Category Archives: Tsardom

An Interview with a Russian Countess

Countess Benckendorff, a parishioner since 2010, has kindly agreed to be interviewed about the contemporary situation in Russia. We have recorded her answers, slightly edited, below.

 

Q: Can you tell us something about the Benckendorff family? I presume it is a German name.

A: The Benckendorffs were Saxons, not Germans. The Germans persecuted us. We were first recorded in 1240 in the village of Benckendorff in Saxony in eastern Germany, from where we became known as von Benckendorff. 300 years later some of our family settled further east in the Baltics, at first in Riga, then near Tallinn. After the Baltics had been absorbed into the Russian Empire, many of the family settled in the Morshansk area of the Tambov province, where in 1775 we were awarded the Sosnovka estate of 8,000 acres. In the early 19th century we were made counts in gratitude for service to the Tsar.

After 1917, part of the family, including a cousin Konstantin, who was the last ambassador of the Tsar to Great Britain, emigrated. He passed away in 1917, but belonged to the Germanised Lutheran-Catholic side of the family and did not even speak Russian very well. He was allowed to write his reports as ambassador in French, which everyone in Saint Petersburg spoke fluently at that time. However, his family, who were Orthodox, came to live in Suffolk because of the agricultural connections of the Benckendorff family. Suffolk farm machinery was used in Sosnovka.

Thus, our branch of the family had been Russianised in the late eighteenth century and became Orthodox. After 1917 we remained in Russia, still living in Morshansk in the Tambov province. Obviously, we lost everything and we had to hide our identity, changing our surname in the 1920s, but we always remained faithful to the Orthodox Faith, the Tsar and Rus, to all our traditions. We were always different from others and members of our branch of the family never became members of the Party. We did not want to be Sovietised.

Q: What happened to your family inside the Soviet Union?

A: Our family suffered. In 1937 one of our family, who had been sent to the camps, was shot for being an Orthodox priest and is venerated as a New Martyr.  We have his icon. He is our family saint.

We lived all over the European part of the USSR and there are still Benckendorffs in the Ukraine (including a famous film-maker), Belarus and the Baltics, as well as Russia. Since the fall of the USSR, as you say in English, we have been scattered to the four winds. Some of us now live in England, Denmark and the USA. In England we attend the Romanian church, in the USA the OCA. We are the new White emigration, though we still use our 1920s name. It is just too complicated to change our name back for the moment. But that will come. I and my husband are talking about doing this at this very moment.

Q: You mention the Ukraine. What is your view of the conflict there today?

A: The Ukraine? First of all, people must understand that the war there is nothing to do with the Ukraine. It is between Western imperialism with its wealthy oligarchs who control the USA, and the rest of humanity with its poor people who are represented by Russia. The war is between the globalist rich like Soros and Schwab against humanity, between the elite minority with its media dictatorship, arms merchants, global warming, artificial covid and transgenderism, and the vast majority of the world with its ordinary people who just love their homelands and their families. The naïve Ukrainians are being used as paid mercenaries by the rich West as cannon fodder. As the Western elite said, they will fight till the last Ukrainian. They will not die themselves because they do not believe in anything, except in themselves. They are all narcissists, so others die in their name.

The origin of the Ukrainian tragedy is in the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. He was the one person who linked us all together, the central point. After he was overthrown, what could you expect? There was no unity left, nothing to fight for. Through weakness and lack of principle, willingness to sell themselves for money, first the western Ukrainians allowed themselves to be conquered by the Nazis and then by the Americans. They always go wherever they imagine they have an advantage. Nazis and Americans are the same thing, those so-called Ukrainians are Nazis.

Until all the peoples of the former USSR have truly repented for their ancestors’ sin in 1917, there will be conflict among its former peoples. I just hope that the conflict in the Ukraine is the last post-Soviet conflict, with the other conflicts of the traitors in the Caucasus, in Georgia and Armenia, and elsewhere. Then there can at last be the restoration of the real Rus and all the other countries will be free.

Q: What do you think of the old White Russian emigration?

A: They had to emigrate. It was that or be killed by the Bolsheviks. But most of them were also against the Tsar, they overthrew him, they were just right-wing atheists like the Bolsheviks, who were left-wing atheists. Many of the so-called Whites entirely lacked patriotism. Some of them supported Hitler invade Russia during the war and today their descendants support the Americans, which is the same thing. Nazism is an inherently Western colonial ideology, German or American, French or British, Belgian or Italian, Spanish or Portuguese, Austrian or Dutch. It was all about killing and exploiting others who are considered to be inferior subhumans, Untermenschen, as the Germans called them. What is this forced imposition of transgenderism, if not Nazism? The name NATO, which was staffed by German Nazis from the outset, even sounds like the word Nazi.

Q: Should all Russian Orthodox be under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate?

A: How is that possible? That is absurd! The Moscow Patriarchate is a house divided because it still has to be cleansed of Sovietism and post-Sovietism. It is very, very corrupt and many of the bishops are just capitalist oligarchs, interested only in money and luxury and they defrock good priests for disagreeing with their Sovietism and denouncing them for their corruption and immorality. The fools-for-Christ tell the truth, not the bishops. If the bishops told the truth, we would not need fools-for-Christ. Some of the bishops are atheists or moral perverts, just as they were in the Soviet period. Look at Filaret with his palace in Kiev. It is shameful.

Most of the Russian bishops should be sent to monasteries to repent for the rest of their lives. Only, if they were sent there, you would see that most of them would run away and defrock themselves. Anything except repent! Like that awful Bishop Maxim in London, who ran away because he was running a drugs factory in Saint Petersburg with his boyfriend. That is the level of so many Russian bishops today, here or in Russia. They are on the same level as the Greeks from Istanbul. There is no difference between them.

True, after 1991 the Patriarchate made the first leap – from the theory of Soviet ideology. But it failed to make the second leap – from the practice of Soviet corruption. Nowadays you can be an atheist in the Church, all you need to do is decide which Church group you as an atheist want to join.

Here in England, for example, I have been horrified by ROCOR. It is full of American agents, it is an anti-Russian organisation, just a Fascistic branch of the CIA, right-wing atheists. Little wonder so many in ROCOR sided with the Nazis against Russia then. Now they are doing it again. ROCOR refuses to be nice or negotiate and thinks that by being nasty and punishing, it wins. In fact, it punishes itself and loses, just like the US government in its dealings with other countries. Treachery is everywhere. As someone said, the persecuted Church has become the persecuting Church. The greatness of the Russian Church is when it is persecuted. It is not in its bishops, with rare exceptions. And certainly not in today’s bishops.

Q: How do you see Western Europe?

A: It is so sad. Old Europe is dying. I think present Europe, which has already become very decadent, will have to hit rock bottom before it can be reformed. Only then will the various nations of Europe be able to negotiate with Russia and return individually to having normal relations with Russia, the wider world and with each other. Probably Europe is not far off rock-bottom now. My husband fears the situation in France especially. He says there could be a revolution there, if a military coup does not take place first.

Q: You have lived in England for 14 years and speak English fluently now. How do you see England?

A: When we first came here, we knew nothing. I had studied German at school and my husband French. We just came to work, to survive, like everyone else. But now we have come to appreciate and love Old England, the countryside, the thatched cottages, the traditions. For example, we go regularly to Ely to venerate St Audrey, whose hand is still venerated there, still making the sign of the cross over the city through all these centuries. Her presence is there. But we also see how Americanised modern England has become, like the rest of Western Europe in general, even the Catholic countries in the south.

For example, a few days ago when I had a day off, we were sitting in the lovely Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, another city of a saint. Two schoolgirls, aged perhaps 9 or 10, walked by in their lovely uniforms. So sweet and innocent. And we thought this is the real England. And then a very badly-dressed young man, his face covered in tattoos and pieces of metal, walked by, wearing a ragged T-shirt with the logo of an American baseball team. My husband said that he must have many psychological problems to do that to himself. I mean you can remove psychological complexes, but how can you remove tattoos on your face? He had come from another planet, as far as I am concerned. Two different worlds.

Of the real England, there are still some beautiful fragments left. We have recently been on holiday in Shropshire. How lovely it is there. But I fear that England has fallen too far and cannot now be restored. Though there are still many English people who are very kind. As for the government and British politicians, I have no time for any of them. They are all liars and have made the lives of ordinary English people much worse. Nowadays you cannot find a dentist in England. Why? Because the politicians gave all our money to that atheist and murderer Zelensky.

Q: What do you think of the Royal Family?

A: There is not one any more. Queen Elizabeth was the last who still had something. We watched her funeral on television. That was the funeral of Old England. When England is free again, you will need to find an English noble family to replace all those ‘royals’. You need a new Royal Family for England. You need an Alfred II, a Patriot-King, not a false one paid by those behind the government to do and say whatever they order him to do.

Q: You have had British citizenship for four years now. Will you vote in the elections in the UK?

Only for a party that promises to stop arming the Kiev regime and help end the war there. Is there such a party? All over Western Europe the US-chosen elites are just hanging on to power, but they will be swept away by their peoples. They are war criminals, responsible for the deaths of all those poor Ukrainians, who would have been happy to live in peace with Russia years ago, if the elite had not wanted them to make war against Russia.

Q: Do you think you will return to Russia one day?

A: We have friends who have already returned, but we are attached to East Anglia. Tsar Nicholas came here, to Sandringham and Kings Lynn. We would like to open a memorial church in Kings Lynn, dedicated to the Imperial Martyrs. As regards returning to Russia, we both prefer to wait until the new Tsar. We want to be in Russia for his enthronement. Then we shall see.

Q: The new Tsar?

A: Yes. After President Putin, who does not yet love Tsar Nicholas, there will be a Tsar.

Q: Are you sure?

A: Of course, the saints and elders have said so. See how already the best of the Tsar’s Russia is being restored and reconstituted even now. Everything that was good about the Tsar’s Russia – policies like free medicine and education, including higher education for women, were kept by the USSR – is being restored. Look at how North Korea is now allied with Russia, as it was until 1904 when the Japanese treacherously attacked Russia and went on to destroy Korea.

Recently Russia became the fourth largest economy in the world, as it was in 1914. It will overtake the USA eventually. And then see how Russia is forming a mighty coalition with countries which wanted to be with Russia or were supported by Russia before 1917, with India, South Africa, Iran, Ethiopia, Thailand and many other countries like Vietnam and Algeria, Afghanistan and Cuba, Indonesia and Turkey. The whole of Eurasia and Africa are allying.

Q: But who will the candidate for the new Tsar be? A Romanov from the emigration?

A: The Romanovs were nearly all traitors to the Tsar, even before the Revolution. The émigré Romanovs definitely cannot provide any serious candidate. That is laughable. Most of them cannot even speak Russian and many are not Orthodox! The new Tsar must come from inside Rus, as his ancestors went through the Soviet period. Only such a man can understand the peoples of Rus today. Once you emigrate forever, you become irrelevant to the Motherland. We live in the present, emigres live in the past. I do not know who the next Tsar will be, but there are many people of Romanov descent inside Rus. The prophecies say that the future Tsar’s mother will be a Romanov. God will provide. You will see.

Q: Thank you. Is there anything you would like to say to our readers in conclusion?

A: Yes, those same words again: God will provide. He always does. Do not be afraid. Everything will fall back into place.

The Emperor is Coming And He Will Cleanse the Church of Corruption

‘Wherever Americans come to a region of the planet, they bring chaos’.

Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister speaking on RT, 15 November 2023

The American war against the Russian and Ukrainian peoples in the eastern Ukraine is now coming to an end. However, terror and genocide are breaking out in the Holy Land, which is a convenient get-out, or ‘off-ramp’, from their lost war in the Ukraine for the US elite. For that elite, which fights wars with the blood of others, is threatening even more wars and chaos in many other parts of the world with their same imperial ‘Divide and Rule’ policy. The world knows that we are seeing global transformations in these pre-apocalyptic times.

The post-1945 US-controlled world is over and US-led institutions are collapsing, from the EU to the UK, from NATO to the WTO. This is a parallel to the collapse of Soviet institutions from 1989 on, including the Soviet-created Ukraine which is only now disappearing. A great power shift, prophesied by many, is taking place, with the old Western elites falling everywhere. The time of the prophecies has come. These include the promised return of an Orthodox Emperor or Tsar, of whom we will now speak.

Over a century ago, apostate Orthodox Christian Russians betrayed the Orthodox Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, his Family and his faithful servants.  Since then the vast majority of Russians have not yet woken up from their nightmare. The episcopate of the Orthodox Church has sunk into divisions and corruption, as though a mafia had come to reign there. However, prophetic voices have resounded. Thus, the great Elder Nikolai (+ 2002) of the Pskov Lake, answered pilgrims on three occasions that ‘The Tsar is coming’, when they doubted. On the first occasion, they objected:

‘St Seraphim of Sarov also made such prophecies, but there is no sign that a Tsar is coming. That those in the present government do not see him coming is clear, but the most terrible thing of all is that there are priests who are not waiting for the Tsar’. One metropolitan also objected: ‘What monarchy? That time is over, now we live in a democracy’. Fr Nikolai listened and said: ‘The Tsar is coming’. ‘How come? Who is coming?’ And again he answered: ‘The Tsar is coming’. They argued with him for a third time and once more he repeated: ‘The Tsar is coming’.

‘We left perplexed, but a little later this is what happened. We met a priest from Kiev, who told us how he had been in a car crash. The angels took him away, a bright light shone from above, his soul rejoiced and he thought: ‘Glory to God, I am home’. Suddenly he heard a voice: ‘Not yet, you have to go back’. ‘Why?’ ‘You are a convinced monarchist, you will pray for the Tsar’. ‘Who is the Tsar?’ ‘Only I and the Tsar know this. Even his parents and the Mother of God do not know this’. ‘Why?’ ‘Because as soon as people find out, they will immediately kill him’’.

Thus, there will be no revolutions, elections or councils. When the time comes, the Lord Himself will raise up the chosen Tsar. According to the prophecies, this will happen some time after a war. This is the American war that is now coming to an end in the Ukraine. By the prayers of the last Orthodox Emperor and Martyr and all the New Martyrs and Confessors, the Tsar will be enthroned in the coming years. Then he will cleanse the Church of corruption. As for us, we are simply forerunners, sent to announce this message, though we are unworthy even to untie his shoelaces.

 

Together in Life, Together in Heaven: Ten Questions and Answers on Martyrdom of the Russian Imperial Family

  1. Who ordered the murder of the Russian Imperial Family in 1918?

The seven members of the Imperial Family and their four faithful servants were shot and bayoneted to death in the very early morning, probably just before 1 a.m., of 17 July 1918. This took place in the requisitioned house of a military engineer called Nikolai N. Ipatiev in the city of Ekaterinburg in the Urals on the very limits of Europe and Asia. This house had been built on the site of the Church of the Ascension, which had stood there in the eighteenth century.

From studies in post-Soviet Russia, for example those by the senior official investigator,  V. N. Soloviov, it seems that the murder of the Imperial Family was carried out only on the initiative of the local Urals Regional Soviet. The Bolsheviks in the industrial city of ‘Red Ekaterinburg’ were particularly militant, hateful and also powerful, showing great independence from Moscow. In any case, no proof has been found of co-ordination between the local Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg and Lenin in Moscow or anyone else.

However, it is clear that Lenin would have had the Imperial Family murdered in any case and with the backing of his financial and political sponsors abroad, for example in New York. However, Lenin had wanted some sort of show trial first. It is also clear that the Soviet leaders and ordinary Bolsheviks who did not actually order the murder were not upset when it did occur. Thus, although they did not order it, they were quite capable of doing so and would have done it anyway in time. Probably they even felt relief that others had done the dirty work for them so soon.

  1. Were their murderers Jews?

Although the top Bolshevik elite in 1917 was 90% Jewish by race (but militant atheists by religion and mocking their ancestral religion and mercilessly slaughtering Non-Bolshevik Jews), ordinary Bolsheviks were overwhelmingly Russian. As the Old Bolsheviks, largely Jewish, died (Lenin was only a quarter Jewish) or were murdered (like Trotsky), they were replaced by Russians or those of other nationalities, like the Georgians Stalin and Beria, or later the Ukrainian Khushchov. Of the ten murderers (not ‘executioners’, as the secular West calls them) of the Imperial Family, eight were Russian, one was, probably, Latvian and only one was Jewish, although he was in charge of the other killers. However, this latter, Yankel Yurovsky, was a Jew who had long before been baptised a Protestant and had nothing to do with his Jewish family or religion. Therefore, he was Jewish only by race.

Indeed, several foreign soldiers, perhaps Latvians or Austro-Hungarians, had categorically refused to pull the trigger and murder the Family, especially the children. The fact – however terrible – is that the ten murderers were all baptised Christians, eight of them Russians. Their names were: Yurovsky, Kabanov, M. Medvedev, P. Medvedev, Netrebin, Nikulin, Strekotin, Tselms (probably, and probably Latvian), Vaganov and Yermakov. This fact that they were all officially Christians should be reflected on.

This is also why the Church Outside Russia canonised the Imperial Family and their servants as martyrs, whereas in 2000 the Church inside Russia canonised only the Family as Passion-Bearers. The difference here is only that the term ‘Passion-Bearer’ is used only when the murderers are nominal Christians and not pagans. However, in reality the terms are largely interchangeable.

  1. Was their murder a ritual murder?

There is no such thing as a ’ritual murder’. This whole Non-Orthodox myth was invented in the Roman Catholic Middle Ages. It began in Norman England, with the notorious case of the murder of ‘William of Norwich’ in 1144, the first such case. The myth, based largely on jealousy of the wealth of certain elite-connected Jews, finally spread from Catholic Poland into the western Ukraine only in the late nineteenth century. Anyone who reads about the chaos of the murders at the Ipatiev House, carried out by militant atheists and Non-Jews, can see that there was no system (rituals are by definition always systematic) and had no connection with any religion whatsoever. The myth of ‘ritual murders’ is pure anti-Semitism, as is the myth of ‘kabbalistic’ signs on an inside wall of the Ipatiev House. They were simple scribbles.

  1. Why did many not believe that the remains of the nine victims, found in 1979, and those of the two victims, Alexei and Maria, found in 2007, were those of the Imperial Family and their servants?

The second early investigator of the murder, N. A. Sokolov, (well before him the first investigator, I. A. Sergiev, had done nearly all the work) was appointed by the White Army in 1919. He could not find the remains of the Imperial Family and therefore concluded that the victims’ bodies had been consumed by fire, petroleum and sulphuric acid. In reality, only the martyrs’ clothing and shoes had been burned on bonfires. His ‘conclusion’ – although in fairness it was only a preliminary conclusion because he had not had time to finish his investigation – came about simply because he could not find the remains, even though he had passed by their site. Many, if not all, at the time and for long afterwards, believed in his conclusions/suppositions for lack of any other information, and a few still do believe in him today.

Sokolov was not a chemist or a forensic scientist, just a legal man – and also a convinced anti-Semite – and did not realise that you need very high temperatures – about 1,000 C – and huge amounts of sulphuric acid in order to destroy eleven human bodies. These had not been available. Others blindly repeated his suppositions, even adding the speculation that the bodies had been burned to cinders and their heads had been sent to Moscow. This latter wild and proofless speculation was made only because the investigators had found no teeth – by far the most difficult part of a human body to destroy. In reality, there were no teeth, simply because the bodies with their heads and therefore teeth had not been found. However, there are still a few who believe these suppositions, even today, though probably for ideological (anti-Semitic) reasons or out of personal vanity and wish for publicity.

  1. How can we be sure that ‘the Ekaterinburg Remains’ are indeed the relics of the Imperial Family?

We are 99.999999% sure of this just from the two sets of extremely thorough genetic studies on the unique remains, conducted internationally. If you add to this the locations and the number of bodies (eleven), the post-Revolutionary period when they were killed, their ages, the way they were killed, the type of bullets and other fragments found with them, as well as the dental records showing very clearly that the victims’ teeth had been treated by world-class dentists, I can see no rational way in which there can be any doubt about their identity.

  1. In that case, why have the Church authorities been so slow in recognising the remains as the Imperial Family’s relics?

The first genetic tests were carried out in the 1990s under the Yeltsin government, which of course no-one trusted, as it was notorious for its lies, just as all the Communist governments before it had been notorious for their lies. After all, Yeltsin himself had ordered the destruction of the Ipatiev House less than twenty years earlier, in September 1977, for the sixtieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Since the remains could eventually be venerated as holy relics, the Church authorities, also distrusting Yeltsin, had to be absolutely certain of their identity. You cannot make a mistake if you are going to present remains as relics. This is why a second batch of genetic tests were made on the basis of even more advanced DNA science, their results being released on the centenary of the martyrdom in 2018. The findings coincided with the first ones.

Secondly, perhaps more importantly still, the Church authorities have had to face the opposition of sectarian elements inside Russia, who are largely anti-Semitic. Only now are the Church authorities dealing with them. The bishops have always feared a schism, however small, on the subject of the identification of the remains.

Thirdly, the Church authorities know that in post-Soviet Russia there are those of the other extreme, opposed to the far right anti-Semites. These are the liberal and atheist elements opposed to the enshrinement of the relics, just as they were – and are – opposed to the very canonisation of the Imperial Martyrs. Indeed, inside Russia itself, the Church authorities have still not canonised three of the four servants of the Seven Imperial Martyrs (see below).

Outside Russia we should not be surprised at this or, even worse, feel smug. Even the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), supposedly free, only made up its mind about canonising the Imperial Martyrs and four of their servants in 1981, 63 years late! This is scandalous. And even here there were some members of the Church Outside Russia who opposed the canonisation, as I well remember. Anyone who remembers the very hostile reactions to the 1981 canonisation outside ROCOR, on the part of the liberal Paris Russian Jurisdiction (founded by the very Saint Petersburg aristocrats who had overthrown the Tsar) and the Parisian-influenced OCA, let alone the mocking reactions of the secular media, will recall just how virulent the opposition to the canonisation was.

  1. Why are there no miracles from the relics, which do not give out myrrh or perfume?

I think there are many miracles from them. The fall of the Soviet Union was only the first one.

As regards the actual relics, not all relics give off fragrance or myrrh. In any case, relics need faith to work miracles. This we can see time and again from Christ’s words in the Gospels – ‘according to your faith be it unto you’ (Matt. 9, 29). Christ Himself could not work miracles in Nazareth, where he had spent most of his life, precisely because of the faithlessness of the inhabitants (Matt 13, 58 and Mark 6, 5-6). In the Gospels Christ says time and again: ‘Thy faith has healed thee’. In other words, there is no healing without faith. At this moment, nine sets of relics, which lie in the St Catherine’s chapel in the Church of St Peter and Paul in its Fortress in Saint Petersburg, are closed off and cannot be venerated by the faithful. Disgracefully, the relics of St Alexei and St Maria are not even enshrined in the church. We cannot even venerate these relics physically.

  1. In Moscow the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate has not canonised three of the servants of the Family, though it did recently canonise one of them, Dr Eugene Botkin. Many say that it cannot canonise all of them in any case, since one was a Roman Catholic and another was a Protestant.

These four servants were all canonised by the Church Outside Russia in 1981 together with the Imperial Family. I questioned the very conservative Archbishop Antony of Los Angeles about this matter, when I accompanied him to visit Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich in Paris in autumn 1991. He explained to me that this issue had been discussed by the ROCOR Synod in New York well before the 1981 canonisation. The Synod had accepted the age-old practice of the Church that anyone who was martyred for the Faith, even though unbaptised, was considered to have been baptised in their blood.

There are many such examples of baptism in blood in Church history. The fact that of two Orthodox martyrs, one was a Roman Catholic and another was a Protestant, should surely be considered as Providential: this is a call to the Non-Orthodox world to follow in the footsteps of the Imperial servants, as indeed is the canonisation of the converted Tsarina Alexandra herself, though she had been chrismated into the Orthodox Faith before her wedding in 1894. We are all called to be Imperial servants, servants of the Christian Empire, the Empire of Christ.

  1. If the remains are eventually accepted by the whole Church as holy relics, should the relics be enshrined at Porosionkov Log, where they were found?

The area a few miles to the north of Ekaterinburg where the relics were found in 1979 and, 67 metres away, in 2007, was renamed Porosionkov Log (‘Piglet’s Ravine’) only in the nineteenth century, as a result of the amount of mud there which attracted pigs. Originally there had been a large lake here, but when the railway was built across this area, the land around the large pond became very boggy with no drainage. It would not be possible to build a large stone church here, but only a small wooden church on piles. This is the case four and a half miles away at Ganina Yama (‘Gabriel’s Pit’), where the murderers burned the victims’ clothes and belongings and first and unsuccessfully tried to dispose of the relics in the early morning of 17 July 1918. Here there now stand wooden churches dedicated to each of the Imperial Martyrs.

  1. In your view what should happen to the relics now?

Tsar Nicholas II repeatedly said that he wanted to be buried in Saint Petersburg. He spent most of his life as Tsar at Tsarskoe Selo (‘The Tsar’s Village’), just outside Saint Petersburg. Here the whole family was happy, rather than among the mean-minded gossip, criminal slander and treasonous intrigues of jealous aristocrats in Saint Petersburg. Surely, it is here in the spacious grounds of Tsarskoe Selo, where the Family spent so many happy times together, that a huge Cathedral dedicated to the Imperial Martyrs could be raised up, with the relics of all of them at last reunited and enshrined inside. This would become a pilgrimage centre for Orthodox the world over. The Imperial Family: Together in life, together in heaven. From here tiny splinters of relics could be sent out all over the world, so that their veneration could be confirmed as worldwide, as indeed it already is, and for the repentance of all. Then clearly visible miracles would begin, including the transfiguration of Post-Soviet Russia into Orthodox Russia and the beginning of the realisation in Western countries that they cannot continue as they are now, in their state of apostasy from Christ.

Holy Imperial Martyrs, Pray to God for us!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

St John of Shanghai Church, Colchester, England

 

Blessed Xenia of Saint Petersburg

24 January/6 February 2021

 

The Great Betrayal

For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Isaiah, saying: ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make His paths straight’. (Matt.  3, 3)

 Introduction: Fake History

The textbooks of official history are like old ‘newspapers’ filled with interpretations, not facts. This is to justify the biased beliefs of their writers or, much more often, of those who pay their writers. This can be seen clearly if you compare a history book from 100 years ago with a modern one: the two versions are very different. This bias is not least true when it comes to the fake history about the last Russian Emperor. For the attitudes of most towards Tsar Nicholas II are still dictated by that fake history, first spread by the traitors who overthrew him in March 1917. This fake history actually asserts, for example, that the Tsar was ‘weak’, ‘cowardly’ and ‘stupid’ and that therefore he deserved to be replaced (by those who wrote, or else paid for the textbooks).

Such lies were promulgated inside Russia by jealous and power-hungry revolutionaries before the Revolution and in the West which aided and abetted them. It was reinforced by Paris Russian emigres who had overthrown the Tsar (and were then overthrown in their turn for their crass incompetence). As for the very Bolsheviks, who overthrew them in November 1917, they simply repeated the lie. In other words, there was no concern with the truth anywhere, only with self-justification. And later Western historians, in self-justification, have only reinforced it. All justified themselves with yet another lie: that the Tsar had abdicated. This myth, promulgated by émigrés and Soviets alike, is still repeated today and also presented as ‘history’!

Real History

Today, we know that for several years before 1917 the aristocratic conspirators who wanted power for themselves had worked sytematically with spies (‘diplomats’) in Western embassies, using foreign-controlled media and hired agitators to discredit and slander the Tsar. And they were successful; many jealous Romanovs, power-seeking aristocrats, politicians, professionals, the half-baked ‘intelligentsia’, clergy, industrial workers and even peasants believed their lies, especially about Gregory Rasputin, alleged to be a base drunkard and revolting debauchee, who controlled everything that the Tsar did. The fact that so many believed these disgusting lies proves only the loss of faith leading to spiritual blindness of huge numbers at that time.

When on 16 December 1916 debauchees and atheists murdered the in fact righteous Orthodox healer and prophet Gregory Rasputin, there was actually rejoicing. A few weeks later later, on 1 March 1917, as the Tsar was being held prisoner by his generals on the royal train in Pskov between the Front and Saint Petersburg, an attempt was made on his life, not for the first time, by arranging a train crash. Threats were also made to the lives of the Tsarina and the royal children. On 2 March the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich, the Tsar’s foul-mouthed uncle and incompetent and so sacked former commander of the Western Front, also gave allegiance to the traitors. A document of abdication was drawn up, signed in pencil with the forged signature of the Tsar.

Some of the other main traitors were politicians like Guchkov, an agent of the Anglo-German imperialist Lord Alfred Milner, and the President of the decadent Duma, Rodzianko, a puppet of the British ambassador, Buchanan. But virtually all the military commanders were also traitors, from Alekseyev, Ruzsky, Kornilov, Brusilov, Kolchak, Evert, Nepenin, Sakharov to Bonch-Bruyevich, who in Pskov imprisoned the Tsar on the royal train. Like the others, they all broke their oaths of loyalty to the Tsar and his Dynasty. Lacking a living Orthodox Faith, the Tsar’s own brother, the Grand Duke Michael, and even his Danish mother were disloyal. And Romanov relatives, the Grand Dukes Nikolai, Sergei and Alexander Mikhailovich, were among his most virulent critics.

In the Church there were also unprincipled clerical careerists, who betrayed the Tsar. Just as the disciple Peter betrayed Christ (though then repented, unlike Judas), so too there were so-called ‘churchmen’ who initially betrayed the Tsar. Once the pious metropolitans of Saint Petersburg and Moscow had been removed by the ‘Provisional Government’ which treated the Church as a mere Department of State, the traitors broke their oaths of allegiance to the Lord’s Anointed, under the pretext that the Tsar had abdicated! They had signed their own death warrants. These traitors, consciously or unconsciously, were all acting for Western spies, German or Allied, the enemies of Russian Orthodoxy. Their only desire was that Orthodoxy would not win the War.

However, those who betrayed the Tsar all paid for their crime in the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, or in bitter exile, or when they were repressed by the Soviet State, or in the Fascist invasion of 1941. However, those who even today continue to spread the lies of the revolutionaries about a ‘weak and stupid Tsar’ and ‘an abdication’ are also guilty. Almost all the Romanov relatives, aristocrats, generals, politicians, professionals, senior clergy and intellectuals, all the elitist plotters, were guilty. The fact that they tried to justify themselves in émigré memoirs proves it. When they wrote:  ‘We were right and we suffered because of the mistakes of the Tsar and the Tsarina’, all were repeating the same lie. And today their spiritual heirs only repeat it.

We have the Old Testament which the Tsar read in his Gethsemane on the royal train. In the book of Leviticus 26, 14-36, he made notes which make it clear that the Tsar understood prophetically the deep apostasy of his people: ‘But if you will not hearken to me and do all these commandments…I will appoint over you terror, consumption and a burning fever that shall consume your eyes and torment your hearts: and you shall be slain before your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you… and I will make your heaven as iron and your earth as brass…And I will bring a sword on you that shall avenge your quarrel with my testament…And I will make your cities waste and bring your sanctuaries into desolation…And I will scatter you among the heathen…

Conclusion: The Warning to the West

Tsar Nicholas knew about his future, including his sacrificial martyrdom, long before they came. However, this did not stop him from doing what he had to do, making the Russian Empire into a Great Power, only a little behind Great Britain and Germany and catching up ever faster with the USA. The nearly 50 million increase in population in his reign proves it and as for the technological developments, we know that the Second World War was won by the men trained and the equipment in development already in his reign. After the Great Betrayal, Marxism came to power, delivered by special train from Germany. After destroying much that had been achieved, they took up the development of what remained of the Russian Empire, but with one vital difference.

The Bolsheviks thought that they could create heaven on earth by atheism, a ‘bright future’ without belief in heaven and a way of life that takes heaven as its model. As a result they created hell on earth, an earth in which souls are not saved. Tsar Nicholas wanted to create earthly prosperity, but only in proportion as spiritual prosperity could be created, which is why he also tried to do much for the spiritual and moral welfare of his peoples. This is the knowledge that Russian Orthodox have today and warn the West of: If you organize worldly life without attention to spiritual life, if you make the same mistake as the Soviet Union, you will end up like the Soviet Union: spiritually, morally and economically bankrupt. But the West appears to be deaf…

 

 

 

Questions and Answers February 2019

Moscow/Constantinople

Q: What would you answer to those who claim that the present problems between the Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow regarding the Ukraine are simply an ethnic problem?

A: No, it is not an ethnic problem, it is a dogmatic problem. It is all about faithfulness to Orthodoxy, that is, to the Oneness, Holiness, Catholicity and Apostolicity of the Church.

Just imagine if the Russian Church had backed atheist-promoted modernists in Constantinople against its persecuted Patriarch (as Constantinople did in the 1920s in Russia against the heroic missionary Patriarch St Tikhon), interfered in the internal affairs and territories of other Local Churches, insisted on a racist and nationalistic ethos and so had opposed itself to any missionary, apostolic work and multinational activity, had fallen away from the Orthodox calendar, messed about with the Liturgy, canonized dubious political figures, promoted freemasonry, practised simony, preached ecumenism and semi-Catholicism (as Constantinople had already done in the fifteenth century), got itself paid by the US State Department, but the Church of Constantinople had remained faithful to the Orthodox Tradition. In that case we would be supporting the Church of Constantinople and not the Church of Russia. Canonical crimes are canonical crimes, regardless of the ethnicity of the culprits.

Moreover, it is now clear that Constantinople will not repent, as it is still justifying its outrageous acts. It is even going to sack the old bishops and appoint new Bartholomew-esque bishops in North America, Australia and the UK and so everywhere dig an abyss between itself and us Orthodox. Therefore, it is clear that this schism is at least semi-permanent. Only repentance on the part of the proud of Constantinople can overcome the problem they have caused and there is absolutely no sign of this at present.

Therefore, given the paralysis and irresponsibility of others, the Russian Church is now reorganizing its administration of the Non-Orthodox world, as in the now 15 countries in the Russian Orthodox Western European Exarchate. (Since the Synod on 26 February Malta has been added to it, leaving only the five Nordic countries and Germany, Austria and Hungary to be added in due course). The same thing is happening in the Russian Orthodox South-East Asian Exarchate with its Metropolitan of Singapore and now four dioceses, Singapore, Korea, Thailand and the Philippines and Vietnam. South Asia, mainly India and Pakistan, is at present a no-go area. (South-West Asia is largely the canonical territory of Antioch, as Africa is that of Alexandria, just as North Asia is Russian canonical territory). In the remaining continents of the New World, maybe we shall one day see a Russian Exarchate for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean and possibly another for South America, leaving the rest of North America and Oceania to ROCOR, if competence is shown.

Thus, all faithful Orthodox of all nationalities will end up independent but in association with the Russian Church. This will recreate the canonical situation in North America before 1917, with all Orthodox united within the Russian Church, before Constantinople introduced division with its ‘jurisdiction’ 100 years ago. Only the modernists in the Local Churches will go under Constantinople. The tiny, modernist and unfaithful minority who want a Protestant, ‘reformed’ Orthodoxy, a Traditionless, gutless and saintless Halfodoxy, disunited, unholy, uncatholic and unapostolic, will follow the schismatics. This is simply a falling away from the Orthodox Church. In these latter times the chaff is being separated from the wheat. This is not some ethnic dispute, where there is truth on both sides, but a dispute in which there is right and wrong, Thirteen Local Churches against One evildoer. This is the great cleansing we have been awaiting for so long, the tares are leaving us.

Q: What is your policy regarding those who frequent churches under Constantinople and who want to take communion and other sacraments in the Russian Church? Do you refuse them?

A: Certainly not! We do not punish the people for the anti-canonical actions of an elderly US-run Turkish Patriarch, whom they never chose. As long as the Russian Church does not have a full network of parishes in the Diaspora, catering for all the faithful of all languages, we will give the sacraments to those who have no choice but to attend nearby Constantinople churches at times, even though they know that their Patriarchate is utterly wrong. Of course, if there are actually those among them who consciously support their Patriarch, then we cannot have communion with them because they are enemies of the Church of God. But such extremists do not approach the Russian Church anyway.

Q: The Patriarchate of Constantinople has only one Western Diocesan bishop, Metropolitan Athenagoras in Belgium. Will he stay with Constantinople?

A: This is none of my business, though I know that he fully shares in the Phanariot ideology. I also note that the only Non-Diocesan Western bishop under Constantinople, Metr Kallistos (Ware), has not expressed any indication that he will move either.

I remember Metr Athenagoras in the 70s when he was a young layman. He and his family left Rue Daru for the Greeks of Constantinople, if I remember rightly, in 1987, after the whole Bruges convert parish (and Peckstadt family) was mistreated by the tyrannical and unjust German Archbishop of Rue Daru, George (Wagner). (He was an ex-Catholic, who managed to alienate Russians with his Russophobia and Western Orthodox with his refusal to recognize any liturgical languages apart from Greek, Latin and Slavonic!! What a disaster – really Rue Daru never recovered from this German intellectual. I witnessed all this first-hand).

At that time the Bruges parish could have joined Moscow, though many of the Moscow bishops outside Russia were very corrupt. (I can still remember how in 2003 the Sourozh Diocese Cathedral was still refusing to have any icon of the Royal Martyrs (‘there is no space for them’, as they so eloquently said, in fact not about their empty walls, but about their empty hearts), even though Moscow had at last canonized the New Martyrs and was negotiating with ROCOR, and how that Cathedral also refused to sell books written by Fr Seraphim (Rose), who was very popular inside Russia.

Or else the Bruges converts could have joined ROCOR. However, to accept the Tradition and disciplines of the Church in all their integrity, as is normal for ROCOR, was far too much for them. They wanted a ‘pick and choose’ Orthodoxy for the consumer age. Such converts play a fantasy game and never want the real thing, skirting around it, like people who skirt around a lighthouse and are then surprised when they are wrecked on the rocks around the lighthouse.

Rue Daru

Q: What do you think is the future for this group after their meeting on 23 February?

A: Here the chickens have come home to roost and decisions have to be made at last after so many decades of putting off the question. These decisions cannot, like Brexit, be continually put off. A few will surely join one part or another of the Russian Church (as some already have), including perhaps the elderly Archbishop Jean himself. However, most will remain under Constantinople, and a few may go off to join various curious Protestant-style or New Age sects, where some of them originally came from.

Q: Will the Rue Daru parish in Rome join ROCOR?

A: I have no idea – you must ask those involved. What I do remember is how ROCOR lost this parish to Rue Daru in 1985 through the incompetent meddling of Bishop Gregory Grabbe, who had sent an old calendarist American convert priest there (he was later defrocked, like several other convert priests whom Bp Gregory had had ordained by the innocent and naïvely pure Metr Philaret). I was there at the time and remember it well. Rue Daru at once ordained a Russian-speaking man for the Rome parish and three months later made him an archpriest (such was the favouritism of Rue Daru also!)

Politics

Q: Do you think that Brexit will happen?

A: Only if the UK is democratic will it happen. Over 45 years have already been spent in the Brussels straitjacket. On the other hand, both the EU and the UK Establishments, including the Remainer Mrs May, are against Brexit. The mere fact that the people were once allowed to express their opinion was a miracle, but since then we have seen the battle of the people against the elite and anything can happen.

Q: Why do countries which have lost their monarchy veer between left-wing and right-wing governments?

A: Because such countries get governed by ideologies/philosophies of either left or right. Whenever this happens, injustices happen because such ideologies are based on ideals, not on reality. Idealistic intellectuals (like Lenin or Hitler) are ruthless because they always force reality to fit their personal ideology, slaughtering all the millions who refuse to accept it and silencing all others by fear. We can see this on a lesser level in recent UK history with the idealistic obsessions of Thatcher (‘the free market’), Blair (meddling in other countries and starting wars) and Corbyn (Stalinist socialism). The question these ideologues never answer is: Does my ideal actually work? And by definition no ideal ever works, precisely because it is ideal, not real, not realistic, not practical. If you govern with an ideology, you will always end up being tyrannical and being hated. You have to govern with a heart.

Q: There are only two faiths in the world which have always been persecuted, Orthodoxy and Judaism. Why?

A: Because they both contain Truth. Where there is no Truth, there is never any persecution. The Truth of Judaism is that God is One and that He is sending His Son to bring justice to the world (The Second Coming). The Truth of Orthodoxy we know (The First Coming).

Worldliness in the Church

Q: Why are there so many Orthodox in the Ukraine, Russia (and maybe other parts of the world, and this may have nothing to do with just Orthodoxy, but all religions) who can be heard saying, “My believing is inside me.  I don’t believe in Church but I believe in God.  I follow Orthodox traditions and go to church sometimes.”  Is this primarily a reaction to the influence and momentum of Communism, like the saying about how the Communists almost accomplished in Russia in 70 years what the Ottoman Empire failed to accomplish in the Balkans in 400 years?

A: You are indeed quite right, this saying is very common, but it is also universal. The reason for this is corruption (’institutionalization’) in the Church; clerics turning the Church and Faith into a business, a mere religion. This makes people cynical. We need churches which are free of the tables of moneychangers and we need bishops (the simoniacs are usually Greek and Romanian) and priests whose main concern is people’s souls, not their wallets. In the West no jurisdiction is free of this; I remember the old ‘pre-Revolutionary’ ROCOR of 45 years ago – it too sometimes had this money, money mentality, which was the bane of the pre-Revolutionary Church. Our universal Russian Orthodox task is not at all the restoration of the pre-Revolutionary Church (as some very ignorant people imagine), but the cleansing of the pre-Revolutionary Church.

Therefore, this is nothing to do with Communism. We need apostolic St Pauls, who work as tentmakers, not rich bishops with fancy cars. This has been the combat of my life; it is why I do not serve in a den of corruption. I have always refused to do so and for that reason they have never wanted me.

Russian Converts

Q:  Why are there personality tensions in the Church inside Russia, for example as in the recent internet conflict between Fr Andrei Tkachov and Fr George Maximov?

A: The Church inside Russia has many converts. It sometimes reminds me of what I saw in the West in the 1970s: young women dressed in long drab dresses and young men with long beards, crosses or prayer knots on display. The neophyte mentality – imitating the external dress of monks and nuns – works regardless of nationality and even if the parents were nominal Orthodox. Converts have to show off – just like neophytes in any religion, from Islam (long beards and a uniform) to Buddhism (people dressed in saffron robes and with shaven heads). It is converts who create this hothouse mentality, usually on the internet. It is all so immature. It is time for teenagers to grow up.

The Future

Q: When will there be a new Tsar in Russia?

A: It is vital to understand that this can only come about when Russian Orthodox are worthy of the last Tsar. You cannot have a next Tsar, if you do not love and venerate the last Tsar and all those who served him – and were martyred for it. Read what others said of the last Tsar and his family:

‘It was the holiest and purest family’. (The Tsar’s valet Volkov, when interviewed by the investigator Sokolov 100 years ago).

‘There, in that house (the Ipatiev House), blossom the great souls of Russia, smeared with the mud of politicians’. (The Holy Martyr Eugene (Botkin)).

When this happens, then we shall see headlines like this:

‘Tsar restores the unity of the Russian Lands’.

‘Christian troops from Russia liberate Eastern Europe from EU tyranny’.

‘Afghans plead with Russian Imperial forces to free them’.

‘Russian Tsar stands on the Mexican border and demands: ‘Tear down this wall, Mr Trump’.

Do not be surprised; everything is still possible.

 

My Life, the Last Battle and the New Orthodox World (N.O.W.)

‘Tell the people: Although I have died, I am alive.’

St John of Shanghai

Foreword: The War

Forty-five years ago I was told by one who could have known better that, as I had been waiting for years to join the Orthodox Church, I now faced a choice: I could either join the Greek Church of Constantinople or the Church of Russia; it was all the same. But only to him was it all the same, as, in spite of, or rather because of, his great intellect, he was spiritually confused. He lived in an alien compromise, washing his hands before the critical choice. I joined the Russian Church because, since the age of twelve, I had known through revelations to my soul that my destiny was most definitely in the Russian Orthodox Church. However crippled it may have been after 1917, I was destined to share in that agony, indeed, although it seemed foolishness to the Jews and to the Greeks alike, only by sharing in that agony could I hope to find my own salvation. I sensed even then that what he had told me was somehow untrue. At best it could only have been a delusion. It was not all the same – and recent very sad events have shown this to all absolutely clearly. Let me explain:

The Church is not to be found in a people who believe that it is a chosen people. Many Hebrews believed that they were the chosen people, but they stoned the prophets and crucified the Son of God. To this day many of their descendants reject Christ, some considering themselves superior to the rest of humanity. Then the Western European elite came to believe in their ‘exceptionalism’ (that is, their claim that they too were above God) too, all in order to justify their organized barbaric aggression. So a thousand years after Christ, they too fell away from the Church, rejecting the Holy Spirit and seizing control of the Church in the West in order to justify their conquistador power-grab. So, like pirates, they began persecuting us ordinary Christians and conquering the rest of the world by fire and the sword. Then their secularist descendants, in turn the Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, German and finally American elites, did exactly the same, demanding world hegemony (‘globalism’), also rejecting Christ because they consider themselves superior to the rest of humanity. (Hence their anti-Semitism: the other ‘chosen people’, the Jews, were rivals to them, therefore they had to be eliminated). In the Church there has now come the turn of certain Greeks, telling us that only they are Christians, that God speaks only Greek, and, as one very well-known Cypriot archimandrite told me, even that their pagan ancestors had prepared the way for Christ! Many Russians fell victim to the same delusion, in the same way believing in themselves instead of believing in God, taking communion only once a year. So they lost everything and overthrew the God-appointed Christian Emperor in 1917. Only through the blood of the New Martyrs and the tears and sweat of the New Confessors did repentance eventually begin to come to them.

All these ‘chosen peoples’ failed to understand that salvation comes only from the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Church of Christ through the Mercy of God and the Holy Spirit – not from some earthly ‘Jewish Rome’ of some mythical ‘chosen people’. For this reason, once I had chosen the Russian Church, I was to spend the rest of my life at war, in tireless battles, in unceasing strife, in the trenches, on the Western Front, fighting for real Christianity, for the real Russian Orthodox Church, together, of course, with many others. We all fought against the narrow-minded, nationalist delusions and impurities of those who had lost the big picture, who could not see the wood for the trees. They told us that only Russians could be Orthodox, that only their own exclusive little fragments of the great Imperial Orthodoxy, which had not undergone the blood, tears and sweat of others, could be right, that God’s Church needed ‘saving’ or ‘reforming’ (naturally, by themselves!). Some of them even persecuted and took to court as a common criminal the greatest saint among them all, St John of Shanghai. Little wonder that the Lord sent me to a military Church. I never sought any of this; it was all imposed on me. My soul would have died had I not taken part in this spiritual warfare. My life has been unceasing warfare in four battles, all fought beneath the Protecting Veil, which my patron-saint saw and which is the only reason why I am still alive.

Three Battles

My first battle was to take part in the struggle to help free that small part of the Russian Church Diaspora in England, which was dependent on Moscow, from spiritual impurity. After nine years, by 1983, I realized that I would fail in this. It was a task quite beyond me, with my very feeble abilities and from my modest, provincial, rural background; the enemies were invested with the strength of a personality cult, with all the authority of men and their city establishments, they had no time for a ploughman’s grandson. I was knocking my head against brick walls. So I left into exile, seeing my limitations. I understood that it would take far-reaching political changes inside Russia and indeed the departures or deaths of some outside Russia before this battle could be won (I did not know then that this would mean twenty-four years). Victory was inevitable, but only God Who created time, could in time bring the victory. My battle had been premature. By myself I could do nothing. It was good for me to know this.

My second battle was to take part in the struggle to help free that small part of the Russian Church Diaspora, which was dependent on Constantinople (Rue Daru), from spiritual impurity. I fought in Paris and thought that this battle was winnable. It was – almost. However, after six years in 1988 there came a turning-point when I saw that I would fail in this battle too. The intrigues of freemasons in high places meant that I could not help win this battle – all my friends were in low places. I knew then that this Paris group would eventually (I did not know then that this would mean thirty years) disappear into spiritual irrelevance. Those who had betrayed the Tsar and made him and his Family into martyrs had also betrayed the Church. So I left, having understood that here too it would take far-reaching political changes inside Russia and indeed the departures or deaths of some outside Russia before the battle to bring even a part of this group home to the Russian Church could be won. Victory was inevitable, but only God Who created time, could with time bring the victory. My battle had been premature. By myself I could do nothing. It was good for me to know this.

My third battle from the first day of 1989 onwards was to take part in the struggle to help free that part of the Russian Church Diaspora, which was dependent on New York (ROCOR), from spiritual impurity. Here there was a much greater chance of success, for the contaminating Protestant disease of ‘super-correctness’ (as another disciple of St John of Shanghai called it), with its ignorance, phariseeism, extremism, sectarianism, old calendarism, psychological (not theological) deviations of convertitis and Cold War money, had many opponents in the USA itself and even more in Western Europe where I was fighting on the Front. And above all, my Diocesan Archbishop supported me and I supported him. The ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva, a spiritual son of and the European successor to St John of Shanghai, was in effect the first real Orthodox bishop I had met. We had an identical understanding of the Church. By myself I could do nothing, but now I was far from being alone; I was simply one of very many, a little cog in a large machine. I did not know then that this struggle would take eighteen years, for only in 2007 did the Church win the day. I was taking part in our first victory, together with millions of others, in the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, to which I had always belonged in spirit. Only geography had ever divided us.

After the Three Battles

Once this battle, in which I had played only a tiny role, eventually from my provincial home-town, had been won by the many, especially by the bishops who had been inspired by the grace of God, I knew that the two other houses of cards where I had earlier lost the day would fall in their turn. I just did not know that it would take another twelve years. Between 2007 and today, in 2019, I have seen both these first lost battles won. History won them. What I knew in the past, that they would be won only in God’s own time, has come to pass. What we have fought long and hard for has been obtained. Thus, we now at last have for our Diocese of the British Isles and Ireland a bishop, pleaded for during over four decades. He is Orthodox, understanding the local language and people, not phyletist, venerating the local saints and not denying them, missionary-minded like us, encouraging us and not destroying us, not under the control of laypeople, in good health, and who will be resident here in just a few weeks from now.

Secondly, the Russian Orthodox Exarchate of Western Europe, awaited for over three decades, was at last established in Paris only a few weeks ago. This means that our House will be built on rock, not on sand, and that the ‘Euro-Orthodox’ fantasy of the Paris Brotherhood is now dead. The future Local Church of Western Europe will be authentically Orthodox. For what we have sought for and fought for since 1988 now is. There is now a real Orthodox Exarchate for Western Europe, with many regional dioceses and young bishops, hundreds of parishes and several monasteries, venerating the local saints and not denying them, the foundation of the new Local Church. Led by Metropolitan John in Paris, who bears the name of our missionary father in Christ, St John of (Shanghai and) Western Europe and so continues in the tradition of Archbishop Antony of Geneva, it will of course need much more time to develop. It consists of the generally newer Russian Orthodox parishes of Western Europe, in many dioceses and with many bishops. However, alongside it and complementing it, also stand the two (Western European and German) dioceses of ROCOR, with their five bishops, two of them younger and active. This consists of the generally older, more integrated, Russian Orthodox parishes of Western Europe, a few of them until recently under Constantinople, but now at last come home. The two parts need each other and hopefully their bishops will meet regularly in order to help each other in their own joint Synod.

However, in this Year of the Lord, 2019, there is the last mystical battle (last for me) in the series of mystical battles in this Hundred Years’ War, which for a century has so deformed Church structures in the Diaspora. This battle is also against spiritual impurity, against masonic ecumenist and modernist intrigues. However, this last battle is the battle inside the Russian Lands, inside historic Rus’; it is therefore not a local battle for English, French and American Rus’ in London, Paris and New York, for part of the small Russian Diaspora, it is a general battle which concerns the whole Church. This is taking place today in the Ukraine, but it affects all. For the Church is the mystical centre of the world and it is the Ukraine which is now the mystical centre of the Church. And this is why we have come here now, sent to fight from the Western Front to the Eastern Front. All will stand or fall by their attitude to what is happening in the Ukraine today, to this battle between Christ and Satan. Whose side are you on?

The Fourth Battle

The internal administrative centre of the false Orthodoxy against which I fought in all our four battles, was formed in Istanbul a century ago. It came into being only because of the long-planned overthrow of the restraining protection of Imperial Tsardom. However, the Western disease which had overthrown the Christian Emperor and so the Christian Empire and then brought that centre into being had already infected Russia and elsewhere before that. For the disease contaminated all nationalities, including many in the Russian Lands and from there in the Diaspora. The disease came to be called renovationism and the renovationists were keenly supported from Istanbul. Today it has become crystal clear that the whole of the supposed Orthodox world has now to side either with real Orthodoxy or else against real Orthodoxy. The time of reckoning has come; the time of compromise is over. No-one can stand by any longer with the indifference and conceit of Pilate. Even though this battle is of exactly the same nature as the series of three battles which we fought in the Diaspora before this one, now it is not the Diaspora, but the Ukraine which is the sword that divides. The battlefield has changed to the Ukraine, but the battle is the same one; it is the battle for spiritual purity, for canonicity, for real Orthodoxy.

Gradually, over the last two months, one Local Church after another has decided to side with spiritual purity, canonicity and real Orthodoxy and so support Metr Onufry and the Church of God of the Ukraine. The rest of the Russian Church with ROCOR was the first to support him wholeheartedly. The Local Churches of Serbia, Bulgaria, Antioch, Poland, the Czech Lands and Slovakia, Cyprus, and unofficial but spiritually free (= non-political) voices in the Churches of Greece, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Georgia, followed. So far, thirteen out of eighteen Athonite monasteries have joined us. And a few days ago the episcopate of the basically Carpatho-Russian OCA (Orthodox Church in America), which had dithered for several weeks and where some had for years even been threatening to desert the Church for Istanbul, decided the same. This is their spiritual victory and our very great comfort after decades of spiritual slumber, of wandering far from the Church with American phyletist delusions. It means that the little OCA is maturing, at last deciding to accept its destiny, abandoning its eccentric spiritual isolation and so finding its positive identity by returning to its roots under St Tikhon. Inspired by the breath of new life, it can at last begin to play a significant and fulfilling role as one of the component parts of the future, united, much larger, multinational Russian Orthodox Churches of the three continents of the New World, of the Americas and Oceania.

This leaves the episcopates of only two Local Churches, the large Romanian and the tiny Albanian, not politically free and sitting on the fence, paralysed like Pontius Pilate ‘for fear of the Jews’. They are silent, neither supporting nor rejecting, awaiting instructions from above on whether to support the petty nationalism of the phyletist schism of Constantinople or not. The false church in the Ukraine, founded by the US-backed separatists in Kiev, is officially under a certain Sergei Dumenko. He is actually a Vatican- and US-approved puppet-layman, therefore both pro-Uniat and pro-LGBT, and not a metropolitan, His false church has been seen to be without grace, without sacraments, without the Holy Spirit. His church is that of ‘the Ukrainian god’, as one Ukrainian minister has put it. His enthronement in Kiev six days ago was ignored by all the Local Churches. His so-called ‘Church’ is only a regime-manipulated charade of empty rituals, just another small ultra-nationalist organization – an absurd anachronism in this global world. It is supported by teams of police-backed Nazi bandits who intimidate and beat up Christians, because Nazis have no concept of the meaning of the word ‘Christian’. And these anti-Christian men of violence are directly supported by an alien and corrupt political regime in Kiev, supported by alien and corrupt regimes elsewhere, and, to their eternal shame, by Greek ‘bishops’ in Istanbul.

Afterword: The Victory

The decadent, self-appointed, Paris-School ‘theologians’ from the past slip away one by one. With them their secularizing ideologies from the past, Ecumenism (anti-Orthodoxy; against the Father), Modernism (anti-Sovereignty; against the Son) and Liberalism (anti-People; against the Holy Spirit), slip away into spiritual irrelevance. Their books of intellectual fantasy-philosophy are ready for the dust of forgotten library shelves. Those who frustrated, wasted, impeded and persecuted us for so many decades are leaving the stage and we are beginning to see the future clearly now. For the New Orthodox World (N.O.W.) is taking shape. The New Orthodox World (NOW) is led not by anachronisms, relics from the past in cities of empires which have not existed for centuries, but by vibrant and missionary multinational Local Churches, Autonomous Churches and Exarchates worldwide. These are not narrow and corrupted nationalist museums for State rituals, flag-waving and cultural nostalgia or the playthings of disincarnate but very aggressive, politicized and politically correct, liberal intellectuals, but living organisms, cleansed to prepare us all to meet the King before He returns in all His glory. And in the New Orthodox World, NOW, there is the Heavenly Jerusalem of the Church of Christ, awaiting Him and resisting the Enemy of Mankind, who comes before Christ in order to create disunity, disorder and distress among us.

The death-threat which I received three years ago, sent me because the pen is indeed mightier than the sword, did not stop me or deter me for a single second. In a dream, come to me after receiving that death-threat, I opened my front door and saw an agent on my doorstep. He at once fired his revolver at me, but the bullet rebounded off my priest’s cross, killing him instead of me. He fell to the ground and his corpse was dragged away to a waiting car by his colleague, who in fear and astonishment uttered powerless curses. I left and hid in a secret and remote place where I could not be found. I was rescued by the prayers of one who long, long ago had also taken refuge in such a place and I was taken to a faraway land. I have never paid any attention to dreams, especially such dramatic ones, but I remembered this one. However, I only really understood its meaning and symbolism on my first day here. It means that, like all of us, I will die when God decides, not when men decide, for though man proposes, God disposes. It means that the bullet rebounds, for if men want to kill the truth, they kill only themselves (exactly as they have done for the last one hundred and five years, with their atheist wars, one after another). And those who try to kill the Church in the Ukraine are committing spiritual suicide; indeed, their death-bearing bullet has already lethally rebounded onto themselves.

Victory has been ours in the Diaspora, because we have been willing to die for the Church of God and our enemies have not – because they are inherently attached to this world and so fear death which is of this world. Victory is ours in the Ukraine, because we are willing to die for the Church of God and our enemies are not – because they are inherently attached to this world and so fear death which is of this world. This is why we shall win this last battle now – because we do not fear death, for we believe and we know that Christ is the Life-Giving God, Who rose from the dead and freed the captives in hell. They, however, have only heard of the Risen Christ as a theory and symbolic myth for their heads. They believe it not in their hearts. Therefore their heads, like their lives, are full of the philosophies and works of death. But we do believe and we know and we tremble in awe before the Living God, Who is the Great God, Who works wonders and Who is with us, so that none is against us. Let the dead bury the dead. As for us, we shall not die, but live, and we shall declare the works of the Lord. The Lord is our Enlightenment and our Saviour, whom then shall we fear?

Archpriest Andrew Phillips

Kiev, 1-8 February 2019

 

 

 

 

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.

 

On the Martyrdom of St Gregory the New

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

Daniel 12, 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

1. To Kill Rasputin, Andrew Cook, 2005

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

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

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

5. Cullen, P. 197

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

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

Sixty Facts about the Last Christian Emperor and His Reign

1. Tsar Nicholas II spoke five languages fluently and received a brilliant higher education in military and legal affairs. This was combined with a deeply religious, sensitive and modest nature.

2. He was physically very fit, loved gymnastics, canoeing, swimming, skating, hiking and played tennis, hockey and billiards.

3. The Tsar was in no way responsible for the greed that provoked the tragic stampede in Khodynka in Moscow in 1896. When he learned of it, he at once gave very generous financial and also moral aid to all those who had suffered and their families.

4. Thanks to the monetary reform that he alone insisted on carrying out in 1897, the rouble was guaranteed by gold.

5. In 1898 he introduced a universal medical welfare system that cost the tiny sum of one rouble per year. The Swiss hygienist Friedrich Erismann praised this system as ‘the greatest achievement in the world in the field of social medicine’. Russia was third in the world for the number of its doctors.

6. The Hague International Tribunal of Justice, suggested by the Tsar in 1898 to prevent wars but derided by other European leaders, was the personal brainchild of Tsar Nicholas. If it had been implemented as the Tsar wanted, there would never have been any First World War, let alone later wars. Thus, those who derided it signed their own death warrants.

7. The clothes and shoes of the Tsar’s children were handed down from one child to the next. Until the end of his life he still wore the same clothes as he had worn as a young married man.

8. From June 1903 all employers in the Russian Empire were obliged to pay a benefit and pension to all employees and their families who had suffered an accident. This amounted to between 50% and 66% of their salary. Trade Unions were formed in 1906 and from June 1912 compulsory health insurance at work was introduced to cover illness or accident.

9. Social insurance legislation was introduced before other European countries and the USA.

10. The US President William Taft declared that: ‘Your Emperor has created such perfect labour legislation that no democratic state can boast of’.

11. When in February 1904 Japan, urged on, financed and armed to the teeth by the imperialists of Great Britain and the USA, treacherously attacked the small and poorly-armed Russian Imperial Navy without first declaring war (as it later did at Pearl Harbour), it only took the non-militaristic Russian Empire eighteen months to recover. However, instead of continuing the war and crushing by then bankrupt Japan militarily, Tsar Nicholas entered peace negotiations, but imposed such terms at the talks in the USA that Japan, forced to agree to them, went into mourning.

12. On so-called Bloody Sunday in 1905, it was the revolutionaries who opened fire and troops merely defended themselves. There were 130 victims (not 5,000, as claimed by the Russophobic liar and later mass murderer Lenin). All were given immediate medical care. The Tsar was not even in the city at the time. When he learned of it, he at once gave each family that had suffered the enormous sum of 50,000 roubles. This came from his personal money. The Japanese-financed Revolution of 1905-7 was averted only by the strong will of the Tsar.

13. The Trans Siberian Railway was completed at the insistence and according to the vision of the Tsar despite opposition.

14. Compulsory primary education was introduced in 1908. By 1916 literacy in the Empire had reached 85%. By 1914 there were 150,000 students studying at university institutions. In terms of numbers of students the Russian Empire was joint third in the world with Great Britain. Educational finance rose from 25 million roubles to 161 million roubles in 20 years. Another 300 million roubles was spent in 1913 on country schools, a budget up from 70 million in 1894. In less than 20 years the education budget rose by 628%. By 1913 there were 130,000 schools in the Empire with 6 million pupils. All education, primary, secondary and tertiary, was free.

15. Kindergartens, orphanages, maternity hospitals and hostels for the homeless were built in unheard of numbers.

16. By 1913 the Russian Orthodox Church had 67,000 churches and 1,000 monasteries. It had great influence in the Holy Land, Asia and seventeen Russian churches were built in Western Europe to witness to the Faith. The Tsar personally paid for the building of St Nicholas Cathedral in New York and he ensured that the number of bishops in North America went from one to three. In 1916 there were plans to make sure that every Western capital would have a church and that the service books of the Church would be translated into all the main Western languages.

17. By 1914 100% of usable land in Russia in Asia belonged to the peasants and 90% of it in European Russia.

18. Personal taxation in the Russian Empire was half the level of that in France and Germany and a quarter of that in Great Britain. Average earnings were higher than those in any Western European country, less only than those in the USA.

19. Prices were among the lowest in the world.

20. The budget increased threefold during the Tsar’s reign.

21. There were a large number of patriotic organizations and parties covering the Empire.

22. Between 1890 and 1913 GNP increased fourfold. There was a fourfold increase in the extraction of coal and the production of cast iron, and a fivefold increase in that of copper. Between 1911 and 1914 investment in engineering increased by 80%. In 20 years the length of railways and telegraph networks doubled. The largest fleet of river ships in the world doubled in tonnage during that period. In 1901 the USA extracted 9.9 million tons of oil, Russia 12.1 million tons. Between 1908 and 1913 productivity surpassed that of the USA, Great Britain and Germany.

23. It was prohibited to export crude oil, as it was all refined in situ.

24. In 1913 the number of civil servants in the Russian Empire stood at 163 per 100,000 people. (In the Russian Federation in 2010 it was 1,153).

25. National income and productivity increased at a rate unrivalled anywhere else in the world. The Empire was the biggest exporter of textiles and one of the biggest of metals and engineering.

26. The rate of railway construction was one of the highest in the world, the later Soviet rate being a mere fraction of it.

27. Inflation and unemployment were practically non-existent.

28. The Empire was the biggest exporter of cereals, flax, eggs, milk, butter, meat and sugar in the world. The wheat harvest was one third larger than that of the USA, Canada and Argentina combined.

29. Cereal production doubled during his reign.

30. The number of cattle increased by 60% during his reign. The Empire was number one in the world for the numbers of horses, cows, sheep and one of the biggest for the numbers of pigs and goats.

31. A number of territories voluntarily joined the Empire or became its protectorates, without a shot being fired. Among others these included Northern Manchuria, Northern Iran, Eastern Galicia and Western Armenia.

32. The Sovereign stood outside and above narrow party, group and class interests. He personally insisted on introducing economic reforms and measures against alcohol abuse, often in spite of the Duma. Contrary to popular myth, they were introduced by him alone and not others.

33. Alcohol consumption per head was one of the lowest in the world and the lowest in Europe outside Norway.

34. In 1913 the number of mentally ill was 187 in every 100,000, compared to 5,598 per 100,000 in the Tsarless Russian Federation in 2013.

35. The number of suicides in the Empire was 4.4 per 100,000. (In the Tsarless Russian Federation in 2012 it was 19.5 and 12.1 in the USA).

36. Crime was lower than in Western Europe and the USA. At an international forum held in Switzerland in 1913, Russian detection rates were considered to be the best in the world.
37. In 1908 56 people per 100,000 were imprisoned. (In the Stalinist Soviet Union in 1949 the figure was 1,537 per 100,000 and in the Russian Federation in 2011 555, with 724 per 100,000 in the USA in the same year).

38. There was a free press and freedom of speech, such as there had never been before and certainly not afterwards during the Soviet period.

39. The Empire had the largest gold reserves in the world and the Russian gold rouble remains one of the safest investments in the world.

40. In 20 years of the Tsar’s reign the population of the Empire increased by 62 million.

41. At the beginning of his reign the Tsar had inherited 4 million roubles held in a London Bank. By the end of his reign he had given it all away to charity.

42. The Tsar never rejected a single petition for pardon. Fewer death penalties were carried out during his whole reign than in any single day in the Soviet Union until the death of Stalin.

43. Russian culture went through a period known as the Silver Age, with developments in science, philosophy, art, architecture, music and literature. The French writer Paul Valery stated that Russian culture at the beginning of the 20th century was ‘one of the wonders of the world’.

44. The Russian Empire produced the inventors of: the wireless telegraph, the helicopter, the television, cinenews, the tramway, hydroelectric power stations, the electric plough, the submarine, the parachute, the radio, the electron microscope, the powder fire extinguisher, the astronomical clock, the seismograph, the electric omnibus, the flying boat, the icebreaker, the motorcycle, the airship and double-decker railway carriages.

45. The car industry was on a par with the German, Russian cars winning races at rallies in Monte Carlo and San Sebastian, the plane industry was on a par with that of the American and its locomotives were among the best in the world.

46. Two of the five founders of Hollywood came from Russia. Chanel No 5 was invented by the Russian émigré Verigin and Mercedes and Daimler engines were invented by the Russian engineer Boris Lutskoy.

47. All of this was achieved without terror, collectivization (State enserfment), concentration camps and millions of deaths in State-sponsored massacres and famines.

48. The Tsar had created the strongest and most prosperous Empire the world has ever seen.

49. The Tsar personally tried out new infantry equipment and clothing, marching 24 miles to do so.

50. He decreased the length of military service to 2 years in the Army and five years in the Navy.

51. He created one of the strongest and best-equipped armies in the world, which would have been the best by 1917 if Germany had not started the First World War.

52. The Russian Imperial Air Force, founded in 1910, was by 1917 the largest in the world, with 700 planes.

53. By 1917 the Russian Imperial Navy was one of the strongest in the world.

54. In 1914 the Russian Empire sent 2,000 engineers to help the USA at its request to set up a heavy armaments industry.

55. During the Great Patriotic War (as the First World War was then known) the Tsar constantly visited the Front together with his son, showing that he was not afraid to die for his country. In 1915, given the incompetence of the the former supreme commander, his uncle, the Tsar took on supreme command, against the advice of all, showing his strength of will, and immediately began winning the greatest victories of the War, advancing huge distances and taking huge numbers of prisoners, undreamed of by the Western Allies, bogged down in immobile and bloody trench warfare. Had it not been for the treason of the Allies, most of the aristocracy and many in the middle class, historians consider that the Tsar would have occupied Vienna and Berlin in 1917, thus ending the murderous war. He treated the 2,417,000 captured enemy soldiers with every dignity and over 95% of them returned home safely after the War.

56. Only 39% of males aged between 15-49 were mobilized in the Russian Empire, as against 81% in Germany, 79% in France, 74% in Austro-Hungary, 72% in Italy and 50% in Great Britain. Per 100,000 of its population, the Empire lost 11 people, as against 34 in France, 31 in Germany, 18 in Austria and 16 in Great Britain.

57. The plotters of the February Revolution, orchestrated by Great Britain, Germany and the USA, issued a forged document of abdication, ‘signed’ with a pencil (!) in handwriting that is not the Tsar’s.

58. When the Provisional Government wanted to accuse the Tsar of treason, someone suggested publishing his personal letters to the Tsarina. To which he received the reply: ‘Don’t do that, otherwise the people will recognize them as saints’.

59. Imprisoned in Tobolsk, the Family constantly worked. The Sovereign chopped wood, cleared the snow and did gardening. One of the soldiers, a peasant, commented: ‘If he we gave him some land, he would turn Russia around again with his own hands’.

60. The Tsar never abdicated from the throne, it was the elite that abdicated from him. As he wrote: ‘All around, treason and cowardice and deceit’. Refusing to leave the Empire, when he could have, he was ritually murdered with all his family.