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

Foreword

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

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

How My Views Were Formed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Afterword

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

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

1. What Happened

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thirty-Three Churches Founded by the Russian Empire Outside Russia

Austria (2)
Vienna (1895 and 1899)

Czech Lands (3)
Karlovy Vary (1902), Marianske-Lazne (1902), Frantishkovi-Lazne (1889)

Denmark (1)
Copenhagen (1883)

France (9)
Biarritz (1892), Cannes (1896), Menton (1880, 1892), Nice (1859, 1867, 1912), Paris (1861), Pau (1897)

Germany (12)
Bad Kissingen (1901), Baden Baden (1882), Bad Ems (1876), Bad Homburg (1896), Berlin Tegel (1893), Darmstadt (1903), Dresden (1874), Leipzig (1913), Potsdam (1829), Stuttgart (1895), Weimar (1862), Wiesbaden (1855)

Italy (3)
Bari (1919), Florence (1902), Merano (1897), San Remo (1913)

Switzerland (2)
Geneva (1866), Vevey (1878)

USA (1)
New York (1904)

For photographs, see:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%85_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BD%D1%8B%D1%85_%D1%85%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%B8_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%B2_%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%85_%D0%95%D0%B2%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BF%D1%8B

4 July 1997- 4 July 2017: Twenty Years of Mission: On Restoring the Heritage of St John of Shanghai in the British Isles and Ireland

Exactly twenty years ago, on the eve of the feast day of St John of Shanghai in 1997, an Orthodox Christian mission began to England from the east coast town of Felixstowe, the town of St Felix. This was much like the original Orthodox Christian mission of 631 to exactly the same place but led by the future St Felix. Indeed, this new mission was also an Orthodox Christian mission and it came from the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe, centred in Geneva, precisely next to the native Burgundy of St Felix. This was therefore not a mission created around Parisian personalities with dreamy philosophies and dubious cults, nor one of sectarian and Calvinist phariseeism.

On the contrary, this mission owes itself to Archbishop Antony of Geneva (1910-1993), who was named after the theologian Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev, ordained by Metr Anastasy, and was a disciple of St John of Shanghai and so another authentic Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Western Europe (1). He was briefly bishop in England in 1985. It was in order to restore the heritage of his spiritual father, St John, who had left England in 1962, that we returned, for, to all intents and purposes, his heritage had been lost and forgotten in the British Isles, crucified by spiritual impurities from both the left side and the right side.

Today, as a result of this mission, we are looking not only at real parish bases in Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, two of them our property, with four priests, but also at hopes of penetrating further inland, with missions to the north, south and west, to Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Kent and Sussex, and setting up a monastery. It seems, if God so wills, that the mission that could lead to a new Local Orthodox Church here, is indeed to be led from New York by the largely English-speaking ROCOR, to which Archbishop Antony belonged. Its local representative is Bishop Irenei (Steenberg), whose patron saint is the very saint whose icon was long ago painted in the Russian Orthodox church in Lyons – by Archbishop Antony.

Thus, today, whereas our Isles of the North Atlantic (IONA) appear to have a separate destiny from the Continent, it seems that God’s will for the imminent Russian Orthodox Metropolia of Continental Western Europe, the foundation of a new Local Church there, is not for it to be centred under the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) in Geneva, as it was in the past under the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. It is rather for this work to be continued directly from Moscow via the new Cathedral and seminary in Paris. May God’s Will be done!

Note: (From his Biography)

1. As a priest in the 1950s Archbishop Antony had served in different churches in the Western European diocese, including in Lyons. Here he had painted the iconostasis of the Lyons church, including an icon of St Irenei of Lyons. As a hierarch, at the Third All-Diaspora Council in 1974 he spoke forcefully for Church unity and against ROCOR self-isolation. He advocated preserving the purity of Orthodoxy against atheism and new calendarist modernism, all the while using the free voice of the Church Outside Russia to understand and not condemn the enslaved, cherishing unity with the universal Church of Christ, avoiding old calendarist divisiveness, intent on seeking out and exaggerating errors.

He called all Russian Orthodox to unity through love and to help Russia. He was commended for taking this royal path by the future St Paisios the Athonite. Archbishop Anthony was also noted for his pan-Orthodox vision and welcome to converts, asking one of his Russian priests to compose a service to All the Saints of the Swiss Lands. Despite his limited linguistic abilities, he ordained clergy of many origins and established multinational missions. His episcopacy was noted for the peace and love within his diocese, which stretched from Portugal to Austria and from the Netherlands to the south of Italy, and for the brotherly feeling among the clergy.

Diveevo, 9 May 2045

The Third Imperial Council in Diveevo

After the Divine Liturgy and a Paschal service of intercession before the relics of St Seraphim of Sarov, whose veneration is now worldwide just as the saint prophesied, the 2045 Imperial Council of the Russian Orthodox Church opened today in the Sacred Monastery of Diveevo. Present were Tsar Nicholas III, Patriarch Tikhon II of Moscow, the 205 metropolitans representing the 1,040 other archbishops and bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church and representatives from the other sixteen smaller Local Churches.

Tsar Nicholas’ Opening Speech

After greeting everyone, Tsar Nicholas, who has now ruled the restored Russian Empire for 15 years, recalled how on 22 June 1941 the Russian peoples had been treacherously attacked by Fascists of many Western nationalities on the feast day of All the Saints Who have Shone Forth in the Russian Lands. This had seen the beginning of the repentance of the Russian peoples for their apostasy a generation earlier in the tragic twentieth century.

He noted how the dreadful events of the 1941 attack had led the Russian peoples to achieving two of the aims of the Russian Empire after it had been attacked in the First German War of 1914, that is, freeing Berlin and Vienna. His Majesty recalled how the genocidal anti-Slav invasion of 1941 had ended with victory on this day, 9 May, exactly 100 years ago in 1945. At these words all stood and sang ‘Eternal Memory’ to all Russian Orthodox of all nationalities who fell in the Second Patriotic War of 1941-45.

Since 2030, as Tsar Nicholas noted, the annual rate of church-building throughout the Empire had increased from 1,000 churches per year, which it had been at since 1992, to 6,000 per year. This did not include churches being built for other Local Churches, notably in Africa and Western Europe, and churches being rebuilt and restored in Turkey. There were now nearly 125,000 churches throughout the Empire, serving its 210,000,000 population.

Tsar Nicholas then reported that the Eurasian Confederation (EAC), at the head of which the Russian Empire stood as founder, now had exactly fifty members. It stretched from Portugal to the Pacific, as far north as the Arctic and as far south as Vietnam, included China and India, and numbered over a third of the world’s population. All fifty members of the Confederation had accepted the voluntary evangelization of their countries by the Russian Orthodox Church, providing that this would lead to the foundation of new Local or Regional Churches.

Unfortunately, it was still not certain what the eight countries of the bankrupt Brussels Union dictatorship (Germany apart from Saxony, since the latter had rejected what it called ‘Carolingian’ rule from Brussels, France, Italy, Benelux, Croatia and Galicia (capital L’viv)) intended to do after more recent Muslim terrorist attacks in their capitals. He added that these eight countries were not ready to join the Eurasian Confederation, as they would first have to mature spiritually.

Greetings from the Other Local Churches

Patriarch Vasilios IV of Istanbul and All Turkey, a former Athonite monk, sent his fraternal best wishes in Turkish and begged for alms for his Church, which was struggling to meet the needs of the millions of Turks who had joined it in recent years. He said that although there were still a few churches in his territory where Greek was used, 98% of his parishes were now all Turkish. He thanked the Russian Church for its help in translating liturgical e-books into Turkish and rebuilding many churches in his jurisdiction.

Patriarch Seraphim II of Antioch, who is a fluent Russian speaker, spoke by skype and thanked the Russian Orthodox Church for its help in building churches and monasteries in Syria, Mosul and Beirut. He expressed his devotion to St Seraphim, whose name he bears, and recalled his life-changing pilgrimage to Diveevo twenty-two years ago.

Pope Nektarios I of Alexandria and All Africa, a Kikiyu from Kenya who is also a fluent Russian speaker, sent his greetings and thanked the Russian Church for building over 900 churches throughout Africa over the last ten years and training so many of his clergy free of charge. He remarked on how the Faith had thrived ever since in 2031 his Patriarchate (like that of Istanbul and Antioch and other Local Churches that had made the same error) had returned to using the Orthodox calendar, ending old calendarist schisms. He estimated that there were now nearly 100 million African Orthodox, with tens of thousands being baptised every week all through Black Africa, making his Church the second largest Local Church.

Patriarch Theodore II of Jerusalem and his All-Arab Synod thanked Tsar Nicholas for his help in restoring and rebuilding churches for the Arab faithful throughout Palestine and Jewish Israel, for preparing liturgical e-books in Arabic and helping to set up schools and two universities for Arab Orthodox.

Other fraternal messages were sent from the Local Churches of Romania, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Poland, Cyprus, Czechoslovakia and Albania, thanking Tsar Nicholas and Patriarch Tikhon for their protection and aid.

Then Metropolitan Mitrofan (Liu) of Beijing stood before all the assembled Metropolitans and announced that the Chinese Orthodox Church, the fifteenth Local Church, was now celebrating the tenth anniversary of its autocepaly from the Russian Church and new missions were opening every month. He mentioned in particular that the mission to Tibet was meeting with great success and that the seventh Tibetan Orthodox convent had opened in Lhasa last month. The assembled Metropolitans stood and sang Many Years to Metropolitan Mitrofan and the peoples of his Church.
Metropolitan Istvan (Stefan) (Bojko) of the Hungarian Orthodox Church sent his fraternal greetings by skype from Uzhgorod, where he is currently visiting members of his family, after consecrating the new Cathedral in Budapest. His flock now numbers 1.3 million.

Metropolitan Ioann (Maartens) of Paris, speaking on behalf of the Western European Orthodox Church, which had received its autocephaly from Moscow eight years ago, so becoming the seventeenth Local Orthodox Church after the Chinese and the Hungarian, reported that it now had 992 parishes, despite the political and economic difficulties in those parts of Western Europe that had not yet freed themselves from the Brussels Union dictatorship and joined the Eurasian Confederation.

Metropolitan Ioann, who is fluent in nine languages, spoke eloquently of the duty of the Russian Orthodox Church to meet the spiritual needs of those who had witnessed the spiritual and moral collapse of Catholicism and Protestantism in Western Europe and indeed worldwide. He noted the shock of those in France after the recent declaration that atheism was now the new official State religion. He feared that direct persecution was now imminent and that he might even be forced to take refuge in Dresden, the capital of Free Saxony, part of the EAC.

The Russian Orthodox Church

Patriarch Tikhon II of Moscow and All the Russias then spoke of his ecclesiastical territory, Europe and Asia, and how all were held together by the One Faith, for which he thanked God. He said that the main task of the Council would be to deliberate on granting autocephaly to create three new Local or Regional Churches in Japan, Korea (reunited since 2024) and South-East Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand). There followed reports from various Metropolitans of the Russian Orthodox Church.

First, His Beatitude Metropolitan Job (Romanchuk) of Kiev and Malorossiya remarked on how Malorossiya had prospered since 2020, when the old American-imposed junta in Kiev had collapsed and the ‘Ukraine’ (as it was then still called) had divided into its constituent parts, with EU-sponsored Greek Catholic Galicia breaking away from the Orthodox world altogether, but refusing to join Poland. He said that enormous progress had been made against corruption and that Malorossiya was today one of the most trustworthy countries in the world. However, he noted that the birth-rate was only now beginning to increase again after the social, economic and political collapse of the old Soviet-style ‘Ukraine’.

His Beatitude Metropolitan Nicholas of Washington (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia), which in fact is the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Continental Eurasia (the territory of Patriarch Tikhon) and Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), spoke next of Church life on the continents where his Church works.

He described how his part of the Russian Church was now composed of six Metropolias, of which the largest, that of the Confederated States (the former USA) and Canada, now had 702 parishes. The Alaskan Metropolia, represented by Metropolitan Innocent of Alaska, reported that it now had 211 parishes.

The former Latin American Metropolia had now been divided into two Metropolias, firstly for Mexico and Central America, with 624 parishes, and secondly for South America, with 511 parishes. He noted that missionary work was progressing well in South America, but there was still a shortage of Portuguese-speaking priests in Brazil.

The Oceanian Metropolia numbered 373 parishes, most of which were in Indonesia and the Philippines. As for the Ionan Metropolia, (Isles of the North Atlantic – England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), it now numbered 167 parishes, all with their own buildings, and had eight monasteries.

Metropolitan Gregory of Tashkent and Central Asia spoke next, reporting considerable growth in his flock, especially from Muslim women who were asking for baptism.

The Council will continue tomorrow with brief reports from all the remaining 202 Metropolitans.

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

Q: What is your deepest childhood impression?

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

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

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

Q: What did you understand from their stories?

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

Q: Was there anyone else who shaped you?

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

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

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

Q: When did you first begin writing?

A: Before I could write!

Q: What do you mean?

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

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

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

Q: Would you say that you are political?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Saints Are Calling To Us

Old Europe is mystically calling to us from across the darkness of ten anti-Orthodox Christian centuries. It is calling to us through its long-forgotten saints, from Orleans and Roskilde, from Lisbon and Lindisfarne, from Utrecht, and Barcelona, from Tongres and Turin, from Glendalough and Palermo, from Salzburg and Iona, from St David’s and Cologne, from Oslo and Arles and from ten thousand more cities and hamlets and holy islands and holy mountains. The saints, the fruit of the Holy Spirit, are calling for a Europe that is holy and therefore both personally righteous and socially just.

The saints of this Old Europe are calling us to continue their feats in the Tsar’s Europe, Imperial Christian Europe, which anti-Orthodox Christian Europe has strived so hard to destroy, especially over the last 100 years since 1917. Thus, today, all the saints of the Christian Empire, both of the Old Europe and of the Tsar’s Europe, are reaching out to us. Their call for our repentance is urgent, for after a thousand years’ of patience anti-Orthodox Christian Europe is now at suicide’s door. And its only hope is in its return to the saints, for they are the fruit of the Holy Spirit from down all the centuries.

Sunday of All the Saints of the Western Lands, 2017

How Was the World Made? Facts and Theories

How was the world made? There are many things that we do not know and cannot know in order to answer this question, because quite simply and obviously we were not there at the time. The world was made before we existed. So what can we know about it?

Everyone agrees that we, human-beings, standing at the height of visible creation, are far higher and far more complex than mere liquids, gases and solids, than microbes, plants, insects, fish, birds and all animals. This is why we were made only after everything else. When we make something, we start with the simplest things, the building blocks of life, as they say, and then we go on to other things that are more complex.

All this is why there are so many theories about how we were made, like, for example, the theory of evolution. If you were not present, then all you can have is theories. They cannot be proved, but sadly, such theories are often presented as facts.

In order to help us answer our question about how the world was made, even in part, we can refer to the oldest text that we have about it, that found in the first chapter (one page) of the first and oldest book of the Holy Scriptures, the Book of Genesis. (Genesis means Birth). This was written down thousands of years ago, on the basis of stories handed down by word of mouth for thousands of years before that. What exactly does it say?

Firstly, the first words in this Book say that God made everything. The existence of everything is therefore not an accident or a chance. All exists for a reason. All was made on purpose. If we can understand something about God, then we can understand why all was made. Now we are told by St John in his Gospel that God is Love. It is clear therefore that we were made to love one another. That is why we were made, that is the purpose of our life. Nothing is by chance, all is for Love.

Secondly, it is clear that everything was made in a special order. Just as we do not make a car by starting with the last details like the seat covers and then build the bodywork and the engine, so God too made everything in logical order. In fact, we are told that He made everything in six different phases. Firstly, He made space and time, with light and water (because, as we know, nothing can live without light and water). Secondly, He made the sky and the earth. This was so that, thirdly, He could make all sorts of plants and trees, which can only grow if there is earth. Fourthly, God made days and seasons, creating the sun, the moon and the stars. Fifthly, He made everything that lives in the water (fish etc) and everything that lives in the air (birds etc), each species or ‘kind’, as the Book of Genesis says, separately. In the sixth and final phase, God made all sorts of creatures that live on the land (animals and reptiles), again each species separately, and then He made the first man and the first woman. When He made each of these things, we read again and again that everything that He made was good. After all, why would God make anything that was bad? That would be very strange. Nobody sets out to make something that is bad, but something that is good, that works as it should.

One thing we should notice here is that God made animals and then, separately, the first human-beings. In other words, it is not true that human-beings are animals. Of course, it is clear that higher animals and human-beings are similar. For example, most animals have a head and a face, two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, and four limbs with muscles, as well as organs like the heart, the brain, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the stomach etc and there are an equal number of males and females (in itself a miracle), just like us. But this does not mean that human-beings are animals. The resemblances between our bodies only mean that we have the same Maker – God.

Some people especially notice the physical similarities between people and monkeys and say that we are descended from them. But if monkeys had changed into people, then monkeys would no longer exist! The fact that millions of species of plants and animals exist at the same time proves that there is no such thing as evolution. If there had been evolution, then nothing would exist except for people, according to the theorists of evolution the last stage of ‘evolution’. Of course, this does not mean that plants and animals cannot adapt. It is well-known that some butterflies change colour if they live near factories, their wings go darker. Also there develop different species of the same animal, some become bigger and some smaller. This is because, for example, they may live on big islands where there is lot to eat or small islands, where there is little to eat.

Such adaptation also exists among us. For example, in hot countries people have darker skin, hair and eyes in order to protect themselves. On the other hand, in cold countries people have pale skin and often have blond hair and blue eyes. This is all about survival in different climates, we adapt in order to survive. But this adaptation is not the same as some magical and quite unproven theory of evolution, where somehow microbes become whales, bees become eagles, kangaroos become elephants or chimpanzees become human-beings.

We also note that the human race began with one man and one woman, whom we call Adam and Eve: although we are all different, through adaptation to different climates, we all have one common father and mother, we all belong to the same family. This fact is confirmed by modern DNA testing. Why are people white, brown, yellow, black and have different colour hair and eyes, different sizes and heights, slightly different shape eyes, noses, lips and so on? Simply as the result of adaptation to cold and hot climates, to mountains and lowlands, and to diet.

Of course, we also know more about the past from what we have found in the earth.

For example, we now know that the universe is enormous; in fact, we did not know just how enormous Creation is until quite recently. This discovery has been made now, so that we can adore God’s work in wonder, rather than dismiss such a vast and complex universe as some random accident.

We also know that there were many creatures that no longer exist. Some animals have died out quite recently, hunted to extinction, others, like so-called ‘dinosaurs’, whose fossils we can find, lived a very long time ago and died out because of huge changes in climate. Nobody knows exactly when, and scientists disagree with each other about this, constantly changing their theories as they make new discoveries. Some people ask why the Bible does not mention such creatures that long ago died out. This is quite simply because they lived before people did, as the Bible says, animals were made first, so the only way that we can know about them is by discovering their fossils, which we have only done in recent times. The Bible records only the most important things about God and human-beings. We leave the records of disappeared animals like dinosaurs to those who dig up their fossils.

And, thirdly, we also know that although God made everything good, now there are many bad things: death, animals that kill each other, mosquitoes that kill people, rats that spread diseases. The reason for this is also related in the Book of Genesis. Here we learn that God made everything good, but when people disobeyed Him, they became bad. And because they became bad, they died. And this bad and death spread to all Creation, poisoning it.

We should be careful about saying much more than this, because then we would get involved in theories and ideas and so in arguments, which can never be proved one way or the other. It seems to us better to stick to facts.

The above was first published in the second issue of ‘Searchlight’, the ROCOR diocesan magazine for young people. It is available from Mary Kisliakov: mary0170@yahoo.com

Fake News and Fake History, Frangistan and Freedom

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Fake News and Fake History

We are told that in 2017 43% of British people still trust the UK media to tell the truth, down from 50% in 2016 (1). Why is the figure still so amazingly high? After all, by the end of the old Soviet Union, the figure for trust in the Soviet media must have been 0%. And the fake news issued by all the Western Establishment media, from the BBC to the New York Times, from Le Monde to German Television, is no more truthful than the propaganda lies issued by the three generations of the Soviet Establishment. The reason for this high figure can only be because many Western people have been so deeply brainwashed by Establishment lies, not over three generations, but over a millennium, forty generations. In other words, what lies behind fake news is fake history.

This fake history actually began over a millennium ago, with the Frankish ‘Charlemagne’ (real name: Karl the Tall) in the First Reich centred in Aachen. He began the first post-Truth society with the news that he had the right to massacre any non-Frankish peoples (Saxons, Slavs or anyone else) who resisted him. This was because he had the self-created divine right to bring ‘barbarians’ to his ‘truth’ and if they refused to accept his truth, then they could be murdered en masse, which he did. As the ‘Father of Europe’ (2), the truth of the Holy Spirit flowed from him as vicar of God on earth – a conscious part of his filioque ideology. Fortunately, his propaganda myth was rejected in and immediately after his time, because Orthodox Christianity was still then strong enough, even in his Western tip of Eurasia, for it to be rejected.

Unfortunately, this spiritual strength did not last and by the mid-eleventh century his propaganda to mask plunder, that the task of Frankish ‘Europe’ was to spread ‘civilization’ among ‘primitive peoples’, had been revived under the popes. As a result, in 1066 the papally-sponsored, feudal Normans invaded, occupied and massacred their way through England (3) and then all Britain. A generation later Frankish Europe began the ‘crusades’, invading, occupying and massacring their way to the Holy Land. In 1204 their greed led them to plunder the Christian Capital of ‘Byzantium’ (real name: New Rome). Their cousins then attempted to plunder Russia under the name of the ‘Teutonic Knights’. In and after 1492 their ‘Frankish’ (4) Spanish and Portuguese spiritual cousins took part in the rape of South and Central America, as well as Mexico.

Later, other spiritual descendants of the Franks got rich quick by plundering Roman Catholicism, under the pretext of ‘The Reformation’. In England, the Tudor ‘reformers’ proved to be ruthless Machiavellians and their descendants massacred all who resisted them in civil wars in England and then in genocide in Ireland. In 1689 they usurped power from the legitimate Stuart Kings and invited Dutch and then German puppet monarchs to permit their merchant class to build an Empire based on slavery. They sang ‘Britons never, never, never will be slaves’, but did not add that everyone else would precisely be slaves, including their own voteless labouring masses. In the 19th century the elite of Western Europe plundered Asia and Africa, as described by the Polish novelist Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novel ‘The Heart of Darkness’.

Nineteenth-century ‘Frankish’ hypocrisy, wiping out the ‘Red Indians’, the Tasmanians, slaughtering spear-armed Africans with Maxim guns (5) and anyone else who stood in their way, led directly to two ‘World Wars’ (real name: inter-tribal European Wars), which Western Europe spread worldwide, not least through the descendants of European colonists in North America. The Western European ideologies of Capitalism, Communism and Fascism did untold damage, creating and using weapons of mass destruction, which killed tens of millions and can destroy the whole planet many times over. In the 21st century the continued neo-colonial attempts to impose Western values on the Middle East, notably on Iraq, called a ‘crusade’ by the Italian leader Berlusconi, in a bid to plunder and control, are still generating massive genocide.

Frangistan and Freedom

The above, presented by fake history as the ‘generous’ civilizing influence of the West among the Rest, ‘the barbarians’, is in fact the unjustifiable justification for the plunder and control of the Non-Western world by the Western world. Because of its origins in Continental Western Europe under the Frank Charlemagne, this Western world became known as ‘Frangistan’ in traditional Persian. However, long before, the Norman invasions of Scotland and Ireland in the 12th century were called ‘the coming of the Franks’, Arabs called Westerners ‘Faranga’ and when the Portuguese and Spaniards arrived off the coasts of China in the 16th century, locals called them ‘Fo-lang-ki’ – Franks. And in modern Hindi all Europeans in general are still referred to as ‘Firang’ (4). In other words, ‘Frangistan’ is the Western world.

With its modern acronyms of USA, EU, NATO and G7, Frangistan, represents much less than one seventh of the world, much less because many ordinary ‘Franks’ can themselves see through the fake history spun by the Frankish elite. In the real world, where live the other six and a half billion of the world’s population, this Western world seems to be isolated. Originally meaning only the Western tip of Northern Eurasia, the name Frangistan comes, as we have said, from the one Germanic tribe, the Franks. Ironically, this meant ‘the free’, but it has come to define the world’s greatest enslavers – whether literally, as before in the Americas and Africa, or else economically, as today. The endlessly greedy and aggressive ‘Franks’ not only destroyed the Christian Civilization of New Rome, but all other civilizations, whoseever assets could be stripped.

Thus, they destroyed the great civilization along the Amazon, reducing the cities by the banks of that river to jungle, they destroyed the other civilizations of South America, among them the Inca, those of Central America, among them the Aztec and the sophisticated Maya, and despised and laid waste to all others in North America, India, China, Japan and the rest of Asia, as well as in Africa. Only when the ‘free’ ‘Franks’, or at least the 43% of them who apparently still believe in the fake history told them, have delivered themselves from their self-justifying fake history, that they are ‘civilized’, demonizing the Non-Frankish peoples with their often far more advanced and humble civilizations, as ‘half-devil, half-child’ (Kipling), ‘wild animals’, ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’ and wishing them dead, will they really be free.

The self-justifying foundation of the ‘civilizing’ propaganda for plunder, ‘the white man’s burden’, is that the Franks persuaded themselves that they alone are ‘Christians’, that ‘God speaks only to them’ (George Bush (6)). But their god is not the Risen Christ, the Living God, Who is ‘an all-consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12, 29), but the sentimental, weak as water, bleeding Western man ‘Jesus’. Thus, there is nothing new in fake news. Western history is a thousand years of fake news. The news is: ‘We are bringing you ‘Christian’ civilization (meaning our plunder of your civilization), and if you reject it, ‘as true Christians’ we will be so kind as to bomb you back into the Stone Age’. Gun and Bible. Freedom will come for the ‘Franks’ only when they give up their thousand years of fake news and retrieve real Western history in the saints of the pre-Frankish past.

The word ‘Europe’ is said to mean ‘the West’ and the word ‘Asia’ ‘the East’. Hence ‘Eurasia’, where all civilization began, means ‘West-east’. By far the greatest part of ‘West-East’ Eurasia is united in the Eurasian Russian Federation. This developed and expanded by assimilation, not by massacre, quite rapidly from Muscovy to the Arctic north, then to the east, gradually heroically overcoming immense Tartar/Muslim opposition, as far as the shores of the Pacific and even across it, then to the south (although ‘Frangistan’ has challenged that expansion by aggressive wars and imposing German puppet kings in the Balkans, especially to the south-west, invading the Crimea twice in a century. With illegal sanctions it is still challenging today the overwhelming democratic will of Crimeans to return to and belong to the Federation (7)).

Indeed, even apart from the Crimea in the south-west, the Christian Federation of Russia (unlike the atheist USSR) has never been able to expand to the west, with Western Europe powers repeatedly invading Federation territory, four times between 1812 and 1941 alone. This tragedy has meant the self-isolation of Western Europe, cut off from Christian Northern Eurasia. Today’s great hope among many in the Federation is that it will at long last be able to establish a Metropolia in Western Europe, thus bringing the extreme Western territory at least into Church order out of its chaos. This will represent a spiritual victory, the victory over 1,000 years of fake news, the millennial fake history of ‘Frangistan’, delivering it and bringing it to rediscover the real Europe, the Free Christian Europe of the Saints of the first millennium, of the Church of God.

Notes:

1. uk.businessinsider.com/fake-news-drives-down-programmatic-budgets-2017-6

2. The monstrous Karl, founder of the First Reich in 800, the mass murderer and forerunner of Bismarck of the Second Reich and of Hitler of the Third Reich, is still quite seriously honoured as ‘The Father of Europe’, notably by the Fourth Reich EU elite.

3. The Norman occupiers wrote their own propaganda history, proclaiming that there had been no English kings or people before them, merely ‘primitive’ and ‘decadent’ ‘Anglo-Saxons’. To this day kings of England are numbered from the foreign kings from 1066 on; not one of them has been English.

4. For a full survey of the word ‘Frank’ to mean a Western European see ‘The Making of Europe’ (950-1350), by Robert Bartlett, 1993, especially pages 101-105.

5. See Hilaire Belloc, in the words of the figure “Blood” in his poem “The Modern Traveller”:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.

6. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa

7. The bilionaire leader of the genocidal, US-installed Kiev puppet junta, Poroshenko (real name: Waltzman) has only this week stated that all Ukrainians who do not accept his tyranny should go and live in Siberia. With these words he has repeated the ‘Drang nach Osten’, ‘Lebesnraum’ policy of Hitler, to exile all East Slavs to the east of the Urals in order to make room for ‘European’ expansion and exploitation in the east.