An Interview with Count Benckendorff

 Two years ago you interviewed me and my wife and published those interviews under the title The Benckendorff Papers, illustrating the brochure with photos from our home, with our permission. Our project now is to set up a small Russian Orthodox chapel in the garden with your help, though we also want to include some local saints there.

Now we wanted to interview you, Father. The last two years have3 seen so many events. I would like to ask you about political matters, the Countess would like to ask about the Church and other matters, but you will have to come back for that..

Personal

Count Benckendorff: My first question is general – where do you get your ideas and insights from?

Fr Andrew: It is perhaps embarrassing to admit it, but the truth is that any good ideas, if there are any, come when I am not thinking, but when I am asleep. They are sent to me. They are not my thoughts. I regularly have to get up in the night and write thoughts down, which is why I have always kept paper and pen next to my bed. This is the proof that it is bad to think, or in Griboyedov’s Russian expression, ‘grief comes from thinking’ – горе от ума!

CB: How many people did our parishe4s lose when we transferred from ROCOR to the Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate in August 2021?

FA: We lost six Russians who were nationalists and used to come to church about once a month, in part to speak Russian to one another. And we also lost a couple with four children, who were new converts with more zeal than knowledge, who then led their children into the ROCOR schism.

Almost exactly six months later, in February 2022, the Moscow Patriarchate, where we had been, was forced by political pressure to give us a canonical release for the Romanian Patriarchate. This was eight days before the SMO began in the Ukraine. As you know, here we continue exactly as before as refugees, on the old calendar, in the Russian way, but with about 200 new parishioners, mainly Moldovans and Ukrainians, and, above all, free of politics, from Moscow, the CIA and Constantinople. And our Moldovan bishop, whose surname is Rusnak, speaks much better Russian than the old ROCOR bishop!

The Follies of Empire

CB: Let us get on to politics. Has Trump accelerated the decline of the West?

FA: The West has been attempting suicide ever since 1914. The process accelerated greatly after 1939 with the second European attempt at tribal suicide. In 2014, 100 years after the first attempt, the third attempt started. Trump is merely a stage in this third attempt, Trump or no Trump.

Arguably, under Biden the decline accelerated even more quickly than it has under Trump. After all, Trump’s slogan is MAGA. Now, if you have to make American great again, that means that it is already no longer great. If the slogan was KAG, Keep America Great, that would be different. But that is not the slogan. Western Europe’s decline began in 1914, that of the USA, arguably, began in 1975, with its defeat in Vietnam and is ending in Iran, where Trump foolishly thought he could weaken China, destroy BRICS, take revenge for Iran’s liberation from the US puppet regime in Iran in 1979, please the powerful Israel lobby in Washington and, perhaps, keep the rest of the Epstein Files out of public view.

The failure of America to destroy Russia through the battering ram of the Ukraine, which Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden began, is America’s Retreat from Moscow. Its failure to destroy Iran, which began in 1979, is America’s Waterloo. Such are the Follies of Empire.

CB: We of course know Russia and the Ukraine very well. Who do you support in the war?

FA: Do I support a group of Nazi atheist nationalists, who venerate Hitler and his 50,000 Ukrainian SS collaborators, who murdered hundreds of thousands of Poles, Jews and Russians, or do I support a group of Communist atheist nationalists, who venerate the mummy of Lenin and his Russian Bolshevik collaborators, who murdered 700,000 Soviet citizens? The answer is neither. There is no Holy Rus here on either side. I do not and cannot venerate Death, which is the flag and ideology of both Lenin and Hitler, of both Communists and Nazis.

In 2014 the US neocons installed their Nazi Galician junta in Kiev, who then sold off huge chunks of the Ukraine to US Agribusiness like Cargill and Blackrock for billions and enforced Ukrainian as the State language. Yet 83% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language; a situation similar to that here in Wales, where most people speak English as their first language and most do not even speak Welsh. Let us not talk about Holy Rus here.

As for Russia, Holy Rus died there in the appalling Russian betrayal of its own Tsar in 1917. Only a few crumbs survived inside Russia and in the emigration outside Russia, so let us not talk about Holy Rus here either.

As you know from your own life in Kiev, modern Ukrainians are just as little Orthodox as modern Russians, both with their mass abortions, declining birthrates, divorces (‘Orthodox’ Kiev is a world centre for surrogacy and prostitution) and all the rest. The only difference is that one regime is pro-Communist, the other is pro-Nazi. It is a Soviet-Nazi war, the end of the unfinished Second World War.

This is a war that common sense says is unnecessary. As you know, I have been to both countries frequently. Put simply, I would tell the Ukrainian proxies and their Western puppeteers: Don’t poke the bear, even if you do not like Russia and find it oppressive, it is still a bear, far bigger than you. It is very foolish for a small and poor country, ruled by Zionist oligarchs, like the Ukraine, to take on the fourth largest economy in the world, which has the world’s best-armed and best-trained army and an endless amount of arms, both traditional and very sophisticated. Use diplomacy. Negotiate unless you want to be killed.

The fault here is with the Western sponsors of Kiev, who have constantly refused to talk and have ‘cancelled’ Russia as ‘subhuman’, just as the Nazis called all Slavs ‘Untermenschen’. The West openly says that its task is ‘to Yugoslav’, that is, to destroy, Russia through divide and rule, just as Hitler’s task was. Therefore, Russia has in turn cancelled the aggressive and hateful Western elite, turned its back on Europe and become Eurasian, facing China, Iran, North Korea.

Today 70% of the cars in Moscow are Chinese. That says a lot; the West has lost Russia and its markets for ever. Emperor Peter’s ‘window on Europe’ was closed by the West after 300 years and Russia was fed up with the draught anyway. Wars happen because people want them to happen and the West wanted this one to happen. Too many people in the West are still making too much money out of this war to want to stop it.

CB: To your knowledge, is the Russian economy suffering from the war in the Ukraine? What annoys everyone we know is the shutting down of Whatsapp and other social media channels by President Putin, rather than anything else.

FA: My friend the economist Sergei Glaziev is optimistic, though I think he should have been appointed head of the National Bank, and not Nabullina. And I can’t see any real suffering to the economy because of the war. The whole world wants to buy Russian national resources, wheat and technology. Apparently, Russian national debt is still only about 16% of GDP (and it is going down thanks to the US, which has doubled the price of oil and gas by attacking Iran, and Russia is selling oil and gas in huge quantities to Western Europe through India, as well as to Asia).

The European elite is financing the Kiev regime by getting even further into debt, which in most Western countries is well over 100% of GDP. The Ukraine went bankrupt in 2022. Russian military spending is 7% of GDP, the Ukraine’s is something over 40% and its teachers and pensioners are paid only by Western money, not to mention its millions of emigrants to Western Europe, many of whom are fed by Western social security systems. Look at the facts.

CB: Why do you think the Russian victory in the Ukraine has been so slow?  We both thought it would end in early 2025.

FA: I would not use the word ‘victory’ here. In wars everyone is a loser. Parts of ‘liberated’ eastern Ukraine are in ruins. The Russian Army has only ‘liberated’ the ruins created by both sides. Where is the victory here? Real victory can only come with a just and therefore long-lasting peace, which accommodates both sides. This is unlike the injustices that happened at Versailles in 1919, which made a second round of war inevitable. And the injustices of 1945 made today’s third round of war also inevitable.

The real solution in the Ukraine, and everywhere else in the former USSR, has never been in war, but has always been in self-determination. Let the people choose which country, and also which Local Church, they want to belong to, and then redraw the borders. However, that goes against imperialism, that of the US, and of Kiev and Moscow (and that of the Russian Church), all of which want to impose by force. The Follies of Imperialism always go against the interests of the peoples.

If only Russia had taken Kiev in the first weeks of the conflict in early 2022 and changed the Nazi regime there for a democratic regime, then perhaps self-determination could have been implemented. So-called ‘Ukrainians’ could have been allowed by internationally-observed referendum in each province (as had happened in the Crimea in 2014) to return to Russia (as before 1922), or to return to Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Belarus (as before 1939). What would have been left after that would have been the real Ukraine, Kievan Rus, a free country, neither an American, nor a Russian colony, with its own people, language and culture, and its Church granted autocephaly. Instead of that, we have imperialism, tragedy and well over a million dead.

In February 2022 the British Secret Service at GCHQ predicted that the war in the Ukraine would last two to three weeks. So much for ‘intelligence’ services. Following the prophecy of Elder Iona of Odessa, I originally thought that it would end in 2024. I was wrong, I misinterpreted. The former Defence Minister Shoigu said 2025. He too was wrong. How can we explain that the war is now in its fifth year?

Firstly, some would say that the length of the war has been caused by Russian naivety, weakness and incompetence. That is certainly part of it. President Putin admitted his extreme naivety at Western duplicity between 2014 and 2022.

His naivety reminds me of that of the Tsar’s government in 1914. It made the very naïve error of attacking German Prussia, under pressure from France and Britain. These were the two countries which had invaded Russia in 1854 and which stabbed Russia in the back in 1917 by betraying their best friend, the Tsar, and so ensuring that the Bolsheviks came to power and then bled the Russian Empire. Russia’s argument was with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not with Germany.

Some say that Russia should have taken Kiev back in 2014, or at least in 2022. Weakness, incompetence? I do not know, but they must also play a part. Several Russian generals were imprisoned for corruption.

Secondly, there is the fact that by April 2022, Russia was no longer fighting the Ukrainian regime, but the whole of NATO and its completely militarised EU. Ukrainians, ‘to the last one’, had to die as proxies, but with huge amounts of NATO money, arms and tens of thousands of mainly NATO mercenaries. That stretched everything out much longer, as this became a war of attrition against NATO, leaving Russia with huge amounts of NATO arms to destroy. That takes time.

The Western technique is to outsource its wars, to toss others into the fires it starts. As far as it is concerned, the dying must be done by Ukrainians, and if they are willing, Poles (over 10,000 dead NATO Poles so far), the Baltics, Georgians (they refused), Romanians and Moldovans (also refusing) and now they are trying to recruit the Armenians to die for them.

Thirdly, some say that President Putin is going so slowly in order to save the lives of Russian soldiers, of whom at least 200,000 have already died or been seriously injured. Perhaps that is true. After all, the Ukrainians have lost nearly 2,000,000 killed and seriously injured, as they sadistically use their troops as Soviet-style cannon fodder.

Fourthly, there is the question of strategy. The original Russian aims never were to occupy the Ukraine, but to liberate the Russian eastern part of the Ukraine from the ongoing genocide there by Kiev and to demilitarise and denazify the Ukraine. Instead, as a result of the Russian failure not to regime-changing Kiev at the outset which brought further NATO aggression, it is having to demilitarise and denazify the whole of the West, that is, the whole of NATO.

And some say that for the denazification of the West to happen, Russia will have to wait for the Western peoples to overthrow their US-imposed, Globalist elites, formed by the cocaine-sniffing, pedophile or pervert Nazi Epstein Syndicate. That is taking many years. Since 2003 and the French and German refusal to invade Iraq, the US has replaced the French and German elites with US-trained elites, who form the Epstein Syndicate, as also in Moldova, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, the Baltics etc. (The British elite has been in the US pocket since 1956). The US regime-change/elite replacement programme failed only in Slovakia and Hungary. You can always tell where the regime-changed – the new US elites all speak fluent English, like Macron and Merz, Sandu and Tusk.

CB: When will the war end?

FA: Who knows? President Putin has said ‘soon’. This year? What do I know? Though, if I can be ironic, it is said that no European war can end until Italy, and most Eastern European countries, have changed sides, and the UK has gone bankrupt. The latter happened in 1916, which caused the British to betray Russia and sell Palestine, all in order to get help from Zionist bankers and issue the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and then in 1941, which caused the half-American Churchill to sell out Britain to the US. Today it is happening again. So maybe we are not far off.

CB: Why has the British government been so Russophobic? I mean, it invented Litvinenko and then Salisbury, long before the Military Operation began in 2022.

FR: The Russophobia of the British Establishment began in 1814 when Russia defeated Napoleon and then liberated Paris. The ensuing jealousy and panic at a strong Russia resulted in the Anglo-French invasion of Russia in 1854, the Victorian invention of ‘the Great Game’, the British-financed Japanese War against Russia in 1904-5, the British-orchestrated overthrow of the Tsar in 1917, which backfired and brought the Bolsheviks to power, and then Churchill’s 1945 Operation Unthinkable, which was a proposed Anglo-US-Nazi invasion of the USSR.

I have the impression that the Western Europe elite, especially the German, wants revenge for the Soviet victory over Nazism in 1945. This is because they are all basically ideological Nazis, as we can see in all the recent British Prime Ministers. For the British elite, it is all about revenge for not routing Russia in 1856, at the end of the so-called Crimean War, and then jealousy. The British Establishment lost its Empire, so the Russians must suffer. The Establishment are bad losers, for they lost the Great Game which they invented.

CB: I think you agree that the vice of the British is hypocrisy, double standards. What do you think is the vice of Russians? You can be honest with me!

FA: It is the untranslatable Russian word ‘Хамство’, ‘Khamstvo’. For Non-Russian readers, this means great rudeness, but even more than that, it is self-centredness, abruptness, breathtaking contempt for others, arrogance, ignorance and a feeling of racist superiority. Khamstvo is why Russia is today hated by the western Ukrainians, Balts and Poles.

Like everything else, Khamstvo existed before 1917, but it developed greatly under the Soviet system, after the murder or expulsion of the old White Russian cultural elite. For example, as you will recall, in the USSR a good job was considered one where you could steal a lot from your employer. Since the Soviet State had stolen everything from the people, the people considered that they had the right to steal back. ’Normal’, as the Soviet word says.

You see it in people like Fr Andrei Tkachov, the anti-woman Ukrainian priest, now much promoted in Moscow, who upsets people with his sweeping generalisations and insults issued on TV. He has no idea of tact and diplomacy and justifies himself by saying that he is just ‘frank’. He can only see black and white. There are many poorly-educated priests like that. That sort of priest is a bully and you see in Russian churches how they make women cry at confession and during sermons and seem to enjoy punishing others. A little power makes these people crazy. We had one such Russian convert priest here a few times some years ago. A very jealous type, he made two women cry, so I asked him not to confess any more. Thank goodness he left.

As you know, in Russian you even have a verb for the ‘Хам’, the rude person, which is ‘Хамить’. To translate it as ‘to be very rude’ does not even begin to express the idiocy of it. A typical such person is a Russian driver who in heavy rain soaks pedestrians by driving fast, near the pavement. Such people have absolutely no consideration for others. So it is not just extreme rudeness, but thoughtlessness, lack of any culture, being badly brought up, the ‘I spit on you’ attitude as in the Russian expression: Мне наплевать.

Another example was a friend in Odessa in 2017. A woman who had been going to church all her life, she had broken her right hand, which she had in a sling. She went to church and made the sign of the cross with her left hand. A typical ‘Kham’, who knew nothing about Church life, shouted to her rudely, swearing at her, and told her how to make the sign of the cross properly with her right hand. And then there is the old woman, the babushka, who seems to guard the entrance to every Russian church, so she can curse badly-dressed visitors who come in. It is all Khamstvo. ‘Без предел’, no limits, as you say.

This was also the attitude of the Stalinist State and I have seen senior Russian bishops do it as well. You know the sort who behave as feudal lords and have brought three priests in Russia to suicide in the last year alone. If the British are hated for their hypocrisy and resulting perfidy, the Russian Church has committed suicide through its ‘Khamstvo’ everywhere, inside and outside Russia, above all in the Ukraine. Most of its bishops have made themselves hated.

CB: What do you think will happen to China and Taiwan, given US preoccupations elsewhere?

FA: Taiwan will one day return to China, probably quite naturally, without military means, which is what over 50% of the Chinese in Taiwan want anyway. Taiwan has been part of China for millennia. The so-called ‘Taiwanese’ are Chinese. The nationalism of some in Taiwan is petty and artificial (how can you be loyal to a country that is not real, like Taiwan, Belgium or for those who live in the east of the Ukraine to the Ukraine?). Economically, Taiwan already depends on China anyway.