1914 – 1939 – 1964 – 1989 – 2014. The hundred-year nightmare of four generations of decivilisation is coming to an end. The generational change is becoming apparent and the cycle of historical injustices is being broken. True, we are now witnessing only the first timid signs of this transformation, but there is the promise of much more to come. After the recent expression of the free choice of the people of the Crimea, we are now witnesses to a historic moment throughout the Russian Federation and indeed throughout the Eurasian Union. The attempt to westernise, that is, to secularise, Christian Russia by violence, that which began 100 years ago in 1914 by dragging the then Russian Empire into the contagion of a decivilising Western imperialistic war, has failed.

The attempt to destroy the millennial underlying belief system which held together the East Slav and other peoples of the Russian Empire had begun with the influx of Western materialism among the upper classes long before 1914. What was new in 1914 was the spread of Western materialist ideology in a most extreme form. First, from 1914 a foreign invasion (as in 1812 and 1854) led to weakness. However, this time the weakness became so great that in 1917, just as the Russian Empire was on the brink of victory, it led to the overthrow of the legitimate government by upper-class traitors, orchestrated from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg (just as the recent overthrow of the legitimate government in the Ukraine has been orchestrated from the US Embassy in Kiev). lmmediately, after a good many deaths, this ‘bloodless’ revolution took the legitimate ruler captive and pressure was put on the Church to compromise and accept the coup d’etat.

This first coup d’etat was followed some six months later by the seizure of power from these upper-class incompetents and traitors. This second coup d’etat was operated by a group of extreme and violent materialists, the brainwashed heirs of Voltaire, Darwin and Nietzsche, imported into Russia through and by Germany in a train (not sealed, as the myth would have it). lmmediately, the Church, which had always supplied the belief-system of the Russian Lands, came under bloody and unheard of persecution and the former ruler and his family were slaughtered. The materialists abolished the Russian Empire and founded the Soviet Union. There followed a generation of the most violent persecution, sweeping away millions of innocent lives, including 600 bishops, nearly 200,000 priests, monks and nuns and millions of faithful Christians. Mass shootings, artificial famine in Russia and the Ukraine to enforce collectivisation (on the model of the ‘Enclosures’ in England and the ‘Clearances’ in Scotland), torture chambers and concentration camps were the rule of the day. The Western world, birthplace of the ideology behind this holocaust, was mainly silent and eagerly traded with the new country.

This generation of violence ended in 1941, when the contagion that had yet again started in Western Europe, this time in 1939, also spread to the Soviet Union with yet another invasion, the fourth bout of anti-Russian Western imperialism in the five generations since 1812. On the feast-day of All the Saints of the Russian Lands, expansionist Nazi Germany invaded the former Russian Empire, causing 27 million mainly civilian victims, the greatest holocaust and genocide known to the history of humanity. However, it was also this holocaust that began to bring the new rulers of the Soviet Union to their senses. lt was a very slow and extremely painful process that lasted two generations and although direct persecution of the Church more or less ceased, indirect persecution continued most viciously. However, during that period, most stopped believing in atheism – when they had believed in it at all – and even their atheist rulers began to realise that their ideology was bankrupt.

It was in 1989, exactly two generations after the Second European War of 1939, that the signs of imminent collapse became obvious. This culminated in 1991, exactly two generations after the most recent Western invasion of the Soviet Union, that the atheist regime collapsed and the country fell apart. The West was triumphant and now, having divided, it tried to rule through its present ideology. So there began that disastrous period when Western materialism, now in its liberal consumerist form of individualist egoism, spread anarchically into the newly divided countries of the old Soviet Union. The spiritual and so moral decivilisation of the West took over. There was a decade of shame, when capitalist oligarchs (the old nomenklatura, the new aristocracy) stole the public assets and the poor were created. ABCDE – alcoholism, abortion, corruption, drugs and emigration – prevailed. Many of the best left, many of the worst seized assets and power. Only in recent years have we begun to see light, culminating now in the freedom and return home of the Crimea.

Four generations, one hundred years, since the attempt to destroy the Russian Orthodox world began in 1914, its geographical reunion has started. Christianity, in its original form and not in the apostate and compromised forms of the second millennium, is rising up against the whole tide of atheist secularism that seized power in Saint Petersburg in 1917 and in Kiev in 2014. lf those who are apostates and those who are compromised do not wish to join this movement, they are free not to do so. Thus, if the Roman Catholics of former Poland, now the far west of the Ukraine, wish to leave the Ukraine for the Poland of the secularist and bankrupt EU, let them do so, taking their Galicia with them. But let them leave the rest of the Ukraine, the other 80%, alone. As regards the rest of the smaller and weaker Orthodox Christian world in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it can now look to the Russian Orthodox Church to lead it away from the mess of pottage of the European Union and the USA, back to Orthodox Christian roots and the free and uncompromised calendar and practices of the Orthodox Tradition in the coming Inter-Orthodox Council. The Restoration, Reconstitution and Reconstruction of the world that was lost in 1914 are in the air. Our vision is clear.