Last week I was contacted by someone who had prepared a mobile exhibition ‘to celebrate the Russian Revolution’ and wanted to come to our Church so that our parishioners could visit it. When explaining her crass error to her and rejecting her visit, I at first wondered whether she came from a different planet to me, and then I realized that, whatever her nationality, she was simply yet another victim of the Non-Christian culture of the Western world. She was not part of our Orthodox Christian civilization and was therefore completely unaware of our values and criteria.

The fact is that the events which took place in Russia in 1917 were not in spirit Russian, but Western (whatever the nationality of those involved), that there was no Revolution, but a bloody seizure of power, and that there is nothing to celebrate in that bloodshed, for what followed was an unmitigated disaster. Some people point to industrialization under Communism, technical achievements, free education and medicine, but all these were already present in the very advanced and prosperous pre-Revolutionary Imperial Civilization; Communism took Russia backwards.

Communists said that they wanted to create paradise on earth, but without God paradise is hell; the hell of the destruction of the Church and the martyring and torturing of its clergy and faithful, the Red Terror, civil war, massacres, artificial famines, cannibalism, collectivization, concentration camps, arrests for virtue, the failure to defend against Nazi terror, genocide, the mass destruction of family life and morals, mass alcoholism, mass abortion and mass corruption. Indeed, the latter four are still very much present in today’s post-Soviet/still Soviet Russia.

Though vast, the Russian Empire once constituted two thirds of Europe, one third of Asia and part of North America. It was unnaturally cut off from the eastern seaboard of the Atlantic by the Western Schism, from North America by aggressive British Imperialism which forced the sale of Alaska, and from protecting Manchuria and the still united Korean Peninsula by the US/British creation of Imperialist Japan. Its ‘manifest destiny’ of uniting Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific was thus never fully achieved, though, ironically, it came very near to this in 1945.

Although we know that the restoration of the Orthodox Christian Empire is only possible through mass repentance, here too, in the County of Suffolk, in the Region of the East of England, in the Kingdom of England, in the future Orthodox Christian Empire, we pray for its restitution.