Some Frank Thoughts about the Jurisdictional Situation in the Isles of Britain and Ireland

Introduction: Division

Seven of the fourteen universally recognized Local Orthodox Churches have diasporas, that is, jurisdictions outside their homelands. However, four of those seven Local Churches, the Serbian, Bulgarian, Georgian and, for the most part, the Romanian Patriarchates, are mononational, catering only for one ethnicity. Of the remaining three groups, that is, the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Antioch and Moscow, the Patriarchate of Moscow is separated into two parts, one dependent on Moscow, the other based outside Russia and autonomous.

This separation is because we have to await the full implementation of the 2007 agreement between the two parts of the Russian Church and so, locally, the merging of the parishes of the Sourozh Diocese, still dependent on the Church inside Russia, into ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia). Each of these four above groups of three Local Churches, Constantinople, Antioch and the two Russian groups, has its own strengths and weaknesses. In chronological order of their ethnic presence in Great Britain and Ireland, they are:

Thyateira

Firstly, there is the Thyateira Diocese, part of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople, formed after the Russian Revolution. This is largely made up of post-War Greek Cypriot immigrants and their descendants. Representing Cypriot national clubs (even mainland Greeks and Cretans can find acceptance difficult), their parishes commonly tell English people who try to join them ‘to go away’ (and sometimes less politely than that). Without any missionary concept, they now face a generational crisis, as the original immigrants die out and their descendants, understanding hardly any Greek, have drifted away from the Church entirely.

This jurisdiction also includes some western Ukrainians, formerly of Polish nationality, very nationalistic and until relatively recently uncanonical, who are now also dying out. And it also includes some 250 mainly elderly, Establishment ex-Anglicans, rather naïve and Russophobic admirers of the late Metr Antony (Bloom) with his peculiar and unique variety of Orthodoxy. The great problem of the foreign-named Thyateira Diocese is that it faces extinction as its parishes literally die out. Those who immigrated in the 1950s and 1960s have now reached old age and it has to face up to its failure to keep its young people – the same mistake which the Russian dioceses also had to face up to thirty to forty years ago.

ROCOR

Secondly, there is the Diocese of the Isles (of Britain and Ireland) of the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), also formed after the Russian Revolution. Although in the 1930s it had its own Bishop of London, it is now very small, though at least solid after the recent crisis, which dated back to the 1970s. At that time elements in its headquarters administration in New York accepted money from the CIA and political motives began to divide it from the persecuted Russian Church inside Russia. Politically and nationalistically motivated Russians, many of them in the USA working for the CIA, together with sectarian Greeks and conservative, Protestant-minded converts (in England converts of a sectarian Anglo-Catholic background), began to dominate it.

Traditional Russian Orthodox spiritual values, represented by Metropolitans Antony and Anastasy, the Jordanville Monastery, St John of Shanghai, Fr Seraphim (Rose) and the whole older generation of clergy and laity, were thus somewhat overshadowed by politics. The crisis came to a head in the two decades between 1986 and 2007, with the victory of traditional spiritual values and consequent unity with the by then free Church inside Russia and their common and uniting veneration of the New Martyrs and Confessors. Today, the great problem of this well-named local diocese of ROCOR is its lack of a resident bishop, which means that growth is painfully slow and the diocese numbers only about 2,000.

Sourozh

Unlike ROCOR, the Russian Orthodox Sourozh Diocese, formed in the 1950s and dependent on the Church Inside Russia, has a resident Russian bishop. However, it suffers from a severe lack of clergy, with many of the few clergy left elderly or untrained, and from a crisis of a lack of property. These two difficulties are both the sad legacy of the late Metr Antony (Bloom), who instead of building up a diocese, which he refused to do, built up a highly divisive personality. Belonging in ethos not to the Russian Church but to the liberal Paris School, his diocese, mainly unvisited by him, largely never knew the Russian Church Tradition at all.

However, since 2006, under new management, Sourozh has begun to return to the practices of ROCOR and the identical practices of the Church Inside Russia. Thus, icons of the New Martyrs and the Royal Martyrs have at last appeared in its Cathedral and elsewhere and its bookshops now sell the once banned books by Fr Seraphim (Rose). The great problem of the foreign-named Sourozh Diocese is its inability to turn outwards to the world around it, thus providing a real (and not fictitious) infrastructure of real, staffed parishes for local Russians and for English people. Its weak infrastructure, the legacy of the visionless past, is a real problem.

Antioch

The fourth, smallest and most recently-formed group, under the Patriarchate of Antioch and still awaiting the appointment of a diocesan bishop, is often dismissed by outsiders as a club for retired Anglican vicars and their small flocks, with no consciousness of the real Orthodox Tradition. Its members, so it is said by its critics, have confused joining the Orthodox Church (through its Arab branch) with actually becoming Orthodox. Its Anglican ethos and practices has brought some to call it ‘Angliochian’. Certainly it is highly clericalized, one wonders if Non-Anglican vicars will ever be ordained for it and it is not attractive to Non-Anglicans, who feel out of place in it.

However, beyond such criticisms, fair or not, this group is probably the most vibrant of these four dioceses. And, in fairness, it must be said that its founding members did in 1995 ask to join both the dioceses of Sourozh and Thyateira. Through no fault of their own, they were refused, as the bishops of both dioceses were highly compromised by ecumenical accords with the Church of England and their own divisive attitudes. Sadly, they did not think to ask to join the uncompromised ROCOR. This was partly because, with an Establishment Anglican mentality, the Anglicans in question rejected the Orthodox calendar and the other disciplines of traditional Orthodoxy as practised by ROCOR, and partly because ROCOR, tragically without a local resident bishop, was also still dealing with its own inner crisis, which was not fully resolved until 2007.

Conclusion: Unity?

As we can see from the above, opportunities for unity have been lost in the past, although at least the two Russian dioceses are now spiritually united. It is especially tragic that the Antiochian diocese had to be formed because of the ecumenical compromises of the Russian and Greek bishops. It is even more tragic that the only local figure who could have united everyone, the now elderly Metr Kallistos (Ware), has for thirty years been trapped as a titular bishop in the Thyateira Diocese, unable to act as a diocesan bishop.

Had he overcome his Establishment concerns and joined either Russian diocese in his youth, or the Antiochian group in 1995, he would most certainly be their respected diocesan bishop today. Lacking him and a traditional Orthodox monastery to supply unity, it seems therefore that unity can only now come as a result of the vast changes in the wider Orthodox world since the fall of Communism inside Russia and the restoration of Holy Rus as a world power and therefore as a centre for worldwide Orthodox unity, as it was before 1917.

The Atheist World Takes Literal Aim at Holy Rus: Three Dead

With the war instigated by the CIA-installed regime in Kiev going badly, thousands of Ukrainian troops changing sides with their equipment rather than kill their own and thousands of other troops captured, as in yesterday’s victory parade over the Fascists in Donetsk, anti-Church atrocities continue, unreported by the two-faced Western media.

Thus, during Sunday’s service in Moscow His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill prayed for the repose of the victims of the shelling by the Fascist Uniat/schismatic junta of St John of Kronstadt church in Kirov in the Ukraine. He said that he could not believe that the demolition of the church through shelling could have been a coincidence and that a canonical Orthodox could have done such a thing.

Calling the event ‘a monstrous crime’, he noted that the church had been wholly destroyed, three faithful were dead and many others in hospital injured. He said that ‘an Orthodox belonging to our Church could not have done such a thing, but I know what evil those who do not belong to our Church breathe. I would not exclude the possibility that in taking aim at that church, they were aiming at all of us, at all Holy Rus, at all historic Rus, at which aim has been taken so many times in our history’.

Holy Rus or the Atheist West

There is no more hot water in working-class parts of Kiev. Pensions are half of what they once were and workers are being made redundant because of closing enterprises (most of the Ukrainian economy depended on the self-imposed loss of the Russian market). Adulterated bread is on sale in Kiev bakeries and many goods are no longer to be found in the shops at any price. Most men are avoiding the draft, no one wants to go killing their own people and die for the oligarch/Uniat junta. The natural gas supply is running out for the bankrupt regime and is due to be gone as the autumn and winter approach. The German Chancellor has just been in the Ukraine to warn the Ukrainians not to steal the Russian gas on which Germany depends for 50% of its energy supply. As for the Malaysian Airlines flight that the Ukrainian Air Force shot down, as was revealed by German sources, the events surrounding its downing by the junta have just been ‘classified’ by Western secret services, which supplied the logistics. The junta is in trouble, as are the Uniat and schismatic hierarchies which openly show their demented approval of it.

As in 1914, there is still a Holy Rus, even though the predatory West brought down the Imperial Christian government three years after 1917 and still, the BBC often at the forefront, vilely slanders the holy Tsar Martyr Nicholas, all his holy Family and all faithful Rus together with them. Holy Rus includes Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, as well as many other areas of the world and living hearts and minds in 62 different countries, who resist spiritual death. Holy Rus wants to live in peace with all other peoples of good will. Of course, that means that Holy Rus, by definition, must come into conflict with the narrow-minded Western world, which preaches spiritual death and so does not live with good will towards others. The only things that it believes in are its right to totalitarian control of the rest of the world and its resources, that ‘might is right’ and that ‘money (and not Love) makes the world go round’. This is the New Dark Age, called the ‘New World Order’. Support Holy Rus and oppose the spiritual death of the atheist Western world – this is how we honour God and His Church.

Double Standards

The beheading of an American journalist by a British Muslim should surprise no-one. For over two years now hundreds of British Muslims, let alone French, Belgian, German and other European Muslims, have been slaughtering the innocent in the interventionist war in Syria, which has been encouraged by the Western Powers and their subservient media. That is not so much a civil war as a war between Syrians and hordes of foreign mercenaries paid for by Saudi and Qatari Sunnis and well supported by Western ‘Special Forces’ in training camps in the Jordan and Turkey.

Indeed, it is only a year since Western governments were prepared to bomb Syria back into the Stone Age over the poison gas / ’red line’ affair, thus probably bringing Muslim fanatics to power there and replacing the popular government. When it was discovered that the poison gas (invented and used by the West for the first time nearly 100 years ago) had been used by the terrorists and not by the government, the Western hypocrites fell silent.

Now that the terrorists are victorious in eastern Syria, they have tried to take over Iraq (which the West did bomb back into the Stone Age), the West is alarmed and is beginning to realize that it should have been supporting the Syrian government of President Assad all along and not trying to annihilate it, as they did to the governments in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The West was wrong all the way down the line. (It is almost as if after its fifty years of self-imposed cultural nihilism which began in the 1960s that the West wants to annihilate the cultures of all other countries).

Therefore, today the British government is worried that its self-created (by immigration) Muslim ghettoes have produced jihadists. However, the problem of the radicalization of young British Muslims has only two basic self-created two real causes. The first cause is the fact that British ‘governments’ (more correctly ‘regimes’), have, without popular consent, invaded, occupied and committed genocide in several Muslim countries, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The second cause is that British regimes have consistently supported the genocide of native Palestinian Muslims by Zionist Israel, not least over the last month. The outrage of young British Muslims is actually understandable; their violence, however, is only to be condemned, as is the whole Muslim (and Zionist) anti-New Testament eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth ideology.

The hypocrisy of the British Establishment at the terrible beheading is also blatant. However barbaric it is, beheading is at least instant death. On the other hand, to be slowly slaughtered or grossly maimed by NATO uranium-tipped shells in Serbia or by NATO cluster bombs and shells in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya is, if anything, even more barbaric. And to be victims of the Atomic Bombs which the ‘high-minded’ West dropped on civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is even more barbaric.

The hypocrisy is even worse, when one considers that at this very moment the Western world is supporting a civil war in Europe, unleashed by the Western-backed regime in Kiev, planned by the CIA and other US ‘military advisors’ and executed mainly by Western mercenaries. Well over a thousand have been slaughtered, often burned to death (as earlier in Odessa) in the Western-sponsored genocide against freedom-fighters and civilians in the Ukraine in the last two months, and refugees (no support from the New York-based UN here) number over 150,000. The fact, as we now know from German sources, that the Malaysian Airlines plane was brought down by the Western-backed Ukrainian junta is also irrelevant, conveniently buried with another invented ‘red line’. The Ukrainian train of death is to be forgotten.

Apparently, genocide in the Ukraine, as in Gaza, does not matter, because those who are committing the genocide are pro-Western and are equipped with Western bombs and bullets to do it. There is one standard for the vast majority not so barbaric Non-Western world and quite another for the minority barbaric Western world. How the Western world will deal with this genocide in the Ukraine when the Ukrainian junta goes bankrupt and the gas runs out in the approaching winter, we shall see.

A Letter from His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill to Patriarch Bartholomew on the Real Situation in the Ukraine

To write this letter to you brings me a deep sense of pain and extreme concern about the situation facing the flock of the Church in Novorossiya (the south and the east of the Ukraine), where a fratricidal civil war has been raging for the last few months. Last autumn, at the beginning of the current Ukrainian political crisis, members of the Greek Catholic (Uniat) church and schismatic ‘Orthodox’ openly preached hatred of the Orthodox Church on Maidan Square in Kiev; they urged the seizure of Orthodox shrines and called for the eradication of Orthodoxy from the Ukraine. Since the outbreak of hostilities, Uniats and schismatics have taken up arms under the guise of an ‘anti-terrorist operation’ and started direct aggression against the clergy of the canonical Church in the Ukraine. Nevertheless, the Church, unlike the Uniats and schismatics, remains alien to political bias. It continues to carry out pastoral care for its faithful, including those who find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict, trying to reconcile them, issuing constant calls for dialogue.

In recent weeks we have received reports from local bishops indicating abuse of canonical Orthodox clergy as they carry out their pastoral duties. Here are a few examples. On 17 July, during the Divine Liturgy in the Church of the Resurrection in Slavyansk, a gang of armed men led by a Uniat military chaplain threatened the rector, Archpriest Vitaly Vesyol. The Uniat ‘priest’ stated that the Church does not belong in the Ukraine and lamented that the authorities would not let the Uniats steal the Monastery of the Kiev Caves. On 19 July junta ‘soldiers’ issued death threats to Archpriest Andrei Chicherinda, Dean of the Nikolaevsk District of the Dioceses of Gorlovka and Slavyansk and harassed and interrogated him, keeping him handcuffed. On 20 July, near Slavyansk, thugs armed with sub-machine guns made Archpriest Vadim Yablonovsky dig his own grave and on the same day they arrested Archpriest Viktor Stratovich, handcuffed him, and took him away with a bag over his head into the woods, where they forced him to grovel on his knees as they interrogated him.

On July 30 in Krasnoarmeiskoe a group of armed men illegally searched the home of Archpriest Igor Sergienko, rector of St Alexander Nevsky parish. They insulted Fr Igor, accusing him of taking part in clandestine organisations, threatened him with torture, demanded that he leave the Ukraine and that he hand over the deeds of the parish property. On the same day, in the Amvrosievska District, Ukrainian troops seized Archpriest Yevgeni Podgorny, showering him with abusive curses, bound him and threw him to the ground. They kicked him, hit him with a rifle butt and fired over his head, to force him to admit that he supported the Home Guard. They tried to force him to take off his priestly cross, but he refused, so they tore if off by force, put a bag over his head and threw him into a pit. Then they threatened to kill his son and robbed his house. Only his parishioners’ intervention saved Fr Igor.

We cannot ignore the fact that the conflict in the Ukraine has unambiguous religious overtones. The Uniats and schismatics are trying to overpower the canonical Orthodox Church, which continues to minister with patience and courage to its suffering faithful in a harsh environment. Priests are serving in places that have become battlegrounds; the majority remain with their flocks, sharing with them all the horrors of the civil war. Their families suffer from attacks, lack of water and food and shelling. On 31 July Archpriest Vladimir Kreslyansky died of his wounds after the shelling of civilian areas in Lugansk, leaving a wife and five children.

Novorossiya was a fruitful land inhabited by millions of hardworking Orthodox Christians… now, it is being burned down and destroyed. Bombing has destroyed the home of Metropolitan Hilarion (Shukalo) (he heads the Diocese of Donetsk and Mariupol). Artillery shelling damaged the Diocesan Administration building in Gorlovka. The Convent of the Iviron Icon in the Diocese of Donetsk lies in ruins, it was burned down during the fighting. However, the canonical Church is a Martyr Church; it remains with the believers in spite of these difficult conditions, it does everything possible to help people who are experiencing the worst times in modern Ukrainian history. The fire of civil conflict has caused hundreds of thousands to lose their homes and become refugees. Many of them try to escape the horrors of war by finding shelter in churches and monasteries, in particular, in the Monastery of the Dormition in Svyatogorsk, which is full of refugees. In Donetsk, Gorlovka, and Lugansk, civilians try to escape the bombardments by staying in the churches at night; once there, they get free food and shelter. All the canonical Orthodox monasteries, parishes, and dioceses provide all kinds of assistance to refugees and ordinary civilians.

Our Church as a whole is using every opportunity to provide humanitarian assistance to the civilian population in areas where fighting is taking place. Daily, all our churches offer up special prayers for peace and the end of internecine warfare in the Ukraine. The Church is taking care of many thousands of refugees from Novorossiya in camps and in specially prepared facilities located all over Russia. We are providing assistance to all without distinction as to nationality or religion. Amongst those who have sought refuge in Russia are many Ukrainian soldiers who did not want to shoot their own people.

These are perilous days for our Russian Orthodox Church, especially for the faithful in the Ukraine, I ask the prayers of Your Holiness, archpastors, pastors, monastics, and all the believers of the Holy Church of Constantinople for peace in the Ukrainian land, to stop the bloodshed and to end the suffering of our brethren in the Lord, especially of our archpastors and pastors, who in the most difficult conditions of civil strife continue to do their duty courageously, serve the Church and defend Holy Orthodoxy. I ask Your Holiness to use every opportunity to raise your voice to defend Orthodox Christians in Novorossiya, who live in daily fear due to the worsening violence by Greek Catholics and schismatics, who fear that if the persecutors take power they and their loved ones will face severe persecution if they do not renounce their faith.

15 August 2014

+ Kyrill, Patriarch of Moscow and all the Russias

http://www.patriarchia.ru/db/text/3704024.html

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’.

Finland: Between Sweden and Russia

Some 150 years ago Dostoyevsky compared Western Europe to a cemetery of the dear departed and so to a place of pilgrimage. However, if you dig deep enough, then in any Western country you can find Orthodox roots and it becomes literally a place of pilgrimage. Only in some Western countries you have to search less hard than in others. In Finland you do not have to look very hard; until 1917 it was a province of Russia, large in area, but tiny in population. Moreover, what was the eastern part of Finland, called Karelia, long ago converted to Orthodoxy and is still part of the Russian Federation. On the other hand, only 1% of the population of today’s independent Finland can provide a witness to even a Lutheranized Orthodoxy.

In Helsinki, the capital of modern Finland, which could be called ‘Western Karelia’ when looked at from an Orthodox perspective, there stands on high the Orthodox Cathedral of the Dormition. Also, on the Square in front of the magnificent St Nicholas Church (Lutheran on the inside, but with thoroughly Orthodox architecture on the outside), stands the 1894 statue of Tsar Alexander II. Unfortunately, however, even the Russian buildings which give central parts of Helsinki the look of a suburb of St Petersburg, are buried beneath the layer of Lutheranized Scandinavian rationalism and post-Lutheran modernist utilitarianism that predominates in contemporary Finland.

You can go inside one of the Finnish churches (Patriarchate of Constantinople), see new, clean, perfectly painted (as far as technique goes) icons neatly arranged, but no iconostasis, no women in headscarves, no prayer, no sense of mystery and no Divine presence. The overwhelming impression is that of a ‘Lutheran Uniat’ church: Orthodox on the outside, but Lutheran, empty and devoid of the sense of the sacred, on the inside. As one Orthodox in Finland (of the Russian Orthodox Church) put it to me: ‘When you go inside a Non-Orthodox church, you are visiting a museum, it is of interest, but God is not present’. You have the same feeling in many such ‘Finnish Orthodox’ churches. They appear to be Orthodox without Orthodoxy.

This can be seen in daily life. If we compare Finland with Karelia, ‘Western Karelia’ with ‘Eastern Karelia’, as we might say, even the houses are different. Finnish houses are functional, clean, efficient and modern, but often devoid of atmosphere. The prettily and elegantly carved timber Karelian houses may not be as functional and efficient, but they do have inner life, presence and warmth, like the people inside them whose souls would seem to be alive with that inner presence which we know as Faith.

Some might say that we are confusing the spiritual and the cultural; but wherever, and only then, the cultural conflicts with the spiritual, the cultural must always give way to the spiritual; where there is no conflict, then we can rejoice in local culture in all its facets. Thus, we take joy in the Finnish language and the beautiful Finnish landscapes of lake and forest. However, the fact is that the ultimate source of any culture is in the spiritual. Here there is a lesson for all Orthodox, especially those of us who live in the Western world: Let us not lose the savour of the Faith and so become souls that are empty and suffering from depression, like a Western cemetery – so different from an Orthodox cemetery, which is a bright place of resurrection.

The Church shapes and influences the world; the world does not shape and influence the Church. Jesus Christ, today, tomorrow and for ever; not ‘yesterday’, as in the funeral anthem for the Western world sung by the Beatles fifty years ago. Let us not only not lose the savour of the Faith, but here in Finland, as elsewhere, restore it. We are living souls and we live not in cemeteries, but in life, for we believe not in the Western god of death, in the academic god, but in the Living God, in the Christian God, Who is risen from the dead and is gloriously triumphant over death.

Helsinki, August 2014

The Footprints in the Western Desert are Satan’s

The news that US-armed and CIA-organized neo-Nazis have raised a swastika-like flag in a town in the eastern Ukraine comes as no surprise. It means that the government in Kiev, voted in by only 25% of hoodwinked Ukrainians, and which barely received 5% of the vote anywhere in the south and east of the Ukraine, is illegitimate. It means that it will never receive the popular assent of the people of the Ukraine and that in the south, east and in the Transcarpathian south-west, it faces implacable resistance from partisans and freedom-fighters, however many billions of dollars Washington foolishly pumps its way.

The present anti-Russian sanctions are already rebounding on the West and threaten a new, self-imposed recession in Europe. The Chinese are delighted – it has given them a new market at no cost to themselves, handed to them on a plate by Western stupidity in its eastern imperialism. Come the winter and the inability of the junta to pay for heating will lead to popular revolt. And the news that a community of Satanists, just as we predicted, has been registered by the new pro-EU junta in Kiev, proves our point: the footprints in the Western desert are indeed Satan’s.

Why there is no Peace on Earth

They burned the bones of the king…into lime.

Amos, 2,1

A restored Russia is needed by the world, which has lost the spirit of life and trembles in fear, as before an earthquake.

St John of Shanghai

Russia will not be restored until she understands who our Russian Tsar Nicolas was.

Elder Nicholas Guryanov

‘The Tsar and Russia are inseparable from each other. If there is no Tsar, then there is no Russia, and the Russian State will inevitably go astray from the path Divinely foreordained for her. This is understandable, for that which God entrusts to His Anointed cannot be entrusted to the crowd.

The tasks of the Tsar of Russia imposed on him by Divine Providence go far beyond the bounds of the tasks assigned to one who is vested with the authority of the State. He is not a head of State who is elected by the people and there to please the people, by whom he is appointed and on whom he depends. The Tsar of Russia is anointed to his Tsardom by God and is appointed to be the Image of God on earth: his task is to do the works of God, to express the will of God, to be the bearer and preserver of the general Christian ideal of earthly life.

As a result, the tasks of the Tsar of Russia went far beyond the bounds of Russia and embraced the whole world. The Tsar of Russia struck a balance in world affairs, in international relations in both hemispheres. He defended the weak and the oppressed, united peoples made up of many tribes through his supreme authority, guarded Christian civilization and culture, he was he who ‘stands in the way’, to whom the Apostle Paul refers in his second epistle to the Thessalonians, saying: ‘For the mystery of iniquity works already, only he who now stands in the way will stand in the way, until he is taken out of the way (2 Thess. 2, 7).

This is what the mission of the Russian Orthodox Sovereign and Tsar consisted of…His task was not only for the good of Russia, but for the peace of the whole world…

And until Russian Orthodox have understood the mission of the Russian Sovereign Tsar, until they are conscious of what the tasks of the Sovereign and Lord’s Anointed were and are, until they have pledged themselves before God to aid the Tsar in carrying out those tasks, the grace of God will not return to Russia and there will be no peace on earth’.

Prince N. D. Zhevakhov, Bari, Italy, 14/27 May 1928