Category Archives: Tsar Nicholas II

Russian Orthodoxy in South Africa

Summary. In this article the author, Dr Vladimir de Beer, depicts the establishment of the Russian Orthodox Church in South Africa. It is preceded by a sketch of the historical background, including the participation of Russian volunteers in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). Recognition for their sacrifice in the service of Boer independence came more than a century later with the dedication of a new chapel on the premises of the Russian Orthodox Church in Midrand.

Key words: South Africa; Afrikaners; Boers; Anglo-Boer War; Russian volunteers; Russian Orthodox

Historical background

The Christian religion (albeit in its Protestant form) was brought to the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch, German and French settlers who arrived at the southern tip of Africa from 1652 onwards. This new Dutch-ruled colony was established to provide a replenishment station for cargo ships and other vessels sailing between Western Europe and South-east Asia. In this way the future city of Cape Town, the Afrikaner people and the Afrikaans language gradually came into being. Among these early European settlers there was a Moscow-born Russian named Johannes Swellengrebel, whose son Hendrik in 1739 became the first Cape-born governor of the new colony [7]. Towards the end of the Dutch colonial era in South, Africa, in 1798, a Russian cellist named Gerasim Lebedev gave a number of well-attended concerts in Cape Town before returning to St Petersburg [2, pp 11-12].

In 1806 the Cape colony was annexed by Britain during its wars against Napoleonic France. Among notable Russians whose accounts of their visits to the Cape during its early British-ruled era became popular were the naval officer Vassili Golovnin, the novelist Ivan Goncharov and the artist Alexei Vysheslavtsov [2, pp 13-16]. However, the most famous Russian to visit the Cape colony during the nineteenth century was Grand Duke Alexei, son of Tsar Alexander II. His first visit occurred in 1872 when the Cape parliament formally welcomed the Russian dignitary, and the second visit took place in 1874 as commander of the frigate Svetlana. Moreover, in 1886 a remarkable letter was sent by the Pondo1 chief

1     A Xhosa tribe living in the Eastern Cape.

Faku to Tsar Alexander III, requesting Russian protection against the British annexation of his land [2, pp 18-20].

Many of the Afrikaners were not content to live under British rule, and therefore during the 1830’s several thousand men, women and children migrated in ox wagons northwards across the Orange and Vaal Rivers. This Great Trek, as it came to be known, gave rise to the establishment of the Boer republics of the Orange Free State, the Transvaal and Natal, although the latter was swiftly annexed by the British. The Transvaal and Free State republics, in contrast, had their independence recognised by the British government in 1852 and 1854 respectively. However, this peaceful situation only lasted until the discovery of the world’s richest gold-bearing strata in the southern Transvaal in 1886. This development brought substantial wealth and growing international recognition to the Transvaal, which was officially known as the South African Republic. Given the global ambitions of the imperialist rulers in London, as well as the influential diamond magnate Cecil John Rhodes’ vision of a British-ruled Africa stretching from Cape Town to Cairo, it was only a matter of time before the Transvaal became their next victim. The resultant escalating tensions between the British and the fiercely independent Boers (as the northern Afrikaners were called, the word meaning ‘farmers’ in Dutch and Afrikaans) eventually led to the outbreak of war in October 1899, in which the Transvaal and the Free State (with a combined Boer population of less than a million) were allied against the might of the British Empire.

In the ensuing three years of conflict the Boer farmers-turned-soldiers astonished the world by their military prowess in the face of overwhelming odds, facing around half a million well-trained soldiers from the British Isles, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) eventually became Britain’s longest and costliest war in the century between the Napoleonic Wars and World War One, prompting the well-known author Rudyard Kipling to declare that the Boers had taught the British ‘no end of a lesson’. The Boer republics enjoyed the sympathy of many European nations, including Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Russia [3, p 46]. Although none of these countries dared to openly provide military assistance to the Boers, thousands of volunteers risked life and limb travelling to the South African fields in order to fight on the Boer side. A notable contingent came from Ireland, which at that time was under British rule, and consequently the Irish pro-Boer volunteers were viewed as traitors by the British and treated accordingly when captured. It is with this groundswell of support for the Boer cause in Europe that Russian Orthodoxy made its entry into South Africa.

Enter the Russians

The Boer republics enjoyed the moral support of Tsar Nicholas II (later to be venerated as St Nicholas the Royal Martyr) and of the celebrated author Leo Tolstoy. Confiding in his sister Xenia, the Tsar wrote “I am wholly preoccupied with the war between England and the Transvaal; every day I read the news in the English newspapers from the first to the last line, and then share my impressions with the others at the table… I can not conceal my joy at the confirmation of yesterday’s news that during General White’s sally two full English battalions and a mountain battery have been captured by the Boers!” In a similar vein Tolstoy admitted, during the early months of the war when the British suffered a series of humiliating defeats by the Boer forces, that even as a well-known pacifist he rejoiced at the victories of the Boers [2, pp 26-27].

Around 225 Russian volunteers came to South Africa to assist the Boers in their freedom struggle against the mightiest empire up to that point in recorded history [1, p 45]. Their number included a unit of Scouts containing many Cossacks, such as Prince Bagration of Tiflis and Count Alexis de Ganetzky [3, p 47]. There was also a Russian-Dutch ambulance service active in the Transvaal and the Free State during the war, as well as medical staff from the Russian Red Cross [2, pp 27-28]. Such was the Russian enthusiasm for the Boer republics that a folk song ‘Transvaal, Transvaal, my country’ became quite popular throughout Russia in the early years of the twentieth century. It was still being sung at the time of the Great Patriotic War, while famous Soviet writers such as Anna Akhmatova and Ilya Ehrenburg also paid tribute to the Boers [2, pp 25, 29].

Among the Russian volunteers who fought in the Boer armies, the most famous was Colonel Evgeny Maximov, who initially served as second-in-command of the International Corps [3, p 47]. Renowned among the Boers as an excellent shot and horse-rider, Maximov was also an adviser to the Boer presidents Kruger and Steyn [2, pp 68, 73]. He was eventually appointed commander of the Dutch Corps, in which capacity he was severely injured during the battle of Thaba Nchu on 30 April 1900. A month later he left the Transvaal (as did the afore-mentioned ambulance service) when the conventional phase of the war came to end with the British capture of Pretoria [2, pp 77, 81]. To the chagrin of the British, this was followed by two years of highly effective guerilla warfare by the Boer commandos (to which Winston Churchill would later pay tribute when he designated the British special forces during World War Two as commandos). The British military responded by destroying more than 90 percent of the farms in the Boer republics, as well as herding most of their women and children into concentration camps erected on the open field, where around 30 000 were to die from malnutrition and disease. Prompted by these devastating losses of their families and farms while remaining undefeated in the field, the Boer leaders signed the Treaty of Vereeniging with the British in Pretoria on 31 May 1902, thereby ending the war and bringing the former republics into the Empire.

Another prominent Russian volunteer in South Africa was Lieutenant Yevgeny Augustov, whose memoirs of the war were published in Russia in 1902 [2, pp 24-25, 30-33]. With some of his countrymen he had fought in the Battle of Spioenkop in January 1900 (which was vividly described by Augustov), during which the British suffered one of the worst defeats of their imperial history. Captain Leo Pokrovsky was killed while leading a commando raid on the British garrison at Utrecht in December 1900, later receiving a memorial plaque in that Natal town in 1938. Captain Alexander Shulzhenko fought in the commando of the legendary Boer leader General De Wet, until he was captured by the British in April 1901 [1, pp 42-43]. Alexander Guchkov was wounded in July 1900 and remained paralysed for the rest of his life. However, this setback did not prevent him from later becoming chairman of the Russian Duma and eventually War Minister in the Provisional Government, following the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II [1, p 64]. Another volunteer, Vladimir Semionov, designed the opera and ballet theatre in Yekaterinoslav shortly after the war, and had by the 1930’s become a prominent architect and academic in Moscow [1, pp 57-58]. Remarkably, even some opponents of the Tsarist government volunteered for military service with the Boers. Among them were Ivan Zabolotny, a member of the first State Duma in 1905; Alexander Essen, who became a leading Soviet economist in the 1920’s; and Prince Mikhail Yengalychev, who in 1907 attempted to form a republican organisation in Russia [1, pp 65-67].

It is interesting to note that when Russia sent its Baltic fleet around Africa towards the end of 1904 in order to fight the Japanese with whom they were at war, the British government issued strict orders that no Russian ships would be allowed to enter British-controlled ports anywhere in the world, which at the time included the South African ports. This armada included the cruiser Aurora, which would later become legendary for signalling the start of the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Tragically, most of the Russian sailors in the armada sailing past the Cape of Good Hope never returned to their homes, having died in the disastrous naval battle of Tsushima in 1905 [2, pp 30-31].

During the first two decades of the twentieth century a variety of economic, cultural and academic ties were developing between Russia and South Africa. The economic link was centred on the mining industry, which is not surprising given the abundance of minerals found in both countries. In addition, the years before the outbreak of the First World War saw both the Transvaal and the Cape province import timber, textiles and railway rails from Russia. The academic link, overlapping with agriculture, included co-operation in locust control and irrigation. And in the cultural sphere the novels of the South African author Olive Schreiner became highly popular in Russia from the 1890’s onward, being published in most of the Russian popular magazines and literary journals. One of her publishers was Maxim Gorky, who like many Russians found resonance with Schreiner’s socialist views [2).

  • 37-38]. A later famous Afrikaans author, Louis Leipoldt, visited Moscow in 1908 and was enamoured by the architectural splendour and colourful crowds of the Russian capital, which he vividly described in his letters to a friend. As a young physician Leipoldt was equally impressed by the high level of the Russian medical services, which he considered to be superior to that of Britain at the time. His only complaint was the exorbitant prices in Moscow [2, pp 32-33].

However, by the early 1920’s relations between the newly formed Soviet Union and South Africa practically came to an end, as was the case with all of the British dominions [2, p 38]. Although the two countries were Allies during the Second World War, Soviet-South Africans relations deteriorated further during the second half of the century. The South African Communist Party (SACP) was declared illegal by the Afrikaner nationalist government in 1950 and then formed a strategic alliance with the African National Congress (ANC), which continues to this day. Moreover, from the early 1960s until the late 1980s the Soviet Union actively supported the black guerilla movements fighting white rule in South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South-west Africa (now Namibia). The Soviets and South Africans also clashed in Angola during the period 1975 to 1988, backing the Moscow-aligned MPLA government and the pro-Western rebel movement UNITA, respectively.2 However, with the transfer of power from the Afrikaner nationalists to the ANC in 1994, the SACP became an integral component of the new South African government. This surely has to count as one of the greatest ironies of recent history, since by that time the Communist era in Russia had already ended.

Russian Orthodoxy is established

Only in the 1990’s would diplomatic, economic and cultural relations be restored between the post-Soviet Russian Federation and post-apartheid South Africa. An office of the South African diamond mining giant, De Beers, was opened in Russia in 1992 [2, p 34]. Another beneficiary of the renewed links between Russia and South Africa was the Russian Orthodox Church, which founded a parish in Midrand (situated halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria) in 1998. Named after St Sergius of Radonezh, this became the first Russian Orthodox parish in sub-Saharan Africa. The first rector of the new parish was Father Sergius Rasskazovsky, who was also a professor at the St Petersburg Theological Academy.3 Under a new rector, Father Philaret Bulekov, a church began to be built for the parish towards the end of 2001. Funded by the Russian engineering construction company Stroytransgaz and supported by the Russian embassy in South Africa, the newly built church was consecrated early in 2003 by Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk, who later became the Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ [6]. With beautiful golden domes placed atop the building in 2004, the Russian Orthodox Church of St Sergius of Radonezh makes a striking appearance not far from the N1 motorway between Pretoria and Johannesburg.

The Russian volunteers who had fought and died in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century finally received recognition from the Church that most of them were

  • The most comprehensive accounts of this protracted yet neglected conflict from a South African viewpoint are the following books: South Africa’s Border War 1966-89, by Willem Steenkamp; and The South African Defence Forces in the Border War 1966-1989, by Leopold Scholtz.
  • This author had the privilege of receiving his first Communion as Orthodox Christian from Father Sergius in 1999.

members of in 2013, when a chapel commemorating them was built on the premises of the Midrand church [4 & 5]. The new chapel is dedicated to St Vladimir, Equal-to-the-Apostles, thus affirming a significant link between Russian Orthodoxy and the South African population, particularly the Afrikaners. The current rector of the Russian Orthodox parish of St Sergius of Radonezh in Midrand is Father Daniel Lugovoy, who also travels to Cape Town periodically to serve the Slavonic liturgy in a newly built chapel there. In addition to services every weekend and on major feast days, the parish conducts an active Sunday school for children and an Orthodox study group for adults. It also has a well-stocked library with over a thousand titles in Russian and English [6]. May God grant the Russian Orthodox Church in South Africa many years!

Bibliography

  1. Apollon Davidson & Irina Filatova. The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902. Cape Town, Pretoria & Johannesburg: Human & Rousseau, 1998.
  2. Apollon Davidson. Russia and South Africa before the Soviet era. National Research University Higher School of Economics, 2013. hse.ru/data/2013/04/18/1297820237/21HUM2013.pdf
  3. Donal Lowry. ‘When the World loved the Boers’, in History Today, 43-49, May 1999.
  4. Andrew Phillips. ‘Orthodox who Fought for Freedom in the Boer War Commemorated.’ (17 April 2013). http://www.events.orthodoxengland.org.uk/orthodox-who-fought-for-freedom-in-the-boer-war-commemorated/
  5. ru: ‘Foundation laid for a new chapel in Johannesburg’ (15 April 2013). http://www.pravoslavie.ru/english/60855.htm
  6. Russian Orthodox Church of St Sergius of Radonezh: http://www.st-sergius.info/en/our-church
  7. Wikipedia: Hendrik Swellengrebel. https://af.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Swellengrebel

Dr. Vladimir de Beer

Email: vladimir.debeer@gmail.com

Bristol, England

30 November 2016

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem…

Woe unto you, scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites!…All these things shall come upon this generation. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them who are sent to thee, how often I wanted to gather thy children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, but you did not want it!

Matthew 23, 29, 36 and 37

Just as he had promised before he was elected, President Trump has now recognized occupied Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State. His Modern Orthodox Jewish son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, and now Jewish daughter, Ivanka, are pleased. The rest of the world is in consternation and in the Arab world violence can be expected. Let us not forget that in Jerusalem in November 2016 the revived Sanhedrin sent President Trump and President Putin a petition about the restoration of the Third Temple. The Sanhedrin press spokesman, Rabbi Gideon Weiss, said at the time that the election of Mr Trump had made the dream of restoring the Temple a reality. He added that ‘the American and Russian leaders could lead the peoples of ‘the global world’ to peace by building the Temple’.

Meanwhile, in the centre of ‘the Christian world’, a Council of nearly 400 Orthodox patriarchs and bishops in the main ‘Temple’ of Moscow, attended by all the Local Orthodox Churches except for Constantinople and Greece who refused to attend (more Local Churches than attended the so-called ‘Council of Crete’ in 2016), has just concluded. The Council was addressed by President Putin, the first time in over 300 years that a Patriarchal Council has been addressed by a Russian leader. The President then met the leaders of the Local Churches, like a new Constantine, the first Christian Emperor. President Putin appears as the protector of the whole Orthodox world, and has just won back Syria through defeating terrorism there and co-operating closely with the regional powers, Turkey and Iran.

After the Moscow Council, which commemorated the centenary of the restoration of the Russian Patriarchate, so much worked for by Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky), and so gathered the Orthodox children together, Patriarch Theophil (the name means ‘friend of God’) of Jerusalem is today visiting the city of Ekaterinburg. Today is St Catherine’s day and the name of the city means ‘Catherine’s fortress’. It is also of course the place of martyrdom of the last Christian Emperor, Nicholas II. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the prominent ‘friend of God’ and pious Orthodox layman, Konstantin Malofeev, has stated that just as 100 years ago those who sought the restoration of the Patriarchate to resist the coming atheist onslaught were victorious, so we too ‘must convince contemporary Russian society that if Russia is to remain a sovereign country, the restoration of Tsardom is just as indispensible’.

He that has ears to hear, let him hear.

 

The War We Wage for our Christian Empire of Holy Rus

On the centenary of the 1917 Western-organized coup d’etat which overthrew the Christian Empire of the Third Rome and led to the martyrdom of the Imperial Family and millions of others, attempts by our enemies to create divisions in contemporary Russian Church and Society have intensified. These enemies are financed from abroad; they are programmed to destroy both the Russian Federation and its foundation, the Church. The war is being fought openly, militarily and bloodily, in Syria, in the Ukraine and in parts of the Caucasus, but it is also going on ideologically in Russia and throughout the Russian Orthodox Church worldwide, by manipulating those who are on the fringes of the Church.

The aim of these enemies is to destroy all that remains of Holy Rus, the Third Rome. These enemies are Westernized liberals, pseudo-intellectuals (‘intelligenty’) the self-appointed Russian ‘social elite’ (in fact the decadent scrapings from the bottom of the barrel) such as Nemtsov, Radzinsky, Uchitel and their followers like ‘Pussy Riot’. This is a repeat of the situation just before 1917. Tired of attacking the Russian liberation of Syria from Western-backed terrorists and Russian support for freedom in the Ukraine from the violent persecutions of the US-installed Zionist Kiev junta, they are now trying through their media, ‘creative’ (= destructive) art and cinema to sully the image of the Tsar Martyr Nicholas.

They accuse us Orthodox faithful of worshipping the Tsar as God! In reality, no such ‘Tsar-worshippers’ exist. They make use of the marginal half-hearted and Halfodox intellectuals among the clergy, in the Spiritual Academies and seminaries and among the unChurched though baptised masses. These enemies deny the ritual killing of the Imperial Family in 1918, they deny reality. In the same way they also rejoice at the present final destruction of the fragments of the old Orthodoxy in Western Europe, and instead promote atheism, transgenderism, a ‘post-Christian’ Europe, where the masses have lost all faith and former churches have become mosques, shopping centres, casinos and nightclubs.

Our enemies make use of deluded liberals and Russophobes like Fr George Kochetkov, Fr George Mitrofanov and their handful of followers, who are given prominence by the anti-Church media in their foreign-owned, anti-Putin newspapers like Moskovskoe Ekho and Moskovskij Komsomolets, on their notorious Western-financed portal-credo website and their TV and radio stations. These are the heirs of the clerical traitors who welcomed the February 1917 palace revolution and the abduction and imprisonment of the Tsar and his family, the ‘revolutionaries in cassocks’. They accuse the Tsar of all the misfortunes that befell Russia over the last 100 years, denying that such as they are in fact to blame.

However, there are also young (and not so young) hotheads, with ‘zeal not according to knowledge’, filled with absurd conspiracy theories. Like old calendarist sectarians, which in fact they are, they refuse to commemorate Church hierarchs and berate them. They are supported by those who suffer from the nationalist delusion that Tsar Ivan IV, through whom Metropolitan Philip of Moscow was martyred, was a saint or, even more absurdly, that the apostate antichrist Stalin was such. Bitterness and sarcasm, expressing no love or sympathy, and isolationism mark their lives. Many of them are under the influence of Protestant Creationism, which is ironic, given that they are claim to be anti-Protestant.

The main complaint of the zealots is that they do not agree with certain words and actions of a non-dogmatic, i. e. non-essential, nature of Patriarch Kyrill. This is illogical. Firstly, the concept that the Patriarch must agree with them in everything is pure pride. Why this disagreement? Perhaps because they are right, but more probably because they are wrong. This intolerance denies the simple fact that in any case there is no reason why we have to agree with our Patriarch on every detail. There will never be any identity of opinion between any two people. In this obsession with opinions we find once again pure Protestantism. They disagree, so they protest and go and start their own sect, condemning all others.

The Church does not depend on us or on any Patriarch, whoever he may be; we are all here today, gone tomorrow. The Church belongs to God and She was here long before us and will be here long after us. In order to justify themselves, the zealots dogmatize everything. Thus, if you do not believe that God created the Universe in six 24-hour periods (like fundamentalist Protestants), you are a heretic. If a baby is not baptised exactly on the fortieth day of its life, you are a heretic. If you shake hands with a Roman Catholic (again this is Protestantism!), you are a heretic. There is no end to the anti-logic of the zealots. They have hot heads, but cold hearts, what they need is just the opposite.

Outside such marginal extremists, the Orthodox are led by hierarchs like Metr Benjamin of Vladivostok, Metr Agafangel of Odessa, Metr Vincent of Tashkent, Metr George of Nizhny Novgorod, Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov), any of whom could become the next Patriarch. Then there is the laywoman, Natalya Poklonskaya, the much admired deputy of the Russian Parliament and heroine of the Crimea. We see that Russia is today the last bastion of the Church of God and so of Christianity in the world. Our war is against those who have destroyed the Church in the West over the last thousand years and are now trying to destroy the Church in the Middle East, in the ‘soft’ Balkans and even in parts of the Ukraine.

The enemies of our Church want schisms, manipulating those on the margins, whether they are naïve and unthinking zealots, or treacherous and Russophobic ecumenist liberals. We must understand that either we are with the Tsar, that is, with all the New Martyrs and Confessors, all the multinational host of saints of the Russian Church, with the holy elders and the Christian Empire of Holy Rus, or else we are, consciously or unconsciously, traitors and helping the enemies of our Church. In accordance with the prophecies, we believe that the war waged by our enemies against the Church of God and Russia will, if there is repentance, end with the rebirth of the multinational Empire of Holy Rus. Amen.

1917-2017: 100 Years in the Empire of the Double-Headed Eagle without the Emperor

The Last Christian Emperor

Russian Orthodox of all nationalities belong to and live in the spiritual Empire of the Double-Headed Eagle, uniting East and West. We are subjects of His Imperial Highness. The fact that our Christian Empire has had no earthly Emperor for a hundred years has caused catastrophes of repaganization the whole world over, exactly as was the plan of the international forces which overthrew him. These disasters have taken place not only inside but also outside the borders of the former Empire, including where we live, in the spiritually backward West.

The fact that we in particular live in these spiritual provinces where we have been cut off from the One Christian Empire for far longer, well over twelve hundred years, makes our lives even harder. However, still we believe that the Empire will be restored, that we are simply between earthly emperors, learning from the wisdom of the last Tsar so that we can prepare for the next Tsar and his Restored Empire. That has been our purpose for one hundred years – to learn and prepare for the Restoration of the Empire, for the future belongs to us.

The last Christian Emperor of the only Christian Empire on earth, the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, was and is portrayed by the enemies of Christ as weak and incompetent, the martyred Tsarina Alexandra as hysterical and fanatical and the martyred prophet and healer of the Heir, Gregory (Rasputin), as demonic and debauched. Why? Those who created such absurd propaganda myths – and even repeat them despite the opposite affirmations of unbiased history! – needed to rubbish Russia for their own self-justification and legitimization of their seizure of power.

Treason, Cowardice and Deceit

Their slander and mythology show their own spiritual impurity – for in reality they are talking about themselves – incompetent, fanatical or demonic. Thus, the shameful reason why the supposedly free Russian emigration did not canonize the Tsar, martyred in 1918, and the other martyrs until 1981 is because there were such elements in the emigration who were responsible for the overthrow of the Tsar and so indirectly for the horrors that followed. They could not admit their many tragic errors and repent of their sins and so we had to wait for long.

When the powerful ‘abdicated’ from him, the last Christian Emperor spoke of ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’ to explain his illegal usurpation. These three words prophetically and exactly define the whole history of the last one hundred years and all that faithful Orthodox Christians have been through in that time. We have experienced the treason of those who put themselves in place of the Church, the cowardice of those who put their own well-being in place of the Truth and the deceit of those who swam with the tide, saying one thing and doing another.

Thus, in the last hundred years there has been the treason of those who betrayed the unity of the Church in Western Lands and the Orthodox calendar under the pressure of foreign powers, to whom the Church of God is alien. Then there has been the cowardice of those who, although representing the Church, refused to be faithful to Her teachings through fear and failed to spread Her Truth in the world. Finally, there has been the deceit of those who told the faithful clergy and people one thing, but did another behind their backs, thus deceiving themselves in their faithlessness to those who sacrificed their lives for Christ.

The Next Christian Emperor

Thus, treason to the Church has been by betrayal of Her Faith, cowardice to the Emperor by not defending the principle of the Empire from its disincarnate enemies, and deceit of the People through propaganda lies. Therefore, we must show faithfulness to the Trinitarian Faith, courage in affirming the Incarnation, and the truth of the Spirit before the people. We must not be sidelined by nostalgia for a lost past, personal opinions on minor matters and petty personal ambitions. We must adopt the great project – the restoration of the next Emperor.

In each of the Western provinces of the former Empire where we live, we represent the Sovereign Spirit of National Resistance and, together, European Resistance, to Antichrist. Our task is to prevent the conditions necessary for his appearance and enthronement, so carefully and cunningly prepared since the overthrow of him who restrained until 1917, by restoring the next Christian Emperor. From the Irish and Portuguese Atlantic coasts to the statues of the Tsars in Helsinki and Sofia we represent Orthodox Europe, the True Europe of the first millennium.

For the false Europe of the second millennium, as a giant with feet of clay, is collapsing in the third millennium. As a priest in my native town, I can say that in our greatest struggle we have achieved what we have achieved despite faithless traitors, visionless cowards and loveless deceivers, the narcissistic, spineless and jealous, the spoilers, thwarters and underminers, despite all who have ignored us, spoken evil of us and tried to destroy us and our Local Church unity. That we can achieve this here means that as much and more can be achieved elsewhere.

1917-2017: On the Holy Relics of the Imperial Family and Their Faithful Servants

Foreword

I write as a priest who has served the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in Paris, Lisbon and England, who loves the Russian Orthodox Tradition, and as a monarchist who hopes for justice through the restoration of Tsardom in Russia. Since the 1970s I have venerated the saint-loving St John of Shanghai, founding the first church in Western Europe dedicated to him after his canonization. I have also always venerated the other saints of the Church Outside Russia, like St Seraphim of Sofia, and our founding bishops, all of whom revered the Tsar-Martyr. Part of my veneration also comes from the fact that the internationally-minded Tsar was a forward-looking missionary, building seventeen magnificent churches precisely in Western Europe for the Orthodox faithful, and looking after Orthodox on three continents.

Like all his followers, the Tsar-loving St John of Shanghai was opposed not only by liberals, ecumenists and modernists, who despised, compromised or had entirely lost the Faith, but also by narrow, Old Believer-type nationalists, some of whom put him on trial in San Francisco. In general, it can be said that attitudes to St John, as to the Tsar, are litmus papers that tell us of love for the Church or, on the other hand, contempt for the Church. I have now been asked what I think of the remains disinterred near Ekaterinburg in 1991 and claimed to be those of five members of the Tsar’s Family and their four servants. With my great-grandfather born in the same year as the Tsar-Martyr and myself born on 19 July, the day of the final disposal of the remains of the Imperial Martyrs, my eagerness to see truth and justice before I die is also personal.

How My Views Were Formed

I was brought up surrounded by the blasphemous Western propaganda which asserts that the last Christian Emperor, the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, was a weak-willed, decadent, incompetent reactionary, who was controlled by others, did not care about his people, and in general ‘got what he deserved’. Significantly, in those Cold War times, this propaganda was more or less identical to Soviet propaganda. This indicated that Western materialism and Soviet materialism were essentially the same. I disbelieved all such propaganda, sensing that it was lies with ulterior, power-grabbing motives, but I lacked arguments to counter it. In the 1960s I neither mastered Russian, nor had access to the often obscure émigré publications about the world-changing overthrow of the Tsar which told the truth. So I waited to discover more.

From the mid-1970s onwards I came to discover émigrés, truly White ones, all of whose words and writings have been confirmed by historians and researchers in the new, post-Soviet Russia, where truth is valued by many, even though a legitimate Tsar has not yet been restored. I understood that the Tsar had fallen victim, not to old-fashioned Marxists, but to an elitist conspiracy of aristocrats, generals and Duma masons, strongly backed by the Western Powers, supposed ‘Allies’. After very careful examination of the evidence over decades, I also came personally to venerate those around the Royal Martyrs. These included the much-slandered St Maria of Helsinki (Anna Vyrubova) and the Martyr Gregory (Rasputin), to whom I composed an akathist in English, published last year on the centenary of his martyrdom.

As a priest I met the last émigrés both in the Church Outside Russia and those in breakaway groups, like that in Paris. I was acquainted with many of the last exiled representatives of the Tsar’s Russia to have been adults before the Revolution. I knew both sides of the emigration. Some were truly White, patriots who honoured the Tsar, both when he was alive and afterwards. With others, it was the opposite, they simply wanted their money, estates and lost power back. They had little love for the Church, Russia or its people, contemptuously calling them ‘Soviets’, and many of them were compromised by sympathy for Hitler or by working for spy agencies, whether in Britain, France, Canada or the USA. They would never accept the miraculous 2007 act of repentance between the Patriarchate and the Church Outside Russia.

There was something rotten in parts of the emigration. It may be called ‘Paris-ism’. The aristocratic émigrés who confessed this ideology and who often lived in Paris had inverted the Imperial Christian motto of ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People’, ‘the Faith, the Tsar and Rus’. They had abandoned the Russian Orthodox Church, were anti-Tsar and anti-people (by being anti-Rasputin – his great grand-daughter is still alive, despised by them, in Paris). It was precisely the Rus-hating oligarchic aristocracy, greedy for power, which had overthrown the Tsar. Those so-called ‘White’ émigrés, in fact not White at all, had carried out the February Revolution that had led directly to the Red Revolution of October. The noble Tsar, forced into abdication, had stood above them all, rejecting the bloodshed of civil war among his beloved peoples.

In the 1990s, amid the political manipulations of the shameful, anti-Russian, US-backed Yeltsin and his corrupt regime, like most other Orthodox I had not been convinced of the authenticity of the Ekaterinburg remains. I distrusted the political appointee investigator of the 1990s, V.N. Solovyov, a disrespectful non-Churchman. There were far too many contradictions and inconsistencies in the results, not least in the DNA results. Nothing was satisfying. In any case two of the eleven skeletons of the Imperial Family and their servants were still missing. Then, in 2007, the remains of two skeletons were found. One of our hierarchs, Bishop, now Archbishop, Agapit of Stuttgart, became convinced of the authenticity of the remains, which for him had become holy relics. For my part I awaited the results of a Church investigation with an open mind.

I wanted the list of questions about the remains submitted by the Church to be answered. At last, the much trusted Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov) was put in charge of a new, Church-led investigation, to be published in this centenary year of the so-called ‘Russian Revolutions’ of 1917. On 3 July 2017 a first interview was published with Professor V.L. Popov, once a sceptic, confirming that the remains were authentic (http://www.pravoslavie.ru/104826.html). It seemed that Nikolai Sokolov, the White Army’s investigator into the Imperial Martyrs, had been mistaken in his report, which had been rushed, through no fault of his own. Not a chemist, he had thought the Martyrs’ bodies had been destroyed by fire and acid and so had not followed his investigation by digging at Porosenkov Log. My view of what had happened has become clear (1).

Afterword

With the results now appearing and publication of the vital DNA results eagerly awaited, it seems that the story has become clear. The remains entombed in the Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral and those of Sts Alexei and Maria kept in store are authentic and so must be enshrined. The great Church-on-the-Blood that stands on the site of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg will continue to be a place of veneration. The shrine and the seven churches at Ganina Yama will remain as the first place where the martyrs’ relics were taken. However, at Porosenkov Log, a great new Cathedral has to be built, a Cathedral of Reparation for the greatest crime of the age, a twelve-domed Cathedral dedicated to the seven Royal Martyrs and their four martyred servants, who joined Christ. Building can begin on the centenary of their martyrdom, in 2018.

This is called on to become a great centre of pilgrimage, the third and final destination for the faithful after Ekaterinburg and Ganina Yama. The holy relics can there be enshrined for the veneration of pilgrims from all over the world. We have no doubt that then, once the relics are properly enshrined and honoured, long-awaited miracles will begin. Tiny fragments of the relics may be distributed elsewhere, especially in Saint Petersburg, but the place where their relics were finally buried is to become a centre of worldwide repentance for all, Russians and Non-Russians alike, who committed ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’ against the Faith, the Tsar and Rus. Only then can the injustice committed 100 years ago be paid for and humanity, descended since the Pigs’ Ravine to the level of the Gergesene swine, turn back from the brink.

1. What Happened

The seven Royal Martyrs and their four servants were horribly and brutally martyred in the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, in the Urals between Europe and Asia, in the darkness just after midnight on 17 July 1918. Their bodies were taken some nine miles north by lorry to marshy ground called Ganina Yama (Gabriel’s Hole). Here, the lorry bogged down, the bodies were laid on the grass, stripped, burned, dumped into a supposed mineshaft and sprinkled with sulphuric acid.

We now know that only then was it discovered that the supposed mineshaft was quite shallow, only some three metres deep. The exhausted murderers learned of deeper mines west of Ekaterinburg, some four miles away. They obtained barrels of petrol, kerosene, sulphuric acid and firewood and returned at about 4.00 am on 18 July. They hauled the corpses out of the shaft and loaded them back onto the lorry, awaiting final disposal in the new location under cover of night.

In the early morning of 19 July, the lorry transporting the bodies again got stuck in mud on the Koptyaki Road near a place called Porosenkov Log (Pigs’ Ravine). The exhausted murderers decided to bury them here. They dug a shallow grave, doused the bodies in sulphuric acid again, smashed their faces with rifle butts and buried nine of them, covering them with quicklime, hoping to prevent identification, and placed railway sleepers over the grave so as to disguise their crime.

In an attempt to confuse anyone who might discover the first grave with only nine, and not eleven, bodies (the confusion caused was for long successful), the murderers had separated the bodies of the Tsarevich Alexei and one of his sisters from the nine others. These were to be buried about fifteen metres (fifty feet) away. These two bodies were also burned, their remaining bones smashed and then they were thrown into a smaller pit. The burial was completed at 6.00 am on 19 July.

After Ekaterinburg was liberated by the White Army on 25 July, a Commission was established under a legal investigator called Nikolai Sokolov. He discovered a number of the Romanovs’ belongings in and around Ganina Yama where the bodies had first been buried. However, not a chemist, he wrongly concluded that the bodies had been utterly destroyed (an impossibility) in a bonfire there with petrol and sulphuric acid. He had failed to find the real burial place on the Koptyaki Road.

The return of Bolshevik forces in July 1919 forced the conscientious Sokolov to leave in haste, his enquiry incomplete, taking only the box containing the items that he had recovered. His preliminary report was published that same year. On 30-31 May 1979, after years of research, a local amateur and a film-maker located the grave. They removed three skulls but, worried about the consequences of finding the grave, they reburied them. Only on 10 April 1989 was the find publicly revealed.

As a result, all the remains were disinterred in 1991 by Soviet officials in a hasty ‘official exhumation’ that destroyed precious evidence. In February 1998 the Yeltsin regime (twenty-one years before, Yeltsin had been responsible for destroying the Ipatiev House) decided to reinter the remains in the Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. Although they were interred here in July 1998, their identity had still not been authenticated beyond doubt, leaving many questions unanswered.

On 29 July 2007 amateur investigators found the small pit containing the remains of Alexei and his sister, located not far from the main grave on the Koptyaki Road. Although criminal investigators and geneticists initially identified them as Alexei and Maria, they were stored pending a decision from the Russian Orthodox Church, which had requested a thorough and detailed authentication to eliminate all doubts. This has only recently been allowed and the results, positive, are now being published.

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (May-June 2017)

Q: What is your deepest childhood impression?

A: My first memories go back to when I was two and a half, but I always felt in childhood that I was in Paradise and that God was just beyond the horizon, not far away at all. That was my first and deepest impression. That is why I have always wanted to re-enter my childhood, or at least, its spirit.

Q: Who were the people you met who impressed you the most?

A: First of all, there were all those of my parents’ generation, who had been through World War II, and of my grandparents’ generation, who had been through World War I. I heard so many stories from them, stories which you never read in the books or see in propaganda films.

Q: What did you understand from their stories?

A: I understood that World War II in Europe had actually been a continuation of the still unfinished World War I. I understood even then that that War had actually been a series of different wars. Later, as an adult, I understood in detail that in the Pacific there had been a contest for dominance in Eastern Asia and the Pacific between Japan, ironically Western-armed and Western-trained, and Great Britain, which Japan has easily won. However, it had then lost the contest when the USA had taken over from defeated Great Britain and beaten it, finally by dropping A-bombs on its civilians. Then there had been the war for oil resources in North Africa and the Middle East, which Great Britain had won against Germany, but only because the USA had armed and helped it. Then there was the war on the Eastern Front in Europe, where the Western Powers had hoped that Germany would exhaust itself by destroying the USSR, so losing two enemies at the same time. In fact, the USSR had defeated and contained Germany, but only for two generations, until the Fourth Reich EU taken over Eastern Europe. Finally, there had been the war on the Western Front, which Germany had lost militarily, but won economically through its EU.

Q: Was there anyone else who shaped you?

A: Beyond them, there were representatives of an even older generation still alive then, those who had been born as far back as the 1870s. One elderly lady I met had been at Queen Victoria’s funeral, another remembered the Relief of Mafeking in 1900. (A third, in France, though I was an adult then, told me how her grandmother had told her how she had seen Napoleon riding through Versailles. I had no reason to disbelieve her). They all impressed me because they were living history, representing something that had disappeared, for good and for ill. History is real, it all happened.

Q: But what about the Orthodox you met after childhood? You knew very well Metr Antony Bloom, Fr Sophrony Sakharov, Fr Alexander Schmemann and other clergy.

A: True, but apart from Archbishop Antony of Geneva, who was a disciple of Metr Antony of Kiev and spoke to me about him, the other clergy you mention did not impress me very much. It was more laypeople who impressed me. For instance, there was Princess Kutaisova the elegant Oxford teacher, Elena Grigorievna Evdokimova who had greeted the Tsar before the First World War, Vladimir Ivanovich Labunsky who was the last White officer in Paris, the genial Prince Boris Galitsin, the noble Ekaterina Osipova, Maria Cattoir, or Lyudmila Brizhatova the poetess, and many others. They were all the best of the White emigration, because that emigration had been divided into two parts, those who were really White, that is the penitent, and on the other hand, those who had betrayed the Tsar. The penitent were not only penitent for themselves, even though they had often had little to repent for, but above all repented on behalf of others.

Q: When did you first begin writing?

A: Before I could write!

Q: What do you mean?

A: When I was four, I used to take scrap paper and draw wavy lines on it; it was my writing. All my childhood and long after I carried pen and paper with me. I was always noting things down. The first piece that was published was when I was eleven. I had an aunt who had written an unpublished novel and my father, who had left school before he was 14, had written poetry. So there was something in the family.

Q: Is there anything you would you like to write in the future?

A: For forty years I have wanted to write a novel about the Russian emigration in Europe. There is a huge untold story there. True, there is a French film specifically about those who returned to the USSR after 1945 and the American film ‘The White Countess’ about the emigration in Shanghai and an immense number of memoirs of individual emigres, but that is not the same. I would like to tell a saga, an epic, though I suppose I never will, as I do not have such talent. I would like to tell of the refugees who had nothing to eat, the Tsar’s generals who became housepainters, the princes who were taxi-drivers, the Cossacks who worked at Renault and went to the church in Boulogne-Billancourt, where I married. There is so much to say here.

Q: Would you say that you are political?

A: Not in any party political sense, but only through the eyes of the Church, in the sense that, as we live in the world, we must understand what is going on in the world, either to encourage and try to channel it, or else to oppose it. Some people say that they are apolitical. Well, that is already a political stance. That is to be disincarnate, futile, to waste yourself on dreams and lose yourself in illusions. That is wrong, spiritually dangerous, even demonic. Real Christians all believe in the Incarnation, therefore we must have an interest in politics, so that we can influence the world.

Q: Do you hope for the restoration of the monarchy in Russia?

A: Of course, but it must be the restoration of the Orthodox monarchy, Sacred Monarchy, not just some token monarchism, as in the UK. This restoration is essential, not just for the Russian Lands, not just for the Orthodox Church (in which so much decadence began after the overthrow of the Orthodox monarchy in 1917), but for the whole world, which became unbalanced afterwards. The Second World War would never have happened, nor would the so-called Cold War (in fact a Hot War with millions of victims in the Third World), if the Orthodox Monarchy had not been betrayed, for the monarchy is the last bastion of Orthodox power.

However, we must be realistic. To have Orthodox monarchy, you must deserve it, you must have the right spiritual level; contemporary Russia is very far from that. It will need mass repentance for the monarchy to be restored. That is not happening yet. Our role is that of St John the Baptist, to be forerunners who preach repentance, who prepare the way. What we feared in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the end of the world, will certainly still come, if there is not mass repentance. We have been given a stay of execution with events in Russia, especially since 2000, but no more than that. All is fragile, hanging by a thread.

Q: What can be done here in concrete terms for restoration?

A: We need to establish a Russian Orthodox Monarchist Association (ROMA) today, on the centenary of the epic tragedy of the so-called Russian Revolution. This needs to commemorate the last Tsar and his family, martyred ninety-nine years ago on the confines of Europe and Asia. Their martyrdom was a catastrophe for the whole world, particularly for the Christian world, which has fallen apart without a strong Christian Russian Empire, going from disaster to disaster.

Such an Association also needs to help prepare the Western world for the coming Russian Emperor, who will have an even greater international significance than the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, because he may well be the last Christian Emperor before the end. As such, he will be the only protector of the Church of God against all the pseudo-Christian and anti-Christian forces that have surfaced on the world, both before and since the fall of the Russian Empire one hundred years ago.

Q: What do you mean exactly by repentance for any of this to happen?

A: The Faith of many has been made impure. It is polluted and corrupted by superficiality. We can see this in the liberalism of intellectual or academic theology. I remember in Paris how a divorced subdeacon and teacher of such ‘theology’, an author of many books on ‘theology’, never fasted, even in Holy Week. What sort of theology could he write, when he did not fast, when he did not clean his soul first, when he wrote against asceticism and monasticism? This sort of attitude, very common among such people, is just decadence. This has to be repented for – not justified, as many do.

We can also see this superficiality in extreme conservatism. Just recently someone wrote to me that he believed that the earth was flat and that dinosaurs never existed because their fossils had only recently been discovered. Yet the Psalms say that: ‘He hath made the round world so sure, that it cannot be moved’. To be very old-fashioned is not the same as following the Tradition, which is much more radical than being old-fashioned. Such extreme conservatism also has to be repented for.
We can see this superficiality in nationalism, which tries to put the Truth for all time and all peoples into the narrow container of one nationality. In one Balkan church I visited years ago, I was told that I could not venerate the icons because I was not of the nationality of the church! Such ignorant nationalism or racism, called phyletism, which is simply attachment to this world, has to be repented for.

We can see this superficiality also in the attitude of certain ex-Soviet people who treat the Faith in a consumerist way, as a sort of magic. Magic happens automatically regardless of the efforts you make, whereas prayer, the sacraments and Church life depend on the efforts that we make to cleanse ourselves and receive grace. Such people are always upset when they pay their money and do not get the magic result that they expect. Faith does not work like that. Such an attitude to the Faith has to be repented for. We have to work for the Faith.

Q: What would you say of the future of the world?

A: Only God knows our future. But some things are clear. We now have to meet the obligations imposed on us by the collapse of the heterodox world, the spiritual and moral collapse of Catholicism and Protestantism.

Q: What do you hope to see in the future?

A: In the years that remain to me, I hope to see the establishment of the Metropolia in Western Europe, which is a single whole, and the restoration of our Diocese of the Anglo-Celtic British Isles and Ireland, after so many decades of spiritual decadence and alien ‘Britishism’. Let us here restore the ideal of the Anglo-Celtic St Cuthbert.

Actions Have Consequences

After the huge success of Tsar Nicholas’ 1916 offensive against the Austro-Hungarians (known to post-1917 history as the Brusilov offensive) which could have taken Vienna (29 years before it happened in a very different way in 1945), Western capitals decided on regime-change in Russia. As the British Prime Minister Lloyd George stated in the London Parliament after the success of the British-orchestrated 1917 coup, ‘we have achieved one of our war aims’, for rival Russia had to be destroyed. However, in usurping the legitimate Russian government of Tsar Nicholas by backing corrupt aristocrats and stupid intellectuals, the West created for itself the Soviet Union, its greatest enemy. Actions have consequences.

Sadly, Western powerbrokers have learned nothing from their mistakes. Thus, in 1960s and 1970s Vietnam, their support of ultra-corrupt Vietnamese led to the victory of Communism there. In the 1990s, their crass mishandling of Yugoslavia produced the terrorist and mafia enclave of Kosovo. More recently, in the Ukraine, where again the West usurped a democratically-elected government and replaced it with a clique of oligarchs who are bleeding the country dry, the impoverished country faces a war against the regime’s own people, a massive refugee problem, endemic corruption and bankruptcy. Actions have consequences.

Western support of corrupt Afghans and Iraqis has killed and maimed and forced to flee millions, given birth to corrupt puppet regimes in both countries that have little control over their countries outside their capitals, destabilized the whole of the Middle East, especially Libya and Syria, and produced ISIS. Now an insane terrorist, prepared precisely in Libya and Syria, has struck Manchester. Former British Prime Ministers Blair (who helped ruin Afghanistan and Iraq and so Syria) and Cameron (who helped bomb Libya back into the Stone Age) must take responsibility. Actions have consequences.

Statue of Tsar Nicholas II Gives Out Myrrh

The Member of the Russian Parliament and former prosecutor of the Crimea, Natalia Poklonskaya, has stated that a statue of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II, siruated near the building of the Crimean prosecutor’s office, wept myrrh on the hundredth anniversary of the so-called Russian Revolution. According to her, this happened on the morning of Friday 3 March. She stated this on the “Constantinople” TV channel, said the website pravoslavie.ru. This report is to be verified by the diocesan authorities.

See:

http://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2017/03/06/eto_chudo_kotoroe_ne_obyasnyat_ni_uchenye_nikto/