and Israel), backed by the USA, have done, whether in Syria, the Lebanon or elsewhere. Remember that Al-Qaeda and Islamic State are CIA inventions to defeat the Soviet Union and divide the Muslim world. The whole Muslim problem began when Britain and then the USA backed Israel as a Western bridgehead in the Arab world. When Western nations turn into terrorist states (that is how Western nations are perceived in the Muslim world) and invade Afghanistan and Iraq, do not be surprised when Muslims turn to terrorism. The radicalization of Muslims was caused by Western governments. Appalling Western terrorism breeds appalling Islamic terrorism.

Q: When did the West set out on this path of apostasy? To what extent was race a factor?

A: I think that there are many misconceptions as regards race and the Western Schism. For example the Neo-Platonist Philip Sherrard presented the Schism as a kind of philosophical dispute between ‘East and West’, between ‘Greek and Latin’ between Plato and Aristotle. True, there was the problem of the Franks, but not for inherent racial reasons, as some modern and rather embittered modern Greek philosophers would have it, but simply because of the mentality which the Franks happened to be the first to adopt. And any race can adopt an anti-Church mentality, as the 20th century showed us. Such racial simplifications completely overlook the multinational nature of the Church. The Church includes Latins like St Hilary of Poitiers and St Ambrose of Milan, Syrians like St Ephraim and St Isaac of Nineveh, Egyptians like St Antony the Great, Georgians like St Nino, not to mention Slavs and so many other nationalities, including Orthodox ‘Franks’ from the period before Charlemagne and from today.

Another point is that although, quite rightly, historians look back to Charlemagne as the real initiator of all the problems, with his massacre of the Saxons and corruption of the Creed, his ramshackle so-called empire was very short-lived. There was a revival of Orthodoxy in the West after him, for example under the Empress Theophano at the end of the tenth century. There was no Schism until the eleventh century and that lasted 100 years; in other words the Schism was not a single event, but a process.

We can do no better than quote the Catholic religious historian, Christopher Dawson: ‘It was not until the eleventh century that the religious bond which united East and West was finally destroyed and Western Christendom emerges as an independent unity, separated alike in culture and religion from the rest of the old Roman world’ (The Making of Europe, P. 47). He relates this to the tenth century and whether ‘feudal barbarism was to capture and absorb the peace-society of the Church or whether the latter could succeed in imposing its ideals and its higher culture on the feudal nobility’ (P. 271). ‘It was not until the eleventh century that the military society (of the barbaric world of northern paganism) was incorporated into the spiritual polity of Western Christendom’ (Pp. 287-288).

In other words the tragedy of the West was that it left the Church and adopted instead the aggressiveness of ‘feudal barbarism’. This, allied with technology, is what lies behind the West’s aggressive imperialism of the second millennium, from 1066 and a couple of decades before that, onwards, and also of the opening years of this already deeply tragic third millennium. We can see this quite clearly in today’s regular gun massacres in the USA. What a culture! Aggression and violence and a society of obesity and mental illness….And you call this civilization?

Q: There is much criticism in the West of President Putin. They have demonized him, making him into a hate-figure. What is the truth?

A: The CIA-fed propaganda is quite shameless, not to say primitive. Of course President Putin, like contemporary Russia, has many faults, but unlike the West, they are both going in the right direction. That is what is important. The name Putin comes from the word ‘put’ which means ‘the path’, ‘the way’. And that is exactly the spiritual meaning of his name, for he is only an instrument. He is not the destination, just part of the way to where we want to go.

Q: What is that destination?

A: Today the atheist West is preaching spiritual death throughout the world. Russia’s spiritual meaning is to preach spiritual life. This is the universal meaning of the coming resurrection of St Seraphim of Sarov for which we must prepare. The West has chosen vulgarity over nobility. We shall not follow. Sadly, we must recognize that when Antichrist comes, he will speak English. It is for us to show him that not all English people will listen to him, that there is a faithful remnant, as in every country throughout the world, that we can speak of nobility, not of vulgarity. It is becoming rapidly apparent, even to those who before resisted – such is repentance – that Orthodox need a Protector, a Guardian, a restored Emperor. A repentant Greece today looks to Russia, a Russia that has thrown off the curse of atheism and apostasy. Many others do the same. We shall not surrender! Christ is victorious!

The Fight for Freedom in Europe Continues

The article below was written within days of the G7 meeting in Germany. Thus, those who support the neo-Nazi puppet regime in Kiev, issued a proclamation from Hitler’s villa outside Munich (!)proclaiming a fight against ‘corruption’! Of course, in the real world the ghetto-like G7 is now irrelevant, surpassed by the economies of the five BRICS countries. Indeed, there are those who fight for freedom from US/EU/NATO tyranny and corruption and work for the liberation of the peoples of the Ukraine from the CIA-run Kievan dictatorship. Reader, read on:

Slovak volunteer in the Donbass: “It’s our way of fighting the EU and NATO.”

Posted: 12 Jun 2015 12:05 PM PDT

Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten
June 11, 2016

Translated from the German by Tom Winter

A surprising melange is coming into view at the Ukraine front: Mercenaries from the Czech Republic and Slovakia have shifted over to the Donbass to fight against NATO. Their home countries are powerless: the rebels apparently pay better.

The Slovaks and Czechs who are currently fighting in eastern Ukraine with the volunteer militias against the Kievan Army intend to put together their own unit that would be part of the so-called International Brigade of the 15th Army.

“The Brigade has a lot of Czechs and Slovaks. They get around 350 Euros a month; they live in barracks and are equipped with tanks and armoured personnel carriers,” reports the Slovakian news portal aktuality.sk.

The news portal conducted an interview Monday with a Slovak mercenary soldier, who says that the most prominent Slovak fighter in Ukraine was Martin “Sojka” Keprta, but that he is now hospitalized with injuries from the fighting.

So far as equipment is concerned, the Slovak source says there are old Mosin-Nagant repeating rifles from Soviet times, plus Kalashnikovs of two different calibres, 5.45, and 7.62 mm, and anti-tank weapons, including PTURs,** grenade launcher RPGs, and all the other weapons that they have captured.

When asked about the involvement of Russian officers or commanders in the Eastern Ukraine conflict, the man says: “In our unit there is no Russian commander. Russia helps us politically and morally. They also provide us with humanitarian aid, which is more than necessary. The Russian military doesn’t have to be here on the spot: Every day the admissions committee in Donbass registers five to twenty people, who are signed in and are going to serve. We have, in contrast to the opposite side, of course, a shortage of motorized transport. ”

Then the Slovak mercenary shares the political motivation behind his service in eastern Ukraine. The mercenary, literally: “We see the EU as a dictatorship and NATO as an aggressive pact. This is our way of fighting the EU and NATO.”

On the same day, the Slovak government released an opinion on the investigative report of aktuality.sk. The Slovak newspaper TERAZ Slovensko quoted the Foreign Ministry in Bratislava: “Such adventurers act alone and actively contribute to the destabilization of Ukraine and the undermining of diplomatic efforts. They hurt the foreign policy interests of the Slovak Republic.

“The government keeps an open and clear distance from these adventurers. The priority of the foreign policy of Slovakia remains the stabilization of the situation in Ukraine in order to achieve a peaceful solution to the crisis through diplomatic negotiations. We support the independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine and condemn all attempts to escalate the conflict. ”

The spokesman for the Slovak Interior Ministry, Petar Lazarov, on the other hand wanted weigh in “for security and tactical reasons:” “Slovaks who are fighting for a foreign military or their units without authorization from the president face a prison sentence of two to eight years.”

In eastern Ukraine there are numerous mercenaries from Europe. They are fighting against one side or the other. There are also mercenaries of the US company Academi, formerly Blackwater, among them.

**Mosin-Nagant is a five-shot, bolt action rifle first developed in 1891, corresponding to an American Winchester; the PTUR (“bassoon”) is a wire-guided rocket launched from a tripod-mounted tube. Big enough to require a three-man team.]

Translator’s note: There are European politicians pushing for independence from NATO, Wagenknecht in Germany, and Fillon in France, for instance. They won’t go to jail. Mercenaries from Academi won’t go to jail either.

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.

Three Prophecies on the Ukraine

St Laurence of Chernigov (+ 1950) said:

When a little freedom comes and they open and restore churches and monasteries, then all sorts of false teachings will appear; demons and secret atheists (Catholics, Uniats, self-ordained Ukrainians and others) will take up arms and fight against the Orthodox Church of Rus, its unity and its catholicity with ferocity. A Godless government will support the heretics and so they will take away churches from the Orthodox and slaughter the faithful. Then a Metropolitan of Kiev (unworthy of the name) together with like-minded bishops and priests will shake the Russian Church to the core. His iniquity will frighten and amaze the whole world. He himself will go off to eternal perdition like Judas. However, all these slanders of the evil one and false teachings will disappear in Russia and there will be a united Russian Orthodox Church.

Elder Jonah of Odessa (+ 2012) said:

Troubles in a country smaller than Russia will come a year after my death. The troubles will continue for two years, after which a Russian Tsar will appear. The first Easter will be full of blood, the second of hunger and the third of victory.

Elder Gregory of Docheiariou, the Holy Mountain (21 March 2015)

Every Ukrainian must understand that if he wants blessings on his country, then you must kick out the Americans. Let Ukrainians rely on their brothers in the faith and in blood, the Russians. If you allow American interference in Ukrainian affairs, then your country will never recover. There is no need to kill your neighbour… how is this possible, brother killing brother? Today, we watch these developments with great pain. Docheiariou Monastery sends up many prayers to succour the Ukrainian people, to whom we as a monastery are very grateful.