Red Russia or White Russia?

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union almost exactly a generation ago, the question has often been raised as to what the destiny of Russia is – to be Red or White. For some, called Red Russians, are Soviet-born, and others, called White Russians, were born outside the Soviet Union. Of course, the question is purely abstract, inasmuch as both Red Russia and White Russia are dead. Red Russia died a generation ago, though it had been dying for a generation before that. As for White Russia, I was one of the many priests who buried its last representatives in the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, I am an heir to White Russia, just as there are those who are heirs to Red Russia. And, although it may sound strange to some, I find myself in complete agreement with the heirs of Red Russia and I know and respect them. Why?

Although there were heroic Tsarist figures in White Russia, there were many anti-Tsarist figures also, indeed, many of the latter were atheists. Their only concern in fighting the Reds was not to fight against atheism and for the restoration of the Tsar, but to get their property and money back. In other words, they were capitalists, without spiritual significance. That is how the White Movement was undermined, betrayed and lost – by their spiritual impurity. Their heirs, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren, are sometimes shocked to learn that the Tsar’s Russia had free schooling and an advanced educational system, with almost 90% literacy, and more or less free healthcare (a one rouble stamp per year in your passport) and a strong social protection system. Social justice was a priority.

More than this, the Russian Empire of Tsar Nicholas II keenly supported anti-colonial independence movements around the world, whether in Siam (Thailand) and Morocco, Korea and Ethiopia, South Africa and Tibet. The fact is that what the Soviet Union is praised for – its free education, free medicine, social justice and anti-colonialism – was merely its inheritance from the Tsar’s Russia. On the other hand, what it is castigated for, its slaughter of millions of its own citizens in artificial famines and concentration camps, its vicious persecution of the Church, dissidents and minorities, its alcohol, abortion, corruption and divorce epidemics and its initial inability to defend its borders against Hitler’s hordes (in the First World War, the Germans got no further than the western borders of Russia), were not parts of the Tsar’s Russia.

Today, with Red Russia dead, there is no going back to its appalling, genocidal practices, especially in the early Troskyite days of the anti-Russian Zionist Bolsheviks. As for the compromised part of White Russia that was not White at all, the money-grubbing and exploitative part that was anti-Tsar and carried out the February Revolution for its own selfish, nationalistic, political, power-grabbing interests, it too is dead. It withered away in irrelevance and bankruptcy in Paris and elsewhere. What is left? There remains the White Russia in exile that believes in Holy Rus and today encourages and is encouraged by that part of today’s Russia that believes in the same. This, we believe, is the Russia that will yet triumph over the remaining negative vestiges of the Soviet era, its alcohol, abortion, corruption and divorce.

Today, the struggle of the heirs of both Red and White Russia is not against one another. It is a common struggle against the anti-Christian traitors of post-Soviet Russia, the corrupt, power-seeking oligarchs who control so much of the media, industry and bureaucracy. These are those who, in their own selfish interests, act as the puppets of the anti-Christian Western neocons, against whom we heirs of White Russia in the West also struggle and against whom we struggled in 1917. For today’s neocons are the spiritual descendants of the selfsame secularists who betrayed the Church in Western Europe a thousand years ago, splitting it from the rest of the Church, making it first Roman Catholic and then Protestant, and who also betrayed the Tsar’s Russia in February 1917. They all say that Might is Right: but we all say that God is Right.