Tag Archives: Resurrection

Towards the Civilisation of the Resurrection

Introduction: The Obvious Russian Victory in the Ukraine

It was from the outset clear that there could only be one winner in the conflict in the Ukraine – the Russian Federation. This is because it is fighting on its doorstep – so there are no logistic issues – in a country where nearly half the population is pro-Russian anyway. Russia, by far the largest country in the world, certainly does not need more territory. Indeed, it is not fighting for territory, but for security by demilitarising and denazifying the very threatening Russophobic Kiev puppet regime, which exists only because of the support, finance and arms of the US elite. And Russia is ideally placed to conduct a war of attrition, which is what it is doing, as Kiev suicidally throws its few arms and few troops into the direct lines of Russian fire.

Russia also has seven times the present Ukrainian population and is completely independent in terms of natural and human resources. It also has one of the best educational systems, very advanced technology and one of the largest militaries in the world. It has most of the world’s most advanced and cheapest arms, such as hypersonic missiles, outmatching NATO’s absurdly expensive and obsolete arms. Russia can provide these arms to others who wish to protect themselves from US threats, it has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world and is supported diplomatically by China and indeed the Non-Western 90% of the world. The deindustrialised West stands no chance against it. However, it is one thing for Russia to win a war, quite another, as all should know from the recent US invasions of West Asia, for Russia to win the peace.

Why the Ukraine?

Essentially the conflict in the Ukraine is a civilisational war. Who does the Ukraine belong to? Does it belong to Western Civilisation, first Catholic, then Protestant, and now Secularist? Or does it belong to (Orthodox) Christian Civilisation, which stretches up from Gaza and Jerusalem northwards to the White Sea and eastwards from the Montenegrin shores of the Adriatic, from eastern Slovakia and eastern Poland to Vladivostok? History tells us that the Ukraine is a strange amalgam, an artificial country, invented at the end of the 19th century by the Austro-Hungarians in order to divide and rule, justifying their domination. In reality, over 80% of the Ukraine is part of Christian Civilisation, for the south and the east of what is now called the Ukraine was part of Russia until 1922 and all the Ukraine is an invention of Communist dictators since then. It is the decisions of these Communist dictators which are being so keenly supported by the US and NATO governments today.

These dictators were Lenin (in 1922), Stalin (in 1945) and Khruschev, who at a drunken party in 1954 gave the Russian Crimea to the Ukraine. Obviously, none of these evil and brutal dictators ever consulted the Russian population whether they wanted to belong to the Ukraine, let alone if they wanted to abandon their own language and be forced to speak Ukrainian. Perhaps the greatest error was that of the atheist Stalin, who in 1945 stole a small area of the far west of what is now called the Ukraine, called Western Galicia. It was this Western Galicia which Tsar Nicholas II had intended to give to the newly independent Poland after the Russian victory in the First World War. This Western Galicia had for centuries been part of the Habsburg Empire and then, after 1918, of Poland. At the same time, he stole smaller areas that had long belonged to Romania and another part called Carpatho-Rus, also miscalled ‘Ruthenia’, which had belonged to Hungary, before that to Czechoslovakia, and before that to the Habsburgs who had oppressed it.

The West Galician Tragedy

The West Galicians alone spoke authentic Ukrainian (a language different from Russian and Polish) as their first language. Like nearly all Catholics in Europe at the time, from de Valera’s Ireland to the Catholic priest Hlinka’s Slovakia, the murderous Pavelic’s Croatia, Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain, Petain’s France and to Mussolini’s Italy) these Galicians, some of them joining the SS, had been ardent Nazis under the German Occupation from 1941 to 1944, as they were also ardent anti-Communists. With Nazi encouragement they ethnically cleansed, massacring Jews, Poles (over 100,000) and Russians alike, in huge numbers. The Galicians gradually rose to power, armed by parachute drops of arms from the CIA and MI6 after 1945 right up till the late 1950s, oppressing others and their languages, Hungarian, Romanian and Carpatho-Rusyn. The Galicians were nearly all Uniats (also known as Greek Catholics), which is a fanatically nationalist religion, different from the rest of the Ukrainians who are Orthodox and from the Poles who are Catholics.

The rise of the pro-Nazi West Galician Uniats became a steep and victorious ascent under the Americans from 1991 on. So that they could Americanise the population, the Americans sent a host of Protestant missionaries. When this failed, in 2018 the Americans set up a fake Orthodox Church, staffed by gangsters and other dollar-paid thugs, and then imposed the Western calendar on it. Of course, virtually nobody has joined it, everyone knows it is an American fake. In other words, after Western European countries had been forced to give up their settler colonial empires around the world after 1945 (the Dutch, the British, the French, the Belgian, the Portuguese and the South Africans), the US set up an apartheid colonial empire in the Ukraine, using the fanatical pro-Nazi Galicians as their enforcers, a battering ram against Russia, just as the British had used the Sikhs in India and the French the Harkis in Algeria against the rest. However, this was not the first case in the late 20th century, for the US has already done the same thing with Israel.

The Western Civilisation of Suicide

However, the period of the domination and exploitation of the world’s peoples by the Western elite, essentially the elite of the USA and of the very narrow strip of land north of it where 90% of Canadians live, and Western Europe, is largely over. The spirit of Cruel Britannia and Cruel America and their forever wars is ending. However, the Western elite resists the death of its domination and refuses to accept constructive change and co-operation, seeking confrontation instead. Its resistance to inevitable change on account of its denial that it is inevitable is leading to suicidal actions in its death agony. And it has exported that agony. Thus, the Western strategy in the Ukraine which has never been to help that wretched country, but to try and weaken US rivals, Russia and, through it, China.

So the Ukraine shares in the same demographically suicidal trap. Since the bloody Western coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in Kiev in 2014, the Ukraine has already lost half its population, down from 40 million to 20 million, also losing one and a half million dead or wounded troops in two years. It is no longer a viable State and cannot even pay the salaries of its civil servants, which are paid by the US and the EU. Who wants to live there or have children there? There is no future. However, the owner of the Ukrainian State, Biden, also lives in a country of suicide in a mixture of bankruptcy and fentanyl. Biden’s US cannot even defeat the Houthis of Yemen. Biden’s term that began with the humiliating US rout in Kabul is ending with the humiliating US rout in Kiev.

European Suicide

However, the same suicide is also taking place in the US colony in Israel, which commits genocidal blunder after genocidal blunder and loses all sympathy worldwide. This suicide is also happening in Europe. Self-imposed sanctions against Russia have meant an 84% increase in European energy costs, equivalent to a loss of one trillion euros. Meanwhile, Russia simply sells its energy to many other willing buyers outside the Western world. Poland and the Baltic statelets have bankrupted themselves helping Ukrainian ‘refugees’, who have run away from the suicidal danger of having to serve in the Ukrainian Army. The German elite has committed economic and social suicide by allowing the US and its allies to destroy its source of cheap energy, the Nordstream pipelines. Germany, once the locomotive of the EU, is now losing its strength, its manufacturing industry. Russia has overtaken the German economy. The French elite, led by the banker Macron, has committed suicide with its racist ideology of superiority towards its colonial empire in West Africa, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, where in nickel-rich Kanaky (New Caledonia) revolt against France is again on the streets.

In the UK, with its collapsing infrastructure, reducing parts of its town and city administrations, water supplies, railways, roads, hospitals and schools to Third World levels, as in the USA, the unelected and extremely unpopular Sunak has given up. First, there was his self-humiliation, while standing in the pouring rain, of declaring that he will hold an election on 4 July, US Independence Day, for the UK has outsourced its Independence to the US. Now Sunak the bank teller has declared that he does not want any young people or people with children and grandchildren to vote for him by absurdly decreeing that he will reintroduce National Service for young people. (Something that Germany had rejected just before him). He and his Party are dead. But then the anti-Left wing Labour ‘Opposition’ which also supports the anti-Ukrainian genocide in the Ukraine and the anti-Palestinian genocide in Gaza is just as dead.

The Ukrainian Myth and Western Self-Esteem

Western politicians declare: ‘We cannot let Russia win in the Ukraine’. Why? Russians, keenly supported by long-oppressed Eastern and Southern Ukrainians, consider that they are fighting to liberate Russians who live on ancient Russian territory, that is, in Eastern and Southern Ukraine. The sacked and disgraced British Prime Minister Johnson has explained: ‘We are at risk of losing Western hegemony’. Admitting Western hegemony, he believes in what can only be called the ‘Western ideology’, that is, the myth that the West is superior to the Rest. This is the ideology of hubris, rejected by the seven billion people of the Global Majority and also by many in the West itself (see below). And that ideology, like all ideologies which apply narrow human imaginings to ever-changing reality, makes those who believe in it stupid.

Western politicians have replaced the old ideological opposition between Capitalism and Communism with a new and mythical opposition between ‘Democracy and Autocracy’. And yet the Ukraine is not a democracy. Its President is a martial law dictator, whose term in office ended on 20 May, who has banned other political parties, the free media, and has had murdered those who disagree with him or else sent them to the torture-chambers of his secret police. His Neo-Nazi military pressgang ordinary Ukrainians into the Army, which is why some ten million of them have either fled abroad (ironically, above all, to Russia), or else are in hiding in their apartments, leaving the streets empty of men. No Ukrainian man wants to face almost certain death by being pressganged into serving in the Ukrainian Army.

Western Fascist Ideology

However, which Western leader has been elected by over 50% of his citizens, let alone represents their views? Not a single one. They are all minority leaders. In fact, so-called Western ‘Democracy’ is a unipolar hegemony, a Uniparty, supported and run by wealthy oligarchs. For in so-called ‘Democracy’ there is no value higher than profit. There is no-one to vote for, both parties are run by the ‘Deep State’, that is, by the Establishment. The West is living in Communist times. There you could vote for anyone, as long as they belonged to the Communist Party. So in the modern West you can vote for anyone as long as they belong to the Establishment/Deep State. Not the Soviet Union, but the Western Union. As for ‘Autocracy’, ‘authoritarian government’, it forms a multipolar world of sovereign patriotisms, supported by the people. (This is why ‘democrats’ deride them as ‘populists’). For ‘Autocracy’ there is no value higher than patriotism. Thus, the actual division in the modern world is not between Democracy and Autocracy, but between Transnational Oligarchy and National Sovereignty, or, put more simply, between Globalism and Patriotism.

In the former French colonies they know this, they at least have no illusions. That is why they are kicking French (and American) troops out. They know it in Armenia, where, led by a patriotic archbishop, they are trying to kick out EU meddlers and their anti-patriotic, EU puppet-leader. None of this is described in the delusional Western media, since globalist oligarchs own them. The Western ideology is supremacism, of which Nazism is only the best-known form. This ideology is espoused by Western supremacist EU officials, many of them grandchildren of actual German Nazis, and the disgraced liar, the British Prime Minister Johnson. He openly praised Ukrainian Nazis as ‘heroes’ and had his photograph taken with them and their Nazi Azov flag. This is the disease of exceptionalism, ‘we are above the law’, as seen in the Western decision to ignore the findings of the International Criminal Court against the genocidal Mileikowsky (who hides behind the alias of Netanyahu). This is satanic pride.

The World on the Nuclear Brink

As a result, we face a situation potentially worse than in 1962, when the world was threatened by nuclear war on account of US missiles positioned near the Soviet border in Turkey. Once the US President Kennedy had removed those missiles, the USSR removed its threat to position its missiles in Cuba. Today some in NATO are threatening to bomb Russia through their Kiev proxies and Russia is therefore threatening to reply in kind. A simultaneous triple war is threatened, in the Ukraine, in the Middle East and in Taiwan, plus the probability that the West will lose Slovakia (where it has tried to assassinate the Prime Minister), Hungary, Georgia (ruled by a Frenchwoman and CIA-run NGOs and whose patriots are threatened by EU assassination), Central Asia, Kosovo, Armenia, Syria, all of Africa (in uranium-rich Niger, Burkina Faso and the Congo in particular), most of Latin America and even the rest of the now bankrupt EU. This includes the US-run Baltics, Poland, Bulgaria and Moldova, which are in fact for the moment run by their US ambassador-governors.

To describe all this, they use the absurd term ‘Cold War’ or ‘Cold War II’. This never existed. Wars were and are always hot, whether in Korea, Africa, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq or today in the Ukraine and Gaza. Western politicians declare that there is a Russian threat to ‘Western Civilisation’, i.e., if defiant Russia does not agree to be bombed by NATO without reply and back the direct and indirect Western massacres which have taken place in Korea, Vietnam, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine and Gaza, and Western colour revolutions, which use small numbers of dollar-paid protestors in Belarus, Kazakhstan, today in Georgia, and tomorrow perhaps in Slovakia and Hungary, then, indeed, that particular exploitative and corrupt form of ‘Western Civilisation’ will collapse. Thank God.

Christian Civilisation

However, that does not mean that Civilisation in the Western world will collapse. On the contrary, it will become civilised, renewed, recovered and restart its long-ago interrupted existence. Clearly, we who are Western and were born in the West do not belong to that ‘Western Civilisation’ of Fascist superiority and impunity, of Nazi hubris and arrogance. That can be called ‘Zionism’ (this is nothing to do with Jews), which proclaims that anything it does is justified because it is ‘superior’, ‘indispensable’ and, just like its ancestor the Roman Papacy, ‘infallible’. For example, the leader of the British Labour Party, an Establishment multi-millionaire, proudly states that he is a ‘Zionist’. So do the Catholic Biden and the atheist Johnson.

We are not Zionists, for we belong to another Western Civilisation, whose sign is not pride, but humility. This Civilisation is called Christian Civilisation. Here we are not speaking of ‘Western Christian Civilisation’, which does not exist as such, but of Christian Civilisation in the West. This Civilisation is part of that same worldwide Orthodox Christian Civilisation which was founded in Jerusalem in AD 33 and existed almost all through the Mediterranean world in the first millennium and still exists in parts of the Middle East and large parts of Eastern Europe. And we too still belong it, this Civilisation of the Resurrection. It does not matter whether we are in the East or the West, we are Orthodox Christians.

The Renewal of Orthodox Christian Civilisation

The definition of Orthodox Christian Civilisation is that it produces saints, for saints are the product of the Holy Spirit, Who makes the Church live. Some say that this Orthodox Christian Civilisation is corrupted, that is, that it no longer produces saints. This is not true. Within the last 100 years, we have seen many new saints on Mt Athos, in Greece, Serbia, Romania, in Carpatho-Russia and everywhere in the former Communist lands. True, there are parts of the Church where we do not see any saints for the moment, but we do see persecuted Confessors of the Faith, bishops, monks, nuns, priests and laypeople and Martyrs for the Faith – clergy and laity. Critics will point to individuals, especially in the heights of Constantinople or Moscow, who have been corrupted and created scandals, either financial or moral, through being tempted by money or power.

However, it is notable that after his landslide election victory and new mandate, President Putin is now strong enough to begin resolving the problems caused by post-Soviet corruption in Russia. Within two weeks, he has had four generals arrested for stealing large amounts of money and equipment. He has now appointed a new Minister of Defence, an Orthodox Christian economist, who is said to be incorruptible. After purging the military, perhaps next the President will purge the post-Soviet Church administration, with its top-heavy centralism, corrupt individuals and scandals, including those infiltrated by the CIA. All these ‘princes of the Church’, with their love of clerical luxury, ignore the grassroots and have made the Church in Russia very unpopular. Their only use for priests is as an army of moneymakers for themselves. We the monastics, the parish clergy and the people have no time for this disgusting froth. If the new Christian Civilisation is to take shape and take root once more in the West and in the East, it must not be corrupt.

Conclusion: A Way Forward

We have spoken about winning the peace. This will be essential for the Church in the Ukraine after the military conflict is over. ‘For the peace of the whole world, the peace of all Rus and victory over the forces of evil, the good estate of the holy Churches of God and the union of all, let us pray to the Lord’. Here in bold are the words that we thought should have been added to the great litany of the Russian Church for the duration of the conflict. And the Communist-period named Patriarchate of Moscow should have been renamed ‘The Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’, its administrative headquarters being removed to the New Jerusalem Monastery outside Moscow. As Russia is now a national State, albeit multi-ethnic, the Russian Orthodox Church should at once have granted autocephaly to Churches outside its national borders, thus forming the Ukrainian Church, the Moldovan Church and the Baltic Church (covering Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland).

Thus, it would have established three new Autocephalous Churches, outplaying US-orchestrated Constantinople schisms in Lithuania, the Ukraine and Estonia, just as the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches were created for newly-independent countries in the last century and so avoided schisms. And if Belarus and the five countries of Central Asia also desired autocephaly, they too should receive it, creating two more Autocephalous Churches, the Belarussian and the Central Asian. And schism should never have been encouraged by Moscow in ROCOR or in Africa. And senior hierarchs could have adopted the attitude of St Nicholas of Japan during the Japanese War against Russia in 1904-5, who locked himself away and prayed. This is the Civilisation of the Resurrection. Here was a way of winning the peace. None of this has been done. And that is why all is now so delicate.

Afterword: Russia’s Lost Time and the Magic Mountain of Europe

In 1913 the famous French economist Edmond Thierry (1854-1925) predicted that by 1950 Russia would dominate Europe politically, economically and financially. In other words, if Russia had not undergone the 1917 ‘revolution’, 33 years later, in 1950, Russia would have dominated Europe. What happened? Quite simply, Russia lost 74 years (1917-1991) under the Soviet regime. Only now, in 2024, has it overtaken Germany and become the largest economy in a Europe which it also dominates politically and soon will dominate financially.

Exactly 100 years ago the German author Thomas Mann wrote his novel ‘The Magic Mountain’. It is about a group of Europeans in a sanatorium. It is about all the problems of a Europe in disarray. The novel was perhaps written prematurely. Perhaps it should have been written today, for Europe is now in an even greater disarray than after the slaughter of the Great War. There is only one hope for the present Europe which is now in its self-made sanatorium of civilisational collapse: that hope is to head for the Civilisation of the Resurrection.

 

 

 

 

The Russian Orthodox Church: Pessimism, Idealism and Realism

Any reading of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, not least from the many volumes of the biography of the Patristically-minded Metropolitan Antony of Kiev and Galicia (1), confirms that there were many negative aspects to her life before the Revolution. Notably, partly because she had been deprived of a Patriarch by Peter I some 200 years before, a careerist mentality had developed within her senior clergy, some of whom had become civil servant administrators on behalf of a bureaucratic State. This meant that many a bishop had been appointed to his position without reference to his zeal for the Faith or to any Faith in general, but only with reference to his ability to ‘administrate’.

Also the Academies and seminaries had become hotbeds of German Protestant and protesting philosophical influence. Some reckon that 90% of pre-Revolutionary seminarists were atheists and revolutionaries – among them many a Bolshevik, including Joseph Jugashvili, later called Stalin, who was ejected from one. An example of a product of an Academy was the very senior Protopresbyter George Shavelsky, a treacherous bureaucrat who had little time for piety, which he dismissed as ‘mysticism’. He was also an enemy of Tsar Nicholas II and the spiritually alive, as is made quite clear in his detailed and self-condemning autobiography (2). In the emigration his sympathies were entirely with the masonic-led Paris Jurisdiction which actually abandoned both parts of the Russian Church!

The paralysing hand of State bureaucracy, eminently disloyal to the Tsar and infected with the Revolutionary virus, with its careerism, conformism and nationalist centralization seemed to penetrate everywhere. These bureaucratic abuses all formed the suicidal basis of the later Soviet regime, in which the old ‘chinovniki’ (civil servants) simply turned overnight into Communist ‘apparatchiki’; their stifling spirit, so detested by the people, was exactly the same. Thus, the State bureaucracy had made the ancient Church of Georgia into a department of the Russian Church! And when Russian forces at last liberated Eastern Galicia (the area centred around Lvov) from Austro-Hungarian control in 1915, incompetent Saint Petersburg bureaucrats soon turned the people away from Orthodoxy and back to Uniatism.

Sadly, there was decadence in many a wealthy monastery too; the stories are legion. As for some village priests, often through no fault of their own, their lack of education, impoverished situation and need for money simply to survive had discredited the Church in many places. The fact is that the Church looked after the State, but for the most part the State did not look after the Church. This was because the State was increasingly run by atheist bureaucrats, which is why they had no problem in serving the atheist Bolshevik State and why the State machine, Duma masons and generals among them, betrayed the Tsar, the Lord’s Anointed. For example, the grandfather of a relative of mine was the last pre-Revolutionary ambassador to Washington – and an atheist….

Indeed, a generation or two ago there was no need to read to read about all this. It was enough to talk to old émigrés who had been adults before the 1917 Revolution or whose parents had accurately described the then situation to them. They were the best remedy for the idealism of later émigrés and others who idealized pre-Revolutionary times for ideological reasons. I well remember one émigré’s grandson who condemned contemporary Russian bishops for having comfortable black cars, driven by their deacons. The ever-memorable patriot and missionary, Archbishop Antony of Geneva, soon corrected him: ‘And what about pre-Revolutionary bishops who each had a black carriage and horses with their driver?’

Another émigré, Prince Boris Galitsin (may his memory be eternal), told me of his youthful naivety and that he only realized that brothels had attached themselves to the First World War Russian Army when he was in his thirties. (Though any reader of the late Archimandrite Sophrony’s version of the life of St Silouan can read of the same and also of how the future saint had lived before the Revolution, not keeping the fasts and getting a village girl pregnant). Another émigré aristocrat told me that the Church in the emigration was like a glass of clear water, inside Russia it was dirty water. I asked him why then we in the emigration had so many defrocked priests and such a severe shortage of priests in general. He had no answer.

The simple fact is that if the members of the Russian Church had all been as they should have been, then no Revolution would ever have happened. The betrayal of the living spirit of the Church is why some bishops then betrayed the Tsar in 1917. This is why the 1917-18 Church Council took place without freedom, under the masonic influence of the democrat Aaron Adler (later called Alexander Kerensky), though it did at least restore the Patriarchate, despite the vigorous opposition of many lay professors of theology and bishops. One of Kerensky’s first and typical acts had been to remove the saintly, such as Metr (now St) Macarius of Moscow. No saints for him! This is why the Bolshevik-sponsored Renovationists (under Metr Alexander Vvedensky and his three wives) prospered for a few short years, many of their clergy being graduates from the decadent pre-Revolutionary Academies and seminaries.

This betrayal is why Metr (later Patriarch) Sergius could make his infamous Declaration of loyalty to a militant atheist government, thus guaranteeing division, so that many inside enslaved Russia and virtually everyone in the entirely free Russian Church in the emigration would not follow him. This is why one small part of the emigration, members of which had created and welcomed the February Revolution, left the Russian Church altogether. And this is why such second generation émigré Parisian academics like the late Fr Alexander Schmemann (born 1921) and their American disciples turned to Renovationism, denying that Holy Rus had ever existed (!), and that the only hope for the Church (!) was in its  American-style Protestantization, that is, Desacralization, which produces not a single saint. These were words he said to me, but also words that he wrote in books.

So much for both second-generation emigre cynicism and second-generation idealism. Fortunately, that is only part of the story and, by far the least interesting part. Beyond the superficial froth of both, academic cynics and naïve and ill-informed idealists there is a far deeper story, a real story, an edifying story, the story of saintliness, of the real Church of God.

Before the Revolution the Russian Orthodox Church was what any real Church should be – a seedbed of saints, a saint-making machine. We only have to think of St Seraphim of Sarov, the Optina and Glinsk Elders and St John of Kronstadt. But above all we can think of the preparation of the millions of martyrs and confessors for the Faith under the Soviet yoke (3), the tens of thousands of martyred and confessing clergy and laypeople, as well as confessor-saints like St Seraphim of Vyritsa, St Matrona of Moscow and St Luke of Simferopol, who had been prepared by the pre-Revolutionary Church. It was their victory that guaranteed the cleansing of the Church inside Russia by blood and persecution from the abuses from before the Revolution and her Resurrection after the atheist Golgotha was over.

However, there was a parallel situation in the emigration. We can say that perhaps 50% of the emigration was not only anti-Orthodox, but also (and as a result) anti-patriotic. These were those who had carried out the Revolution with pride, largely aristocrats. In the emigration, highly politicized, they deserted the Russian Church and Russian history, and went to one or another extreme. Either they became unChristian, narrow-minded nationalists who died out and disappeared, or else they became enamoured of the countries where they lived, lost the Russian language, culture and culture and never even thought of repenting for their treason, cowardice and deceit. Just the opposite – they actually justified their apostasy! Not for the Renovationists either St John of Kronstadt or St John of Shanghai, both of whom they ferociously slandered and rejected, and I am a witness to this.

However, another perhaps 50% of the emigration were not only Orthodox but also, and as a result, patriots. Indeed, the more saintly the Orthodox, the more they were patriots. For them exile was a call to repentance, a chastisement deserved for the sins of the fathers. The cases of the saints of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, St Jonah of Manchuria, St John of Shanghai and the future St Seraphim of Sofia, are well-known. However, there were a great many others, their graves scattered all over the world, seeds of spiritual renewal for the whole earth, from France to Serbia, from Brazil to Australia, from Ireland to New Zealand, from Canada to Germany, from Italy to Venezuela, from the USA to Portugal, from Finland to Tunisia.

Among those I could mention are the repentant hermit Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, buried in the tiny village cemetery of Limeray near Tours in western France. Condemned by some émigrés for his love for the saints, surely the relics of this highly-educated ascetic will be taken up from obscurity and oblivion and moved to the new Russian Cathedral in Paris? What of the White Russian general Anton Denikin, whose last words in distant exile in the USA in 1947 were: ‘So I shall not see how Russia will be saved’, demonstrating his innate faith that Russia would be saved. What of the great Russian philosopher and patriot Ivan Ilyin, whose words are now rightly considered as prophetic?

What about Archbishop George (Tarasov), Bishop Methodius (Kulmann) and Bishop Roman (Zolotov) in France? They all loved the Church and Russia to the core. Then there was Bishop Mitrofan of Boston, a man ingrained with patriotism who desperately wanted to return to Russia. Or Fr George Sheremetiev in London who, as Count Sheremetiev, went from being one of the richest men in Russia to one of the poorest men in England, so that he could repent for the sins of his class, whose betrayals he blamed for the Revolution.

What can I say of the patriot parish priest Archpriest Igor Vernik in Paris? Or, in the same city, Vladimir Ivanovich Labunsky, the last of the 4,000 White Russian officers in our parish. In 1990, on introducing him to the first visiting priest from Russia, he begged him: ‘Bless me with the blessing hand of Holy Rus’. He was typical of so many. And what of the suffering heart of Lyudmila Sergeevna Brizhatova, the delightful Russian émigré poetess, faithful to the end in her lonely Parisian exile? The more saintly, the more Orthodox, the more missionary-minded but also the more patriotic. To some the idea of being both Russian patriots and missionary-minded may seem contradictory, but it is not.

This is because those who were Russian patriots were not simply patriots of Russia, but patriots of Holy Rus, the multinational ideal of the Orthodox Church, the Imperial ideal, the missionary ideal. Not for them nationalism and narrow-minded chauvinism, but the message to the whole world that God is with us. Not for them treason, cowardice and deceit, the slogan of the other 50% of the emigration, but faithfulness, courage and the truth. Faithfulness to Holy Rus, courage in the face of temptation, slander and exile, and words of truth against both the lies spread by the Bolsheviks and against the Russophobic myths spread by Western academics and politicians.

As widespread repentance and so the restoration of Holy Rus begins (and it has only just begun – you have seen nothing yet), old bad habits, a casual and nominal attitude to Church-going, fasting and prayer, a superstitious mentality based on ignorance, a few money-grubbing and compromised clergy, still exist. However, since 1917 the Church has been through a great movement of cleansing. Inside Russia, she has been cleansed by blood and persecution; outside Russia she has been cleansed by poverty and confession. Temptations have been taken away so that we can be faithful.

This is why, in 2007, at the signing of the Act of Canonical Communion by both parts of the Church, inside and outside Russia, there took place not the ‘reunion’ of the two parts of the Russian Church, inside and outside Russia, but the reaffirmation of our mutual unity, which had always existed, for we were always One and never spiritually divided. We, the faithful of the Russian Orthodox Church of all nationalities and tongues, have always believed in the Resurrection, Restoration and Recreation of Holy Rus, not in her national garments from before the Revolution, but in her heavenly raiment all over the world.

The Russian Golgotha delayed us for 100 years, but it has not stopped us, on the contrary it has strengthened us. Thus, one hundred years ago the Russian Church was on the verge of creating Metropolitan districts so that the people and the bishops would be brought together. That is at last happening only today. 100 years ago the most devout and much slandered Metr Pitirim of Saint Petersburg, in charge of churches outside Russia, was proposing to build a Russian church in every Western capital and translate the liturgical treasures of the Church into every Western language. That is at last happening only today. As the deputy of the last lay administrator of the Most Holy Synod in Russia, the spiritually alive Prince D. N. Zhevakhov, wrote prophetically over ninety years ago:

‘Educated society in Russia neglected its duty before God and the Tsar and cast Russia into such a state of terrifying chaos that only God and only a Tsar can extract her from it’ (4).

Notes:

1. See especially the first four of the seventeen volumes of his biography, as compiled by Bishop Nikon (Rklitsky), Jordanville, 1957-1971. Characteristically frank, Metr Antony, who taught in all the Academies, leaves us in no doubt as to the real situation of the Church at the time.

2. Fr George Shavelsky’s autobiography was first published in New York in the 1950s, but is now freely available electronically in Russian and also in a recent French translation.

3. See especially the two volumes of lives of the New Martyrs of Russia by Fr Michael Polsky (original editions in 1957 and 1980) or the thousands of pages in the more contemporary volumes researched and written in Moscow by Fr Damaskin Orlovsky.

4. P. 338 of the first two volumes of his 900-page ‘Reminiscences’ covering 1915-1923, first published in Munich in 1923 and republished by Tsarskoe Delo in Saint Petersburg in 2014. Sadly, the two later volumes are still lost.

How Will Russia Rise from the Dead?

Lazarus, come forth!

(Jn. 11, 43)

Unlike several American Presidents who were actually heads of the huge CIA spy and torture agency just outside Washington, President Putin used to be a mere low-ranking KGB official in provincial East Germany. However, when he lived there he witnessed the collapse of the Eastern bloc, which Stalin had constructed in order to protect the Soviet Union from any further Western aggression. And then he witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union itself and realized that the Soviet Union had failed not just Russia but also many countries around the world. Since nobody would ever want to recreate a failure, what could his real, and not imagined, present intentions and future hopes for the Russian Federation be? In order to answer this question, we first have to understand why the Soviet Union collapsed.

The Soviet Union intended to bring ‘a bright future’, Paradise, to the whole earth. In other words, through it the Third International was to replace the Third Rome and bring the Kingdom of God to the whole earth without and against God, to be Christian without and against Christ and His Church. Once we understand this internal contradiction, we understand why the Soviet Union could not help collapsing. Any understanding this may be tempted to think that therefore it is time to restore the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire. However, this too is illogical, for the Russian Empire, the Third Rome, also failed, being unable to prevent the Revolution, and if it is restored, then there will simply be another Revolution. So we come to a second question: Why did pre-Revolutionary Russia collapse? Here is our answer:

Fr George Sheremetiev was a fine and noble ROCOR priest in London who died in 1973. He used to show an album of photos of the estate owned by his aristocratic family, one of the richest in Russia, an estate which has since become Shermetievo Airport. At the Revolution Fr George lost everything and left Russia with a single suitcase and lived in poverty. He used to say that if he lived in poverty, it was his repentance for the fact that the Tsar’s Russia had fallen because of the corruption and treason of the majority of his aristocratic class which had fallen away from the Orthodox Church. In other words, the Third Rome fell because it was not supported by the Faith of the Second Jerusalem. Once we understand this internal contradiction, we understand why pre-Revolutionary Russia could not help collapsing.

As nobody would ever want to recreate two failures, then what could the hopes and intentions of the President of the Russian Federation be? Since his government rules over what is the essential space of both the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union, it must be to create a country which has the weaknesses of neither. On the one hand, it cannot live with a treasonous upper class which has no loyalty to Russian Tradition and because of whose wealth there is social injustice. On the other hand, it cannot attempt to spread Christianity worldwide without Christ, for a Garden of Eden where God does not walk is the place of the fall of Adam and Eve. It is only on this basis that the Russian Federation and the countries and people who voluntarily ally themselves with Her will rise from the dead.