Category Archives: Tsardom

Christ is Risen!

From Recent Correspondence (March-April 2015)

On the Destiny of the Church Outside Russia

Q: What was the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) supposed to do in the eighty-five years between its formation in the early 1920s and the reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007?

A: Our first calling was to obey the Gospel by beginning the preaching of Orthodoxy worldwide before the end (Matt 24, 14), which we were providentially enabled to start by virtue of being scattered throughout the world. In other words, it was our calling to bring the serious (and not superficial hobbyists) into the Church, to contact all those who realize that the Church is higher than the spiritual impurity of any national establishment and local culture.

Our preaching was called to be the preaching of Orthodoxy without either of the compromises caused by spiritual impurity, that is, to be real Orthodox Christians free of both provincial and inward-looking Russian nationalism on the one hand, and of the modernist, Protestant-style illusions of disincarnate modernism on the other hand. This preaching was to lay the foundations of the preaching of the Gospel in the Orthodox context so that then, once the Church inside Russia was free and we were strengthened and reinforced from Russia, we could accomplish this great task together.

Our second calling was to canonize the New Martyrs and Confessors. This was the only way of conquering atheism inside Russia and so working for the restoration of the Tsar, the Orthodox Monarchy, the protector of all Orthodox peoples and all who know that beyond the veil of this secular world there is a world to come, the world of spiritual reality, the real world. Atheism inside Russia could not be conquered by military means. Both the White Movement after 1917 and the Vlasov Movement of the Second World War failed precisely because they tried to use military means to conquer atheism. You can only fight evil spirits with spiritual weapons, as the Apostle Paul wrote: ‘For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places’ (Ephesians 6, 12).

This need for spiritual weapons is why it took until 1981 for the Church Outside Russia to canonize the New Martyrs and Confessors. It should have happened much earlier but, very sadly, political and nationalistic elements in ROCOR resisted. The True White Movement, which is the essence of the whole Russian Orthodox Church, is a spiritual movement, not a political movement and those political elements had to be overcome before their canonization was possible. I personally knew many parishioners in various ROCOR churches, not least in the London parish, who were opposed to the canonization. To the scandal of the faithful, they thought in secular and nationalistic categories and held back our part of the Russian Church from accomplishing her mission and so fulfilling her destiny.

Q: What is the calling of ROCOR today?

A: As soon as Russia was freed, we were called on to ally ourselves with Her as closely as possible, thus strengthening both parts of the Church. The earthly remains of Russian Orthodox heroes like Ivan Ilyin had already been returned to the Centre, we too were to return, although spiritually we had always been there. In order to return, we had to avoid the various nationalistic and political traps that had been set us by the world. It is sad that some political, that is secular-minded, elements fell into them. The destiny of the whole Russian Diaspora and her missions was to return to the liberated Centre, in order to stand together with her in solidarity. The alternative was to fall into a hopeless provincialism and parochialism, which is exactly what befell the marginal fringes who broke away from the Church in the Diaspora for various ghetto-like sects, whether renovationist and modernist on the left (Paris, North America) or old calendarist and nationalist (ROCOR dissidents) on the right.

Q: You say ‘as soon as Russia was freed’. So why did ROCOR not reunite as soon as 1992, after the fall of the atheist government there?

A: There were naïve, patriotic, nostalgic and very emotional individuals in ROCOR, often very elderly, who did reunite or wanted to do so immediately. I do not judge them. But since 1972 I had known the leaders of the old ‘Moscow Patriarchate’, as it was called, from inside and I knew how corrupt it was, especially in the Diaspora. The fall of atheist government was one thing, the spread of a Non-Soviet and fully Orthodox mentality to the top of the Church took time.

For example, there was no possibility of unity with it in England until the self-cleansing of 2006 when at long last Moscow appointed an Orthodox and not a renovationist bishop, the present Archbishop Elisey. It was one thing not to have an atheist government after 75 years, but it was another for the old Soviet-style reflexes to change and see the practical consequences of freedom in the Church hierarchy, with the deaths of the old school of Soviet appointees who did incalculable harm to the Church, rejecting the faithful and self-sacrificing and persecuting the zealous and God-loving.

There were so many appalling scandals from that time. ROCOR could never unite with such spiritual impurity which was working against the Church. Our hearts are still deeply wounded by what we went through at that time and we feel so sorry for those who died without repentance. Indeed, the real Orthodox inside the old Soviet-style Patriarchate, like Archbishop Anatoly in England, actually told us to have nothing to do with the Patriarchate until it was inwardly free. I can remember him saying that in 2003. And inward freedom only came to it in May 2006. It then took us in ROCOR one year to get ourselves ready for the inevitable.

Q: What about those elements in the Church inside Russia who are themselves still today modernist or otherwise sectarian?

A: There are a few rather absurd and very old-fashioned individuals on the fringes of the Church inside Russia, leftist dissident leftovers from the recent Soviet past, like Fr George Kochetkov (whom the modernists wanted to serve at the Patriarchal Cathedral in London), the hippyish and disgraced Deacon Andrei Kuraev or naïve admirers of the heretic Fr Sergiy Bulgakov and modernists and dreamers of the schools of Schmemann, Bloom and other strange émigré cults, or others who are simplistic, rightist Old Ritualist-type sectarians, but they are all irrelevant to the mainstream. In a Church of 164 million, you will inevitably find a few marginal types. In Russia they have no authority or role whatsoever and people generally mock them.

A few eccentric individuals hardly prevent us from our great task of resurrecting Christian Imperial Russia, which we are all engaged in together, inside and outside Russia, in total unity of purpose. Everywhere in Russia you will find icons of the Royal Family – that is key. we work very closely with all who venerate them because they are Churched Orthodox. If Christian Imperial Russia is resurrected, then the whole Orthodox world will be resurrected, and so we can protect all who have values and understand that the ultimate destiny of all humanity is in the life to come and not in primitive Darwinism and pagan Secularism. It is foolish to spend much time dwelling on such marginal individuals; we must not waste our time looking at eccentric, individual and irrelevant trees who are so easy to resist, we must speak with and move forward with the great and irresistible forest, ever onwards to what God is calling us to do. We are people of destiny.

Q: At the 2006 Diaspora Council in San Francisco at least one voice spoke with concern about the present Patriarch who was then a Metropolitan. Was that a reasonable concern?

A: Thee greatest miracle of God is that He changes people. Look at the apostles, Peter lied, the disciples fled from the Cross, Paul persecuted the Church. But they all repented – except for Judas who despaired and hanged himself. Repentance is always possible – only pharisees, like those who criticized Christ’s visit to Zacchaeus, do not understand that. I think that the Soviet-born Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad who twenty years ago opposed reconciliation with the Church Outside Russia was one person, our Patriarch Kyrill is another. And make no mistake, he is OUR Patriarch. He has been transfigured by the grace and international responsibility of becoming Patriarch and is now able to represent all Russian Orthodox all around the world, as no-one else. I have only met him twice, but I am convinced of this. He understands us and has a profound sense of the role of the restoration of Holy Rus, of the global mission of the Russian Orthodox Church and Her Tradition. This is a miracle.

On Non-Orthodox

Q: Can you explain in the simplest of terms and without mentioning the word filioque the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy?

A: Catholicism came into existence some 1,000 years ago, theologically and then immediately structurally. Although it preserved the Revelation of the Old Testament, that there is only One God, and the Revelation of the New Testament, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God become man, it failed to preserve the Revelation of the Church, that Christ is with us and we are with Him by the Holy Spirit. This happened when at the defining moment of its foundation Catholicism replaced the Holy Spirit with the Pope of Rome. In this way Catholicism replaced the authority of the Church, which is holiness, whose source is the Holy Spirit, with a mere man. Here is the difference between Catholicism, which is essentially a Trinitarian heresy, and the Church: The Pope or the Holy Spirit. As St Seraphim of Sarov, whose resurrection we now await, said: ‘The goal of Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit’. It is not to obey a man who lives in Rome.

Q: Do Catholicism and Protestantism have sacraments?

A: There are no sacraments outside the Church, however, there are sacramental forms. These have been preserved as a heritage, as vestiges from the past. In other words, outside the Church there are wine-glasses (however deformed and defective they may be) but they contain no wine. Thus, Catholicism has seven sacramental forms and classical Protestantism (the sort that baptizes by water in the Name of the Holy Trinity) has one – baptism. Thus, in receiving people from what I call ‘Frankish religion’ (Catholicism/Protestantism) into Christianity, the Church does not absolutely need to repeat the sacramental form (though She can if She considers it better to do so in the specific circumstances). What is vital is to communicate the wine, not the wine-glass. For example, Uniats have a wine-glass which is almost identical in form to the Orthodox wine-glass, but it still contains no wine.

Q: Are you saying then that Catholics and Protestants have no grace at all? That seems harsh.

A: No, I am not saying that at all. That is old calendarist ‘light-switch’ black and white ideology – one moment you have grace, the next you do not. The truth is much more subtle.

According to Orthodox Christian theology, the Holy Spirit can come to us in two different ways. Firstly, He comes to us through the Body of Christ, the Church. This only works if we are real Orthodox, that is, practising members of the Church, living limbs (and not withered or nominal branches) of the Body of Christ. If we are outside the Church, we can receive no grace in this way. Secondly, however, the Holy Spirit can come to us directly. This is what happened to the prophets of the Old Testament, who were also outside the Church, and this is also what happens to those outside the Church who receive the calling of God to join the Church, whether they were first-century Jews and Greeks, third-century Latins, sixth-century English, tenth-century Kievans, nineteenth-century Alaskans, Chinese and Japanese, or twenty-first century Western European Catholics and Protestants.

Q: Speaking on the subject of married priests, a French Catholic bishop recently said that the life of Orthodox priests is ‘infernal’ because they have to combine family life and parish life, and therefore he is against married priests. What would you say?

A: The life of an Orthodox priest is certainly difficult. But who said that it would be easy to get into Paradise? I find it amazing that a Catholic bishop would think that it is easy to get into Paradise! This is the same spirit that asks why we Orthodox stand at services, whereas they sit down in comfort. They have no concept of the ascetic. As for Catholic priests – and I know many of them in various European countries – many (usually the best ones) have a mistress and children, many others – and I have met them – are homosexuals and pedophiles. Recently I was speaking to a Polish taxi-driver in Colchester. He comes from Krakow, which is the Polish Canterbury. He told me that he had made his living there ferrying priests, monks and seminarians to brothels. When I was in Portugal 20 years ago, I visited the Portuguese Canterbury, a city called Braga. Local people called it the city of the two Ps – priests and prostitutes. Now that is what I call infernal. What infernal hypocrisy on the part of that Catholic bishop…Has he met the pedophile former Catholic Bishop of Glasgow?

Q: How would you describe the Church of England and the rest of the Anglican Communion?

A: Anglicanism is a Gothic shell, the shell of Catholicism, a kind of Protestant Uniatism, preserving an outward semblance, even a ritual imitation of a sort of Catholicism, but devoid of even Catholic content. The Church of England is State-founded and State-run, founded by a mass murderer and destroyer of monastic life, an English Lenin, who like him also died of syphilis. The Head of the real Church is no such murderous blasphemer, but Christ the Son of God.

Q: Do you think that the Church of England will one day have a female Archbishop of Canterbury?

A: It would be thoroughly logical. Since any secular institution can be headed by a man or a woman, why should the Church of England be any different? As a matter of fact it was a woman, Elizabeth I, who composed the doctrines of the Church of England and it is a woman, Elizabeth II, who heads it at present. Only misogynists can be against female heads of secular organizations.

Q: Do you think the Church of England will eventually introduce homosexual marriage?

A: It is highly likely. It always takes orders from the British Establishment, whether on its doctrines, the EU, fox-hunting or buggery, which is so widespread in that public-school Establishment. The Church of England has always followed the government of the day, ignoring the truism that the American writer Mark Twain expressed: ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it’.

Q: Can those of what you call ‘Frankish religion’ help us in combating secularism, abortion, euthanasia etc?

A: Individually definitely, but sadly the institutions that such virtuous individuals belong to are actually part of the problem, not part of the solution. More and more of them are realizing this. For instance, I was talking to a group of anti-abortion Catholics last year and I saw that they were horrified by their own episcopate, whom they completely distrusted.

Q: Are any of the Orthodox jurisdictions in England close to the Church of England?

A: Virtually all the 300 or so English members of the Antiochian jurisdiction in this country are former clergy and laypeople of the Establishment Church of England. Many seem to be profoundly Anglican, using the Anglican calendar, church-buildings and vestments, so I am not sure why they made the change. They seem to be dedicated to converting other Establishment Anglicans to themselves, ordaining men within days of their reception into the Church in order to do so. This policy of Anglicans only seems very narrow to me, as it repels the vast majority. This is not the way of the Church – our mission is to the people, to the masses, to the whole country, to the 99% of people in England who have never had any real link with the Church of England.

Thus, I know of one ex-Anglican Antiochian priest who has banned the use of any language other than English in his chapel and sends away Romanians telling them that he has no time for them, yet spends hours with prospective Anglican converts, whom he receives very quickly and then very soon lapse. He rejects reality. The clergy are here to serve the people of God, not ourselves, not our personal fantasies. This is just Anglican clericalism. Another wealthy ex-Anglican (in another jurisdiction, it must be said) told me that he liked ‘small churches’ with select groups of English people only and did not want any ‘foreigners’ in his church. This is typical of Establishment racism, regardless of jurisdiction.

Q: But surely the mere existence of the Antiochian jurisdiction in the UK is because of Greek and Russian racism? The Anglicans in question asked to join both the Greek and Russian Churches first and were refused on racial grounds, so the Anglicans got into the Orthodox house ‘by the back window’, that is, through a special arrangement with Antioch.

A: I absolutely agree that the then Soviet-enslaved Moscow Patriarchate and the Church of Constantinople refused them, the latter because of racism and both because they were not politically free to receive them because of their ecumenist compromises. However, the Anglicans in question made one huge mistake on account of their Establishment mentality – they came with their own agenda and list of demands. In this way they refused the Cross, that is, they refused to ask to join ROCOR, the free Russian Church which had and has no ecumenist compromises. We would have received all sincere Anglicans happily, only we would have made sure that they became Orthodox first and would have trained their future clergy how to celebrate etc.

It is no good joining the Orthodox Church without first becoming Orthodox. Otherwise it is just the religion of the Establishment, Anglicanism, or Anglo-Catholicism, with icons. All Churched Orthodox reject that; we know in our guts that it is wrong. What has happened since their refusal to come to ROCOR is that the ex-Anglicans in question have become marginal, finding themselves on an isolated wing of the Church, outside the Orthodox mainstream. So much has been wasted in this way. Similarly Establishment Anglicans who joined the Church of Constantinople have had to undergo Hellenization, having to take on hyper-Greek names like Kallistos, Pankratios, Aristovoulos, Panteleimon etc., whereas the Greek clergy themselves anglicize their names and are called John, Gregory, Peter, Paul etc!

On the Contemporary Western World and the End of the World

Q: What would you say of the present spiritual state of Western Europe in general?

A: Western European countries are increasingly and paradoxically typified by Secularism on the one hand and Islamism on the other hand. For example, the name Mohammed in its various spellings last year became the most common boy’s name in London and there is a wave of mosque-building throughout Western Europe. However, at the same time the secularists who control Western governments and media are completely indifferent to the tens of thousands of Christian victims of Islamist fanaticism throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa and the tens of thousands of Christian victims of the Nazi junta in Kiev. Why? Because those being killed ‘are not Charlie’, in other words, not anti-Christian secularists like themselves. And who will say at the end of time: ‘Je suis Charlie’? It is Antichrist.
So in the West we have the perfect combination of Secularism and Islamism.

Q: Are there not aspects of Islam that we can appreciate?

A: Moderate or Traditional Islam, as opposed to Islamism, condemns violence and keeps certain universal practices like other traditional religions. Thus, Muslim women dress modestly, for instance, wearing a head covering, a universal practice except in the post-1914 secular West.

Q: More and more Western countries allow euthanasia. What do you think of this?

A: In his short story ‘The Veiled Lodger’, written over 100 years ago, a secular writer, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said: ‘If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest…The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world’. In other words, euthanasia, like any other form of suicide, is the result of an ideology that does not believe in the immortality of the soul and in life after death. All belief rejects euthanasia, but where there is no belief, there is suicide. In this sense euthanasia is symbolic of today’s Western world as a whole – as a suicidal world.

Q: What do you think of the experiment with the Large Hadron Collider on the French and Swiss borders? Some people say that it could lead to a catastrophe.

A: I am not a scientist and am simply not qualified to have an opinion and say whether it will lead to a catastrophe or whether it is perfectly safe. However, since it a vast and vastly expensive experiment concerning the nature of matter, I think we can say that it does represent the Western obsession with the material world as opposed to the spiritual world. In general, I am suspicious of such large experiments and operations. As someone said centuries ago: ‘The chief proof of man’s greatness lies in his perception of his smallness’. And as has been said more recently, ‘Small is Beautiful’. In other words, this is all a question of humility. But I am not able to say any more than that.

Q: How should we vote in the forthcoming elections in the UK?

A: Pray and then vote according to your conscience, voting for whomever you consider to be the lesser evil.

Q: Is there a change you would like to see in Great Britain?

A: I would like to see the concept of ‘Britain’ rejected once and for all. It would mean freedom for all of us from tyrannical ‘Britain’ and its Norman Establishment. As a dream, I would like to see four independent but friendly and co-operating nations, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Their representatives would gather in a round building, a ‘Council of the Isles’, on a high point on the Isle of Man, from where alone the four countries in question are all visible.

Q: Where is the Western world going?

A: The USA controls the Western countries through their elites which have been installed by US PR companies as feudal vassals. All that the Western elites do is in imitation of the USA, its clothes, its food, its television series, its media. Here are four recent statistics about the sex and violence of the USA, which God-fearing Americans know and for which they detest the White House:

85% of the world’s pornography comes from the USA.

Every day 24 former GIs who served in Iraq and Afghanistan commit suicide.

In March 2015 the American police killed twice as many people than the British police have killed since 1900.

In a recent global poll representatives from all the countries of the world, except for the USA, UK and France, declared that Public Enemy No 1 is the USA.

Should not such statistics make us think? It seems to me that either the Western world, especially the USA, is on the point of some great disaster, a hurricane, a tornado, a volcano, an earthquake, a tidal wave, or else it is on the point of repentance, of realizing its foolishness and turning back. It can go either way, but it cannot continue with impunity as now. It is not possible. Our actions always have consequences. It is called responsibility.

Q: Is Antichrist coming soon?

A: Nobody knows if he has even been born, let alone if he is coming to power. However there are clear signs that his coming is being PREPARED. Notably, there are these four signs: worldwide sodomy imposed by Washington and willingly promoted by the Western European elite; the genocide and expulsion of all Christians from of the Middle East; the war between Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims, actively encouraged and financed by Zionism; the invasion of the western marches of Rus by the forces of Satan and their occupation of Kiev, the Mother of Russian Cities.

As yet, however, the Temple has not been rebuilt on Zion and, in general, we should not despair and certainly not fall into fatalism. I think that the coming of Antichrist has been delayed many times in history, not least last year, when the Ukrainian people rose up and fought the Satanic forces that the White House has put into power in Kiev. Despite the American threat of nuclear war, Russia did not rise to the bait and sweep away the junta within a fortnight, as it could have. That would have led to the end of the world with nuclear war started by the Nazi neocons in Washington and their paid allies: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Condoleeza Rice, Tony Blair, Carl Bildt and all those other satanists who have spoken directly of destroying the Church of God. As long as we fight and resist Satan, Antichrist cannot come. It all depends on us.

Q: ‘It all depends on us’. But what can we do?

A: At present we are resisting and fighting. There is no time to lose. Together all Orthodox who have an understanding of Orthodoxy have to work together. The visit of the new Greek Prime Minister to President Putin is a great sign of hope. President Putin gave the Greek leader, who says he is an atheist but in fact is just spiritually inexperienced, an icon which had been stolen by the Nazis from Greece. This was highly symbolic. The soul of Greece has indeed been stolen by the West. Now is the time of restoration. This is a personal message to the young Greek leader, but also a message to the whole Greek people. Restore your soul and give up on Nazism, both the old form and the new neocon form of the US/EU.

It is the same in Romania and Bulgaria. Satan is now trying to steal the souls of the Ukraine, Serbia, Moldova, Georgia – everywhere the same processes. Even in Western Europe there are those of us who are also fighting – for the liberation of the Western Lands from the West, for the ‘de-Europeanization of Europe’ and the restoration of Orthodoxy here too. Together, as conscious Orthodox, as the Army of Christ, we can conquer the Satanic spirit of Mammon and its sinister and idolatrous forces.

When asked how Russia could defeat the far superior American armed forces (each year the USA spends eleven times more on arms than Russia), over twenty years ago now the great and newly-revealed St Paisios the Athonite replied: ‘The Russians will win because the angels will help them’. We see such huge solidarity between all the conscious Orthodox peoples, from Damascus to Nicosia, from Belgrade to Kiev, from Bucharest to Sofia, from Athens to Moscow.

The time will come when Constantinople will be freed. And make no mistake Constantinople will not be freed so much from the Turks as from the Americans. But first there will be a Tsar in Russia for all Orthodox and he will call a real and free Council of all the Orthodox, not a diplomatic nicety. And that Council will not waste time talking about the US-imposed secularist agenda of human rights, racial discrimination and gender equality, it will thunder out the truths of the Church, about the Nation and the Family, which the Western world has deliberately forgotten in the cold and dark tomb, where Satan has buried its soul.

And then there will be a new generation of bishops in Constantinople, not appointees of the US State Department, but taken from the monks of Mt Athos, who, never forget it, are in the jurisdiction of Constantinople and who so eagerly support and pray for the Risen Russia. The old decadence will be gone and those pseudo-bishops who parrot the politically correct doctrines taught them by the Zionist CIA, visit synagogues and change the services will be gone. Great difficulties, but also great days, lie ahead for us all. The time will come, as St John of Shanghai prophesied, when you will hear ‘Christ is Risen’ shouted all through the Orthodox world, with an intensity and faith and conviction and unity that you have never heard before.

On Easter Night, after the Gospels at the Liturgy, I heard an insistent voice in my head speaking in Russian. It said: ‘Budet Tsar v Rossii’ – ‘There will be a Tsar in Russia’. Do not ask me how or when or who. That was the voice. I wonder if others heard the same voice?

Christ is Risen!

Three Prophecies on the Ukraine

St Laurence of Chernigov (+ 1950) said:

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

Elder Jonah of Odessa (+ 2012) said:

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

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

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

Is Today’s Orthodox World Post-Christian or Pre-Christian?

To assert that the Western world is post-Christian is self-evident – it says that about itself. However, from the point of view of the Church and the Orthodox World in general, the Western world has clearly been post-Christian ever since 1054. Not in the sense that there have been and still are individuals who, though outside communion with the Church, live by spiritual inspiration exemplary Christian lives, but in the sense that the whole Western world has been institutionally post-Christian ever since its schism with the Church.

Some may be shocked by this, but they should take thought. Anyone who can call a world which produces Feudalism, the Normans, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the ‘Wars of Religion’, worldwide evil and genocide in the Americas, Asia and Africa, World Wars I, Communism and Nazism, World War II, Belsen and Hiroshima, ‘Christian’, is either insanely illogical or simply insane. Only post-Christians, those lapsed from the Church, could have done such things. Thus, obviously the Western world has been post-Christian since the eleventh century.

However, what can we say of the Orthodox world? For nearly 100 years most of it has lived far from the Church, lapsing beneath atheist Capitalist or atheist Communist regimes. The Patriarchs of two Local Churches are today US-appointed and now the CIA is trying to destroy and divide the Serbian Church in the same way – and having some success.

Talks on preparing the proposed Inter-Orthodox Conference in summer 2016 are now being hampered because representatives of one of the Local Churches, on strict US orders, want approval of homosexuality. US meddling is also notable in the Church of the Czechs and Slovaks and in the Ukraine. The fall of some Orthodox representatives, bishops included, into such traps would suggest that the Orthodox world too is ‘post-Christian’. Is this true?

The attempt to destroy Orthodox Rus, which is what lies behind the current reckless adventurism of the West and NATO terrorism in the Ukraine, is here the litmus test. Western meddling activity in the Ukraine, well-rehearsed in destroying Yugoslavia in the 1990s when the Russian Federation was still ruled by judases, is running into trouble. First of all the people of the Crimea (stolen from Russia by the Western-supported, Ukrainian brute Khrushchev in 1954) have liberated themselves from the largely Uniat Kiev junta and returned to Russia by an overwhelming democratic vote for freedom by referendum.

The same is happening in Novorossiya (what the West likes to call ‘the eastern Ukraine’, but in fact a chunk of western Russia stolen from it by the Western-supported Tartar-German-Jewish brute Lenin in 1922). The same is happening in Carpatho-Russia (‘Transcarpathia’ in Kiev jargon), stolen from Czechoslovakia by the Western-supported Georgian brute Stalin in 1945.

We can only hope that the people of Malorossiya (central ‘Ukraine’) will also rise in revolt against the CIA junta and declare themselves an independent country like Belarus. This will only leave the real ‘Ukraine’, Uniat Galicia, stolen by Stalin from Poland in 1945, to return to Poland, or else to become a separate country which will provide colonial manpower for German factories, as it did between 1941 and 1945.

Of course the Western global elite, ever eager to get its greedy hands on Russia’s natural wealth, is attacking elsewhere, in Central Asia, in the Caucasus, in Moldova, in Belarus and in the Russian Federation itself. Here the assassination of Boris Nemtsov was a clear provocation, an attempt at ‘regime change’, just as the CIA successfully did in Kiev just over a year ago. The CIA is after all expert in overthrowing democratic governments, whether in Latin America, Asia or southern Europe.

It remain to be proved whether the CIA was directly involved in this assassination (as it was in the ‘Pussy Riot’ provocation) or whether this was the work of Muslims, outraged at Nemtsov’s open support for the anti-Muslim blasphemies of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. No-one has forgotten the million-strong demonstration against Charlie Hebdo in Grozny in Chechnia, supported by Muslims and Orthodox alike – all of which naturally went unreported by the CIA-directed Western media cartel.

Here I would like to express my gratitude for the overwhelming support of a great many Orthodox over the last month, as compared to the two isolated individuals of the ever more discredited British Establishment, one anonymous, who pathetically attacked my integrity. I have been heartened by the support of so many Orthodox of so many nationalities, especially Ukrainians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Greeks, Cypriots, Serbs and Russians.

They fully understand that the only way forward for the whole Orthodox world is the re-establishment and restoration of an Orthodox Tsar to protect all Orthodox worldwide against the atheist Western onslaught. Each Orthodox country must have its sovereignty and independence restored, escaping Eurotyranny and the US Fleet, beneath the protection of an Orthodox Emperor for the multinational Orthodox world.

In March 1917 the protection of the Orthodox world was given over to the Mother of God in her Reigning Icon. As we said above, the key question is now whether today’s Orthodox world is post-Christian or pre-Christian. If it is post-Christian, in other words, Westernized and secularized, then there is no hope. We can only wait to see the Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem and Antichrist enthroned, perhaps even within a matter of years.

If, on the other hand, the Orthodox world is pre-Christian, in other words it still has the potential to abandon its Halfodoxy and return to the living fullness of Orthodoxy, then there is hope and the conditional prophecies of so many Orthodox saints, from St Seraphim of Sarov to St Paisius the Athonite, will be realized.

Russia’s role as an Orthodox nation (as a Communist or Capitalist nation, it has no role whatsoever except as a Western colony) is to defy the US and its EU vassal. When Russian Orthodoxy calls on other peoples to work together with it, She is not trying to impose Her way of life, language, tastes and traditions on others (sadly, both the pre-1917 Westernized elite of the Russian Empire and the Soviet nomenklatura did that). Russian Orthodoxy is simply inviting us to walk together with Her in the same direction – towards the Kingdom of Heaven.

That of course only earns us the hatred of Satan and all his minions, some of whom are conscious, some of whom are simply deluded. Some at least in the Western world have understood that Russia is now its only and last hope of salvation. Because if we do not walk with Russian Orthodoxy and instead choose the US/EU option, then we shall be renouncing the Kingdom of Heaven. Let the fifth columnists in all the Local Churches, including in the Russian Church, the placemen of Washington and Brussels – they know who they are and we know who they are – be warned.

The Post-Soviet State and Holy Rus

Russian people have ceased to understand what Rus is;
it is the footstool of the throne of the Lord.
St John of Kronstadt

Introduction: Protection

On 17 July 2014, the 96th anniversary of the entry into heaven of the Russian Royal Family, on orders from Washington an attempt was made by two Kiev junta fighters to shoot down the aeroplane of President Putin, which was then flying over the eastern Ukraine. They failed, mistaking a Malaysian Airlines jet for his plane. They had tragically murdered nearly 300 innocent people on board Flight MH17, a foretaste of the thousands and thousands of Ukrainian citizens the CIA-installed junta was about to murder. What did all this mean?

It meant that the repentant President Putin, once a lowly KGB operative and today a politician who grew up in the Soviet era, is being protected. We know that if the dark forces which control the Western world have their way, there will be a war, a war such as the world has never seen, the Last War. Whatever we may think of President Putin, and he is supported by most Orthodox though only as a lesser evil, it is clear that at present power in the Russian Federation has to pass through him in order to get where we want to get. And where is that?

The Real

Today, a majority of Russian Orthodox still live in a post-Soviet State, not in Orthodox Rus, let alone Holy Rus. True, unlike in the West, at least the direction which the Russian Federation has taken is right. But there is very far to go in a country where fewer than 5% of people really practise Orthodoxy. How and when will we know when the post-Soviet State and its post-Soviet people have become more than nominal Russian Orthodox, that they have become an Orthodox people living in an Orthodox State? It is:

When abortion hardly exists. Although the abortion rate in the Russian Federation has gone down nearly sevenfold in the last twenty-five years since the fall of the atheist Soviet State, it is still nearly double even the very high rates of Western countries like the UK and France.
When corruption stops everywhere. For example, we know that at least one half of a per cent of British police are corrupt and that percentage is higher in countries like France and Italy, but the percentage of Russian police who are corrupt is much higher. We know that in the UK, for instance, there is a large amount of corruption in the political and business world, not least through freemasonry and other ‘clubs’. But what of government officials, businessmen and tradesmen in Russia? Corruption among them is rife. If they were real Orthodox and not nominal Orthodox, as many are, they would not be corrupt.

When alcoholism falls well below the high Western levels.

When divorce hardly exists, falling well below the high Western levels.

When Orthodoxy ceases to be a mere ideological excuse swapped for Communist ideology.

When the statues and place named after the blood-sucking Lenin (together with his mouldering corpse), Stalin and their henchmen have all disappeared.
When the Russian State stops adopting and imitating Western laws and its people stop imitating Western dress.

When there are no more Russian internet brides because Russian women want to stay in Russia.

When health and education in the Russian Federation are largely Church-run.
When the handicapped in the Russian Federation are looked after and respected.

When 100,000 churches have been built and are open, that is, triple the present number.

When people stop substituting mere Russian nationalism and its imperialistic centralization for the multinational idea of Rus and so large-scale missionary work takes place outside the lands traditionally associated with Rus and Rus becomes truly global.

When people understand that if Russia is ever to be the Third Rome, it must also be the Second Jerusalem.

How long will all this take? It took three generations to destroy even pre-Revolutionary Russia. Will it then take three generations, that is two more generations, to reach what is better than that? And it must be better, for if we return only to that, there will simply be another Revolution.

The Ideal

If all the above has been done, and it is a colossal and unlikely IF on which the future of the whole planet depends, then the people will at least be ready for the restoration of a real Tsar, to whom the Mother of God will return the power entrusted to Her on 2 March 1917, after the Russian people had fallen into apostasy and rejected their God-anointed Tsar.

Then will be fulfilled the prophecy of Elder Philotheus that all Orthodox will gather round and join the Centre of the Orthosphere, one eighth of the world, the Tsardom of Rus. It is already clear that even now the Orthodox who are the most devout are closest to Rus and the Church and Patriarch of Rus. This has nothing to do with some sort of nationalism, as some misunderstand, it is to do with faithfulness to the Incarnational ideals of (Orthodox) Christianity. Those who have lapsed by calendar or custom, allowing themselves to become worldly, Westernized or Catholicized and tried to make the Church into a mere intellectual speculation through their ‘theology’, stand furthest away from Rus, even denying Her, apostate Russians among them.

But those who have kept faithfulness to Orthodoxy, in Jerusalem and on Mt Athos, in the Churches of Serbia, Poland, Georgia and in many places elsewhere throughout the world, from Alaska to Australia, from Argentina to Austria, are closest to Rus. Russian Orthodox Civilization and those of all nationalities who are allied with this, can alone bring Christ to a world that has fallen away and not be conquered by it, falling away from piety into indifference. Geographically, Rus is everywhere, all over the planet, wherever there is faithfulness to the Church of Christ, wherever there is spiritual victory over Satan.

In the early 1970s sectarian ROCOR emigres in London misinformed me that Tsar Nicholas was merely a symbol of their narrow Russian nationalism. At the same time anti-ROCOR Russian emigres in Oxford misinformed me that Tsar Nicholas had been a bad Tsar and that they had been happy to overthrow him. However, in 1976, on learning that I was Russian Orthodox, a Romanian Orthodox nun whispered to me that all the difficulties of her country were due to the fact that Russians had overthrown the Tsar of all the Orthodox. She was right; Russian irresponsibility and apostasy has led to every single disaster in the Orthodox world since then. Now it is time to be responsible again, to free what has been enslaved and restore what has been lost, to return to the Father’s house, ‘the footstool of the throne of the Lord’.

Conclusion

As Russian Orthodox, our ideal has always been and will always be Holy Rus, that is, the Gospel incarnate as the life in Christ, heaven on earth. Whenever the vision of the life in Christ incarnate, Holy Rus, has been lost, the way has been lost. This was the case outside the territory of the former Russian Empire, for example, among politicized and nationalistic members of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) who had misunderstood and thought that our enemy (militant atheism) was their enemy (but the CIA enemy was actually Holy Rus itself, as they have now declared). It was also the case inside the territory of the former Russian Empire, for example, in the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire itself, where the elite was mainly corrupted, in the atheist-run Soviet Union and its corrupt appointees among Church ‘representatives’ including outside Russia, or in the present-day Russian Federation among the nominal and nationalistic who confuse the Church with Stalin.

In ROCOR, the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus, a Carpatho-Russian from the foothills of the Carpathians in Slovakia, constantly spoke of ‘the purity of Holy Orthodoxy’ and ‘our ideals of Holy Rus’. It is our task to present to the world those ideals which he preached and lived and which we share. In Fatima in 1917 the Mother of God called on the Western world to repent for the evil of Western atheism that it had spread to Russia. The West did not listen then and mostly has not been listening since. However, in the face of current events, in by far the most dangerous situation the world has seen since 1962, when the USA admitted defeat and withdrew its nuclear missiles from near Soviet borders in Turkey and the Soviet Union did likewise in Cuba, at least some in the Western world may at last be listening.

St John III the Merciful: A Model Orthodox Ruler and Saint for the Last Times

Known to the world as John III Doukas Vatatzes, St John the Merciful was Emperor of Nicea from 1221 to 1254. Born in c. 1192 contemorary Greece, he was probably the son of a general and his wife, an unnamed Imperial niece. In reward for his eminent service and promise, in 1212 when he was aged only 20, the then Emperor of Nicea, Theodore Laskaris, gave him the hand of his daughter Irine and made him his successor. In January 1222, John, aged around 30, was crowned Emperor by the Patriarch in Nicea.

Two years later the new Emperor routed attacking Catholic forces and as a result of this victory the greater part of what the heretics had captured in Asia Minor fell to his control. In 1228 the elderly Catholic John of Brienne exchanged his nominal kingdom of Jerusalem for the Latin throne of occupied New Rome (Constantinople) and in 1233 attacked the Christians. He too was routed and John extended Nicean control over much of the Aegean, freeing Rhodes, Samos, Lesbos, Chios, Cos and many other islands.

Next the Bulgarians joined John as part of an anti-Catholic alliance of Christian rulers. The allies immediately opened hostilities against the Catholic invaders and besieged occupied New Rome by land and by sea. Although the Catholics were reduced to a small strip of land around Constantinople, the siege was unsuccessful. The superiority of the Latin sailors over the Christians led to the defeat of their fleet. By land, however, John was more successful and liberated the rest of the Frankish possessions in Asia Minor. Later John was to liberate most of Macedonia and Thrace.

John’s policy of appointing non-aristocrats to administrative posts was revolutionary. In his social policy he took steps to improve the living standards of both those in the country and in the towns. He ordered a census and gave every subject of his Empire a plot of land. Towards the end of his reign he also requisitioned the property of great landowners and aristocrats. He himself led a very frugal life and took measures to end the excessive spending of private wealth. Moreover, in order to establish and affirm social justice he also took measures against the exploitation of the poor.

John oversaw the smooth functioning of Church affairs. In 1228 he issued a decree in which he forbade the interference of the authorities in matters of Church inheritance. He also made generous donations to Church institutions and saw to the rebuilding of existing churches and the building of new ones. In periods of peace John promoted the welfare of his subjects. He patronized the arts and sciences, built new roads, distributed taxes equally and was loved by all for his kindness and justice.

He was also greatly interested in the collection and copying of manuscripts. The leading representative of the educational movement of the 13th century, the scholar, writer and teacher Nicephorus Blemmydes, lived during his reign. Among Blemmydes’ students were John’s heir and son, the learned Theodore II Laskaris. Sources are full of references to the Emperor’s concern for the development of intellectual life. He promoted the creation of centres of learning, especially of secular studies, while higher educational institutions were established.

In about 1252 when a new war was threatened, John set out to defend the Christians, but fell ill in Macedonia and returned to Asia. He died after much suffering at Nymphaeum on 3 November 1254, probably aged sixty-two, ending a reign of some thirty-three years. He was buried in the Monastery of Christ the Saviour (the Monastery of Sosandra) on Mt Sipylos, near Magnesia in the area of Smyrna.

Christian historians unanimously glorify John and he is called one of the greatest Christian Roman Emperors. His son and successor, Theodore II Lascaris, wrote of him: ‘He unified the Ausonian land which had been divided into a great many parts by foreign and tyrannical rulers, Latin, Persian, Bulgarian, Scythian and others, punished thieves and protected his land…He made our country inaccessible to our enemies’. In spite of his epilepsy John provided leadership in peace and war and he is considered a talented politician and the chief restorer of the Christian Empire.

His foreign policy was focused on the recapture of New Rome and the restoration of the Christian Empire. He brought under his control so much territory that he practically restored the Empire and laid the groundwork for the later recovery of New Rome itself. He was also successful in maintaining generally peaceful relations with his most powerful neighbours, Bulgaria and the Sultanate of Rum, while his network of diplomatic relations extended to the West and the Papacy. Here John’s main diplomatic concern was an alliance with the German ruler Frederick II, as both rulers struggled against Papal aggression. Frederick supported Christian efforts to capture New Rome and in 1236 he stopped the crusade that Pope Gregory IX was organizing against John.

Domestically, John’s long reign was one of the most creditable in history, witnessing the development of a prosperous economy and encouraging justice, charity and a cultural revival. Despite expensive campaigns to restore the Empire, he lowered taxes, encouraged agriculture, built schools, libraries, churches, monasteries, hospitals and homes for the poor and elderly. The arts prospered and he took steps to ensure the harmonious co-existence of State and Church, so that Nicea became one of the wealthiest and finest cities in the thirteenth century world.

When John’s grave was opened seven years after his repose, a fragrance filled the air and his body was found to be incorrupt, an indication of holiness. His body was like that of a living person. John was so loved and revered by the people that he was commemorated as a saint under the name John the Merciful and a Life was composed. Those who went on pilgrimage to pray before the saint’s relics were granted miracles; the sick were healed and demons expelled. The clergy and people of the city of Magnesia and its surroundings, where the Emperor was buried, gathered every year on 4 November to honour his memory.

A half-century later one account mentions that when the Turks invaded Magnesia, a guard on several occasions witnessed a lighted candle circling the city walls. He sent men to investigate, but to no avail. Then the deaf and dumb brother of the guard was sent. He was given a revelation and returned completely healed. He said that where the candle had appeared, he had found a man of a grand royal stature, who loudly urged the Christians to continue their defence. Later, when visiting St John’s shrine, he recognized the icon of the man he had seen.

John’s incorrupt relics were transferred to New Rome once it had been liberated from the Franks. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, his relics were hidden in a catacomb. Tradition tells that ever since he has been awaiting the liberation of the City. It also says that the holy king has his sword with him in its sheath and that every year the blade of the sword emerges a few millimetres until the time comes for the whole sword to emerge completely, which will signify the time for the liberation of the City.

In our own days Elder Ephraim of Arizona has said that the sacred relics of St John the Merciful were guarded by a family of crypto-Christians who kept them secret from generation to generation. He also affirms that the Merciful King has already risen and that the sword has emerged completely from its sheath. Now St John wanders around Constantinople in the guise of a fool and directs the hosts of the saints to take their places around the City. Here indeed is a model Orthodox ruler, and intercessor and restorer for our latter times, when we need him.

Holy John the Merciful, pray to God for us!

The New Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judas Does Not Sleep: Orthodoxy or Demonocracy in 2015

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine…And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buyeth their merchandise and more.

Rev 6, 6 / 18,11

Whatever our nationality, all Orthodox Christians who know and follow the Tradition are in a sense ‘Russian’. Of course, this is not at all in the sense of nationality or passport – there are many who have the nationality and the passport, but they are not Russian in our sense at all. It is in the spiritual sense of belonging to multinational Rus, to the Orthodox world, of being true Christians, real Orthodox, appreciating Orthodox culture and having a generous heart. As one Muslim said to a friend recently, now in 2014 is decision time: Are we with Washington or are we with Orthodox Russia? Are we with those who want to set up a global dictatorship, demonocracy, atheist hegemony over the whole world, or with those who defend Faith in God and spiritual life?

As part of the Russian Orthodox mission outside Rus, we too defend Holy Rus, our spiritual homeland and our cultural values. The choice is between the sectarian and Godless world of neocon mammonism and the communitarian and Orthodox world of Holy Rus, the primacy of this world or the primacy of the other world. Holy Rus must prevail in this momentous and worldwide struggle which was begun in 2014 or Night will fall on us until the Second Coming. In 2015 we pray for the victory of Holy Orthodoxy and our allies over money-worshipping hegemonists, their self-centred individualism and self-seeking hedonism, over the CIA-puppets in Kiev and Moscow, the so-called Poroshenkos and the millionaire Navalnys, or else….For Judas does not sleep.

Today there is the Russian world, the Orthosphere, with her allies and sympathizers, who have been set upon in 2014 through the Western invasion of the Ukraine and the propaganda and currency attacks on Russia, and the rest. Any so-called Orthodox who deludedly choose the rest, choose apostasy and Gehenna. As for Europe, it stands between these two worlds, between Sovereign Freedom and World Dictatorship, between Moscow and Washington, between Jerusalem and Babylon, between Christ and Satanization, between the Church and Sodomization. Who is not against us is with us. Europeans can only be saved through Holy Rus. In 2015 healthy forces in Europe, as elsewhere, may gather around Russia and the Saints of Old Europe against planetary evil, and the Russian world may extend to it. In 2015 we shall see the further development either of a world of free and patriotic nations or of a worldwide dictatorship. And that development is our responsibility.

As a consolation, but also as a warning, we have the prophecies of Elder Jonah of Odessa (+ 2012). In 2007 he said: ‘The Catholics will come to our country…They will not stay long but will do a great deal of evil and shed so much blood…but they will leave, hanging their heads in shame’. As regards the war in the Ukraine, he foretold that ‘it is a spiritual war and its main aim is to tear the Ukraine away from Holy Rus and destroy Orthodoxy in it’. As for the dollar, he said that ‘the wind will blow dollars along the road like leaves in autumn and no-one will chase after them, they will be like bits of cheap paper’. And he said that ‘if the Lord is to give Rus an Orthodox Tsar, then we must repent and pray very hard and that only through a Tsar given by God will Russia find might and salvation’.

And this will be our New Year.

What Path for Russia? Crown, Sceptre and Orb

What path for Russia? To become once more a tyrannical State that attempts to westernize its people by terror and force, as under Peter I or Stalin? Or to become a CIA-controlled banana republic, reigned over by a junta of puppet oligarch-thieves who exploit the country and people, treating them as their private property, as in Latin America? This latter path is what Washington originally planned for Russia. Indeed, in the anarchic 1990s, under the drunkard Yeltsin who gave away large parts of Russia to pro-American bandits, masking themselves under the name of oligarchs, the country was undermined and was starting to become just another banana republic colony. So far, however, Washington has got its way – and only for the time being – only in the provincial Ukraine, not in Russia.

In fact, the oligarch-traitors used by Washington as its puppets in Russia are yesterday’s men. They are now openly seen for what they always have been, over-wealthy and ambitious traitors who want to seize power for themselves, like the aristocrats who in British-organized plots assassinated the Emperor Paul I in 1801 or who deposed his descendant the Emperor Nicholas II in 1917. The 1990s are over and since the year 2000 and the first steps towards freedom and restoration in Russia, we have seen panic, hatred and fury from Washington, with varying plans either to finance traitor-oligarchs to undermine the Russian Federation, as in Latin America, or to create an economic war by enforcing so-called ‘sanctions’, as in Iran, or to declare war and bomb, as in Yugoslavia.

The fact is that what Washington has for the moment achieved in the Ukraine cannot be achieved in the Russian Federation. Unlike the Ukraine, the Russian Federation is one eighth of the world with vast natural resources, but above all is the centre of a unique and uncompromised Christian civilization, respected by many. It has a special vocation, a historic and worldwide mission which, however, can only be achieved through the symphony of Church and State. This was the key element that was missing for over 300 years, ever since the Russian Church was beheaded by Peter I’s tyrannical, Protestant-style State and the German Catherine closed 700 monasteries and stole Church lands. Inded, it was that missing symphony that was responsible for the catastrophe of 1917.

Now when Washington hears of symphony between the Russian Church and the Russian State, it shudders and turns to the torturers of the CIA to attack both its Church and State through such rigged events as ‘Pussy Riot’ and a host of other pathetic propaganda operations. Washington realizes that if Russia is restored to Christianity, its whole Western Sodom and Gomorrah construct will fall. Therefore it has declared economic war through imposing illegitimate sanctions, supposedly to punish Russia for the democratic choice of the Crimean people to return home after separation from their homeland for 60 years. The rouble has lost 40% of its value, prices of imports, including Western consumer goods, are rising dramatically, Russians have to tighten their belts.

But Washington knows that it plans for global dictatorship are still threatened by Russia. They had already been threatened when Russia repelled the US-backed Georgian invasion of Russia in 2008, when Russia rejected US plans to bomb Syria in 2013 and when Russia foiled its plans to make the Ukraine into a NATO base in 2014. This is why Washington is now enacting its new Cold War, forcing all its colonies and vassals, from the EU to Japan and Australia, into a coalition to enforce a media and economic war. EU countries, notably Germany, France (forbidden to sell naval ships to Russia), Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria (forbidden to allow the South Stream pipeline) and Greece, have been bullied into enforcing ‘sanctions’ and breaking contracts against their own interests.

The vassal Saudi Arabia has also increased oil production in order to decrease the oil price, on which the Russian economy is to some extent dependent. However, this has been to the detriment of the USA’s own shale oil industry. Moreover, Russia has fought back, renewing alliances, developing the Eurasian Economic Union, turning successfully east to China and India, west to Latin America, and south to Turkey. It is also trying to find alternatives to international payments with the US dollar, paying in goods, in local currency or in gold. The strength of this Russian reply to the economic Cold War declared by the US explains why warmongers in the US are now threatening a Hot War, which they see as the only way they can succeed in turning the whole world into their empire

This is a huge risk, for attacks on Russia have always been defeated, Western invasions of Russia ending up in history with Russian troops liberating Paris or Berlin. Moreover, although sanctions are definitely hard for Russians, they have also brought positive results. Thus, the Russian government and people are turning ever more to the national-patriotic ethos of their history, turning against the pro-Western ethos of the last generation. Moreover, this is uniting people and elite and has marginalized the tiny US-subsidized minority of the ‘democratic’ (= oligarch-bandit) opposition, composed of ‘liberal’ (= neocon) self-seeking, fifth columnist Russophobes. They who with Western support were foolishly preparing a ‘coloured revolution’ in Russia have all been revealed as traitors.

That was not the West’s intention. This is ‘blowback’. The fact is that some in Russia are beginning to understand that some things are more important than the dubious material ‘blessings’ of Western consumerism, which often turn out in fact to be curses. They have understood that what is more important is the return to Orthodoxy, the ancestral spirit of self-sacrifice for faith, home and the peace and future of the whole world. What path for Russia? There is a third path, neither a westernizing tyranny, nor a CIA banana republic. On 8 December it was reported that a simple blacksmith from Donetsk, Viktor Mizalev, has from the scrap metal of junta missiles, launched against civilians, forged a crown, a sceptre and an orb. The Sanhedrin in Washington has no answer to this.

From Further Correspondence and Conversations

Following the questions and answers published on 23 November, we now publish further questions and answers resulting from them.

Q: Does anyone try and stop you from writing?

A: Oh yes, two or three anonymous individuals, probably from both extreme left and extreme right (interestingly, their views are identical – the extremes always meet) try censorship. The fact that, aggressively and dictatorially, they try to impose their censorship on free expression means that they are wrong. If they wish to read what they agree with, they can turn to any of the conformist, secularist media; why do they try and censor those who are Orthodox Christians and so think otherwise?

As they say of those on the extreme left: ‘There is no-one as intolerant as a liberal’. As regards those on the extreme right, they are by definition illiberal. I ignore extremists, especially anonymous ones, because they are motivated not by love but by hatred. Interestingly, earlier this month I met in London one who had not been anonymous and had tried to silence me some years ago. He has completely changed his life and apologized for what he had asked me to do six years ago. People change, people mature with experience. Give them time for repentance. We do not repeat their intolerance, but show patience.

Q: You said in the first questions and answers that some old calendarists are concerned by the possible 2016 All-Orthodox meeting. But when you compare the piety of old calendarists to new calendarists, can’t you support the former?

A: An example. Last month a Greek woman (dressed in jeans and of course without any head covering) came from London to visit our Church. The first question she asked me was: ‘Why aren’t there any pews?’ (!). Such is the result of decades of modernism in the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the diaspora. But why would I compare an unchurched person from a new calendar Church with an old calendarist convert? You cannot justify your schism by comparing yourself with someone who is unChurched and whose Church attendance consists of 20 minutes per year on Easter night.

I can remember in 1977 meeting an unChurched old calendarist from an old calendarist village in northern Greece. I was not impressed. Let us compare like with like. There are devout people who live on the new calendar (because they are forced to, definitely not new calendarists) and devout people who live on the old calendar (freely, but definitely not old calendarists). And there are non-devout people who live on both calendars too.

On the subject of that possible 2016 meeting, I should also have mentioned that, apart from the dispute between Constantinople with the Czechs and Slovaks, the dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem may also prevent it from taking place. And not only that. This week the US politician Joe Biden, whose son Hunter son has conveniently landed a very well-paid job in the energy sector in the Ukraine, was again in Istanbul, discussing the Ukraine – with a Patriarchate which has no jurisdiction whatsoever there. All the notorious CIA mouthpieces of the Phanar were present at the meeting, ready to take their orders from an organization that has a history of mass murder.

Q: What could happen as a result?

A: If Biden bribes the Phanar into setting up a pro-CIA schism in the Ukraine, as the Phanar did in Estonia, then there will be a major schism, with the elite of Constantinople falling away from the Church altogether, maybe its Patriarch becoming the irrelevant departmental head of the Uniats in an obscure bureau in the Vatican. However, if such a schism occurred, only the elite would fall away, as at the Council of Florence, a few faithful bishops, new St Marks of Ephesus, most monks, parish clergy and people would remain in the Church, perhaps going under the Church of Greece. As the proverb says; ‘A fish rots from the head’.

Q: Is bribery a realistic option?

A: Yes. Remember that the former US ambassador in Kiev, John Herbst, already set up the Agathangel schism in Odessa. Divide and rule is Washington’s motto and even if it costs a few tens of millions of dollars, they don’t care. They just print the money off in Washington and call it ‘quantitative easing’. Remember that it cost them $5 billion, as Victoria Nuland admitted, just to set up the current lame duck regime in Kiev. With $17 trillion dollars of debt (and that is how the Soviet Union was defeated – the US could go into massive debt, but the USSR could not), that is a drop in the ocean.

Q: What could happen if Constantinople fell away?

A: In such a case the remaining faithful Local Churches could hold a real and free Council in the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. This Monastery is almost ready for this. I have been there. From there the Orthodox Truth could be proclaimed in its integrity to the whole world, which would then see the essential, underlying unity of the Church, free of CIA manipulations. In such a case we could expect the Local Churches concerned to drop their compromises, such as the new calendar, and return to the fullness of Orthodoxy. Possibly the Patriarchate of Moscow could, as three-quarters of the Orthodox Church, become the first Patriarchate in the diptychs. That would be a necessary update to the reality of the Church today. Certainly, that would completely change the state of several Local Churches from CIA control and nationalist stagnation to missionary dynamism.

Q: How will Antichrist come to power?

A: There are two techniques for establishing Antichrist’s New World Order, that is, for obtaining the Global Dictatorship of the One World Government.

First of all, you can bribe naïve leaders and organize paid mobs of the unemployed and criminals to create riots in order to overthrow the legitimate government (called a ‘regime’ by the US-run Western media which duly demonize the legitimate government). This is politely known as ‘regime-change’, which is also the aim of Western sanctions. This is what has been tried unsuccessfully in Moscow and more recently in Hong Kong, but successfully in Kiev – a technique that had been well-practised in what the CIA-paid media dubbed ‘the Arab Spring’, a series of catastrophes which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives so far.

I think Washington may soon try the same technique of ‘regime-change’ in Kishinev (where it has banned all parties except pro-EU ones – the Kiev scenario again), Belgrade, Prague and Budapest – capitals of three countries whose leaders are now valiantly resisting US and EU bribery, bullying and threats for being independent. Of course, this does not happen in Tokyo, Berlin, Paris and London, because there the regimes (often elected with less than 30% of the popular vote) are only vassals, heads of US vassal states. Where the selected elite (who call us ‘plebs’) are already in your pocket, you do not have to unseat it – you already control the country

The second technique is to use the media, including the social media, to demonize a government and then to bomb its country back to the Stone Age. This is the Iraq/Afghanistan/Libya scenario. Once you have bombed the country to smithereens and unleashed interminable tribal infighting, you are then free to plunder its natural resources, so dividing and ruling, because, again, you already control the country.

Q: In the first questions and answers you mentioned the fact that there was support in the Russian Church for Kerensky after the 1917 Revolution. How do you explain that?

A: Apart from the naïve, ignorant and deluded, there were treacherous renovationists. They had been infiltrating the Russian Church since the early 1900s. Think of the twice married Fr George Gapon who led the 1905 protest and soon after hanged himself. These people wanted a socialist Orthodoxy! The 1920s renovationist schism under heretics like the renovationist Vvedensky and the Paris schism in the emigration did not come from nowhere – the highly politicized elements responsible for these schisms had long ago infiltrated the Church. Such self-deluded individuals call the Patriarch Antichrist or Judas and still dare to take communion. Such blasphemy burns them alive, as it did the Old Ritualists. Believe me, I have seen it happen. Such individuals always end up outside the Church, embittered through their self-delusion and hatred and often commit suicide.

Q: Are there still renovationists in the Russian Church?

A: There are still a few here and there, but very, very few and they are dying out. Most have left the Church, though some have joined Constantinople.

Q: You seem to overlook the role of Catholicism. Surely it, and not Orthodoxy, could save the West?

A: The West has categorically rejected Catholicism. And here I do not only mean the Protestant West, which has directly become atheist. I also mean the once Catholic countries of Europe. In Europe Catholicism is in freefall, even in a country like Poland, where the number of those practising Catholicism has halved in the last 25 years. Why?

It is because Catholicism is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Catholicism is the father of Protestantism, which is the father of the modern atheist West. No new pope, even if he is a master of PR, is thoroughly anti-Orthodox and pro-Uniat, was voted in by Washington and has the CIA-backed Western media behind him, can change anything. It is 1,000 years too late.

Q: What do you mean by Catholicism as part of the problem?

A: Historically, the West has degenerated from Christ (Orthodoxy) to Feudalism (Catholicism), then to Democracy (Protestantism) and so to Antichrist (Post-Protestantism). We can see this in many examples. For example, feudalism appeared in England very suddenly, in 1066. It simply did not exist here before. In other words, feudalism is the socio-political and economic result of Catholicism. Or, to take another example from today, the present genocide in Catholic Mexico (100,000 dead in the last twelve months, it is said) is being caused by feudal drug-traffickers, who are holed up on their castle-ranches, and pay serfs to work for them. (Of course, the drug-traffickers only exist because a section of the US population takes drugs. Otherwise they would go out of business).

As regards Russia, serfdom, that is feudalism, was only introduced in the 18th century by Western and Westernized rulers like Peter I and Catherine II. Significantly, they are praised to the skies and called ‘the Great’ by both Western and Soviet historians. Why? Because they both represented feudal empires. The West used feudalism to maintain its colonial empires and the Soviets reintroduced feudalism to maintain their empire. For what was Stalinist collectivization if not refeudalization? Take the land from the people and slaughter those who resist, that is refeudalization.

The West hates the fact that Western-introduced serfdom was abolished only after a century and a half in Russia, whereas in the West it lasted for centuries. In Russia, Orthodoxy defeated serfdom and Russian Orthodox have always opposed and destroyed slavery, freeing slaves. However, in the West the ruling Catholic ideology was inherently feudal so it could not be defeated, it could only degenerate into Protestantism, the next step to Antichrist.

Similarly, we can see the example of Western democracy in Russia, which only lasted for seven months in 1917. Why? Because for Western democracy, as it is called, to exist, you must have a Protestant mentality. This why it never worked elsewhere and cannot be imposed elsewhere, where it is always accompanied by massive corruption, as in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Latin America, South Vietnam, Japan, Thailand – or the Ukraine. From Western democracy in Russia, it was only one step to Antichrist, that is, to Bolshevism. True, this so-called Western democracy has lasted much longer in the West, where Protestantism existed, but even here we can see that today it too is degenerating, as Protestantism has been rejected. Even in the Estonian capital they are now selling off the main Lutheran church because it has gone bankrupt.

Western democracy has outlived its purpose, which was to overthrow Christian monarchs. With that done, Antichrist has been readying himself to take over from the secular presidents, prime ministers and chancellors who replaced the Christian monarchs. We saw this with Napoleon and Hitler, who replaced Christian leaders and were both prefigurations of Antichrist and both invaded Russia, just as the US is trying to invade Russia today.

We can see this today in the replacement of democracy and its degeneration in Western countries, which are quite freely introducing ever more Fascist legislation, with selective assassinations by the secret services, censorship of the media, militarization of the police, arrest without charge, deprivation of citizens of their passports, refusing them the right to live where they want, surveillance of their every movement through camera networks and State spying on e-mails and phone calls etc.

Q: Does Orthodox Russia have friends in the West?

A: Yes. Apart from the local Russian Orthodox and Orthodox allies of other nationalities, there are still minorities in the West who have a sense of national tradition, sovereignty and identity. All of them support Russia in some way. The enemy is the cosmopolitan Brussels/Berlin bureaucrat who takes his orders from Washington and has only contempt for real Europeans and our patriotism. There is in preparation an alliance between Orthodox Russia and healthy ‘sovereignist’ forces in at present enslaved Western Europe.

Q: What chance is there of the return of an Orthodox Emperor, a Tsar, who could protect all Orthodox worldwide from Western bullying and so delay the rule of Antichrist?

A: The Church can work in any political system and survive, as history proves, but our ideal is a Christian State, which incarnates the values of the Church, creating a Christian Civilization. If that exists, Antichrist cannot come. Our situation since 1917 has been abnormal; there has been no Christian Emperor, no Tsar, and so the Local Churches have been swayed this way and that way by secular political forces, whether Communist or Capitalist, Atheist or Mammonist, however the end has not yet come. The question is whether we are to return to normality, the Christian Empire, or whether we are to continue on the path towards Antichrist.

Thus, the last nearly 100 years have been quite exceptional, all should have ended in 1917, but we have been granted further time by the mercy of God. Nevertheless, it is still a stark case of the path to the Apocalypse or the path to the Restoration. But there are reasons for thinking that Restoration is still possible because of the sacrifices of the New Martyrs and Confessors during the first generation after 1917, on which the whole rebirth of the Russian Church has been founded.

Since the long and slow process of overthrowing Antichrist in Russia, which effectively began in 1941 with the first Nazi invasion (the second Nazi invasion being in the Ukraine in 2014) and the revival of the Church inside Russia, we have begun to see the three different stages in the restoration of the Church. These are: Orthodoxy; the People; Sovereignty. They come in the opposite order to what we would expect, Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and the People, because we are putting history into reverse.

First of all, we have seen the process of restoration of Orthodoxy, with the end of outward persecution by Communism and the end of inward persecution by renovationism. This first stage in this process is ongoing, but is almost at an end now. The outward persecution by the Communists has ended. And both the renovationists who were supported by the Phanar and the Bolsheviks in the 1920s and who were still active in the Diaspora until recently, and the neo-renovationists who came to prominence inside Russia in the 1990s and 2000s (with the support of the old Diaspora renovationists), have literally been dying out. The latter were rejected outright by Patriarch Alexei II and elders like Fr John Krestyankin and have been defeated. That is why the last ones are so aggressive. The re-establishment and reassertion of Orthodoxy inside the Russian Orthodox Church is clear. Only a few treacherous individuals inside Russia and in the Diaspora are still resisting – but they are living in the past, irrelevant.

The second stage in the process is the revival of the People as a believing force. This stage is ongoing, but has very far to go. The missionary witness of the Church to the masses has scarcely begun, but at least it has begun. Only when the Church has been allowed to go out into the whole world by Divine Providence and preach the authentic Gospel, which has been so compromised by Catholicism, Protestantism and Modernism, can we move on to the third stage. Already, however, there has been the first political emigration after 1917, which brought Orthodoxy to countries which previously knew nothing of it, and since the collapse of the Soviet Union there has been a second economic emigration, far larger than before. All this is the Providential opportunity to witness.

Only when people have been Churched, when they are ready for the new Orthodox Emperor, the Tsar, can that restoration occur. In other words, there can be no restoration of the Sovereign Christian Empire until the baptized masses want it, until they have repented in preparation for it. Only repentance can bring restoration. And we are still far from this – though I must say we are much closer than even five years ago, let alone twenty-five years ago, when all this was still only a dream.

For Russia has now begun to play the role of the country which restrains or withholds the movement towards Antichrist. That is why the forces of this world are so aggressively attacking Russia at the moment, trying through so-called sanctions to punish Her. The most ruthlessly logical and consistently anti-Christian Western elitists like Brzezinski in the US and Bildt in Sweden have publicly declared that the West must destroy the Russian Orthodox Church (in order to hasten the arrival of Antichrist – though they are so delusional that they do not even believe in Antichrist).

Q: If that repentance or process of Churching happens, who will the new Emperor be?

A: We do not and cannot know. That is in God’s hands or rather in the hands of the Mother of God, for since the forced and forged abdication of 1917 the Empire has been in the hands of the Sovereign Mother of God. Our task is to repent, not to argue about possible candidates. God will choose the right candidate for us and it will be plain to all Churched Orthodox that this is the right choice.

Imperial Russia: 1894 – 1914

Our children and grandchildren will not be capable of even imagining the Russia where we once (that is yesterday) lived and which we failed to appreciate and understand – all that might, complexity, wealth and happiness…

Ivan Bunin, Russian émigré author and Nobel prize-winner

Preface

One of the myths of Western propaganda, faithfully copied in every detail by Soviet propaganda, heir to the materialist West in all things – only more consistent than it, is that Imperial Russia was backward. In reality, everything that was good about the Soviet Union, its educational and health systems, literacy rates, absence of unemployment, low crime rate and thirst for social justice, was part of the heritage of the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II; what was bad about it, its atheism and persecution of Orthodox Christian values, came from the West. Some imagine that as Russian Orthodox we must be anti-Soviet; in reality, since we are anti-atheist, we are anti-Soviet only to the extent that Soviet ideology persecutes the Orthodox Church and imposes atheism. We are not anti-Soviet as regards the values which the Soviet system inherited from the Tsar’s government.

Thus, there was a time when we Russian Orthodox in the West supported the anti-atheism of the West. However, as soon as, a generation ago, that anti-atheism began to turn into Russophobia, we began to take another view. Today, the situation is the opposite of the past. The West, led by Washington and faithfully obeyed by its unthinking poodle Europe, part of which it has occupied since 1942 (the ‘friendly invasion’ of Great Britain by 2 million US troops) and another part since 1944 (the D-Day invasion), has become the most virulent centre of atheism in the world. At the same time, today’s Russian Federation has in many respects returned to Orthodoxy. We still, as is only logical, oppose atheism and if that opposes us Russian Orthodox to today’s apostate West and makes us protective of the West’s ancient Christian roots, that should be no surprise. We are consistent.

Introduction

100 years ago Imperial Orthodox Russia stood on the verge of becoming the world’s greatest Power. Only the three European Powers, Great Britain, Germany and France, especially the former with its paranoid Russophobic ‘Great Game’, stood in the way. Indeed, the multinational and territorially continuous Russian Empire had made huge progress since the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in 1894 in all domains, in astronomy, radar, radio (Popov), rocketry (Tsiolkovsky), monorails, ice-breakers (all in the 19th century), petrol and diesel engines, cars, lorries, trolleybuses, trams, diesel tractors and tank designs (both the world’s first).

In the field of aviation the Russian Empire invented helicopters (Igor Sikorsky was the grandson of a priest), the world’s first four-engine aeroplanes, monoplanes, seaplanes, aerodynamics, (in 1914 263 of the world’s approximately 850 warplanes were Russian), airships, parachutes (the world’s first), submarines, electric railways (Russian railways were the cheapest and most comfortable in the world), telegraphy, telephones, television (the world’s first), chemistry (Mendeleev), medicine, physiology (Pavlov was a priest’s son), zoology, geology, oil pipelines and hydroelectricity.

Freedom from a Military-Industrial Complex

On the one hand, the Japanese had almost gone bankrupt as a result of the 1904-5 war which they launched against the Russian Empire as a result of their militarism, which had led to very high military expenditure. This had been encouraged by Western politicians, industrialists and bankers, to whom the Japanese had indebted themselves (but this all rebounded on the West which was to suffer in the Second World War as a result of its greed in arming and selling technology to Japan). On the other hand, Russia’s military expenditure was very low (explaining initial setbacks in both the war against the Japanese invasion and again ten years later in defending itself and Serbia against German and Austro-Hungarian militarism).

Not being dominated by a military-industrial complex like Western countries which relied on it for their economic development, the Russian Empire’s overall military expenditure was less than a third of Britain’s and France’s, less than half of Germany’s and some 25% less than that of Austro-Hungary’s and Italy’s, As regards its naval expenditure, it was a quarter of Britain’s, just over a third of Japan’s and two-thirds of the USA’s. It had proportionately less than half of France’s, Germany’s and Italy’s population under arms and slightly less than Austro-Hungary’s. Its police force was also very small. In 1914 there were seven times fewer policemen than in Britain and 5 times fewer than in France. Crime was also lower. In 1905-6 there were 77 criminals per 100,000 head of population in the Russian Empire, 132 in the USA, 429 in Britain and 853 in Germany.

Thanks to its freedom from the tyranny of a military-industrial complex, Russian productivity increased fourfold between 1890 and 1913; in 1901 it produced 51% of the world’s oil and by 1909 it was the world’s greatest producer of cereals. Between 1892 and 1913 its wheat production had increased by 78% and in 1913 its wheat harvest was 28% higher than that of the USA, Canada and Argentina combined. In 1913 it exported 50% of the world’s eggs, 70% of its butter and 80% of its flax. It also produced over 25% of the world’s wheat, oats and potatoes, 40% of its barley and over 50% of its rye.

Between 1890 and 1910 the Russian Empire’s average rate of growth was over 9%, greater than that of the youthful USA. In 1913 it had the lowest direct taxes in the world, four times lower than in France and Germany and 8.5 times lower than in Britain, and incomes had increased sixfold between 1893 and 1913. In the same period, the length of railways had doubled, as also had its grain harvest. Russian manufactured goods outclassed British and Japanese goods in the Far East – they were both cheaper and better quality.

International Affairs

Internationally, it was Tsar Nicholas who in 1898 had called for an International Peace Conference to be held in the Hague in order to ban, or at least limit, arms. Although this proposal was to become the foundation of the International Court, the League of Nations and then the UN, sadly for the victims of the First World War, the initial proposition was rejected outright and even mocked by aggressive and imperialistic Britain, as well as militaristic Germany, France and Japan

The Russian Empire opposed colonialism and would not allow foreign capitalists there to exploit native peoples or massacre them, as the Western Powers had done in the Americas (putting ‘Indians’ onto ‘reserves’, or concentration camps, a technique today copied by Israel in Palestine), in Africa (massacring peoples born there, as in the Belgian Congo, French North-West Africa, the British Sudan and South Africa, or German South-West Africa) and committing genocide, as in Tasmania. The different peoples of the Russian Empire were respected, not massacred, which is why countries like Hawaii, Siam (Thailand), Tibet, Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and the Boers sought Russian protection or even Russian nationality.

This anti-colonialist policy was later continued by the Soviet Union, which did not invent it, as some imagine from its propaganda, but simply prolonged it. Thus, in 1899 the Russian Empire opposed the seizure by force by the USA of Hawaii, a territory which had previously voluntarily asked to receive Russian protection and even nationality in order to protect it from Western imperialism. In 1900, the Russian Tsar similarly protected Tibet from British imperialism and massacres, placing it under Chinese tutelage. In 1912 he set up the Balkan Union of Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece in order to counter Turkish imperialism and also the provincial nationalism/phyletism of the governments of those four countries. Sadly, the treacherous German King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, egged on by the German Kaiser, soon broke the Union and attacked Serbia.

International Orthodoxy

Between 1894 and 1912 7,546 new Orthodox parish churches, not including chapels, were built and 211 new monasteries were opened. 17 churches were also built in major European cities as a witness to Orthodoxy, some with the Tsar’s own money, as in Nice and as also with St Nicholas church in New York. Tsar Nicholas made generous personal gifts to Local Orthodox Churches and others, including the Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, Montenegrin, Constantinopolitan (Mt Athos), Antiochian, Alexandrian and Abyssinian (Ethiopian) Churches, as well as to the Holy Land (Jerusalem).

By 1914 there were 117 million Orthodox in the Empire, with 48,000 parish churches, some 25,000 chapels and churches in monasteries and other institutions, some 50,000 priests and deacons and 130 bishops in 67 dioceses. The Church had over 35,000 primary schools and 58 seminaries. (By 1917 there were 163 bishops, 51,105 priests and 79,767 churches, including 25,593 chapels and churches in 1257 monasteries and other institutions).

By 1895 there were 22,000 Orthodox in Japan and a seminary. In 1897 an Orthodox mission was established in Seoul in Korea. In 1898 the Nestorians of Urmia in Persia joined the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1903 86 Russian schools were opened in Syria. In 1913, there were 3,812 Orthodox in China and a seminary. Apart from his zeal for the glorification of new saints, in March 1905 Tsar Nicholas proposed himself as Patriarch, which would effectively have restored the Patriarchate almost immediately, if only his offer had been accepted.

Western Russophobia

Western newspapers, often owned by imperialistic bankers, industrialists and arms merchants, loved to attack Russia for the ‘pogroms’. In fact, these did not take place in Russia itself, but above all in Catholic Vienna and Berlin and among settlements of Jews in the Russian Empire (who had taken refuge there centuries ago from Western anti-semitism) namely in Catholic Poland, Catholic Lithuania, Catholic Galicia and Romanian Orthodox Bessarabia (Moldova).

Between the four years of 1903 and 1907 1,622 people were killed in the ‘pogroms’ in the Russian Empire, of whom however only 711 were Jews (the same number of Jews as were killed every four hours and the same number of Soviet citizens as were killed every hour by the Western Nazis between the four years of 1942 and 1945). The other victims were Catholic and Orthodox. Indeed, many of the pogroms were started by Jews, but the Tsar’s government had to constantly intervene between the two sides, usually Catholics and Jews, being as even-handed as possible. Despite the pogroms, the Jewish population rose considerably, in spite of massive emigration, mainly to the USA.

Another object of propaganda was the war launched by Japan, a proxy armed to the teeth by the West against Russia. Thus, the Japanese attack on Port Arthur, in no way different in its treacherous unexpectedness from Pearl Harbour, was greeted with joy by British and American newspapers, since the Japanese Navy had been built and armed mainly by Britain, all part of Britain’s ‘Great Game’ to control the whole world. Although Russia’s much smaller and older Navy did lose naval battles against Japan, its army was beginning to win on land and, if it had not been for the Japanese and Western-fomented troubles which began in 1905, there is no doubt that Russia would have won the war within another year, crushing Japan, as it did in 1945.

Western Support for the Enemies of Russia

The open support for the enemies of Russia can also be seen in the ‘Hull Incident’, when Russian battleships bravely sailed around the world, west to east, to fight against the superior Japanese Navy. Arriving in the North Sea, they were provoked, probably on purpose, by Japan’s British ally and the Russians fired on a British trawler in error. Once the Russians had arrived in the Far East, their small fleet was defeated at Tsushima by the Japanese fleet, twice as numerous and powerful. Breaking the 1899 Hague Convention, nearby Japanese ships refused to allow two Russian hospital ships to pick up wounded Russian sailors and seized the ships as prizes of war instead.

Another instance of extraordinarily biased propaganda occurred when Western newspapers deliberately misreported the tragic events known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. This was during the Western-financed 1905 troubles in Russia, when on 9 January a crowd led by the renovationist Fr George Gapon (who later committed suicide after it was discovered that he was in fact a secret agent), led a crowd to the Tsar’s Palace with a petition, knowing full well that the Tsar was absent, and terrorists in the crowd, hiding behind icons, opened fire on the troops who defended the Tsar’s residence. Many died in the crossfire, possibly as many as 128.

When the Tsar heard of the events, he personally generously compensated the families who had lost members in the crossfire between terrorists and troops. He at once instituted a commission to investigate workers’ needs. However, in comparison, in the next two years several thousand were to die at the hands of terrorists, of whom only a few hundred were captured and punished, many of them fleeing to Western countries, such as Britain (Lenin), the USA (Trotsky) and Switzerland, where they were deliberately protected by the authorities. Even the Edwardian British children’s book ‘The Railway Children’, written by E. Nesbit, sentimentally supported the protection of anti-Russian terrorists in England, which was a reality, for example the formation of the Bolshevik Party in London.

Social Achievements

Free from domination by a military-industrial complex, by 1897 the population of the Russian Empire had reached 129.1 million and the annual rate of increase was then 1.6 million. Some 12% of people lived in towns and cities. The birth rate was 48 per 1,000, whereas in the rest of Europe it was between 22 and 41. By 1902 the population had reached 139 million and by 1913 170 million, an average rate of increase of 3.7 million per year, twice as high as in the decade between 1892 and 1902. Growth had become the highest in the world and it is estimated that by 2000 the population would have reached 600 million.

Education was made free at the start of Tsar Nicholas’ reign in 1894 and between 1893 and 1913 expenditure on education increased by 628%. Between 1902 and 1913 the national education budget was four times higher than the defence budget – a proportion which the Soviet Union was unable to maintain. On the eve of the First World War half of all students at the University of Moscow were educated for free, another quarter received grants. There were then over 39,000 university students in Russia and more women in higher education than in any other country in the world. By 1912 nearly two million children were being educated in over 37,000 Church schools, but there were 130,000 schools altogether, given that since 1908 10,000 schools had been opening every year.

In 1908 70 million books were published in Russia. In 1914 150,000 new titles were published worldwide, of which 32,238 were published in Russia, 25,531 in Russian, the others in other languages of the Empire. This was as many books as in Britain, France and the USA combined. In 1914 there were nearly 150,000 libraries in Russia and by 1920 literacy would have reached some 90%. Unlike in the bureaucracy of the later Soviet Union, the number of civil servants in Russia in 1914 was 336,000 – in much smaller France it was already 500,000. The merciful Tsar Nicholas II never signed a single death sentence during his reign and pardoned a great many who had been sentenced by the courts.

By 1913 medical treatment of the poor was free and virtually every hospital had free wards for their treatment. In 1897 the working day had been limited to a maximum of eleven and a half hours and ten hours if on a night shift (in France the maximum was 12 hours, in Italy the maximum was 12 hours, but for women only, in other countries there was no limit at all) and Sundays were non-working days. There was no unemployment in Russia – just as later in the Soviet Union. By the law of 1903 injuries caused by industrial accidents were generously compensated after more than three days of incapacity. If workers were incapacitated by a serious accident, they were paid a pension two-thirds of their salary. In 1912 the US President Taft publicly declared that ‘your Emperor has created the most perfect labour legislation, which not a single democratic state can boast of’.

Conclusion

Satan has inspired the jealous secularist Western Powers to destroy the Russian Empire in their greedy, anti-Christian bid for world hegemony, whether through their export there of atheist Communism in 1917 or through the export there of their atheist Capitalism in 2014. The only difference is that then it was Great Britain which led the war against Russia. Today it is its younger brother, the USA, which eclipsed Britain, making into its colony in 1942 under Churchill, who was half-American. And ever since the British Establishment has loyally followed orders from Washington, wagging its tail at every one, its prize – crumbs from the master’s table. As can be seen above, most of the achievements falsely claimed by the Soviet Union were in fact the real achievements of the Tsar’s Russia and built on its firm base.

During the reign of Tsar Nicholas, the length of the railways increased by almost 150%, production of coal by 430%, of sugar by 400%, of iron ore by 140%, of oil by 100% and gold reserves grew by 250%, despite the Japanese and then Austro-Hungarian and German aggression in their anti-Russian wars. In 1912 a French newspaper predicted that if the European nations continued to progress between 1912 and 1950 as they had between 1902 and 1912, then Russia would dominate Europe, politically, economically and financially by mid-century. A review in the November 1914 issue of the American ‘National Geographic Magazine’ called Russia ‘the land of unlimited opportunities’. It is to this that today we wish to return. If today’s Russia is faithful to Orthodoxy and Orthodox values, then it will indeed become once more ‘the land of unlimited opportunities’.