Lazarus, come forth!
(Jn. 11, 43)
Unlike several American Presidents who were actually heads of the huge CIA spy and torture agency just outside Washington, President Putin used to be a mere low-ranking KGB official in provincial East Germany. However, when he lived there he witnessed the collapse of the Eastern bloc, which Stalin had constructed in order to protect the Soviet Union from any further Western aggression. And then he witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union itself and realized that the Soviet Union had failed not just Russia but also many countries around the world. Since nobody would ever want to recreate a failure, what could his real, and not imagined, present intentions and future hopes for the Russian Federation be? In order to answer this question, we first have to understand why the Soviet Union collapsed.
The Soviet Union intended to bring ‘a bright future’, Paradise, to the whole earth. In other words, through it the Third International was to replace the Third Rome and bring the Kingdom of God to the whole earth without and against God, to be Christian without and against Christ and His Church. Once we understand this internal contradiction, we understand why the Soviet Union could not help collapsing. Any understanding this may be tempted to think that therefore it is time to restore the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire. However, this too is illogical, for the Russian Empire, the Third Rome, also failed, being unable to prevent the Revolution, and if it is restored, then there will simply be another Revolution. So we come to a second question: Why did pre-Revolutionary Russia collapse? Here is our answer:
Fr George Sheremetiev was a fine and noble ROCOR priest in London who died in 1973. He used to show an album of photos of the estate owned by his aristocratic family, one of the richest in Russia, an estate which has since become Shermetievo Airport. At the Revolution Fr George lost everything and left Russia with a single suitcase and lived in poverty. He used to say that if he lived in poverty, it was his repentance for the fact that the Tsar’s Russia had fallen because of the corruption and treason of the majority of his aristocratic class which had fallen away from the Orthodox Church. In other words, the Third Rome fell because it was not supported by the Faith of the Second Jerusalem. Once we understand this internal contradiction, we understand why pre-Revolutionary Russia could not help collapsing.
As nobody would ever want to recreate two failures, then what could the hopes and intentions of the President of the Russian Federation be? Since his government rules over what is the essential space of both the pre-Revolutionary Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union, it must be to create a country which has the weaknesses of neither. On the one hand, it cannot live with a treasonous upper class which has no loyalty to Russian Tradition and because of whose wealth there is social injustice. On the other hand, it cannot attempt to spread Christianity worldwide without Christ, for a Garden of Eden where God does not walk is the place of the fall of Adam and Eve. It is only on this basis that the Russian Federation and the countries and people who voluntarily ally themselves with Her will rise from the dead.