‘Serve Russia just as you served me…Faithful service to your homeland is more precious in the days of its fall than in the days of its greatness’.

The last words of the Holy Martyr Nicholas II to Colonel Kushelyov, 31 July 1917

‘The night will come soon, dark and long’.

St Tikhon, Patriarch of Moscow, Prophecy of the Twentieth Century, 25 March 1925

In a remote provincial cemetery in Paraguay where the clocks go slow, beneath the brilliant sun and the torrential rain, lie the grave and mortal remains of Evgeny Ivanovich Smirnov, a White Russian Officer from Kursk and hero of the war against Bolivia (1932-35). He died there exactly fifty years ago, in 1967, across the ocean, so very, very far from his forebears’ homes. There were many such who, like him, did not live to see the light in their homeland and so return there. They are scattered in faraway cemeteries under wooden and stone crosses all over God’s earth, from Manchuria to New South Wales, from Saskatchewan to Seine et Marne, from Patagonia to Vermont, from Tunis to Cape Town, from Belgrade to Dublin, from great European cities to outback shacks, from parched deserts to snowy wastes, their hearts broken by enforced exile from their homes and their kin. Why?

Because in 1918 the peoples of the Russian Empire actively or passively, consciously or unconsciously, consented to the murder of the last Christian Emperor and his family and beautiful children at the hands of a clique of foreign maniacs and ever since they have had to pay in blood for their crime, either of treason, or of cowardice, or else of deceit. The ruling elites of foreign powers did not only stand by, but actively financed and encouraged the sadistic murderers. The jealous elites of Great Britain and France had already beheaded their own Christian kings in bloody, secularist revolutions and could not understand why others would not do the same. The greedy elite of Germany had always wanted to destroy the Slavs, militarily, from Charlemagne to Hitler, and, economically, to Merkel. As for the crazed elite of the United States, it wanted, as it still wants, to head a Zionist-inspired World Dictatorship.

In that way, repeating their lie that, ‘you cannot turn the clocks back’, they ensured that there would be no return to the peace of the pre-1914 world, but war without end, with only pauses on the way to their suicide. Having rejected a thousand years of the revelations of the Holy Spirit, in the nineteenth century the Western elite proclaimed the death of God and in the first half of the twentieth century it proclaimed their new gods of Communism and Fascism. But when these failed hopelessly in unspeakable barbarism and downfall came, they proclaimed the golden calf of Consumerism, bread and circuses, which in despair the people turned to, living without an ideal. Us who did not follow the consumerists call ‘losers’. For us there is more important than the stripes in toothpaste. For us ‘losers’, our ideal is still Christ and His heavenly kingdom, which we wish to bring down to earth.

To the ‘winners’, we say let the dead bury the dead, for we know that the last words on earth belong to Christ. Their illusion that they are winners will only lead them to bitter disillusionment. As long as we remain faithful to Christ, we have no cause to fear. In the meantime, we shall continue to fight for Christ’s Truth, delaying the coming of the Antichrist until more can find salvation. This means bringing down Christ’s Kingdom on earth, incarnating the truths of the Orthodox Christian Faith. Perhaps we are mystics, but we are pragmatic mystics, bending the State to all the implications of the Church of God. ‘May thy will be done on earth, as in heaven’. One day, perhaps sooner than many expect, the bourgeois Consumerist nightmare will inevitably end, and then the Western and Westernized world will be faced with spiritual reality: that which Evgeny Smirnov suffered for in his exile in faraway Paraguay.

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars.