Tag Archives: Russia

Six Days in Moscow: Thoughts from Outside In

‘…On the days of their commemoration tens of thousands of the faithful, come to the scene of the sufferings of the holy passion-bearers, have asked for their help for our people in its spiritual rebirth, in the straightening of its historical paths.

Let us be firm in the hope that the Lord will make us worthy to overcome all the consequences of the tragedies, controversies and crimes of the 20th century, raising up Holy Rus from strength to strength.

May God fulfil the words of St John of Shanghai over Her, when in the menacing year of 1938 he said: Blessed art thou, O Russian Land, cleansed by the fire of suffering! Thou hast passed through the baptismal waters and now thou art passing through the fire of suffering and then thou wilt enter into thy rest’.

His Holiness Patriarch Alexis of Moscow
Nativity Epistle 2008/9

Introduction

As I prepare to go to Moscow from London, I wonder about the love-hate relationship between Russian and English people and between Russian and British governments respectively. As the Grand Duchess Olga, sister of the martyred Tsar, commented over fifty years ago, and hundreds of others before and since: ‘Many of my best friends are English and I love them dearly, but as for the policies of successive British governments towards Russia, they are contemptible’. As an Englishman, I can say the same. From the assassination by the then British ambassador’s friends of Tsar Paul I to the assassination of Rasputin organised by the awful Lloyd George, who then greeted the Revolution in public, or of attitudes of successive, contemporary British regimes, the role of successive British governments in trying to destroy Russia has been appalling.

Monday 27 May 2013

One of the first impressions of Moscow, beyond its ultra-spacious, ultra-clean and ultra-orderly airports, is shortage of space, dirt and disorder. The individualism that entered Russia from the West after the brutal and disastrous, Western-engineered collapse of Communism in the 1990s is such that most here today are interested only in their own lives and own well-being. This perhaps sounds good, almost like responsibility, but it ill conceals ill-concealed social ills and decomposition, discourteousness and cheating, lack of basic health and safety, packs of abandoned dogs that bark the night through and ubiquitous corruption – even more ubiquitous than in Western life. And, believe me, it is ubiquitous in Western life – even though the Western media like to deny that – no doubt because they are the most corrupted of all.

Self-interest is revealed in the contemporary Russian contempt for public life, traffic rules and parking (through the ironic lack of provision of parking space in by far the largest country in the world), contempt for the state of its Krushchev-era trains, post offices (parcels six months late!), roads, pavements, public land and forests where piles of rubbish are dumped, contempt for lifts (if they work) and the entrances to blocks of flats, where the masses live. Civic pride in Russia today must be at an all-time low. Potholes and mud, flooded roads when it rains, hot water that is suddenly cut off for days on end ‘for pipe cleaning’, wooden railway platforms out of Africa, the almost Third World appearance of many public buildings, the smoking at garages and tram stops, the drunks – often youngish – lounging by the side of the road, all witness to this.

Worse still, the contempt which the disabled are held in and the pocket-money pensions offered to them and to pensioners, who are humiliated and forced to beg to survive, speak of the contempt of the State for those who are not able to slave for its needs. It is no good that some political websites and nationalistic media sources suggest that all is well in Russia, whereas in the West, with its gay parades and empty and vandalised churches (all a reality, it is quite true), all is decadent. Such statements show a mixture of boorish xenophobia and provincial ignorance. If they were true, then there would not be the clamour in contemporary Russia to introduce ‘European standards’, which is more than just a desire to imitate, but discloses a real need and a real frustration at the lack of provision, that is, lack of pre-vision, that is, lack of planning.

All this dirt and disorder is real, but such criticisms are superficial and come from the spoilt inasmuch as they show no analysis or understanding of the deeper and essential problem of contemporary Russia. The real question is why all this exists and yet at the same time why the airports are superb (much better than most in the West), the airlines and the high speed trains excellent, why you can go to wonderful Tsaritsyno, the former estate of Catherine II on the southern outskirts of Moscow, or to Tsarskoe Selo, the beautifully restored estate of the martyred Tsar Nicholas II outside St Petersburg, and you can truly say that this is the best in the world. And I mean not in the Third World, not in the Second World, not even in the First World (a title so arrogantly and egoistically invented by and for the Western world), but simply the best in the world.

The answer to the above question lies, it seems to me, in what Russians often say of themselves, sometimes rather shockingly, that, ‘Russians need the knout’, that is, the whip. In other words, they say of themselves that we need to be whipped in order to make something of us, to ‘lick us into shape’. In other words, they are saying that ‘we are natural anarchists and need a strong man or woman (perhaps the historically-minded may think of a Varangian?) to rule over us’. However, this answer is, I believe, very badly formulated and shows a real lack of seriousness. In reality, only those with no self-discipline and no self-control need a whip. Those who can control themselves, who have self-discipline, need no whips. The problem then is how first to discipline and control ourselves, and not others. And that is a spiritual question.

Tuesday 28 May

I wrote yesterday that contemporary Russia is characterised by the absence of authority (in Russian, ‘bezvlast’e’, a word which suggest chaos, disorder and anarchy). Why is this dirt and disorder, this absence of authority so real? After all, the Western media’s favourite current myth is to insinuate that Russia is not a democracy, but a tyranny run by a dictator called Putin. I would suggest that this absence of authority is so real precisely because of the absence of legitimate authority. Yes, President Putin was elected by a majority of Russians – even allowing for local corruption, a majority greater than any Western politician could dream of having, and he is still more popular than any Western politician could dream of being, especially in a country where the street lights do not always work. However, in one sense, he does not have ‘legitimate’ authority.

The truth is that, despite such real popularity among a real majority (and real unpopularity among a real minority), and despite his PR machine, President Putin is only a man, a weak man. Spiritually and mystically, we must not forget that the President does indeed have no legitimate authority. We speak now about him not in the vulgar Western sense of him having ‘no legitimate authority’; Western hatred of him is based only on envy, the desire to steal Russia’s natural wealth, land, oil, gas and timber, the same that fatally attracted Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and today the USA. We speak of the President’s lack of authority spiritually and mystically. There is only one legitimate authority in Russia and that is the authority of the Tsar, interrupted by the coup d’état of March 1917 and assumed temporarily by the Sovereign Mother of God.

The Holy Lady is patiently waiting for that time when Russia will through repentance be worthy of an earthly Sovereign, a new Tsar. Then there will no longer be this dirt and disorder, this absence of authority. Then there will be no need for the knout, there will be respect for an example set from on high – not just by a Tsar, but by the knowledge that, unlike in the PR-driven, media-driven and mob-driven pseudo-democracies of the West, above the Tsar reigns Almighty God. If the people are not worthy of a Tsar, then he will be taken away from them – as before. And instead there will either be bezvlast’e, primitive pagan Slavic anarchy, or else the knout, as was in the past imposed by Communism, or else in the future will be imposed again by some other equally awful ‘ism’, imposed from the West by fools, just as Communism was in 1917.

I go on now to think of the recent atrocity in London in which an off-duty soldier was horribly slaughtered in a revenge attack by two Islamist fanatics should serve as a lesson to the British government. Engaged today in the same policy as in the 19th century of supporting and arming fanatical Muslims against Christians (then in the Balkans, today in Syria and elsewhere), the risk is that the policy will rebound – as it has recently done. I think of this in Moscow because today a process similar to that in London over the last fifty years is taking place here too. Moscow is being invaded by Dagestan is, Chechens, Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Tadzhiks and others from the mainly Muslim Republics of the former Soviet Union. It is already facing racial tension, attacks by Muslims armed with knives or guns, and threats of mosque-building.

It is said that the Muslim immigrants, many of them here illegally through ubiquitous corrupt payments made to government ‘officials’, are doing the jobs that Russians do not want to do – or will not do without strong doses of vodka. The answer is simple: pay sober Russians proper wages for doing real jobs instead of £200-£300 per month, so that they can live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and then they will do the work that needs to be done without vodka. Why is it that the Russian ‘authorities’ (as they inappropriately call themselves) cannot learn from the errors of the West? When every other citizen of Stuttgart, Hamburg, Marseilles, Lyons, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Oslo, London and Bradford is called Mohammed or Fatima and every other church has been converted into a mosque, it will be too late. Learn now, not later.

Wednesday 29 May

What I wrote yesterday is not racist or Islamophobic; it is merely a pragmatic statement of reality. Christians and Muslims do not mix; the only way in which they can live together is separately. The Middle East knew this for centuries before the then Catholic West invaded peaceful but parallel communities of Orthodox Christians and Muslims in their jihadist Crusades, giving the Muslims the idea of using their old word ‘jihad’ in the Western sense of ‘Crusade’, that is to say, the sense of barbaric slaughter of all who are not of your own religion. Since then the now Protestant West has continued its barbaric slaughter, so that Iraq has now been all but deserted by its ancient Christians and is now on the verge of Somali-isation and Yugoslavisation – like Afghanistan and now Syria. The consequences are incalculable, that is, not apparent to the calculating, but obvious to those with common sense.

Moscow – and Russia – will be saved by not committing suicide. That sounds obvious, but in a world in which common sense is in short supply, it needs saying. This is the world that daily commits suicide through lack of common sense. When the mass of Muscovites – and the mass of Russians – go to church like Christians and so start treating each other like Christians, with courtesy, then the new Muslim immigrants will leave. In any case, by that time the Russian birth rate, instead of the Russian abortion rate (i. e. suicide rate), will be such that the work of even a single Muslim will no longer be needed. The same could of course be said of the West; but here it is probably too late because, unlike in Moscow, there are not enough faithful to stand up and speak common sense, let alone be heard by the few who are left with any common sense.

Recently I read how the stories of how the Red Army raped its way to Berlin were invented by Dr Goebbels. Then they were enthusiastically adopted by the Americans and British, some of whose warmongers were quite willing to continue the Second World War in 1945 by trying to take it to Moscow, just as Hitler had nearly done just before them. The West has always believed its own propaganda. But historians look at facts. The German Army, breaking into Russia in their unprovoked attack in 1941, raped as they went – one in two Wehrmacht soldiers claimed to have raped. Even worse, they usually murdered their victims after raping them. Millions of Belarusian, Ukrainian and Russian women and girls so became martyrs. It is reckoned in contemporary Russia that only 100,000 children were born from these rapes. The others were murdered in their mothers’ wombs.

Compare this to what happened in the West. In the occupation of England by the friendly American forces, over 10,000 rapes of English women took place. The half-American Churchill had this hushed up. When the Allies invaded Western Europe, rapes took place all over. The British, as a nation of calculating shopkeepers, paid for their sad pleasures in the suddenly swollen brothels of Brussels. The rapes of the Americans in Stuttgart and later in West Berlin are well-known. The French too took part. Yes, some Russian troops raped on entering East Prussia and Germany. In one three-month period 72 cases were discovered among a million soldiers of the Red Army. Many of these soldiers were shot as a punishment. In reality, by far the worst cases of serial rapes committed were the revenge attacks by freed Soviet POWs, whom the Germans had treated far worse than animals.

‘The Church inside Russia is just like the Church Outside Russia in that it is rich. I know I have been to two Cathedrals in Moscow and one in Washington’. The crass ignorance of such a statement sends us into fits of laughter. The concept that the Church Outside Russia is rich is in itself hilarious. But not only among us. I can think of one young priest not far from Moscow, married with two children, who is paid in chickens and eggs (which come first I do not know). Without his plot of land where he grows his own and without some part-time work (like the rest of us), he would not survive. No doubt, with time, he will build up his parish (like the rest of us). Maybe after thirty years or so (that is how long it has taken me), he will even be able to live as a priest without working on the side. The point is that you cannot ask for money from parishioners who are even poorer than you are. I don’t.

Thursday 30 May

Such were my thoughts yesterday on those twin human instincts – the instinct for survival (the gathering of the means to live), which is so often perverted into the amassing of money that you cannot take with you, and the instinct for the continuation of the race (sexual reproduction), which is so often perverted into sexual disorder. In the West, after, it is true, generations of hypocrisy, sexual disorder began to become acceptable fifty years ago. However, within a generation it had become perverted into the allowing and even encouraging of sodomy. Today, another generation on, the wild and seemingly almost untameable sexual forces that have been unleashed are set on pedophilia, the crime for which Christ said that it would be better not to be born than to commit, for it is the ultimate violation of holy innocence.

Today I am heading for Dmitrov, an ancient town some fifty miles to the north of Moscow. On the train I see my second and last Russian with a tattoo and red dyed hair; people here dress as in the West in the 1970s. (May Russia never ‘catch up’ with the West in this respect). It is important to see outside the capitals, to see reality. Otherwise you may end up with the same false impressions of those who visit London for a few days and imagine that they have seen England! Here you can see poverty, though you can also see prosperity. One of my first impressions is of the two statues on the central town square. One is of that Judeo-Russian monster from the Volga, whose corpse still wallows in its chemicals in Moscow, the other is of the Anglo-Russian founder of this town and also of Moscow, Yury Dolgoruky. They face each other. I just hope that Yury will cross the square one night and cut off the other’s head.

After visiting the slightly forgotten but beautiful little Cathedral in the town kremlin (fortress) with its huge earthen ramparts and lilac trees now out of flower, I visit the museums around it. In one of them there is an ancient wooden chalice from the Cathedral. It is tiny. I am reminded that Russia’s downfall came about precisely because of attitudes which led to the use of such tiny wooden chalices. They signify that in such towns as these, as all over Russia, Romania, Greece and elsewhere, Orthodox tend to be inert, passive, asleep. They say: ‘We are all Orthodox, therefore we won’t bother to go to church, to confession and to communion’. Yet it was this very attitude that led to the abolition of the Patriarchate, to icons being unnecessarily covered in gold frames and heavy, luxurious and uncomfortable vestments while the poor starved – and that led to Revolution.

Why is it that in Dmitrov, a pleasant town of 60,000, there are only three churches, though, true, the Cathedral does have three altars, though again one of the churches is only now being restored? The capacity of these three smallish churches cannot be much more than 600. This suggests that only 1 in 1,000 is practising here. That is few, but, honestly, it is enough to make the difference. Then I think of the state of the town. Why is it that in the largest country in the world, so it seems, all new blocks of flats have to be twelve or more storeys high? Why not limit them to, say, five floors? Or why not simply encouraging the building of traditional wooden houses with their own plots of land to grow and buy and sell food? Russian land is very fertile. Why not set up a modern railway network around Moscow instead of the desperate and archaic 1950s system they have at present?

In such a way overcrowded Moscow could begin to empty. Towns within a 200 kilometre (120 mile) radius of Moscow could be revitalised, 21st century railway infrastructure bringing them within an hour of Moscow. A whole region, two thirds the size of England and one third its population, could be renewed by an express train service. This would require investment from central government. And why does the government not send out official and incorruptible (good salaries and very harsh sentences for law-breaking) government inspectors to check on local authorities to see that they are implementing laws, abolishing dirty Soviet relics, their insignia and names, keeping public buildings clean and painted, renovating the archaic post office system and avoiding the dirt and disorder so common? Of course, those in small towns like this might pass the test fairly well, whereas in Moscow itself…

Friday 31 May

The one thing that marks out Russia today and gives hope to all is the New Martyrs and Confessors, led by the martyred Tsar and the holy Patriarch. Their resistance – and so our resistance through our veneration of them – to ‘the new world order’ is the only thing that stands between us and the end, that draws nearer every day. Here we each bear a heavy responsible for our canonical territory. For the Church inside Russia this means the vast territories and peoples of almost all of the old Russian Empire, together with China and Japan and probably in fact several other countries such as North Korea, Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Thailand, Iran, the Persian Gulf, Cuba, and Alaska, as well as witnessing to those in the canonical territories of the Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem and of other Local Churches.

For the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia ‘canonical territory’ means the whole Western world, that is, Western Europe, the Americas, Australasia, and those in countries under their influence like Pakistan or Indonesia. Here two extremes must be avoided. The first extreme is that of setting up national ghettoes. This was done in the Church Outside Russia in the past, for example, in countries in Africa and also in Western Europe. Once Russian people left those countries through emigration or else died out, the churches died – for they had put down no roots among the native peoples. The second extreme is that of many a parish of the Church inside Russia, uncanonically outside its canonical territory, for example in France, England and North America. This extreme was of identifying so closely with the host country that the essentials of the Faith were forgotten.

The results were – and are to this day – in schism or in tiny parishes which have lost all their roots, so desperate was the Patriarchal Church to have any presence outside Russia during the Cold War. Today a heavy price is being paid for such errors of the tragically politicised past. Fortunately, in our own day, most Orthodox services are accessible, faithfully translated into several local languages. This means that there is no reason to be unfaithful. Moreover, inasmuch as those translations are mainly made idiomatically, there is no reason either why local people cannot enter into authentic Church life. Of course, parishes with such services are few, but they still exist and with God’s Will in time they will grow and spread. With time, God’s own good time, there is no reason why we cannot move forward together, spreading the word of authentic Orthodox Christianity in our canonical territory also.

All extremes are to be avoided. On the one hand, whether inside Russia or outside Russia, we have to be open to the world around us without creating some kind of closed ghetto. On the other hand, we must never abandon our principles, the essentials that make up our Faith. Especially at this time, this tension is both creative but also difficult. We have to avoid a closed nationalism, since we bear responsibility for the whole world, given that the other Local Orthodox Churches are basically mononational. As we have said already, faithfulness to the sacrificial blood of the New Martyrs and the declaration of faith of the New Confessors are essential here. There is no room for politics of either left or right, for any ism, only for God’s Gospel Truth, suffered and died for by the hundreds of thousands of the faithful New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Lands.

Of course, were I not an Orthodox Englishman, all this would sound hypocritical. After all, I live in a country where Henry VIII and Elizabeth I are still not everywhere recognised as the monsters they were and the statue of the English Lenin, the murderous bloodsucker Cromwell (1 million dead in Ireland?), stands outside Parliament in London. However, I am an Orthodox Englishman. Only today I have read that on Mt Athos, Greek monks are now praying for the restoration of a Tsar in Russia. I am reassured; I feared that I and a few priest-friends and faithful scattered in our network across Europe were the only ones. Russia is on a knife edge, it can go either way; but perhaps you have, by God’s Providence, to experience dirt and disorder, material poverty, so that you can make the right choice, the one that the spoilt West therefore cannot make.

Saturday 1 June

The recent visit of Patriarch Kyrill to China, a country forbidden to the Pope, shows a possible way forward all over the East. The fact is that the East has rejected the Christianity of the West. The Muslims will never forgive the Catholics for the Crusades. The Hindus will never forgive the British Protestants for their exploitation of them. As for the Chinese with their philosophies, Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist, they may yet learn the new Philo-Sophia, the love of the Wisdom of God, from Russian Orthodoxy. They will not learn from mononational Churches, like the Greek or the Romanian or the Serb. They will not learn from strange sects, Old Ritualists or the just plain wrong ‘True Orthodox’ – it is time to gather in, to harvest, not to crawl away into sects – but they may learn from our great, multinational Russian Orthodox Church.

Who knows, perhaps we shall yet see the Patriarch in Tibet. Tibet has a fine and venerable monastic tradition – what it lacks is Christ to fill the empty space there. Let us recall that had it not been for the bloodshed of Revolution, the Russian Church today would number one twelfth of humanity, instead of one forty-second. Of course, the challenges are huge. The East has rejected the West; therefore unless it falls into rabid and fanatical nationalism, like the Muslims and the Hindus often do, or into a blind imitation of the West, like South Korea and Japan often do, the only way forward is to adopt Orthodoxy, which looks both East and West. Orthodox Russia had to fall because its mere existence prevented the powers from establishing their new world order. But suppose we can re-establish our old world order again? Is it not also written that the salvation of Russia will come from the East?

Dirt and disorder or Holy Russia because where there is Orthodoxy, there is no dirt and disorder. That is the choice that Russia faces. Just try and imagine the streets of Moscow clean, with orderly traffic, without layabout drunks, without smoking, cursing, beggars and chaotic parking, without posters offering ‘credit’ glued up on every wall. The choice surely seems clear. Some Russians have definitely already chosen Holy Russia – and you can recognise them in the street at once. Most have still to decide on how they want to live. However, there is something even more disturbing than all this. This is that people in the West also have to decide which Russia they want to see. And let me make it clear to all Western people now; there is only this choice: dirt and disorder or Holy Russia. And there is something even more profoundly disturbing than this.

This is that there are many in the West who would prefer to see dirt and disorder in Russia. And there is here another serious point. This is that until the West itself recognises that Holy Russia is the only choice, it will itself not heal, but slide ever more rapidly into its own depravity and degeneration, into its own spiritual dirt and spiritual disorder. This recognition that its well-being depends on the well-being of Russia is called repentance for a thousand years of error; it is the repentance of the once Catholic West that time and again, through mercenary Teutonic Knights, Poles and Jesuits, has tried to destroy Holy Russia; it is the repentance of the once Protestant West that time and again, though British sectarians and US Evangelicals, has tried to destroy Holy Russia; it is the repentance of the once atheist West that time and again, through Napoleon, Hitler and today, has tried to destroy Holy Russia.

The ‘new world order’ is a propaganda myth. The Polish-American propagandist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, put it truthfully, when in February 2012 he spoke not of ‘a new world order’, but of ‘The Greater West’. That in truth is all the slogan of the ‘new world order’ is about – vulgar and greedy imperialist expansion. And we Russian Orthodox can also put it truthfully: The world is divided between two Romes, two models; pagan Rome characterised by the classical temple and masonic portals of the eighteenth-century White House in Washington (not a church in sight) and Christian Rome, characterised by the golden domes of the Kremlin in Moscow (only churches in sight). The choice is between pagan and Christian, Babylonian and Jerusalemic. But I would remind all in Moscow that the word Jerusalem means ‘City of Peace’.

Conclusion

The West never expected the Resurrection of Russia and has done its best to deny it, to hush it up. Just like the readily bribable Roman soldiers of old who were paid to ‘say that his body had been stolen by his disciples in the night’, its media have silenced the story of the Russian Resurrection. They did not expect Russia to rise from the dead after it, like Pilate, washed its hands of Russia in 1917 and through cowardice allowed its Crucifixion and indifferently looked on. And yet the Resurrection is here, however much it still has to be announced. During the dark hours of the 1940s, St Seraphim of Vyritsa – and I tell you this now, so that you will remember it then – looked out on the Gulf of Finland and saw many ships sailing in from many lands and prophesied: ‘The whole world will head for Russia to repent’. This means that there will be Orthodox priests of many nationalities giving the sacraments there.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Somewhere over the Baltic

The Forces Behind Pussy Riot

Some eight years ago now I had the honour of speaking on the spiritual essence of Western Europe at a Conference in London, where also spoke Alexander Dugin. Having renounced a compromising past, he is today one of the foremost Russian philosophers, the founder of the contemporary Eurasian Movement and a very influential speaker and adviser. Here he explains what lay behind Pussy Riot, that synonym of sex and violence.

Quo Vadis, O Vaticane?

There are many views of Pope Benedict’s recent shock resignation. Some see just an old and failing man who cannot go on any longer, who is exhausted by ‘the heat of the day’. Others see more sinister forces at work. Some believe that his resignation came about as a result of pressure from various international groups, political and financial lobbies or pro-homosexual and pro-contraceptive lobbies. They believe that the Pope, ‘the infallible Vicar of Christ’, was forced to leave his post because he was resisting those secularist lobbies. There are after all groups who are working towards the New World Order, in which there is no place for sovereign institutions such as the Vatican, or indeed anyone who shows spiritual independence from the financial domination of a future Global Government. If this is all so, at present, it seems, these powers are operating a two-pronged attack, financial and political.

Firstly, they are setting the stage for a World Bank, required because of the present purely artificial financial crisis, a worldwide manipulation which is now in its sixth year. This was caused by indebtedness, which was long promoted by Western governments and banks, Secondly, these powers are sowing chaos in the Arab World, taking back Arab countries to the Middle Ages. The influence of these powers in Rome seems to be clear from the Vatican’s silence on Libya and its apparent abandonment of Egyptian and Syrian Christians, like Christians in Iraq before them and Christians in Serbia before them. Already on 5 September 2011, the then French President Nicolas Sarkozy, himself of Jewish descent, openly announced to the Roman Catholic Maronite Cardinal of Antioch that, with the coming to power of Western-backed Islamists in Syria, Christians there would have to flee to Europe.

Interestingly, the Western Roman Catholic Press attacked this same Roman Catholic Cardinal’s denunciations of the West for its support of Islamist terrorism in Syria. The Vatican’s silence and even encouragement of Western interventionism, exactly as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, suggests that it may already have become the puppet of the New World Order project, which only further weakens its spiritual authority. The global elite behind the New World Order project is not so much saying, ‘If you do not go along with us, your country will descend into chaos’, but rather, ‘If you do not go along with us, we will ensure that your country descends into chaos’. It has already happened in fragmented Yugoslavia, and now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Now it is happening in Syria, with its ‘Somali-isation’, that is, division by bandit warlords into rival fiefs.

If all this is so, then the Cardinal-electors of the new Pope face a stark choice. Are they going to assert their independence from the New World Order, or are they going to fall for globalism and ‘global governance’, as it is called? This is very much their last chance to choose. After a thousand years of compromise with this world, this may well be the Vatican’s final choice. In today’s terms, it means a choice between the continued desacralisation of protestantisation and secularisation, begun fifty years ago with the Second Vatican Council, and spiritual resistance to secularisation by siding with Non-Western countries. Undermined and discredited by the pedophile scandal, which was completely of its own making, the Vatican may well choose secularisation. That would make it popular with the highly-controlled Western media. But that would also be its suicide, the end of the road.

The crisis in Rome is nothing new. In the past the Papacy has continually been manipulated by foreign and often atheist powers, from Medieval Monarchs to Napoleon and from Republicans to Fascists. Thus, only recently, there was a Polish Pope, elected to destroy Communism. And the present German Pope reflects the Western Schism of 1054, which occurred as the result of another carefully chosen German Pope, Leo IX. However, if the present crisis is the final crisis, one of its results will surely be the exile of Orthodox refugees from the West to Russia. After all, in her time Catherine II gave refuge to Serb, Bulgarian and Greek Orthodox from Turkish oppression and Tsar Nicholas I gave refuge to French citizens from Revolutionary oppression. Some of their descendants fought for Russia against France during the allied Western/Ottoman invasion of Russia known as the Crimean War.

Although the Russian Federation and Church seem to have defeated last year’s orchestrated media attacks from the West, the rest of the Orthodox world is in chaos, not least in the Ukraine and Georgia. The four Orthodox countries that were seduced by Western money to join the EU are now in crisis: Greece has gone bankrupt and Cyprus is going bankrupt amid elections; the Bulgarian government has just resigned amid demonstrations; poverty-stricken Romania is on the verge of bankruptcy – as also the depopulated Baltic States with their Orthodox minorities. Orthodox Syria is being divided and returned to the Middle Ages by 65,000 foreign Islamist terrorists, financed largely by Qatar and flown there by the USA under its divide and rule policy. The only light is the sight of Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria and Africa aboard a Russian warship in Dar es Salaam on 17 February.

Little wonder that eyes are turning with hope to a future when a restored Orthodox Russian Federation could once more become the visible centre of the Orthodox and so Christian world. At this moment when we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the House of Romanov and the 1700th anniversary of the Incarnational Edict of Milan, our prayers turn to a new Tsar, who could renew the monarchy of St Constantine. Soon the Orthodox Patriarchs will be gathering in Nish in Serbia to commemorate the Edict. As Orthodox, we should beware, however, of extremists on the left (disincarnate, liberal, ecumenist and modernist) and on the right (sectarian, nationalist and zealous not according to knowledge) fringes of the Church who have tried, try and will try to stop the restoration of Orthodox Russia to her inter-Orthodox calling. Only the Royal Way, the Tsar’s Path, will save us from such temptations.
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Russia Unprepared for Flood of Christian Refugees from Western-sponsored Islamist Winter

» 02/05/2013 10:18
RUSSIA
Syrian and Coptic Christians fleeing to Moscow, but Russia lacks shelters

by Nina Achmatova

http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Syrian-and-Coptic-Christians-fleeing-to-Moscow,-but-Russia-lacks-shelters-27050.html

Human rights activists denounce inadequate facilities for the reception of immigrants and the bureaucratic obstacles.

A Copt tells AsiaNews of death threats of the Muslim Brotherhood for failing to convert to Islam.

Moscow (AsiaNews) – A flow of refugees from Syria and Egypt is pouring into Moscow to escape from wars and violence in their country of origin bringing to light the inadequacy of facilities for the reception of immigrants in Russia.

The complaint has been made by a veteran in migrant assistance, the president of the ‘Civic Assistance Committee’, Svetlana Gannushkina. In the past week a family of 10 Coptic Christians, including a child a few months old, presented themselves in their office. The family say they fled religious persecution from Islamist groups taking place in Marsa Matrouh, near the border with Libya. “They threatened us with death if we didn’t convert and make our women and girls wear a veil,” Reda, 26, who fled with his 19 year old pregnant wife told AsiaNews.

“After the revolution many activists of the Muslim Brotherhood came – added his brother Viktor, 30, – who put pressure on us Christians to convert. Our problems started already in late 2011, but are getting worse. ‘Last year, after an argument with the principal of the school who wanted to force my daughter to wear the hijab, we were told that the presence of Christians in the city was no longer welcome. ” “We sought shelter with a local priest – he concluded – but his church had already been burned once and so he did not want to further expose himself to attack.”

Now all 10 Egyptians, plus Iraqis and Sudanese, are forced to live in a room of 20 square meters, with only a few chairs and a table, because there is no temporary accommodation center for immigrants waiting to receive refugee status in the city.

“Everyone is waiting for an answer from the Federal Service for immigration – Gannushkina , who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times told AsiaNews, – which must decide on their possible transfer to Ochyor, in Perm region, where there is one of only three reception centres for refugees in the entire country.”

The process, however, can last for weeks and the authorities have not thought of any temporary accommodation for these people, who do not have a place to live.”The problem is much worse for the Copts – said Gannushkina – because for them here, unlike Syrians, there is no large community or network of countrymen ready to open their homes.” “It is winter, and in these conditions they are likely to die of exposure – she added – so we are forced to accommodate
these people in our offices, but they are not adequate facilities.” The small child Cirillus, who arrived with his mother, father and sister also from Marsa Matrouh, is already sick and was visited by doctors from Doctors Without Borders.

Last year 700 people turned for help to ‘Civil Assistance’, including 80 Egyptian Copts. The new arrivals are in addition to about 30 Syrians who in January of this year already made a request to Moscow for refugee status. One hundred Syrians arrived in the last six months of 2012.

Reception centers for refugees fleeing persecution and war are provided in all countries that have signed the UN Convention on Refugees. In Russia – denounced the Gannushkina – formally, there are three centers, but in fact only one works, that of Ochyor for more than 80 people. “This integration does not exist and the sanitary conditions are very bad,” she added.

According to rumors circulating in the press and among NGOs, the Immigration Service is considering even closing it down. The other two centers are located one in the Tver Region and the other in the south of Rostov, but are not working at full capacity. “In a country as large as Russia three centers for immigrants is virtually nothing, if you think that Poland, which much smaller than us, has 11,” added Gannushkina, who has always declared that if she ever wins the Nobel she will allocate the prize money to building at least another refugee centre near Moscow.

Russia has the potential to feed the world as it did before the 1917 Revolution

Its existence and strength (of a Commonwealth of Orthodox States) would restrain the world from its headlong rush into catastrophe. It could lead to the regeneration of the spiritually and morally decaying Western world. This Commonwealth could become the breadbasket of the Third World. Its huge natural resources could stop starvation and let it know of Orthodoxy…

Orthodoxy and the post-1989 World
Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition, Chapter 29, May 1990

On 2 February Arkady Dvorkovich, Deputy President of the Government of the Russian Federation, stated on the ‘News on Saturday’ programme on the national television channel ‘Rossiya 1’, his certainty of Russia’s ability to feed the world.

‘Before the Revolution Russia fed the whole world and there is every chance of doing this now’. Dvorkovich noted that the national agriculture could yield huge crops. ‘We have a lot of good land, though it does need good husbandry and the climate is not easy, but even with this climate huge amounts of cereals can be grown’, said the Vice-Premier. He added that the agricultural produce would also need to be thoroughly processed.

According to the ITAR-TASS News Agency, the Vice-Premier cited Tatarstan and the Tambov Region as examples, but regretted that for the moment these were exceptions which had yet to become general. Dvorkovich stated that since joining the World Trade Organisation, Russia had gradually been implementing a new system of agricultural support, which would be fully operational within two or three years. He added, ‘There will be many jobs in this sector and people will be well paid’.

Il barlume di luce sulla strada davanti a noi: sullo Tsar Nicola II e la restaurazione dell’Impero cristiano

Qui di seguito sono riportate le risposte a vari commenti e domande in recenti e-mail provenienti da Russia, Olanda, Gran Bretagna, Francia e Stati Uniti

D: Perché ci sono così tante incomprensioni su Nicola II e tante critiche stridenti nei suoi confronti?

R: Per comprendere lo Tsar Nicola II, devi essere ortodosso. Non serve essere laico o nominalmente ortodosso, semi-ortodosso, ‘ortodosso per hobby’, e mantenere il tuo bagaglio culturale non convertito, sia sovietico che occidentale – che è essenzialmente la stessa cosa. Devi essere coerentemente ortodosso, consapevolmente ortodosso, ortodosso nell’essenza, nella cultura e nella visione del mondo.

In altre parole, è necessario avere integrità spirituale – esattamente come l’aveva lo Tsar, al fine di capirlo. Lo Tsar Nicola era profondamente e sistematicamente ortodosso nella sua prospettiva spirituale, morale, politica, economica e sociale. La sua anima ortodossa guardava il mondo attraverso occhi ortodossi ed ha agito in modo ortodosso, con riflessi ortodossi. Così anche noi dobbiamo essere ortodossi dall’interno per capirlo.

D: È per questo che gli accademici sono così negativi su di lui?

R: Gli accademici occidentali, come gli accademici sovietici, sono negativi su di lui, perché sono laicisti. Ad esempio, di recente ho letto ‘Crimea’, il libro dello storico britannico della Russia, Orlando Figes. Si tratta di un interessante libro sulla guerra di Crimea, con molti dettagli e fatti ben documentati, scritti come dovrebbero scrivere i professori universitari esperti. Tuttavia, l’autore parte da criteri non espliciti, puramente laici e occidentali, che dicono che dato che lo Tsar dell’epoca, Nicola I, non era un laicista occidentale, doveva essere un fanatico religioso, e che la sua intenzione era di conquistare l’Impero Ottomano. Attraverso il suo amore per i dettagli, Figes trascura il punto principale – ciò che fu in realtà la guerra di Crimea da parte russa. Tutto quello che riesce a vedere sono obiettivi imperialisti in stile occidentale, che egli attribuisce poi alla Russia. Questa attribuzione è una proiezione della sua visione occidentale.

Ciò che Figes fraintende è che le parti dell’Impero Ottomano alle quali era interessato Nicola I erano quelle in cui una popolazione cristiana ortodossa aveva sofferto per secoli sotto il giogo musulmano. La guerra di Crimea non era una guerra coloniale, imperialista russa per espandersi nell’Impero Ottomano e sfruttarlo, così come le guerre condotte da potenze occidentali per espandersi in Africa e in Asia e per sfruttarle. Era una lotta per la liberazione dall’oppressione – in realtà una guerra anti-coloniale, anti-imperialista. L’obiettivo era quello di liberare terre e popoli ortodossi dall’oppressione, non di conquistare l’impero di qualcun altro. Per quanto riguarda Nicola I come fanatico religioso, agli occhi di tutti i laicisti i sinceri cristiani devono essere “fanatici religiosi”. Questo perché i laicisti non hanno una dimensione spirituale. Sono sempre unidimensionali, incapaci di vedere oltre il proprio condizionamento culturale secolare, di ‘pensare fuori dagli schemi’.

D: Questa prospettiva laica occidentale è il motivo per cui gli storici accusano lo Tsar Nicola II di essere stato debole e inetto?

R: Sì. Questa è propaganda politica occidentale, inventata al momento e ancora oggi ripetuta a pappagallo. Gli storici occidentali sono istruiti e pagati da istituzioni occidentali e non possono vedere al di fuori di quella scatola. I seri storici post-sovietici hanno smentito queste accuse, inventate da occidentali e da occidentalizzati, ripetute volentieri dai comunisti sovietici, come giustificazione per lo smantellamento dell’impero dello Tsar. L’unica giustificazione per l’accusa che lo Tsarevich era ‘inetto’ è il fatto che egli era in un primo momento impreparato a essere Tsar perché suo padre, Alessandro III, morì improvvisamente e in giovane età. Ma presto imparò e divenne ‘adatto’.

Un’altra falsa accusa preferita è che lo Tsar diede inizio a guerre, vale a dire la guerra nipponico-russa, chiamata guerra russo-giapponese, e la guerra del Kaiser, chiamata prima guerra mondiale. Questo non è vero. Fu l’unico leader mondiale a volere il disarmo, a essere anti-militarista. Per quanto riguarda la guerra contro l’aggressione giapponese, i giapponesi, finanziati, armati e incoraggiati dagli Stati Uniti e dalla Gran Bretagna, hanno iniziato la guerra nipponico-russa. Hanno attaccato la flotta russa senza preavviso a Port Arthur – un nome che fa quasi rima con Pearl Harbour. E, come sappiamo, sono stati gli austro-ungarici, spinti dal Kaiser, che era alla disperata ricerca di una scusa per iniziare una guerra, a far scoppiare la prima guerra mondiale.

Ricordiamo che è stato lo Tsar Nicola che per la prima volta nella storia del mondo ha chiesto il disarmo a L’Aia nel 1899, perché poteva vedere che l’Europa occidentale era una polveriera, in attesa di esplodere. Era un leader morale e spirituale, l’unico leader mondiale di allora che non aveva ristretti interessi nazionali a cuore e non spingeva al riarmo a costo enorme. Invece, come Unto di Dio, aveva a cuore gli interessi universali di tutta la cristianità ortodossa, per portare a Cristo tutta l’umanità creata da Dio. Perché altrimenti fare dei sacrifici per la Serbia? Per sopravvivere, deve essere stato incredibilmente volitivo, come osservava, tra gli altri, il presidente francese Émile Loubet. Tutte le potenze infernali scatenate contro lo Tsar non sarebbero mai state scatenate per rimuoverlo se fosse stato un debole. Solo i forti devono essere distrutti, come confermato da coloro che lo hanno conosciuto a quel tempo.

D: Ha detto che era profondamente ortodosso, ma è vero che aveva ben poco sangue russo, non è vero?

R: Mi scusi, ma questa affermazione contiene una presunzione razzista, che si debba avere ‘sangue russo’ per essere ortodosso, un cristiano universale. Lo Tsar aveva, credo, un 128° di sangue russo. E con ciò? La sorella dello Tsar ha risposto a questa stessa sfida molto adeguatamente più di cinquant’anni fa. Intervistata dal giornalista greco, Ian Vorres, nel 1960, sua sorella la granduchessa Olga ha spiegato: ‘Forse gli inglesi chiamavano Giorgio VI tedesco? Non aveva una sola goccia di sangue inglese… Il sangue non è tutto. C’è la terra da cui sorgi, la fede in cui sei cresciuto, la lingua che parli e in cui pensi’.

D: Ci sono alcuni russi che oggi descrivono lo Tsar Nicola come un ‘Redentore’. Crede a questo?

R: Certo che no! C’è un solo Redentore, il Salvatore Gesù Cristo. Ciò che si può comunque affermare è che il suo sacrificio, e quindi quello della sua famiglia, dei suoi servitori e delle decine di milioni di altri che sono stati assassinati dai regimi sovietici e fascisti che seguirono, ha avuto un valore di redenzione. La Rus’ è stata crocifissa per i peccati del mondo. In effetti, le sofferenze dei russi ortodossi sono state redentrici nel loro sangue e nelle loro lacrime. Tuttavia, è vero che tutti i cristiani sono chiamati a riscattare se stessi vivendo in Cristo IL Redentore. È interessante notare che i russi pii ma non colti, che chiamano lo Tsar un ‘Redentore’ chiamano anche Rasputin un santo.

D: Parlando di questo, cosa dovremmo pensare di Rasputin?

R: Centinaia di libri sono stati scritti su Rasputin – quasi tutti da persone che non lo hanno mai conosciuto. Vorrei solo ripetere le parole dello stesso Tsar, ‘È un russo semplice, buono, religioso’, e le parole della sorella dello Tsar, granduchessa Olga,’ Non era né un santo né un diavolo… era un contadino con una profonda fede in Dio e un dono di guarigione’. Il fatto che Rasputin fu poi atrocemente calunniato, e, infine, nel dicembre del 1916 torturato da aristocratici russi – un segno di quanto era malata la classe superiore – e assassinato da spie britanniche, non fa che aiutarlo per l’eternità. Tuttavia, Dio non ha rivelato il suo destino dopo questo mondo. Noi non anticipiamo il giudizio di Dio. Quando quel giudizio sarà rivelato a tutti noi, allora saremo in grado di dire di più. Allo stato attuale, a mio avviso, è meglio tacere. Rasputin è ancora una figura misteriosa – lo lasciamo al giudizio di Dio.

D: Ma che dire di tutte le accuse che egli era un ubriacone, un ladro e un libertino?

R: Gli scrittori di romanzi sovietici e hollywoodiani, come il romanziere sovietico Radzinsky, amano questa immagine di Rasputin. Gli storici contemporanei all’interno della Russia de-sovietizzata hanno dimostrato che quasi tutte, forse tutte, queste accuse sono state calunnie, finzioni. Inoltre, non furono composti per screditare Rasputin – era solo una pedina nelle mani dei calunniatori – ma per screditare la Famiglia imperiale.

La loro logica era che se l’amico della famiglia regnante poteva essere presentato come un ladro, ubriacone e dissoluto, anche la famiglia doveva essere così, e quindi erano indegni, e i calunniatori avrebbero dovuto avere il potere. Tale calunnia era molto semplice e molto primitiva. I decadenti privi di alcuna profondità spirituale ci credevano perché volevano crederci, perché questi tipi preferiscono sempre calunnie, scandali e pettegolezzi alla Verità di Cristo.

D: Lei dice che dobbiamo lasciare Rasputin al giudizio di Dio. Vuole paragonare coloro che chiamano Rasputin un santo a coloro che chiamano Ivan IV e Stalin santi?

R: No. Chiamare quei personaggi santi, in particolare Stalin, è ignoranza e bestemmia. Questo è causato da un desiderio a sfondo politico di poche persone di fondere la vecchia mentalità atea sovietica con quella nuova ortodossa. Questo è impossibile, una totale confusione spirituale, analfabetismo teologico. D’altra parte, la questione di Rasputin è piuttosto un caso di alcuni individui con zelo ma poca conoscenza.

D: Se possiamo tornare al nostro punto principale, qual è l’importanza dello Tsar Nicola II, oggi? I cristiani ortodossi sono una piccola minoranza fra tutti i cristiani. Anche se egli fosse importante per tutti gli ortodossi, sarebbe ancora un interesse minoritario fra i cristiani.

R: Certo, noi cristiani siamo una minoranza. Secondo le statistiche, di sette miliardi di esseri umani sul pianeta, il numero di cristiani è di 2,2 miliardi – il 32%. E i cristiani ortodossi sono solo il 10% di tutti i cristiani, cioè solo il 3,2% della popolazione mondiale, circa uno su 33.

Tuttavia, se guardiamo teologicamente a queste statistiche, che cosa vediamo? Per i cristiani ortodossi, tutti i non-ortodossi sono ortodossi decaduti, che sono stati portati involontariamente dai loro capi, per tutta una serie di ragioni politiche, ragioni mondane di convenienza, a diventare non-ortodossi. Per noi, i cattolici possono essere definiti come ortodossi cattolicizzati e i protestanti come cattolici protestantizzati. Noi ortodossi indegni siamo il lievito che fa fermentare la pasta.

Senza la Chiesa, non c’è luce e calore dello Spirito Santo da irradiare al di fuori nel resto del mondo. Così come, anche se si è al di fuori del sole, si può ancora sentire la luce e il calore del sole, così anche il 90% dei cristiani che si trovano fuori della Chiesa sono ancora consapevoli degli effetti della Chiesa. Per esempio, la maggior parte di loro confessa la Santa Trinità e Cristo come il Figlio di Dio. Perché? A causa della Chiesa, che ha istituito tali insegnamenti molto tempo fa. Tale è la grazia della Chiesa, che risplende al di fuori di lei. Ora, se si capisce questo, inizieremo a capire l’importanza del leader del cristianesimo ortodosso, l’ultimo successore dell’imperatore Costantino, lo Tsar Nicola II. La sua deposizione ha cambiato tutta la storia della Chiesa, come anche il suo Golgota e la sua glorificazione di oggi.

D: Se questo è il caso, perché allora lo Tsar è stato deposto e poi ucciso?

R: I cristiani sono sempre perseguitati in tutto il mondo, come il nostro Signore ha detto ai suoi discepoli.

La Russia pre-rivoluzionaria correva sulla fede ortodossa. Questo era l’olio che faceva andare avanti il motore. Tuttavia, quella fede è stata respinta dalla massa della classe dirigente occidentalizzata, dall’aristocrazia, e da molti altri nella classe media in crescita. La rivoluzione è stata causata da una semplice perdita di fede, il motore si è fermato ed è esploso per mancanza d’olio.

Per la maggior parte le classi superiori russe volevano il potere per se stesse, così come i mercanti ricchi e le classi medie volevano il potere per se stessi e avevano così causato la rivoluzione francese. Dopo aver ottenuto la ricchezza, volevano salire il gradino successivo nella gerarchia dei valori – il gradino del potere. Nel contesto russo questa sete di potere, che era venuta dall’Occidente, è quindi basata, per definizione, su una cieca ammirazione dell’Occidente e sull’odio per la Russia. Questo si può vedere sin dall’inizio con figure come Kurbskij, Pietro I, Caterina II e occidentalizzatori come Chaadaev.

Questa mancanza di fede è stato anche ciò che ha avvelenato il movimento bianco, che è stato disunito dalla sua mancanza di una fede comune e vincolante nell’impero ortodosso. In generale, l’autocoscienza ortodossa era assente nel direttivo dell’élite russa, che vi ha sostituito surrogati vari, miscele stravaganti di misticismo, occultismo, massoneria, socialismo e ricerca di ‘verità’ nelle religioni esoteriche. Tra l’altro, questi surrogati sono sopravvissuti nell’emigrazione a Parigi, dove varie figure si sono distinte nella teosofia, nell’antroposofia, nel sofianismo, nel culto del nome e altre fantasie molto eccentriche, ma anche spiritualmente pericolose.

Questi avevano così poco amore per la Russia, che in realtà sono andati in scisma, rompendo con la Chiesa russa e trovando giustificazioni per farlo! Il poeta Bekhteev scrisse molto bruscamente di questo nella sua poesia del 1922, ‘Tornate ai vostri sensi, classi superiori!’, Paragonando la situazione privilegiata a Parigi a quella del popolo della Rus’ crocifissa in patria:

E ancora una volta i loro cuori sono pieni di intrighi,

E ancora una volta il tradimento e la menzogna sono sulle loro labbra,

E la vita scrive nel capitolo dell’ultimo libro

Il vile tradimento dei grandi che sapevano tutto.

Questi membri delle classi superiori (e non tutti erano traditori) sono stati sponsorizzati per principio dall’Occidente. L’Occidente riteneva che una volta che i suoi valori di democrazia parlamentare, repubblica o monarchia costituzionale fossero stati introdotti in Russia, questa sarebbe diventata solo un altro paese borghese occidentale. Per lo stesso motivo, la Chiesa russa ha dovuto essere protestantizzata, vale a dire spiritualmente neutralizzata, o meglio castrata, come l’Occidente ha cercato di fare con il Patriarcato di Costantinopoli e altre Chiese locali cadute sotto il suo potere dal 1917, non appena il patrocinio russo è stato rimosso. Questi atteggiamenti sono stati causati dalla presunzione arrogante che in qualche modo il modello occidentale possa essere universale. Per inciso, questa è la presunzione arrogante delle élite occidentali fino a oggi, mentre cercano di imporre i loro modelli in tutto il mondo, presentandoli come ‘Nuovo Ordine Mondiale’.

Lo Tsar, l’unto del Signore che rappresenta l’ultimo baluardo del cristianesimo della Chiesa nel mondo, doveva essere rimosso, perché stava bloccando la presa di potere del mondo occidentale e occidentalizzato. Tuttavia, nella loro incompetenza, i rivoluzionari aristocratici del febbraio 1917 persero subito il controllo della situazione e in pochi mesi il potere scese da loro al più basso del basso, ai criminali bolscevichi. Questi intrapresero un corso di massacro e genocidio, di ‘terrore rosso’ – così come in Francia cinque generazioni prima, solo che ora lo facevano con la tecnologia molto più micidiale del ventesimo secolo.

È stato in questo modo che il motto dell’impero ortodosso si è deformato. Vi ricordo che si tratta di ‘Ortodossia, Sovranità e Popolo’. Questo è stato deformato dai russi occidentalizzati e dai laici occidentali, sia allora che oggi, in: ‘oscurantismo, tirannia e nazionalismo’. I comunisti atei lo hanno deformato ancora di più in ‘comunismo centralizzato, dittatura totalitaria e bolscevismo nazionale’. Che cosa voleva dire, infatti, questo motto? Voleva semplicemente dire: ‘(pienamente incarnato) autentico cristianesimo, indipendenza spirituale (dai poteri di questo mondo) e amore per il popolo di Dio. Come ho detto sopra, questo motto è il programma spirituale, morale, politico, economico e sociale dell’Ortodossia.

D: Un programma sociale? Ma sicuramente la rivoluzione è nata perché c’erano tanti poveri e tanto sfruttamento tanto dei poveri da parte dei super-ricchi aristocratici, e lo Tsar era a capo di quella aristocrazia?

R: No, è proprio l’aristocrazia che si opponeva allo Tsar e al popolo. Lo Tsar ha donato gran parte della sua ricchezza personale e ha tassato i ricchi fino in fondo sotto il suo brillante primo ministro Stolypin, che tanto ha fatto per la riforma agraria. Purtroppo, il programma di giustizia sociale dello Tsar è stato uno dei motivi per cui molti aristocratici odiavano lo Tsar. Lo Tsar e il popolo erano uno. Entrambi sono stati traditi dall’élite occidentalizzata. Ciò risulta evidente dall’assassinio di Rasputin, che è stata la preparazione per la rivoluzione. In esso i contadini avevano intuito il tradimento del popolo da parte delle classi superiori.

D: Qual è stato il ruolo degli ebrei in questo?

A: C’è una teoria della cospirazione anti-semita, che dice che i soli ebrei erano – e sono – responsabili di tutto il male in Russia (e ovunque). Questo contraddice le parole di Cristo. Prima di tutto, gli ebrei che sono stati coinvolti nella rivoluzione russa – ed è vero che la maggior parte dei bolscevichi erano ebrei – erano apostati, atei, come Marx, e non veri ebrei praticanti. Tuttavia, quegli ebrei che sono stati coinvolti hanno lavorato fianco a fianco con non-ebrei atei, come il banchiere americano Morgan, o con russi e molti altri e dipendevano da loro.

Così, sappiamo bene che la Gran Bretagna ha organizzato la rivoluzione del febbraio 1917, applaudita dalla Francia e finanziata dagli Stati Uniti, che Lenin è stato trasportato in Russia dal Kaiser e finanziato da lui, e che le masse che hanno combattuto nell’Armata Rossa erano russe. Nessuno di questi era ebreo. Alcuni, prigionieri di miti razzisti, semplicemente si rifiutano di vedere la verità – che la rivoluzione era satanica e che Satana può usare qualsiasi nazionalità, chiunque di noi, per le sue opere velenose, ebrei, russi e non russi. Satana non favorisce alcuna cittadinanza, ma si avvale di tutti quelli che gli sottomettono la loro libera volontà per il suo ‘Nuovo Ordine Mondiale’, in cui egli sarà il Sovrano Universale del mondo caduto.

D: Ci sono russofobi che dicono che c’è continuità tra la Russia dello Tsar e l’Unione Sovietica comunista. È così?

R: Vi è certamente una continuità nella russofobia occidentale! Leggete le copie del quotidiano The Times del 1862 e del 2012, per esempio. Vedrete 150 anni di xenofobia. Sì, è vero che molti in Occidente erano russofobi molto tempo prima che nascesse l’Unione Sovietica. Ci sono tra tutti i popoli individui di mente gretta che sono semplicemente razzisti. Ogni nazionalità diversa dalla propria deve essere demonizzata, qualunque sia il loro sistema politico e comunque tale sistema possa cambiare. Lo abbiamo visto nella recente guerra in Irak. Possiamo vederlo ora negli articoli dei tabloid sulla Siria, l’Iran o la Corea del Nord, che cercano di demonizzare i popoli di questi paesi. Noi non prendiamo quelle menti ristrette sul serio.

Ora, passiamo alla questione della continuità. Dopo la generazione di oscenità dopo il 1917, una continuità è riemersa davvero. Questo è stato dopo che la Germania aveva di nuovo invaso la Russia in occasione della festa di Tutti i Santi glorificati nelle terre russe, nel giugno del 1941. Stalin si rese conto che poteva vincere la guerra solo con la benedizione della Chiesa, ricordando le vittorie dei russi ortodossi del passato, come quelle di Sant’Aleksander Nevskij e Dmitrij Donskoj, che ogni vittoria doveva essere la vittoria dei suoi ‘fratelli e sorelle’, del popolo, non dei suoi “compagni” e della sua idiota ideologia comunista. La geografia non cambia, quindi c’è continuità nella storia russa.

È solo che il periodo sovietico è stato un’aberrazione da quella storia, una caduta dal destino nazionale, in particolare nella sua prima generazione violenta. Ciò che è importante è che il modo in cui l’Unione Sovietica ha agito è stato tanto perverso, non necessariamente quello che ha fatto, ma come lo ha fatto. Sono rimasto colpito dalle parole della sorella dello Tsar, la granduchessa Olga, che nella sua biografia del 1960 ha dichiarato: ‘Ho sempre seguito la politica estera sovietica con grande interesse. Quasi nulla è diverso dal corso adottato da mio padre e da Nicky’ (da Alessandro III e Nicola II). La differenza è che la politica sovietica ha lavorato con la violenza e le menzogne, le politiche dello Tsar lavoravano attraverso la pace e la sincerità.

D: Ci può fare un esempio di questo?

R: Che cosa sarebbe successo se la rivoluzione non avesse avuto luogo? Sappiamo (e Churchill lo ha espresso molto bene nel suo libro, ‘The World Crisis 1916-1918′) che la Russia era sull’orlo della vittoria nel 1917. È per questo che i rivoluzionari sono intervenuti a quel tempo. Avevano una finestra di tempo molto stretta in cui operare prima che avesse inizio la grande offensiva della primavera del 1917.

Se non ci fosse stata la rivoluzione, la Russia avrebbe sconfitto gli austro-ungarici, il cui esercito multinazionale e soprattutto slavo era comunque sul punto dell’ammutinamento e del collasso. Poi la Russia avrebbe respinto i tedeschi, o meglio i loro signori della guerra prussiani, a Berlino. In altre parole, la situazione sarebbe probabilmente stata simile a quella nel 1945 – con una sola eccezione vitale. Vale a dire che gli eserciti dello Tsar avrebbero liberato l’Europa centrale e orientale nel 1917-18, non invadendola, come nel 1944-45. E così avrebbero liberato Berlino come avevano liberato Parigi nel 1814, in modo pacifico e rispettoso, senza gli errori e le ubriachezze commessi dall’Armata Rossa.

D: Che cosa avrebbe potuto succedere, allora?

R: La liberazione di Berlino, e quindi della Germania, dal militarismo prussiano avrebbe sicuramente portato alla smilitarizzazione e alla regionalizzazione della Germania, al ripristino di qualcosa della Germania pre-1871, la Germania di cultura, musica, poesia e tradizione. Questa sarebbe stata la fine del Secondo Reich di Bismarck, che a sua volta era un revival del Primo Reich dell’eretico militarista Carlo Magno e che ha portato a sua volta direttamente al Terzo Reich di Hitler.

Se la Russia fosse stata vittoriosa, ci sarebbe stata un’umiliazione del governo tedesco / prussiano, il Kaiser sarebbe stato inviato in esilio, forse in qualche isola remota come avvenne per Napoleone. Ma non ci sarebbe stata alcuna umiliazione dei popoli tedeschi, il risultato del terribile trattato di Versailles, che ha portato direttamente agli orrori del fascismo e della seconda guerra mondiale. E che, tra l’altro, ha portato direttamente al Quarto Reich dell’Unione europea di oggi.

D: La Francia, la Gran Bretagna e gli Stati Uniti non si sarebbero opposti ai rapporti della Russia vittoriosa con Berlino?

R: Francia e Gran Bretagna, impantanate nelle loro sanguinose trincee o forse ormai raggiunti i confini francese e belga con la Germania, non avrebbero potuto obiettare, perché la vittoria sulla Germania del Kaiser sarebbe stata soprattutto una vittoria russa. Per quanto riguarda gli Stati Uniti, non sarebbero mai entrati in guerra, se la Russia non fosse stata prima messa fuori combattimento – in parte per il finanziamento degli Stati Uniti ai rivoluzionari, questo va detto. E questo di per sé è il motivo per cui gli Alleati hanno fatto del loro meglio per eliminare la Russia dalla guerra, perché non volevano una vittoria russa. Tutto quello che volevano dalla Russia era carne da cannone per esaurire la Germania, al fine di prepararla per la sconfitta da parte degli Alleati, in modo da poter finire la Germania e prenderne il controllo.

D: Gli eserciti russi si sarebbero ritirati da Berlino e dall’Europa orientale poco dopo il 1918?

R: Sì, certo. Ecco un’altra differenza con Stalin, per il quale la ‘Sovranità’, il secondo elemento nel motto dell’Impero ortodosso, era stata deformata in totalitarismo che significava l’occupazione, l’oppressione e lo sfruttamento per mezzo del terrore. Dopo la caduta degli Imperi tedesco e austro-ungarico, ci sarebbe stata una libertà per l’Europa orientale con trasferimenti di popolazione nelle aree di frontiera e la creazione di nuovi paesi senza minoranze, come una nuova Polonia riunita, Cechia, Slovacchia, Slovenia, Croazia, Russia carpatica, Romania, Ungheria e così via. Ciò avrebbe creato una zona demilitarizzata in tutta l’Europa centrale e orientale.

Questa sarebbe stata un Europa orientale con frontiere razionali e protetto, evitando così gli errori degli Stati conglomerati come le future, e ora passate, Cecoslovacchia e Jugoslavia. Per quanto riguarda la Jugoslavia, nel 1912 lo Tsar Nicola aveva già istituito un’Unione dei Balcani, al fine di evitare ulteriori guerre balcaniche. È vero, questo non era riuscito a causa degli intrighi del principino tedesco Ferdinand in Bulgaria e gli intrighi nazionalisti in Serbia e Montenegro. Possiamo immaginare che, dopo una prima guerra mondiale, in cui la Russia era stata vittoriosa, una tale unione doganale, istituita con frontiere eque, avrebbe potuto diventare permanente. Coinvolgendo Grecia e Romania, avrebbe potuto finalmente stabilire la pace nei Balcani, dalla libertà garantita sotto il protettorato russo.

D: Quale sarebbe stato il destino dell’impero ottomano?

R: Gli Alleati avevano già concordato nel 1916 che alla Russia sarebbe stato permesso di liberare Costantinopoli e controllare il Mar Nero. Questo è solo ciò che la Russia avrebbe potuto ottenere sessant’anni prima, evitando i massacri turchi in Bulgaria e in Asia Minore, se non fosse stato per l’invasione della Russia in Crimea da parte di Francia e Gran Bretagna. (Ricordiamo come lo Tsar Nicola I fu sepolto con una croce d’argento raffigurante Aghia Sophia, la Chiesa della Sapienza di Dio, ‘in modo che in cielo non si dimenticasse di pregare per i suoi fratelli d’Oriente’). L’Europa cristiana sarebbe stata finalmente liberata dall’oppressione ottomana.

Gli armeni e i greci dell’Asia Minore sarebbero anche stati protetti e i curdi avrebbero avuto un proprio Stato. Ma più di questo, gli ortodossi della Palestina e gran parte della futura Siria e Giordania sarebbero giunti sotto la protezione russa. Non ci sarebbe stata nessuna delle guerre permanenti che vediamo nel Medio Oriente di oggi. Forse le situazioni dell’Irak e dell’Iran di oggi avrebbero potuto essere evitate. Le implicazioni di tutto ciò sono enormi. Possiamo immaginare una Gerusalemme controllata dai russi? Anche Napoleone ha riconosciuto che ‘colui che controlla la Palestina, controlla il mondo intero’. Questo è noto oggi in Israele e negli Stati Uniti.

D: Quali sarebbero state le implicazioni in Asia?

A: Pietro I aveva aperto una finestra sull’Europa. Era il destino di Nicola II di aprire una finestra sull’Asia. Nonostante la sua generosa costruzione di chiese in Europa occidentale e in America, aveva solo un interesse limitato nell’Ovest cattolico / protestante e nelle sue estensioni nelle Americhe e in Australia, perché questo aveva e ha solo un interesse limitato per la Chiesa. In Occidente, c’è stato e c’è relativamente poco potenziale di crescita per il cristianesimo ortodosso. Infatti, oggi, solo una piccola percentuale della popolazione mondiale vive nel mondo occidentale, anche se questo copre un vasto territorio.

L’obiettivo dello Tsar Nicola di servire Cristo era quindi più interessato all’Asia, in particolare all’Asia buddista. Aveva cittadini ex-buddisti nell’impero russo che si erano convertiti a Cristo, e sapeva che il buddismo, come il confucianesimo, non è una religione, ma una filosofia. I buddisti lo chiamavano ‘Il Tara (Re) bianco’. Così ha lavorato con il Tibet, dove è stato chiamato ‘Chakravartin’ (‘Il Re della Pace’), Mongolia, Cina, Manciuria, Corea e Giappone, paesi dal grande potenziale. Era anche preoccupato dell’Afghanistan, dell’India e del Siam (Thailandia). Il re del Siam, Rama V, aveva visitato la Russia nel 1897 e lo Tsar aveva impedito al Siam di diventare una colonia francese. Questa era un’influenza che si sarebbe diffusa in Laos, Vietnam e Indonesia. In termini di popolazione di questi paesi hanno quasi la metà del mondo di oggi.

In Africa, con un settimo della popolazione mondiale di oggi, lo Tsar aveva relazioni diplomatiche con l’Etiopia e la proteggeva con successo dal colonialismo italiano, intervenendo anche a nome del Marocco e anche dei boeri in Sudafrica. Il suo odio di quello che gli inglesi avevano fatto ai boeri, uccidendoli nei campi di concentramento, è ben noto. Possiamo pensare che deve aver pensato la stessa cosa del colonialismo francese e belga in Africa. Era anche rispettato dai musulmani, che lo chiamava ‘Al-Padishah’, ‘Il Gran Re’. In generale, le sacrali civiltà orientali avevano molto più rispetto per ‘lo Tsar bianco’ che per l’Occidente borghese.

È significativo che in seguito anche l’Unione Sovietica si oppose alle crudeltà del colonialismo occidentale in Africa. Anche qui c’è continuità. Oggi ci sono missioni ortodosse russe in Thailandia, Laos, Indonesia, India e Pakistan, così come chiese in Africa. Penso che il gruppo contemporaneo BRICS, Brasile, Russia, India, Cina e Sud Africa, sia anche molto rappresentativo di ciò che la Russia avrebbe potuto raggiungere 90 anni fa, come membro di un gruppo di paesi indipendenti. In effetti, l’ultimo Maharaja dell’Impero Sikh, Duleep (Dalip) Singh (+ 1893), aveva chiesto allo Tsar Alessandro III di liberare l’India dallo sfruttamento e dall’oppressione britannica.

D: Così l’Asia avrebbe potuto essere colonizzata dalla Russia?

R: No, sicuramente non colonizzata. La Russia imperiale era anti-coloniale e anti-imperialista. Dobbiamo solo confrontare l’espansione russa in Siberia, che fu fondamentalmente tranquilla, con l’espansione europea nelle Americhe, che fu fondamentalmente genocida. Gli stessi popoli – i nativi americani sono fondamentalmente siberiani – sono stati trattati in modi totalmente diversi. Naturalmente, ci sono stati in Siberia e nell’America russa (Alaska) sfruttamenti di mercanti russi e di cacciatori di pellicce ubriaconi che si comportavano come cowboy nei confronti della popolazione locale. Questo lo sappiamo dalla vita di Sant’Herman d’Alaska e dai missionari in Russia orientale e in Siberia, come Santo Stefano di Perm e San Macario dell’Altai, ma questo non era la regola e non ci fu alcun genocidio.

D: Tutto questo è molto bello, ma non è molto rilevante parlare di ciò che avrebbe potuto essere. È tutto ipotetico.

R: Sì, è ipotetico, ma l’ipotesi ci può dare una visione per il futuro. Potremmo visualizzare tutti gli ultimi 95 anni di storia del mondo come una pausa, un’aberrazione catastrofica di grandezza tragica che ha ucciso centinaia di milioni di persone. Questo perché il mondo è diventato sbilanciato dopo la caduta del baluardo della Russia cristiana, la cui caduta è stata attuata dal capitale transnazionale, al fine di creare un ‘mondo unipolare’. E questo è solo il codice per il Nuovo Ordine Mondiale di un governo mondiale, cioè un’universale tirannia anti-cristiana.

Solo se si capisce questo, si può avere una visione per il futuro. Questa visione è quella di supporre che dopo il luglio 2018, possiamo ancora essere in grado di riprendere da dove avevamo lasciato nel luglio 1918, e raccogliere insieme i frammenti e le oasi di civiltà ortodossa in tutto il mondo, prima della fine. Per terribile che sia la situazione attuale, c’è sempre la speranza che nasce dal pentimento. Il pentimento significa tornare indietro, e questo è ciò di cui abbiamo parlato, riprendere dal punto in cui il mondo ha deviato in quella terribile notte epocale a Ekaterinburg nel luglio 1918.

D: Quale sarebbe il frutto di tale pentimento?

R: Un nuovo impero ortodosso, centrato in Russia, con Ekaterinburg, il centro del pentimento, come capitale spirituale, e quindi la possibilità di riequilibrare tutta questo tragico mondo squilibrato.

D: Potrebbe essere accusato di essere troppo ottimista?

R: Sì, questo è molto ottimista. Ma guardi quanto è successo nell’ultima generazione, dal momento della celebrazione del millennio del Battesimo della Rus’ nel 1988. La situazione del mondo è stata trasformata, anzi trasfigurata, con il pentimento di abbastanza persone della vecchia Unione Sovietica da cambiare tutto il mondo. Gli ultimi 25 anni hanno visto una rivoluzione, l’unica vera rivoluzione, una rivoluzione spirituale, il ritorno alla Chiesa. Supponiamo che la prossima generazione continui in quel pentimento rivoluzionario? Dato il miracolo storico che abbiamo già visto, che sembrava un sogno ridicolo per noi che sono nati durante i timori nucleari della guerra fredda e possiamo ricordare gli anni ’50, ’60, ’70 e ’80 spiritualmente cupi, perché non dovremmo prevedere almeno alcune delle possibilità sopra citate?

Nel 1914 il mondo è entrato in un tunnel. Durante la Guerra Fredda abbiamo vissuto in quel tunnel e non abbiamo potuto vedere luce né dietro di noi, né di fronte a noi. Oggi siamo ancora nel tunnel, ma ora possiamo effettivamente vedere un barlume di luce davanti a noi sulla strada. Certamente questa è la luce alla fine del tunnel? Ricordiamo le parole del Vangelo: ‘Con Dio tutto è possibile’. Sì, umanamente, tutto quanto sopra è molto ottimista e non vi è alcuna garanzia di nulla. Tuttavia, l’alternativa a quanto sopra non è solo pessimista, è apocalittico. Il fatto che il tempo è breve è la nostra principale ansia. Ci affrettiamo in una battaglia contro il tempo. E questo deve essere un monito e una chiamata per tutti noi.

The Glimmer of Light on the Road Ahead: On Tsar Nicholas II and the Restoration of the Christian Imperium

The following contains replies to various comments and questions in recent e-mails from Russia, Holland, Great Britain, France and the USA

Q: Why are there so many misunderstandings about Nicholas II and so many strident criticisms of him?

A: In order to understand Tsar Nicholas II, you have to be Orthodox. It is no good being secular or nominally Orthodox, semi-Orthodox, ‘hobby Orthodox’ and retaining your unconverted cultural baggage, whether Soviet or Western – which is essentially the same thing. You have to be consistently Orthodox, consciously Orthodox, Orthodox in your essence, culture and world view.

In other words, you have to have spiritual integrity – exactly as the Tsar had, in order to understand him. Tsar Nicholas was profoundly and systematically Orthodox in his spiritual, moral, political, economic and social outlook. His Orthodox soul looked out on the world through Orthodox eyes and acted in an Orthodox way, with Orthodox reflexes. So we too have to be Orthodox from inside in order to understand him.

Q: Is that why academics are so negative about him?

A: Western academics, like Soviet academics, are negative about him because they are secularists. For example, I recently read the book ‘Crimea’ by the British historian of Russia, Orlando Figes. This is an interesting book on the Crimean War, with many well-researched details and facts, written as senior academics should write. However, the author starts out from unspoken, purely Western secularist criteria, that since the Tsar of the age, Nicholas I, was not a Western secularist, he must have been a religious fanatic, and that his intention was to conquer the Ottoman Empire. Through his love of detail, Figes overlooks the main point – what the Crimean War was actually about from the Russian side. All he can see is Western-style imperialist aims, which he then attributes to Russia. This attribution is a projection of his Western self.

 What Figes misunderstands is that the parts of the Ottoman Empire which Nicholas I was interested in were those where an Orthodox Christian population had for centuries suffered under the Muslim Yoke. The Crimean War was not a colonial, imperialist Russian war to expand into the Ottoman Empire and exploit it, like those conducted by Western Powers to expand into Africa and Asia and exploit them. It was a struggle to liberate from oppression – in fact an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist war. The aim was to free Orthodox lands and peoples from oppression, not to conquer someone else’s empire. As for Nicholas I being a religious fanatic, in the eyes of secularists all sincere Christians must be ‘religious fanatics’. This is because secularists do not have a spiritual dimension. They are always one-dimensional, unable to see beyond their own secular cultural conditioning, ‘to think outside the box’.

 Q: Is this secular outlook why Western historians charge Tsar Nicholas II with being weak and unfitted?

 A: Yes. This is Western political propaganda, invented at the time and still parroted today. Western historians are educated and paid by Western Establishments and cannot see outside that box. Serious post-Soviet historians have disproved these charges, invented by the Western and the Westernised, gladly repeated by Soviet Communists, as their justification for the dismantlement of the Tsar’s Empire. The only justification for the charge that the Tsarevich was ‘unfitted’ is the fact that he was at first unprepared to be Tsar because his father, Alexander III, died suddenly and at a young age. But he soon learned and became ‘fitted’.

 Another favourite false accusation is that the Tsar started wars, namely the Japano-Russian War, called the Russo-Japanese War, and the Kaiser’s War, called the First World War. This is untrue. He was the only world leader who wanted to disarm, he was anti-militaristic. As regards the war against Japanese aggression, the Japanese, financed, armed and encouraged by the USA and Britain, started the Japano-Russian War. It attacked the Russian Fleet without warning in Port Arthur – a name that almost rhymes with Pearl Harbour. And, as we know, it was the Austro-Hungarians, urged on by the Kaiser who was desperate for any excuse to start a War, who triggered the First World War.

 Let us recall that it was Tsar Nicholas who for the first time in world history had urged disarmament at The Hague in 1899, because he could see that Western Europe was a powder keg, waiting to explode. He was a moral and spiritual leader, the only world leader then who did not have narrow, national interests at heart and was not rearming at huge cost. Instead, as the Anointed of God, he had at heart the universal interests of all Orthodox Christendom, to bring to Christ all God-created mankind. Why else make sacrifices for Serbia? To have survived, he must have been incredibly strong-willed, as, among others, the French President Émile Loubet remarked. All the powers of hell unleashed against the Tsar would never have been unleashed to remove him if he had been weak. Only the strong have to be destroyed, as is confirmed by those who knew him at the time.

 Q: You say that he was profoundly Orthodox, but it is true that he had very little Russian blood, isn’t it?

 A: Forgive me, but that statement contains a racist presumption, that you have to have ‘Russian blood’ to be Orthodox, a universal Christian. The Tsar was, I believe, one 128th Russian by blood. And so what? The Tsar’s sister answered this very challenge very adequately over fifty years ago. Interviewed by the Greek journalist, Ian Vorres, in 1960, his sister, the Grand Duchess Olga explained: ‘Did the British call George VI a German? He had not a drop of English blood in him…Blood is not everything. It is the soil you spring from, the faith you are brought up in, the language you speak and think in’.

 Q: There are some Russians today who describe Tsar Nicholas as a ‘Redeemer’. Do you believe that?

 A: Certainly not! There is only one Redeemer, the Saviour Jesus Christ. What can however be argued is that his sacrifice, and therefore that of his Family, of his servants and of the tens of millions of others who were murdered by the Soviet and Fascist regimes that followed, was redemptive. Rus was crucified for the sins of the world. Indeed, the sufferings of Russian Orthodox have been redemptive in their blood and in their tears. However, it is true that all Christians are called on to redeem themselves through living in Christ THE Redeemer. Interestingly, the pious but not well-educated Russians who call the Tsar a ‘Redeemer’ also call Rasputin a saint.

 Q: Speaking of this, what should we think of Rasputin?

 A: Hundreds of books have been written about Rasputin – nearly all of them by people who never knew him. I would only repeat the words of the Tsar himself, ‘He is a simple, good, religious Russian’, and the words of the Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga, ‘He was neither saint nor devil…he was a peasant with a profound faith in God and a gift of healing’. The fact that Rasputin was later atrociously slandered, and finally in December 1916 tortured by Russian aristocrats – a sign of just how sick the upper class was – and assassinated by British spies, only helps him in eternity. However, God has not revealed his destiny after this world. We do not pre-empt the Judgement of God. When that Judgement has been revealed to us all, then we will be able to say more. At present it is, I think, best to keep silence. Rasputin is still a mysterious figure – we leave him to the Judgement of God

 Q: But what about all the charges that he was a drunkard, a thief and a debauchee?

 A: Soviet and Hollywood fiction writers, like the Soviet novelist Radzinsky, love this image of Rasputin. Contemporary historians inside deSovietising Russia have proved that virtually all, perhaps all, of these charges were slanders, fiction. Moreover, they were made up not to discredit Rasputin – he was only a pawn in the hands of the slanderers – but to discredit the Imperial Family.

 Their logic was that if the Friend of the ruling family could be presented as a thief, drunkard and debauchee, therefore the Family must also be like that, and that therefore they were unworthy, and that they the slanderers should have power. Such slander was very simple and very primitive. People, decadent and without any spiritual depth, believed in it because they wanted to believe in it, because such always prefer slander, scandal and gossip to the Truth of Christ.

 Q: You say that we should leave Rasputin to God’s Judgement. Would you compare those who call Rasputin a saint to those who call Ivan IV and Stalin saints?

 A: No. To call those figures saints, especially Stalin, is ignorance and blasphemy. This is caused by a politically-motivated desire among a few to merge the old atheist Soviet mentality with the new Orthodox one. That is impossible, total spiritual confusion, theological illiteracy. On the other hand, the Rasputin question is rather a case of a few individuals with zeal but little knowledge.

 Q: If we can come back to our main point, what is the relevance of Tsar Nicholas II today? Orthodox Christians are a small minority among all Christians. Even if he were important to all Orthodox, he would still be a minority interest among Christians.

 A: Of course, we Christians are a minority. According to the statistics, of seven billion human beings on the planet, Christians number 2.2 billion – 32%. And Orthodox Christians are only 10% of all Christians, so only 3.2% of the world population, about one in thirty-three.

 However, if we look at these statistics theologically, what do we see? For Orthodox Christians, all Non-Orthodox are lapsed Orthodox, who were brought involuntarily by their leaders, for all sorts of political reasons, worldly reasons of convenience, to become Non-Orthodox. For us, Catholics can be defined as Catholicised Orthodox and Protestants as Protestantised Catholics. We unworthy Orthodox are the leaven that leavens the lump.

 Without the Church, there is no light and warmth of the Holy Spirit to radiate out into the rest of the world. Just as, even though you are outside the Sun, you can still feel the Sun’s light and warmth, so too the 90% of Christians who are outside the Church are still aware of the effects of the Church. For example, most of them confess the Holy Trinity and Christ as the Son of God. Why? Because of the Church which established such teachings long ago. Such is the grace of the Church that shines out of Her. Now, if we understand this, we will begin to understand the importance of the leader of Orthodox Christianity, the last successor of the Emperor Constantine, Tsar Nicholas II. His deposition changed the whole history of the Church, as also his Golgotha and his glorification today.

Q: If this is the case, why then was the Tsar deposed and then murdered?

A: Christians are always persecuted in the world, as our Lord told His disciples.

Pre-Revolutionary Russia ran on the Orthodox Faith. This was the oil that made the whole engine run. However, that Faith was rejected by the mass of the Westernised ruling elite, the aristocracy, and many others in the growing middle class. The Revolution was caused by a simple loss of faith, the engine ground to a halt and exploded for lack of oil.

 Most of the Russian upper classes wanted power for themselves, in the same way that wealthy merchants and middle classes wanted power for themselves and so caused the French Revolution. Having obtained wealth, they wanted to mount the next rung in the hierarchy of values – the rung of power. In the Russian context this lust for power, which had come from the West, was therefore based by definition on a blind admiration of the West and a hatred of Russia. This we can see from the very beginning with figures like Kurbsky, Peter I, Catherine II and Westernisers like Chaadayev.

 This lack of faith was also what poisoned the White Movement, which was disunited by its lack of a common and binding faith in Orthodox Tsardom. In general, Orthodox self-consciousness was absent in the Russian governing élite, which substituted various surrogates for it, whimsical mixtures of mysticism, occultism, freemasonry, socialism and a search for ‘truth’ in esoteric religions. Incidentally, these surrogates lived on in the Paris emigration, where various figures distinguished themselves in theosophy, anthroposophy, sophianism, name-worship and other very eccentric, but also spiritually dangerous fantasies.

 These had so little love for Russia that they actually went into schism, breaking away from the Russian Church and justifying themselves for so doing! The poet Bekhteev wrote very sharply of this in his 1922 poem, ‘Come to your senses, upper classes!’, comparing the privileged situation in Paris to that of the people of crucified Rus in the homeland:

 And once more their hearts are full of intrigue,

And once more treachery and lies are on their lips,

And life writes into the chapter of the last book

The vile treason of the grandees who knew it all.

 These members of the upper classes (and not all were traitors) were sponsored from the beginning by the West. The West considered that once its values of parliamentary democracy, republicanism or constitutional monarchy were introduced into Russia, it would become just another bourgeois Western country. For the same reason, the Russian Church had to be Protestantised, that is spiritually neutralised, or rather neutered, as the West has tried to do with the Patriarchate of Constantinople and other Local Churches fallen under its power since 1917, as soon as Russian patronage was removed. These attitudes were caused by the arrogant presumption that somehow the Western model could be universal. Incidentally, this is the arrogant presumption of the Western elites to this day, as they try to impose their model worldwide, presenting it as the ‘New World Order’.

 The Tsar, the Lord’s Anointed representing the last bulwark of Church Christianity in the world, had to be removed, as he was blocking the power grab of the Western and Westernised world. However, in their incompetence, the aristocratic revolutionaries of February 1917 soon lost control of the situation and within a few months power had descended from them to the lowest of the low, to the criminal Bolsheviks. These set out on a course of massacre and genocide, of ‘red terror’ – just as in France five generations before, only now with far more murderous, twentieth-century, technology.

 It was in this way that the motto of the Orthodox Empire was deformed. I remind you that this is ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and People’. This was deformed by Westernised Russians and Western secularists, both then and now, into: ‘Obscurantism, Tyranny and Nationalism’. Atheist Communists deformed it even further into ‘Centralised Communism, Totalitarian Dictatorship and National Bolshevism’. What did this motto in fact mean? It simply meant: ‘(Full-bodied, incarnate) Authentic Christianity, Spiritual Independence (from the powers of this world) and Love for God’s People. As I have said above, this motto is the spiritual, moral, political, economic and social programme of Orthodoxy.

 Q: A social programme? But surely the Revolution came about because there were so many poor people and so much exploitation of the poor by the super-rich aristocrats, and the Tsar was at the head of that aristocracy?

 A: No, it was precisely the aristocracy that was opposed to the Tsar and the people. The Tsar gave away much of his personal wealth and taxed the rich to the hilt under his brilliant Prime Minister Stolypin, who did so much for land reform. Sadly, the Tsar’s programme of social justice was one of the reasons why many aristocrats hated the Tsar. The Tsar and the people were one. They were both betrayed by the Westernised elite. This is clear from the assassination of Rasputin, which was the preparation for the Revolution. In it the peasants rightly saw the betrayal of the people by the upper classes.

 Q: What was the role of the Jews in this?

 A: There is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that only Jews were – and are – responsible for everything bad in Russia (and everywhere else). This contradicts the words of Christ. First of all, the Jews who were involved in the Russian Revolution – and it is true that most of the Bolsheviks were Jews – were apostates, atheists, like Marx, and not real, practising Jews. However, those Jews who were involved worked hand in hand with Non-Jewish atheists, like the American banker Morgan, or with Russians and many others and depended on them.

 Thus, we know full well that Britain organised the Revolution of February 1917, applauded by France and financed by the USA, that Lenin was transported to Russia by the Kaiser and financed by him, and that the masses who fought in the Red Army were Russian. None of these were Jews. Some people, captives of racist myths, simply refuse to see the truth – that the Revolution was Satanic and that Satan can use any nationality, any of us, for his poisonous works, Jews, Russians and Non-Russians. Satan favours no nationality, but makes use of any who surrender their free will to him for his ‘New World Order’, in which he will be the Universal Ruler of the fallen world.

 Q: There are Russophobes who say that there continuity between the Tsar’s Russia and Communist Soviet Union. Is that so?

 A: There is certainly continuity of Western Russophobia! Read copies of The Times newspaper from 1862 and 2012 for example. You will see 150 years of xenophobia. Yes, it is true that many in the West were Russophobic long before the Soviet Union came into being. There are the narrow-minded among all peoples who are simply racist. Any nationality other than their own must be demonised, whatever their particular political system and however that system may change. We saw that in the recent Iraq War. We can see it now in the tabloid reports on Syria, Iran or North Korea, which try to demonise the peoples of those countries. We do not take those narrow minds seriously.

 Now, let us turn to the question of continuity. Following the generation of obscenities after 1917, continuity did re-emerge. This was after Germany had again invaded Russia on the Feast of All the Saints who have shone forth in the Russian Lands in June 1941. Stalin realised that he could only win the war with the blessing of the Church, by recalling the victories of Orthodox Russians in the past, like those of St Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy, that any victory would have to be the victory of his ‘brothers and sisters’, the people, not of his ‘comrades’ and his idiotic Communist ideology. Geography does not change, so there is continuity in Russian history.

 It is just that the Soviet period was an aberration from that history, a falling away from national destiny, especially in its violent first generation. What is important is the way that the Soviet Union acted that was so perverse, not necessarily what it did, but how it did it. I was struck by the words of the Tsar’s sister, the Grand Duchess Olga, who in her 1960 biography stated: ‘I have always followed Soviet foreign policy with great interest. Hardly anything in it is different from the course adopted by my father and by Nicky’ (by Alexander III and Nicholas II). The difference is that Soviet policy worked through violence and lies, the Tsar’s policies worked through peace and sincerity.

 Q: Can you give an example of this?

 A: What would have happened if the Revolution had not taken place? We know (and Churchill expressed it very well in his book, ‘The World Crisis 1916-1918’) that Russia was on the verge of victory in 1917. This is why the revolutionaries took action then. They had a very narrow window in which to operate before the great spring offensive of 1917 began.

 Had there been no Revolution, Russia would have defeated the Austro-Hungarians, whose multinational and mainly Slav army was on the point of mutiny and collapse anyway. Then Russia would have pushed back the Germans, or rather their Prussian warlords, to Berlin. In other words, the situation would quite possibly have been similar to that in 1945 – with one vital exception. That is that the Armies of the Tsar would have liberated Central and Eastern Europe in 1917-18, not invading it, as in 1944-45. And so they would have liberated Berlin as they liberated Paris in 1814, peacefully and respectfully, without the errors and drunkenness committed by the Red Army.

Q: What could have happened then?

A: The liberation of Berlin, and so of Germany, from Prussian militarism would surely have led to the demilitarisation and regionalisation of Germany, restoring something of pre-1871 Germany, the Germany of culture, music, poetry and tradition. This would have been the end of the Second Reich of Bismarck, which itself was a revival of the First Reich of the militaristic heretic Charlemagne and which led directly in its turn to the Third Reich of Hitler.

 If Russia had been victorious, there would have been a humiliation of the German / Prussian government, the Kaiser being sent perhaps into exile to some remote island as was Napoleon. But there would have been no humiliation of the German peoples, the result of the terrible Treaty of Versailles, which led directly to the horrors of Fascism and the Second World War. And that, by the way, has led directly to the Fourth Reich of today’s European Union.

 Q: Would France, Britain and the USA not have objected to victorious Russia’s dealings with Berlin?

 A: France and Britain, bogged down in their blood-soaked trenches or perhaps by then reached the French and Belgian borders with Germany, could not have objected to this, because the victory over the Kaiser’s Germany would above all have been a Russian victory. As for the USA, it would never have entered the War, if Russia had not first been knocked out of it – partly by the US financing of revolutionaries, it must be said. And that in itself is why the Allies did their best to eliminate Russia from the War, because they did not want a Russian victory. All they wanted from Russia was cannon fodder to exhaust Germany, in order to prepare it for defeat by the Allies, so that they could finish Germany off and take it over.

 Q: Would the Russian Armies have retreated from Berlin and Eastern Europe soon after 1918?

 A: Yes, of course. Here is another difference with Stalin, for whom ‘Sovereignty’, the second element in the motto of the Orthodox Empire, had been deformed into Totalitarianism and that meant occupation, oppression and exploitation by terror. After the fall of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, there would have been freedom for Eastern Europe with population transfers in border areas and the establishment of new countries without minorities, like a newly-reunited Poland and Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Carpatho-Russia, Romania, Hungary and so on. This would have created a demilitarised zone throughout Eastern and Central Europe.

 This would have been an Eastern Europe with rational and protected frontiers, so avoiding the errors of conglomerate States like the future, and now past, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. As regards Yugoslavia, in 1912 Tsar Nicholas had already set up a Balkan Union in order to avoid further Balkan Wars. True, this failed because of the intrigues of the German princeling Ferdinand in Bulgaria and nationalist intrigues in Serbia and Montenegro. We can imagine that after a First World War in which Russia had been victorious, such a Customs Union, established with fair borders, could have become permanent. Involving Greece and Romania, it could at last have established peace in the Balkans, its freedom guaranteed as a Russian Protectorate.

Q: What would have been the fate of the Ottoman Empire?

A: The Allies had already agreed in 1916 that Russia would be allowed to free Constantinople and control the Black Sea. This was only what Russia could have attained sixty years before, preventing Turkish massacres in Bulgaria and Asia Minor, had it not been for the Crimean Invasion of Russia by France and Great Britain. (We recall how Tsar Nicholas I was buried then with a silver cross depicting Aghia Sophia, the Church of the Wisdom of God, ‘so that in heaven he would not forget to pray for his brothers in the East’). Christian Europe would at last have been freed of Ottoman oppression.

 The Armenians and the Greeks of Asia Minor would also have been protected and the Kurds would have had their own State. But more than that, Orthodox Palestine and much of the future Syria and the Jordan would have come under Russian protection. There would have been none of the permanent war that we see in the Middle East today. Perhaps the situations of today’s Iraq and Iran could have been avoided. The implications of this are huge. Can we imagine a Russian-controlled Jerusalem? Even Napoleon recognised that, ‘he who controls Palestine, controls the whole world’. This is known today to Israel and the USA.

 Q: What would the implications have been in Asia?

 A: Peter I opened a window on Europe. It was the destiny of Nicholas II to open a window on Asia. Despite his generous Church-building in Western Europe and the Americas, he had only a limited interest in the Catholic/Protestant West and its extensions in the Americas and Australia, because it had and has only a limited interest in the Church. In the West, there was and is relatively little potential growth for Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, today, only a small proportion of the world population lives in the Western world, even though it covers a huge territory.

 Tsar Nicholas’ aim to serve Christ was therefore more concerned with Asia, especially with Buddhist Asia. He had former Buddhist citizens in the Russian Empire who had converted to Christ, and he knew that Buddhism, like Confucianism, is not a religion, but a philosophy. The Buddhists called him ‘The White Tara’ (King’). So he worked with Tibet, where he was called ‘Chakravartin’ (The King of Peace’), Mongolia, China, Manchuria, Korea and Japan, countries of potential. He was also concerned with Afghanistan, India and Siam (Thailand). The King of Siam, Rama V, visited Russia in 1897 and the Tsar prevented Siam from becoming a French colony. This was an influence that would have spread to Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia. In population terms these countries have nearly half of today’s world.

 In Africa, with a seventh of today’s world population, the Tsar had diplomatic relations with Ethiopia and successfully protected it from Italian colonialism, also intervening on behalf of Morocco and also the Boers in South Africa. His detestation of what the British did to the Boers, killing them in concentration camps, is well known. We can think that he must have thought the same about French and Belgian colonialism in Africa. He was also respected by the Muslims, who called him ‘Al-Padishah’, ‘The Great King’. In general, sacral, Eastern civilisations had far more respect for ‘the White Tsar’ than the bourgeois West.

 It is significant that later the Soviet Union also opposed the cruelties of Western colonialism in Africa. Here there is also continuity. Today there are Russian Orthodox missions in Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, India and Pakistan, as well as churches in Africa. I think that the contemporary BRICS group, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is also very representative of what Russia could have achieved 90 years ago, as a member of a group of independent countries. Indeed, the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Duleep (Dalip) Singh (+ 1893), had asked Tsar Alexander III to free India from British exploitation and oppression.

 Q: So Asia could have been colonised by Russia?

 A: No, definitely not colonised. Imperial Russia was anti-colonial, anti-imperialist. We only have to compare Russian expansion into Siberia, which was basically peaceful, with European expansion into the Americas, which was basically genocidal. The same people –native Americans are basically Siberians – were treated in totally different ways. Of course, there were in Siberia and in Russian America (Alaska) exploitative Russian merchants and drunkard fur trappers who behaved like cowboys towards the local population. This we know from the life of St Herman of Alaska and missionaries in eastern Russia and Siberia, like St Stephen of Perm and St Macarius of the Altai, but this was not the rule and there was no genocide.

 Q: All of this is very well, but it is not very relevant to talk about what might have been. It is all hypothetical.

 A: Yes, it is hypothetical, but hypotheses can give us a vision for the future. We could view the whole of the last 95 years of world history as a hiatus, a catastrophic aberration of tragic magnitude that has killed hundreds of millions. This is because the world became unbalanced after the fall of the bulwark of Christian Russia, whose fall was implemented by transnational capital in order to create a ‘unipolar world’. And that is simply code for the New World Order of a One World Government, that is, a Universal, anti-Christian Tyranny.

 Only if we understand this, can we have a vision for the future. This vision is to suppose that after July 2018, we may still be able to resume where we left off in July 1918, and gather the fragments and oases of Orthodox civilisation worldwide together, before the end. However terrible the present situation is, there is always the hope that is born of repentance. Repentance means going back, and that is what we have been talking about, resuming from where the world left off on that terrible, world-changing night in Ekaterinburg in July 1918.

 Q: What would the fruit of such repentance be?

 A: A new Orthodox Empire, centred in Russia, with Ekaterinburg, the centre of repentance, as its spiritual capital, and so the chance to rebalance this whole tragic, unbalanced world.

 Q: You could be accused of being far too optimistic?

 A: Yes, this is very optimistic. But look at what has happened over the last generation, since the celebration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988. The situation of the world has been transformed, or rather transfigured, by repentance among enough of the people of the old Soviet Union for the whole world to change. The last 25 years have seen a revolution, the only true revolution, a spiritual revolution, the return to the Church. Suppose the next generation continues in that revolutionary repentance? Given the historic miracle that we have already seen, which seemed like a ridiculous dream for us who were born during the nuclear fears of the Cold War and can remember the spiritually grim 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, why should we not envisage at least some of the possibilities outlined above?

 In 1914 the world entered a tunnel. During the Cold War we lived in that tunnel and we could see neither light behind us, nor in front of us. Today we are still in the tunnel, but we can now actually see a glimmer of light on the road ahead. Surely this is the light at the end of the tunnel? Let us recall the words of the Gospel: ‘With God all things are possible’. Yes, humanly, all the above is highly optimistic and there is no guarantee of anything. However, the alternative to the above is not just pessimistic, it is apocalyptic. That time is short is our chief anxiety. We hurry in a battle against time. And that must be a warning and a call to us all.

 

 

 

The Road from Damascus: From Recent Correspondence

Below we present points from correspondence of the last two months, anonymously and arranged thematically as questions and answers.

Q: What are your thoughts as we enter 2013?

A: My thoughts turn both ahead and also back to 2014, the centenary of the great European suicide. This was the disaster of 1914, from which Europe has not only not recovered, but from which it has fallen and falls ever further. The consequences of that War and its disastrous Treaty of Versailles were numerous, not least the guarantee of a Second War, but also:

If in the First World War Russia had defeated Germany and Austro-Hungary, as it was about to in 1917, the whole of world history would have been different. The Jews, who had already suffered terrible pogroms in Vienna and Berlin before that War (much worse than those in Poland, the western Ukraine and Bessarabia), would have been protected. In turn, there would have been no holocaust and no reason to establish Israel. The whole Middle East quagmire that exists today and the results of the manipulative Western divisions of the Ottoman Empire would not have come into existence.

There would have been the promised independence for Poland, Finland and the Baltic States, but with protection for their Orthodox minorities, autonomy for the Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia and other peoples. There would never have been the disastrous centralism of the Soviet period. There would have been freedom at last for Carpatho-Russia, protection for the Orthodox Balkans, freedom for Constantinople and liturgies in the Church of the Holy Wisdom, and protection for Orthodox Asia Minor. Both the Armenians and Greeks in what later became Turkey would have been protected from genocide. No masonic Greeks and Romanians would have catholicised the Church calendar and split the Diaspora. There would have been no Turkish invasion and occupation of Cyprus and the Orthodox of the former Ottoman Empire, as in Syria, would have been protected.

Q: That brings us to today’s situation in the Middle East?

A: Precisely. After the recent wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan and staring bankruptcy in the face, the West now faces the disastrous consequences of its meddling in Yugoslavia, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and perhaps in Bahrain. The ‘blowback’ is enormous, as we see in Mali. Now come the consequences of meddling in the rest of the Ottoman Empire – in Turkey and Syria, not forgetting the Kurds, so mistreated by European colonialism in the carve-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War.

It is said that members of the French and British special services have already been killed in Syria, though this has been hushed up by the governments involved. There are 1500 members of US Sp3ecial Forces in the Jordan alone. Who knows? The 65,000 terrorist mercenaries in Syria belong to 29 different nationalities, according to the UN. Recently many Tunisians, another 5,000, have been flown into Syria and armed by the CIA, financed by the oil monarchies, especially by anti-Iranian Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has made space in some of its prisons and sent criminals to fight in Syria. It is curious that the only well-known European politician who has spoken out against the allying of the West with Muslim terrorists in Syria is the French Marine Le Pen. She has had the courage to say that the Western-encouraged ‘Arab spring has been followed by the Islamist winter’. Interestingly also, no-one in the West has dared to speak against support for the Syrian people by China, only for the support offered by Russia.

Q: Why has the West spoken against Russian support and not against Chinese support?

A: China is due to become the world’s greatest economic power within the next ten years. It may also by then have become the world’s largest Christian country. The anti-Christian West is frightened of this. It is less frightened of Russia, which it still associates with the decadence of the 1990s. This is a mistake. Today’s Russia has been rising since 2000. In 2000 Russia had its revelation, since when it has been on the road from Damascus; the West is still on the road to Damascus, it has still not had its revelation, which it is purposely avoiding. Russia and the West have already passed each other by on that road, heading in opposite directions, Russia heading towards Jerusalem, the West heading towards Babylon.

Q: From a spiritual viewpoint, why are the events in Syria so important?

A: Because Syria is very close to Jerusalem and, spiritually, Jerusalem is the centre of the world, the beginning – and the end.

Q: If we can come back to what you said originally about Russia’s potential victory in the First World War, why did it not win?

A: The Western aims in that War were twofold – the defeat of Germany and then of Russia. The Western elites knew perfectly well that Russia, unimpeded, would become the World’s greatest power by 1950 and its Orthodox Christian culture would then stand at the centre of Europe and of the world. The Russian Empire was already in advance of much of the West by 1914, and not only in terms of agricultural and industrial production. For example, 85% of its inhabitants were literate by 1917, thanks largely to the stupendous achievements of the last Tsar.

But Russia had to be destroyed before it destroyed Germany and then freed the Slav peoples from Austro-Hungarian oppression and the Orthodox peoples of the Near and Middle East from Ottoman oppression. So Rasputin, the symbol of the Russian Orthodox people, was murdered by the British (as we now know from Andrew Cook’s book, ‘To Kill Rasputin’) and the Revolution was organised by the British ambassador to St Petersburg, Sir George Buchanan, with the open support of Lord Milner, Balfour and Lloyd George. Russia could be brought down, because it was no longer necessary to the Allies – they knew that the USA would enter the War on their side, as soon as Russia was destroyed.

Q: Is there any chance that today’s Russian Federation could re-establish a sort of Orthodox Empire, as it could have done, had it been victorious in 1917?

A: Every Empire has problems. European models of Empire were too centralised, which provoked rejection on their fringes. In turn, the Soviet Union was a far more extreme and oppressive form of European Empire. In the territories of the pre-1917 Russian Empire, we should be hoping to see the emergence of a looser and voluntary Eurasian Confederation, not a Union or an Empire. However, at present only Belarus and Kazakhstan are taking part in this organisation. There is far to go.

Q: Eastern Europeans – though not necessarily their governments – have become disenchanted with the EU and have been rejecting the European Union since the Euro disaster. There is even talk of the UK leaving the European Union. Do you think any of these countries would want to join a Eurasian Confederation?

A: EU Eastern Europe is more or less bankrupt. Estonia will soon have no money to pay for any services, because so many of its tax-paying younger people have had to emigrate, mainly to Finland and Sweden. Half of Latvia and Lithuania seem to be in the UK or Germany. Whole villages and towns in the Baltic States are now populated almost entirely by pensioners and almost worthless blocks of flats are locked up, their owners abroad. There is no work.

Even ethnic Estonians and Latvians are cursing Gorbachov and would like the Soviet Union back. Then they had an excellent education system and free, quality health care – far better than the rationed, emergency only health system in the UK today. Eastern European politicians, as in Poland, say that their unemployment is relatively low, but that is only because millions of their young people have emigrated. The situation is similar in Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, where real youth unemployment is over 50%. However, at present there is no real alternative to the EU for EU Eastern Europe. That is the challenge facing the Russian Federation, to set up a viable alternative to the EU.

And I think that this also concerns the UK. The internal realignment necessary for the UK elite to follow the people and quit the EU is unlikely at present, but perhaps largely because there is no realistic alternative. To go from being a US / German colony, as is clear from recently-expressed negative US and German attitudes to UK desires for freedom from the EU straitjacket, to being an independent country in association with a loose Eurasian Confederation is a very big step. But who knows?

Q: What are your thoughts regarding President Putin?

A: He is a phenomenon of the post-Soviet period, so inevitably there is light and also some dark with him. However, he does have one great leading idea, that of rebuilding national unity, retaining the best of the old Soviet Union and restoring the best from the old Imperial Russia. This is why he had the remains of the great Russian Orthodox philosopher Ivan Ilyin and also White émigré leaders brought back to Russia. Now he is restoring pre-Revolutionary regiments and honouring the Russian victims of the First World War. This is the future, not the Communist past.

Currently, for example, the Russian Communist Party asserts that it made only one mistake during its tyranny – the persecution of the Church under Stalin. This is an outrageous lie. Its evils began in 1917 under the mass murderer, Lenin. There was civil war and artificial famine, causing cannibalism. Communist persecution continued right up until the 1980s. Stalinism continued long after Stalin; the Khrushchov period was especially awful. It is a lie to call the genocide of tens of millions a ‘mistake’. That genocide also includes Stalin’s crass mismanagement of the Soviet armed forces before and after the German invasion. Millions of Russians and others died then because of his incompetence. The Soviet period was quite possibly the worst crime in world history – not a mere ‘mistake’.

Q: What will happen after Putin?

A: Who knows? He could be succeeded by another politician, with or without Soviet tendencies, more or less positive. That is not what we want. What we want is the restoration of the Orthodox Monarchy. However, it is unclear whether Russia will be ready, spiritually mature, for that by the time that Putin has disappeared from the scene.

Q: Patriarch Kyrill has been criticised by some in the Diaspora as a liberal. What would you answer?

A: I can remember that the then Metropolitan Kyrill was criticised publicly at the 2006 All-Diaspora Council in San Francisco for his ecumenistic and liberal reputation. At that time no-one challenged that thought – we all felt much the same. However, people change – that is the nature of the Church, at the centre of which stands repentance, though the modernists will not admit that, because in their pride they do not have the repentant spirit, thinking like Protestants that they are ‘already saved’.

Today we are looking at Patriarch Kyrill. Given the overview of the international Russian Orthodox Church that only a Patriarch can have and the responsibilities that he bears, he has changed. I think the concerted series of attacks on the Russian Church of 2012, orchestrated by the pro-Western media inside and outside Russia, and not without foreign finance, have changed him even more. He now knows exactly where his friends are and where his enemies are.

The ecumenists and renovationists, left-overs from the Soviet period inside and outside Russia, have lost the remaining support they had. It is now clearly understood that these are only the frontmen of Western Protestantism, ultimately Eastern-rite Protestants, Neo-Uniats, financed or at least encouraged by the Western Secret Services and the Western media which those Secret Services control. In April 2012 Patriarch Kyrill publicly condemned this ‘fifth column’ of ‘traitors in cassocks’.

Their only purpose is to divide the Church, as they have done especially in the Ukraine, where they have been financed by dollars. All divisions of the Church merely play into the hands of anti-Orthodox and weaken the Church. Hitler knew this and so do the CIA and its embassies in Kiev and Moscow. Some of those who have taken part in these divisions are ambitious and unscrupulous careerists. Tragically, some of those who have followed them in their divisions are truly pious but very naïve, not seeing that the cause that the support is gravely spiritually tarnished.

Q: Many of us have been disturbed by some events inside Russia, for example the continued activities of Fr George Kochetkov’s neo-renovationist group, or the strange opinions of Deacon Andrei Kuryayev. What do you say?

A: These are all adolescent distractions inside Russia, examples of spiritual immaturity. For instance, Fr George Kochetkov’s group is tiny. All these problems concern a small minority who were baptised and ordained in the 1990s and never fully integrated the Church. For example, the concept of merging Christmas and the New Year is fantasy and betrays the still Soviet mentality of its author. This shows ignorance of the age-old liturgical cycles of the Church. But nobody takes such fantasies seriously and they will die out. They are convert froth. Our interest is in the vast and immortal ocean of Orthodoxy, not in the passing froth on the seashore, which is here today, gone tomorrow.

Q: There has been controversy recently as to whether Tsar Nicholas is not a martyr, but a passion-bearer. Do you have any views?

A: Technically speaking, a martyr is one who had been killed for the Faith by Non-Orthodox; a passion-bearer is one who has been killed for the Faith by lapsed Orthodox in a state of apostasy. However, in reality, the word ‘martyr’ is used for all those killed for the Faith, which is why we talk about the ‘New Martyrs and Confessors’, not the ‘New Passion-Bearers and Confessors’.

In the Soviet context, we know that many of the Red murderers, Stalin for instance, were baptised Orthodox. Most of these were Slavs, but among the murderers there were also Latvians, Hungarians, Jews and others who were not Orthodox. So technically speaking, many of the ‘New Martyrs’ were at the same time ‘New Passion-Bearers’. And, in this sense, the Tsar was both a martyr and a passion-bearer. In general, none of the Soviet obscenities could have occurred without the co-operation of lapsed Orthodox, without apostasy. On the other hand, the whole Soviet ideology came, like the Revolution itself, from the West, which organised and financed it.

But what a pedantic question this is! All the more so when we know that only the Russian Church makes such a distinction. The Greek Church calls them all martyrs, that is, ‘witnesses’ for the Faith. In England St Edward the Martyr will always be called so and not a ‘passion-bearer’, which technically he was. In everyday life the Tsar Martyr will always be called universally, both inside and outside Russia, the ‘Tsar-Martyr’. This is an argument about words.

Q: Do you think that the little dissident groups, all split among themselves, who did not accept the reuniting of the Russian Orthodox Church six years ago, will ever return to unity?

A: I do not know. I would answer them with the prophetic words of Metropolitan Philaret on 10/23 September, 1974 in his Reply to Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

‘If the liberation of Russia were to take place and unity with a restored Orthodoxy and canonical hierarchy were to take place, then we would consider ourselves part of the Russian hierarchy’.

I would add that, historically speaking, such dissidence is in any case increasingly irrelevant when we put it into the context of the spiritual meaning of the huge new emigration from Russia and Eastern Europe, which has transformed our situation in the Diaspora over the last six years.

Q: What do you mean by ‘the spiritual meaning of the new emigration’?

A: The first emigration of post-1917 numbered between one and two million. It was very mixed. Some in it were Church-minded, but a large part of it and of the White Movement in general was not Church-minded, only politically-minded. Let us be clear: among the ‘Whites’ were those very people who had brought about the collapse of the Monarchy. They were not ‘White’ at all. This is absolutely clear from documents and Church Councils of the time, from politically-coloured splits of the period in France and the North America and the famous report of St John of Shanghai on the spiritual state of the Russian immigration at the Second All-Diaspora Council. Some of these people I met in their old age. I repeat: They were not White at all.

Today’s post-Soviet economic emigration is far greater than the post-1917 one. It has a huge task of witnessing to Orthodoxy before an atheistic Western world, of saving what is best in dying Western culture. Russians and Eastern European Orthodox have seen atheism, they have lived through it – they already know that the naïve West, with its persecution of Christianity, political correctness, abortion holocaust, single-sex marriage and pedophilia, has set out on a false path. We have advance knowledge of the folly that the West is creating for itself. This means that we could still save the West from itself. That is what our whole task and calling is, and has been, for the last forty and more years. This is our spiritual meaning, the spiritual meaning of ROCOR, as we set out the uncompromised, but also multinational and multilingual, Orthodox Tradition before the Western world and its aberrations.

Q: What were the results last October of the London Conference of all the Russian Orthodox bishops in the Diaspora?

A: Just as there were deviations in the old emigration, so there are also deviations in the new emigration. Some of its elements manifest a certain nationalism, often, strangely enough, a Soviet one, a sympathy with atheism! Such nationalism will only turn into a ghetto and die out. Other elements, like a few individuals at the new seminary in Paris or among some older elements, manifest a pro-ecumenical attitude, again a hangover from the Soviet period.

Clearly, these extremes have to be ironed out before the parishes which are still for the moment under the Patriarchate of Moscow, even though they are outside Russia, can join ROCOR. Their existence is canonical disorder and it is preparatory work towards their merging with ROCOR that was the real purpose of the October Conference. Through it, the vestiges of the Soviet period, when the Centre in Moscow was paralysed by persecution, are being transformed.

Fortunately, most in the new emigration share in neither of the above extremes and certainly such extremes are unknown in the best of ROCOR. We understand that Russian Orthodox means not only those who are by blood Russian and Orthodox, but all those who in spirit, world view, culture and state of soul, confess Russian Orthodoxy. There have been many examples of this in Russian history – Pushkin, who was part Ethiopian, Barclay de Tolly and Lermontov, who were Scottish, General Bagration, who was Georgian, or Levitan the painter. Yet they were all Orthodox in their cultural reflexes.

Q: What is happening with the new Russian Cathedral in Paris?

A: There has been a planning dispute about the appearance of the new Cathedral, aspects of whose design displeased some, including in ROCOR. This problem should be sorted out fairly quickly. Our prayer is that the new Cathedral will be dedicated to Tsar Nicholas and all the New Martyrs and Confessors and that it will become the centre of the future Western European Metropolia. That would be justice and an act of repentance before and by the whole Orthodox Diaspora. May God grant this and may our prayers be heard.

Q: Could a Western European Metropolia be constructed by another of the Local Orthodox Churches, and not the Russian?

A: Let us be realistic. Apart from the Russian Church, the other Local Churches are too small and simply cannot provide the necessary infrastructure, finance and know-how. But size is not the only important thing. Apart from quantity, there is also quality. Such a Metropolia will be constructed on the Tradition, not on decadence of practice, not on communion without confession, not on an abbreviated Liturgy, not on the Catholic calendar, not on intercommunion etc.

In other words, a Metropolia will be built neither on the conservative extreme of ethnic exclusivism, nor on the liberal extreme of compromises with the heterodox world. It will be built on the maximum, not on the minimum. This house will be built on rock, not on sand. Such a Metropolia must have in part a monastic background, not a background of compromises with the Orthodox Tradition – and there is only One Orthodox Tradition above all nationalities. We have seen the failure of the OCA experiment, which was built on an ‘All-American’ phyletism, on an imitation of the heterodox world and renovationist compromise. Such a minimalist ‘sand’ experiment does not work – and it will not work in Western Europe either.

Q: And do you think that this Metropolia will actually come into being in the near future?

A: I think it is highly likely. It is Patriarch Kyrill’s desire.

Q: How do you know that?

A: Apart from others who have told me, he told us that, face to face, in Moscow, last May.

Q: And what about a ‘Western Orthodox Church? Will that ever exist?

A: This seems to me to be less likely – and for lack of time. Western Europe has recently become the scene of persecution of the Faith. The Depardieu incident, when the French actor was given Russian nationality as a result of the persecution of all initiative, may be the start of something much bigger. It may be that many other Western cultural workers of talent may yet flee to Russia because of the persecution of Christian-based Western culture by political correctness. This was after all prophesied by St Seraphim of Vyritsa. The best of European culture may yet be saved by Russia, an Empire of the Spirit.

Sadly, this Western persecution of Christianity is not a matter of if, rather of when. So there simply may not be time to see a Local Church evolve in Western Europe. Let us be honest, the number of native Western Orthodox is tiny; we are far outnumbered by Eastern European Orthodox. Why? Because only very few Western people are interested in Christ and His Church. I am constantly contacted by Russians who want to know about Western saints and Western traditions and who want services for these saints, but, sadly, not by Western people. This is a sobering fact and all should know it. The Church is always built on the sober truth, not on fantasies.

1/14 January 2013