Category Archives: Rus

Tragedy in the Collective West and Tragedy in the Russian Orthodox Church

A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power. It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.

Walter Lippman, US political thinker and journalist, Congressional Record, Vol III, Part 7, 1965

Introduction: The Rise of the Collective West

In 1066 the Papally-backed bandits of North-Western Europe, Normans, Bretons and Flemings, led by Duke William the Bastard, invaded England to oust the ‘schismatic’ English. They were greatly helped by English traitors placed there by the half-Norman King Edward the Confessor. It was one of the first acts of aggression of the Collective West, which was then being assembled and united by its ideological and infallible head, the Pope of Rome. This ‘Crusade’ was followed by other Papally-backed ‘Crusades’, which were also acts of gangsterism and thuggery by the same Collective West. Those Crusades massacred tens of thousands not only in the Holy Land, but also along the Baltic. Here knights and mercenaries of various Western nationalities took delight in murdering the ‘schismatic’ Russians and other Non-Catholics. In the following centuries Poles, Lithuanians, Swedes and Germans took part in further attacks on Russia and in Papally-backed efforts at regime-change, most notably in the Time of the Troubles at the beginning of the 17th century.

However, the greatest examples of violent aggression against Russia by the Collective West were the campaigns of the Papally-crowned Napoleon in 1812 and of the nominally Catholic Hitler in 1941. Napoleon’s aggression was multinational and, indeed, the Russian rout of Napoleon is still celebrated there as a victory over the ‘Twelve Nations’. In 1854, the French, joined by the Ottomans, British and Sardinians, invaded Russia again, this time mainly through the Crimea, the Cardinal of Paris calling it a ‘Crusade against the schismatics’. It was another joint effort of the West. Then in 1914 Germany and Austro-Hungary also attacked Russia. In 1941, having learned nothing from Napoleon’s defeat, Hitler also invaded Russia with an Army of just as many nationalities, but whose losses were many times huger than those of Napoleon. Nearly all of them died and this time instead of troops from the Russian Empire liberating Paris as in 1814, in 1945 troops from the Soviet Empire liberated Berlin and this time stayed there for over forty years.

Today the USA, of which NATO is only a puppet, continues to try and dominate Eurasia. However, the USA island, like Britain before it, is only a maritime power and cannot fight on the Eurasian landmass, but can only attempt to divide and rule it. This is why US allies are on islands like Britain, Japan and Taiwan, on coastal strips like Israel and on peninsulas like South Korea and Western Europe. As soon as it tries to penetrate the Eurasian landmass, it is resisted by huge land-based forces, like those of Russia and China. And because the USA is trying to weaken and destroy Russia through the Ukraine and China through Taiwan, both those countries have now allied themselves to defend each other from the USA.

Some modify the statement that ‘history repeats itself’ and declare rather that ‘history echoes’. Whatever the case, geography does not change. Land-based Russia dominates Northern Eurasia and the maritime island empires, Britain and after it the USA, are still trying to destroy Russia from the sea, whether from the Baltic Sea, the Arctic Ocean, the Black Sea or the Pacific Ocean. The Western ideology of superiority and indispensable exceptionalism remains just as jealous as ever of those who have lived for up to a millennium and a half in the eastern half of Europe. These are the lands of the East Slav peoples, of ‘Rus’, represented above all by the Russians, with their rich agricultural land and abundant mineral resources. Today the Collective West continues, as before, to attack Russia along its northern and southern flanks, with the fantasy of making ‘NATO lakes’ in the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, but also in headlong frontal warfare in proxy warfare with bloody consequences for the hoodwinked Ukrainians, who are simply being used and abused.

However, even the very unpopular elites of the Collective West (Macron and Scholz at about 17%, and Sunak at 9%) are increasingly divided on this issue. This division is very complex, as the forty nations of the western half of Europe are divided by different views and experiences. But all those elites have committed suicide because they have invested so heavily in the lost Ukraine project. Now the US is abandoning the Ukraine and ultimately Europe too. There only ambition now is to stretch out the Ukrainian tragedy until after the US elections. The situation is like that in Britain in the Year 410. Then the Roman Emperor Honorius replied to a request for assistance from Britain against pagan attacks, telling the Roman cities to see to their own defence. It was a tacit acceptance of British self-government. No forces could be spared to protect distant Britain. Roman control of Britannia was entirely lost. So too the declining and bankrupt USA is abandoning Western Europe. Like a pet dog abandoned by his master, the pet dog no longer knows what to do.

NATO – Today’s Collective West

Europe is divided. Apart from the fact that a few European countries are not even members of the US NATO organisation, that is, of today’s Collective West, or else are not members of its political and economic wing, the US-controlled EU, there are those in the western half of Europe who simply want good relations with Russia. Here there stands out Hungary and it has been joined by Slovakia. Remarkable is the aggressive, colonial attitude of the very unpopular Czech regime of Pavel (now more ferociously anti-Russian than even the Americans – perhaps overcompensating for his Communist past?) towards Slovakia. This is why the Slovaks divorced from the patronising Czech elite over thirty years ago. These two countries will not get on until the that elite is removed by the Czech people. More or less openly, Serbia and minorities in every country in the western half of Europe, from Moldova to Germany, from Cyprus to Montenegro, from Bulgaria to Italy, from Austria to Portugal, from Ireland to Sweden, also have pro-Putin attitudes and want to oust their highly unpopular elites.

NATO Romania will become pro-Putin, if he gives it back its land stolen by Stalin in the south of the Ukraine and if it gets back the Romanian parts of Moldova. Many other countries near Russia will also change their attitudes, if their small and unpopular US-elites are removed and, of course, if they can make favourable agreements with Russia about supplies of oil and gas. These include Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, Spain, Portugal and above all Germany. I would also include Poland, Finland and the Baltics, whose aggressive Russophobia exists only because their elites believe that they have US backing for it, which for the moment they have. However, Poland is already changing its attitude and its workers are blockading the Ukrainian border. As for Switzerland and Ireland, they too could return to real neutrality. As for Finland and Sweden, they never asked their peoples in a referendum if they wanted to join NATO because they knew that the peoples would have rejected it. Indeed, even their corrupt elites have already declared that they will have no NATO bases in their countries. Their NATO membership is therefore meaningless and unnecessary.

In any case, what is NATO? NATO Turkey does what it wants and NATO Greece arms against Turkey. Denmark has virtually no military equipment left, Slovakia has no air force left, Hungary has no tanks, the Baltics have minute armed forces, France has no howitzers left, Britain has a navy with submarines and aircraft carriers that have become an international joke, is unable to recruit enough sailors to man its small fleet of boats, has had to scrap one third of its operational planes because it has no pilots for them, has no self-propelled artillery left, only 40 tanks that actually work and has to recruit soldiers for its underpaid army in Nepal. In France the mere mention of conscription is greeted by rioting. Could France supply even 15,000 troops to invade the Ukraine? In any case, they would be killed within two weeks. As for deindustrialised Germany, it has little left to give and what it gave, like Leopard tanks, has been shown to be useless. Its increase in military spending does nothing for its own forces, all the increase is given to prop up the Ukraine.

The End of NATO and of the EU

NATO is going to collapse into the grave it has dug for itself by ‘poking the bear’. Its elitist sister-organisation, the EU, will follow NATO, all the quicker if Trump is elected in eight months’ time, but, in any case, it is inevitable. Western Europe is utterly divided, as we saw with Brexit. True, the British elite which hates the English, Scottish, Welsh and most obviously Irish peoples, has refused to implement Brexit. This is because it wants to continue to line its pockets with EU money, which is why it has always loved the EU. Germany, under its much-disliked US puppet Scholz, and France, under its deluded and detested Emperor ‘Jupiter’ Macron, are also divided.

The ‘Big Three’ pygmies, Germany, France and the UK, are at each other’s throats. The cat (USA) is away, so now the (three) mice play. The three are still respectively obsessed with their need to dominate (Scholz), imperialist superiority (Johnson etc) and delusions of grandeur (Emperor of Europe Macron), they are today irrelevant and squabbling clowns. The German elite still dreams about Lebensraum in the east, its tanks are still burning on the steppes of the Ukraine. The proud and arrogant British Establishment still thinks it rules an Empire and is a race apart (which it is, but not in the way it thinks, for no-one has yet told them the sun has set on them). As for preening and pretentious members of the French elite, they are still as narcissistic, self-important and therefore as petulant as ever. However, the last statesman in Europe, De Gaulle, overthrown in the CIA operation of 1968, died soon after. Now, after the US has destroyed Europe, especially since 2022, there are left only European political midgets, all suffering from megalomania.

Unlike in 1914, in 2024 Russia has the biggest economy in Europe and has by far the most powerful military with invincible arms. Russia was forced by the West into liberating the Donbass. NATO then forced Russia into liberating all the Ukraine and the EU. Russia was forced by the West into demilitarising and denazifying the Ukraine. NATO then forced Russia into demilitarising and denazifying NATO. The irony of all this is that the split and unwieldy 32-nation NATO alliance, most members of which refuse to spend more money on their inadequate armed forces, is fighting against Non-Communist Russia. And yet, during the Cold War, NATO never fought a war against the ‘evil empire’ of the Communist Soviet Union. Today Soviet Imperialism is long since dead inside Russia, though not, ironically, in Kiev.

What is alive, however, is the nationalism of democratic Russia, which is a millennial Civilisation. So is the ultra-nationalism of anti-democratic and autocratic Ukraine. But Ukrainian nationalism is artificial, without historical roots, as the Ukraine has no deep historical past, and now exists in a half-Russian country. Moreover, pro-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism, which the West despises as it also despises the failed state of the Ukraine and despises Ukrainians. It has been artificially revived only as a tool of Russophobia for purely political and military reasons, financed with hundreds of billions of dollars, trained and armed by Western Imperialism only in order to weaken and then destroy Russia through ‘regime change’ and to die ‘to the last Ukrainian’.

This opposition of nationalisms is why the conflict in the Russian east and south of the Soviet-created and NATO-defended Ukraine was inevitable. Like it or not, the reality is that Russia was always, and obviously, going to defeat the Ukraine in any military conflict, thanks to its far greater land mass, its world-respected diplomacy and backing from the multipolar BRICS, its population that is now seven times greater and far superior military technology. The self-deluded West, blinded by hubris and contempt and stuck in its bullying, arrogant, ignorant and triumphalist ‘end of history’ myths of the 1990s, lived in a virtual world, a world of wishful thinking. As a result of this fantasy, it totally underestimated the diplomatic and military might of Superpower Russia of the 2020s. As it could not even defeat Iraqi conscripts and Afghan goatherds, what chance does it have against the most advanced military equipment in the world?

Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not first sit down and consult whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him that comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else while the other is a great way off, he sends an embassy and desires conditions of peace?

Luke 14, 31-32

The Tragedy in the Russian Orthodox Church

Today, we are fighting so that it would never occur to anyone that Russia, our people, our language, or our culture can be erased from history. Today, we need a consolidated society, and this consolidation can only be based on sovereignty, freedom, creation, and justice. Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion.

President Vladimir Putin, 30 September 2022

‘Our values ​​are humanity, mercy and compassion’. So proclaims the Russian State, whether you believe it or not. Ironically, against this background of the victorious Russian State and its reconstruction of ‘Rus’ (the Union State of the Russian Federation, Belarus and the New Ukraine), we see the defeat of the nationalistic administration of Russian Orthodox Church. What are the values of this administration? ‘Humanity, mercy and compassion’? The administration of this Church, known as the Moscow Patriarchate, has been to some extent discredited because of its militaristic and nationalistic attitude to the conflict in the Ukraine. As a result, the Moscow Patriarchate has lost the loyalty of many of the multinational faithful outside the Russian Federation and Belarus. And even inside these two countries, it has lost the loyalty of many who are not devoted to Russian nationalism, but put Christ above a nation.

The Church is not an army. However, some in the Russian Church administration is demanding that its clergy and people behave as if they were in an army. That is suicidal behaviour in what is by definition a volunteer organisation. Fewer attend Russian Orthodox churches inside Russia, especially those of the two younger generations, who did not experience the persecution and nobility of the Church in the Soviet past. They see many of today’s Russian clergy, especially the episcopate, as corrupt mini-oligarchs and anti-spiritual bureaucrats and politicians, who are incapable of spiritual values. It is not surprising. What is the origin of the tragedy, this self-imposed defeat, which is so paradoxical in view of the victory of the Russian State?

The tragedy is that after the collapse of the USSR, the Russian State desovietised itself, but the Russian Church did not. The Russian State had to face up to reality in order to survive in the real global world and so became the leader of the multinational, multicontinental and multicivilisational BRICS Alliance of black, brown, yellow and white. This reality was that Moscow, the Russian State, knew that it could no longer hold on to Non-East Slavs, as the USSR had split into 15 independent republics, let alone hold on to its Eastern European Empire, where the USSR had come to be hated. Tragically, however, the Moscow Patriarchate did not realise this and did not desovietise itself, as symbolised by its keeping of its Soviet name, ‘the Moscow Patriarchate’.

We have repeatedly suggested that it be renamed ‘the Patriarchate of New Jerusalem’, which is a monastery just outside Moscow. Instead, many in it has continued to live in the bubble and ghetto of the Soviet past, thinking it had power over all Non-Russians, over whom it still held jurisdiction. In other words, it is to some extent a remnant of Soviet Imperialism in the post-Soviet world. Leaving to one side the glory of the New Martyrs and Confessors of the real Russian Orthodox Church, the senior administration, the Moscow Patriarchate seems to have retained a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy with a mentality of subservience, cancelling all independent thinking. Will it really need the interference of the Russian State to desovietise the Russian Church? It would be the irony of ironies.

Nationalism and money-making, which soon turned into oligarch-style corruption, became the order of the day for many. The only qualifications to be a bishop were to be single, have an idea of the Church services and history, and to be good at raising funds, to be ‘an effective manager’. Some were pedophiles or spies, psychopaths or drug-dealers. Spirituality and morality never entered into it. Episcopal money-making means exploiting priests, who in turn are supposed to exploit the people. As the proverb says: ‘A fish rots from the head’. Such exploitation means aggressively grabbing and then micro-managing territory, property and income. The larger the territory, the more the parishes, the greater the number of parishes, the greater the income. This means misusing the canons (which such mafiosi always call ‘holy’!) for purely territorial, ideological, financial and sectarian claims.

Any Russian Orthodox pastors or spiritual fathers who disagree with the canonical deviations or just political opinions of their superiors seem to be ‘defrocked’! This includes ‘defrocking’ those who have left the persecution of the Russian Church without letters of leave, because the Russian Church refused to grant them for no good reason, though the Russian Church itself has received hundreds of clergy from other Local Churches without letters of leave, especially in Europe and Africa. The word ‘hypocrisy’ comes to mind! Such a militaristic, nationalistic, centralised and unipolar command and control system has made some in the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Moscow Patriarchate, and those who imitate it, into something that scandalises. And this is in a country whose State has championed not centralisation, but the non-nationalistic and decentralised multipolar BRICS Alliance! Some claim that Moscow is ‘the Third Rome’. But Rome had the ability to unite different peoples and cultures. This is not what ‘the Third Rome’ is doing, because of its exclusivist nationalism.

The Russian Orthodox Fragments in the Emigration

Given recent events, even before the Russian State launched its Special Military Operation against NATO in the Ukraine, some have asked me if I regret helping to foster the unity of the two émigré fragments of the Russian Church, centred respectively in New York and Paris, with the Russian Orthodox Church, centred in Moscow. The answer is a resounding ‘No’, and for the reasons below:

The New York émigré group, known familiarly as ROCOR, numbering about 60,000, essentially in the English-speaking and German-speaking world, was by the 1990s turning into an old calendarist sect. Our victory was that on its reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in 2007, its then hierarchy rejected its past, self-imposed isolation and its emerging status as a pharisaical right-wing sect. Indeed, as a result of this reconciliation, some 5% of the most extreme part of the New York group left it and created four different tiny and exclusivist sects, which were not in communion with any part of the worldwide Orthodox Church. If it had not been for the reconciliation in 2007, the New York group would not have survived, it would have split into two, a sect and the rest – who, like myself, would have joined the Mother-Church.

The Paris émigré group, known familiarly as Rue Daru, numbering about 15,000, essentially in French-speaking Europe, was by the 1990s turning into a modernist cult. Our victory was that on reconciliation with the Russian Orthodox Mother-Church in 2019, it rejected its past, self-imposed isolation and its emerging status as a Tradition-less, make-it-up-as-you-go-along cult. However, as a result of its reconciliation, some 43% of the most extreme part of the Paris group left it, mainly for the modernist section in the Church of Constantinople. If it had not been for the reconciliation in 2019, the Paris group would not have survived, it would have split into two, a cult and the rest – who, like my close friends there, would have joined the Mother-Church.

The Results

Some, reading the above statistics, may say that the reconciliation of the New York group, four times larger than the small Paris group, was by far the more successful. However, the story since 2007 proves otherwise. Having been cleansed of extremists, the Paris group has remained firm. And although only some 5% of the New York group abandoned it, they left behind a large number of others, perhaps about 38%, who still had a sectarian mentality. They just hid behind their paper reconciliation with the Mother-Church as a justification to continue to do exactly as before. Hypocrisy. They had never intended to repent. In other words, there had always been the same proportion of extremists in the New York group as in the Paris group (43%), but the New York group was not cleansed of them. It is this remaining extremist part of the New York group, over a third of the whole, which a decade after the reconciliation, since 2017, began to take revenge for the reconciliation, seized power and caused all the problems. Notably it has actually completely unjustifiably initiated a public schism with the Paris group, supposedly another part of the same Russian Orthodox Church! Moreover, this schism, inside itself, has passively been backed by the administration of the Moscow Patriarchate!

There are already examples of senior clergy and people exiting the New York group, either by ‘retiring’, or else by joining non-schismatic Local Churches. And there are those who have not left yet, but are still suffering the same moral torment as those who have left, seeing the disgraceful behaviour of its new hierarchy. Its pious bishops of the last century must be spinning in their graves. The new sectarian ROCOR hierarchy is reverting to the pro-Nazi or Vlasovite ROCOR mentality in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and to the sectarian CIA-funded, Vlasovite ROCOR of the 1960s to the 1980s. Its degeneration is its own fault. You cannot blame the corruption of individuals in the Moscow Patriarchate for your own corruption. You must take responsibility for yourselves. Individual corruption is a personal choice, not something forced on New York by Moscow, even if New York episcopal corruption follows exactly the same pattern, falling to exactly the same corruption of accumulating territory, property and income. The larger the territory, the more the parishes, the greater the number of people, the greater the income. Power has gone to all their heads.

This pathological micro-management, popularly known as control freakery, also means misusing the canons (which they always called ‘holy’ as part of their absurd self-justification!) as weapons for uncanonical political and territorial claims. Any clergy who disagree because they are Christians are ‘defrocked’ by the corrupt, not least in Non-Russian Moldova, where large numbers of parishes are leaving the Russian Church for their ancestral Romanian Church. Homosexuality and love of money and luxury, living as ‘princes of the Church’ and not as servants of the people, is their choice. Don’t blame Moscow for that. The proof of this is that the Paris group, however naïve some may say that it is, has not followed this path of episcopal and clerical corruption and has no desire to do so. The Paris group has not left to one side the glorious victory of the New Martyrs and Confessors over atheism. It has in no way a centralised, Soviet-style bureaucracy with its mentality of subservience, cancelling all independent thinking. On the contrary, Paris has retained the multinational Russian Orthodox missionary vision. Here is the tragedy of the New York ROCOR group. It has, purely voluntarily, abolished its heritage in suicidal acts of self-destruction.

Conclusion: Quenching the Spirit

Thus, the heritage of multinationality and catholicity of both the Moscow and New York parts of the Russian Orthodox Church have been rejected by their clerical administrations, with the ensuing isolation of the Russian Church. The senior hierarchy of both parts has shut itself off from concelebration with other Local Churches and promoted those of Russian nationality above all others, whom it treats as second-class citizens. Interestingly, the Russian State did not impose any of this. The senior Church hierarchy, acting like a Stalinist Soviet Politburo, did. And quite freely. This has been suicidal. Essentially, the Holy Spirit is being replaced by the human spirit.

The tiny Paris group alone has not chosen that path. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Divine calling of the émigré fragments of the Russian Orthodox Church was firstly to reunite with the freed Mother-Church in Moscow and secondly to call its administration, the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’, to repentance after the nightmare of Sovietisation, by witnessing to Russian Orthodoxy, and so desovietise it. The New York group did the opposite of this. It not only remained silent on desovietisation. It actually imitated and sovietised itself, making itself too into a ‘Soviet tank’. It opposed baptism with the heresy of rebaptism, Christian love with phariseeism, and catholicity with right-wing sectarianism. It could all have been so different, it was all so unnecessary. New York, like Moscow, chose suicidal self-destruction and the living forces of the Russian Orthodox Church are deserting it, as its hierarchy quenches the Spirit.

After reconciling with Moscow, the New York hierarchy copied the worst of it, also becoming corrupt – financially, ideologically and morally. The errors of both Moscow and New York can be measured in the destinies of those who have left them, seeing the unrighteous life lived by bishops and priests and therefore their inability and unwillingness to proclaim Christ. Whatever you think of the inevitable outcome of Russian military victory, the profoundly tragic inter-East Slav war in the Ukraine is Divine punishment for the sins of the hierarchies of both Moscow and New York. The Russian Orthodox Church, let alone Orthodox Rus, let alone Holy Rus, has been torn by civil war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands. This is not pleasing to God. This is hardly the Triumph of Orthodoxy, let alone the Triumph of Orthodox. But it is what happens when there is no repentance for all that went before and when the Russian Orthodox Faith is dominated by corrupt and highly centralised clerical administrations, which compromise everything. However, after the resurrection of the Russian Orthodox Church, we remain convinced that it will shed the bloody graveclothes with which it is still wrapped from the Crucifixion and be cleansed of the unworthy and corrupted.

I tell you, No: but unless you repent, you shall all likewise perish.

Luke 13, 5

 

Church of St John of Shanghai and Western Europe,

England

The Triumph of Orthodoxy, 24 March 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Triumph of Orthodoxy. Two Questions on Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and Russia and the Ukraine

Q: I am Catholic, initially because I was born into a Catholic family of Irish origin. But I have been going to Orthodox churches and travelling in countries where there are lots of Orthodox for twenty years. I have also read a lot, starting off with Timothy Ware’s The Orthodox Church. I am familiar with all the Orthodox views about the Catholic Church. I am myself against the filioque and against compulsory celibacy for clergy, though I have remained Catholic. I also know about the pedophile scandals in Catholicism.

I have a question, but will you have the courage to answer it and then publish it? If you will, I shall respect you, but if you do not, I don’t think I will ever read anything Orthodox again. Now I come to my question:

In the last six months I have read about a pedophile Orthodox bishop in Canada, who was sent to prison, a Greek Orthodox bishop in France involved in homosexual orgies and an Orthodox bishop in Britain who spent the night in a hotel with his boyfriend, but did not know that the manager of the hotel was Orthodox and so was caught out. None of this is hearsay, it is all facts. I have checked them several times. So what is the real difference between Catholics and Orthodox? Do not mention the word ‘filioque’ in your answer.

A: The difference? Simple:

In Catholicism corruption is systematic, institutional, ingrained among the clergy. True, there are many ordinary Catholics, including some priests (usually secretly married) who are very good people, but this is because they defied the system. The Hungarian Fr Gabriel Patacsi, who was a teacher of mine in Paris 44 years ago, was an example, though he later joined the Orthodox Church.

On the other hand, in the Orthodox Church corruption among the clergy is personal. For every bishop you find like those you mention above or who is a CIA spy, and I have come across them all and so can confirm what you say, you will find another who is not only normal, but also pious.

In Russian there is a popular saying that when a man is ordained, and even more so, when he is consecrated bishop, a demon enters into him. Some are shocked by this saying, because theologically it is the Holy Spirit that enters into him. However, there is profound truth here. The theological fact is that when a man is ordained/consecrated, whatever is inside him gets reinforced because of the presence of the Holy Spirit – or else because of that man’s resistance to the Holy Spirit, in other words, because of demonic activity in him. If he is pious, then piety will become stronger. If he is wicked and can only think about money or perversion, then that tendency will also get worse. Here is the great danger of ordaining/consecrating the corrupt or the perverted.

Thus, we know of one bishop who loves trying to close churches, which are the fruits of decades of missionary work. All the people who visit those churches which have remained open despite him, and there are thousands of those people, are disgusted with him. But because he is a careerist and was never interested in authentic Church life, he does the devil’s work instead.

If you read Fr Tikhon’s best-selling books, Everyday Saints (when he asked me before it was translated what the English title should be, my suggestion was Saints and Sinners), there is the story from the Prologue about an awful bishop. When people asked as to why he was a bishop, the answer was: ‘Because we could not find anyone worse’. Here is the reality. Here is why the main task of pastors today is to protect the flocks entrusted to them from wolves in sheep’s clothing and also from wolves in shepherd’s clothing.

Q: Does Russia have a future after what has happened in the Ukraine? Surely the Russian Patriarch Kyrill is finished?

A: Your question seems to confuse three different things, Russia, Patriarch Kyrill, and the Russian Orthodox Church.

As regards Russia, I think it ultimately has a great future, unlike Europe, which is in a huge mess, even more since the US sabotaged its economies by blowing up the Nordstream pipelines and forcing it to impose on itself suicidal sanctions against cheap Russian oil, gas and cereals. Russia, China, India Iran and, frankly, nearly all of Africa, Asia and Latin America, seven-eighths of the world together, can be unbeatable. The sooner Western Europe abandons its exceptionalism and joins them, the better for it.

As for Patriarch Kyrill, let us leave persons aside. He is only a Patriarch, not the Church, so that is not important and any views just end up being speculative. Let us look at the third matter, the Russian Orthodox Church, which is a different matter from Russia.  Here we have to go back into history.

The Russian Church has been betrayed for over 300 years.

Read about what Peter I and the German Catherine II did to the Church 250-300 years ago. Then the Patriarch was replaced by an Erastian, State-worshipping, Protestant-style, German-named minister, who sometimes was an atheist or a freemason, nearly always anti-monastic, anti-Tradition, anti-Patriarchal and so anti-canonical. That Church enslavement to the Russian State was typical of the situation for 200 years, until 1917. They betrayed the Church.

After 1917 Russia was for a few months dominated by the ‘Whites’. The first and main ‘Revolution’ in February 1917 was a palace revolt, carried out by Great Britain with help from other Western countries, above all by incompetent, aristocratic ‘White’ Russian traitors, ones who today would be called oligarchs.  The Whites, for the most part so-called Whites, betrayed the Church. Perhaps 90% of them committed atrocities in the Civil War and abandoned the Church. The 90% were only really interested in getting back their properties and their wealth. They betrayed the Church – and the Tsar and therefore the people, whom he represented. Incompetent, they lost power to the ‘Reds’.

The Reds took everything that was anti-Russian before the two 1917 Revolutions and multiplied it by ten. They betrayed the Church. The second ‘Revolution’, in October 1917, was a Bolshevik mob takeover, carried out by atheist Jews like Trotsky, financed from New York, and they were even more anti-Russian, killing millions of Russians (though a lot fewer than the CIA claimed), destroying Russian churches and Russian values for decades.

After the collapse of all that in 1991, for thirty years, post-Soviet Russia was created and ruled by Western-controlled, money-grubbing Russian oligarchs and traitors. They betrayed the Church, but from inside, through oligarchs in cassocks.

Only since the turning-point of 24 February 2022, exactly 100 years since the USSR was established and exactly 300 years since the foundation of the Russian Empire, has change begun. Then traitors began to flee abroad to their masters and post-Soviet Russia at last began to crumble. For the West’s actions in the Ukraine since 2014 has made all Russians at last face up to the question, which question they wanted to avoid answering, so they could continue living in the illusions of their fools’ paradise. This question was:

Do you support the real Orthodox Russia or do you support the anti-Russian West?

Now this Western-imposed question is a providential sword which forces all Russians to take up a position. And that includes the Russian Church. Here the question is:

Do you side with historic Orthodox Christianity, or with the Western-created decadence of post-Soviet Russia with its adoration of the CIA values of money and luxury, with centralised bureaucracy and nationalism, superstition and ritualism, homosexuality and modernism, mindless ignorance and heartless formalism, which sees the Church as a mere Business.

If you side with the latter, then the Church will return to what it was before the Revolution. And if this is so, then there will be another Revolution. Only in the first case does the Russian Church have a future.

All this is quite independent of the Ukraine problem, which is only a symptom, not the cause. Let me explain:

Since 2007 I have travelled a lot in the Ukraine and in Russia. My last visit to the Ukraine was in October 2021. I have seen both saints and sinners among the clergy. So much is superficial there, all about careerism, awards and money. Buy yourself a mitre, make a nice present to your bishop and after ten years of priesthood, he will award you the mitre, even if you are a rascal. That is so typically Ukrainian, though common in Russia too. I remember at one concelebration with about forty priests in the Ukraine, where I was by far the oldest priest, half of the priests had mitres. The average age? About 40. How can a Church like that survive? It is all so superficial. God is not mocked. Here there is simply a lack of love, it is a Church for show.

The point is that you cannot be a ‘post-Soviet’ Church, just as you could not be a ‘Soviet Church’ or, for that matter, ‘a ‘CIA Church’. If so, then you are siding with hell on earth and that means that you are bent on self-destruction. I am not talking about some personal theory. I have seen this. It is factual.

Or else post-Soviet can mean ‘pre-Orthodox’. And that means that a Tsar is coming and he will cleanse the Russian Church of its wicked clergy. Which way will it go with the Church? I do not know and I have been saying that since 2007. If a Tsar is not coming, then Antichrist will come instead. And that is exactly what is happening in the Ukraine now. That is why I say that is a symptom, not a cause, a symptom of the lack of faith. The war is there because God is not mocked. They mocked Him, so there is war.

In the end the apostles, prophets and fools for Christ who preach of the Holy Spirit will win against the bureaucrats and formalists, against Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, who have no love, who only have self-interest in their careers and bank accounts, in the ‘system’, like the pharisees of old. They always do win. Here is what I mean by the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The war in the Ukraine is the Judgement of God. The Russian Church in Russia and in the Ukraine is being judged NOW for the heartless formalism of its Spirit-quenchers, just as it was in 1917. This judgement is happening now at the Front in the Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have died over the last year. Now is the Judgement of the Nations. The outcome? Don’t ask me, I am not a prophet.

 

 

A Life for the Tsar: Gregory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy (1869 – 1916)

A Life for the Tsar: Gregory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy  

Contents                                                                    

Foreword                                                                       

Origins: 1869-1893

Gregory the Wandering Pilgrim: 1893-1903

On the Way: 1903-5

The Wandering Pilgrim at the Emperor’s Court: 1905-1906                                                     

Eldership: 1907-1916 

Jealousy and Slander: 1907-1916 

Believers in Gregory: 1907-1916 

Unbelievers in Gregory: 1907-1916 

The Path to Victory: 1914-1916 

The British Establishment Intervenes: 1916 

The Murder: December 1916 

The First Shot of the Russian Revolution: 1916-1918                                                                   

Afterword                                                                           

Bibliography                                                                       

Akathist to the Holy Martyr Gregory the New         

 

Foreword

I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord.

Psalm 117, 17

The stone which the builder rejected shall become the headstone of the corner.

Ps 117, 22

The wicked shall do wickedly and none of the wicked shall understand; but those who are wise shall understand.

Daniel 12, 10

Quench not the spirit. Despise not prophesyings. But test all things, hold fast to that which is good.

1 Thess. 5, 19-21

Of all the wretched stories that were told about him, I could believe in none, for there was not the slightest evidence in the man’s behaviour either at the Court or in the houses of his admirers to justify any suspicion of evil-doing…In a land of bribe-takers, robbers of state funds and corrupt officials, Rasputin stood out like the giant figure of a saint moulded in rugged iron. He, of all men in Russia, was immaculate.

Shelley, p. 65

I fight for the Tsar, the Faith and the Fatherland. While I am alive no harm shall ruin them, but if I perish, so shall they.

Gregory Rasputin-Novy (Shelley, p. 37)

Russia will not perish…it was and will be glorified; the tears of those who suffer, whoever they are, are higher than all idle talk.

Gregory Rasputin-Novy, 16 November 1916

Poor Russia bears a penance…It is our duty to cleanse the memory of the Elder from slander…This is vital for the spiritual life of the whole Russian Church…As Divine Truth begins to be revealed, everything will change in Russia.

Elder Nikolay (Guryanov) (1909-2002)

The West will never tolerate the rebirth of Holy Rus. It will always try to annihilate us, foisting on us as heroes its one-time agents of influence (to a greater or lesser extent): Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. It will always strive by any means available to blacken and slander our Orthodox Civilisation and our holy Tsar, in order through them to besmirch and compromise our Orthodox Church and our present State, blowing them apart from inside.

Petr Multatuli, Contemporary Russian Historian

 

In around 1900 the elites of Europe took advice from all manner of charlatans, astrologers, occultists and table-turning mediums. Such was the fashion of the time, as also in Ancient Rome and Egypt, as also in the contemporary White House, under many a US President. However in 1905 at the Court of Imperial Russia, there appeared another sort of adviser. Like Christ come forth from Galilee, despised in the Capital of Jerusalem by the scribes and the high priests, come forth from a distant province, where supposedly only fools and bumpkins lived, from distant Siberia, there appeared at the Imperial Russian Court a peasant ascetic and prophet.

He was ignored and mocked both by the scribes, the intellectualist, modernistic, know-it-all careerists, and by the pharisees, the obscurantist, ritualistic, anti-Semitic nationalists. However, he was revered by the spiritual, many of them future New Martyrs. His name was Gregory Efimovich Rasputin. Over 100 years after his brutal murder his name is still taboo for most, as a synonym of depravity. This taboo comes from the sensationalist disinformation and slanderous fiction about Gregory, ‘the mad monk’, in all the standard and false histories in English. These lies were issued by aristocrats and journalists, right-wingers and Bolsheviks alike.

Therefore, something had to be done. Over the last few years I have been asked to write his life by several readers. Here it is. More than 100 years after his murder there are for the moment only lies about Gregory, written by some of his self-justifying murderers, Felix Yusupov and Vladimir Purishkevich, or by money-seekers, both Soviet and Western. More recently there have been the fictions written by amoralists. like the Soviet playwright and fantasist of obscenities, Radzinsky, with his absurdly-named book ‘Rasputin, The Last Word’ (in truth the last word in lies) and the mythmaker Varlamov, as well as those by similar Western novelists.

Then there is also the account of Gregory on the notoriously inaccurate Wikipedia site. None of the above pseudo-histories, all part of standard anti-Christian Western propaganda, is based on sources, and most of them seek to make quick money from invented accounts of debauchery. It is therefore high time to write down some facts about Gregory Rasputin for the Non-Russian speaker. The following has been compiled from the otherwise unknown 21st century Russian studies of once secret sources; for in Russia too the truth has only recently emerged. These studies, to which I am greatly indebted, include detailed articles both by Church writers like Yury Rassulin and Igor Yevsin and by political writers like Tatiana Mironova and Oleg Platonov.

However, there is also the 400-page study, ‘Rasputin’, by the well-known doctor of history Alexander Bokhanov and published in 2006. This proved to be a turning-point in understanding the truth about Gregory. After this came the invaluable and highly detailed seven volumes of ‘An Investigation’, written by the erudite Church writer, Sergey Fomin, covering some 5,000 pages, with some 2,000-3,000 footnotes in each volume, as well as two excellent complementary volumes. These nine volumes cover the whole background reign of Nicholas II, with detailed analysis of the issues and personalities of the period, aristocrats, ministers, writers, journalists and churchmen, as well as sources for Gregory’s life.

I have read all the above, though critically, and used them in this study, referring especially to Fomin’s Vol II, pp. 1-120, all of Vols III and VIII, ‘Our Dear Father’, which presents 600 pages of authentic source material, and Vol IX. Although precise chronology in the early years is sometimes difficult because of conflicting sources or lack of them altogether, below we have reconstructed the early years of Gregory’s life as best we can. We would be happy to correct any errors in chronology if more certainty can be proved.

What we have concluded is personal, it does not engage the rest of the Church; we are happy to discuss these conclusions with anyone who has read the same sources as ourselves, but not with those who have not studied the matter in hand and dismiss the question out of prejudice. The question of possible canonisation has not yet been raised officially. All is in God’s hands.

 

  1. Origins: 1869-1893

Gregory Efimovich Rasputin was born into a pious peasant family on 9/21 January 1869 (not on 10/22 January or in any other year, as can be read in several misleading publications). He was baptised the following day and was named after St Gregory of Nyssa, whose feast falls on that day. He saw the light of day in the prosperous little town of Pokrovskoe, with a population of about 2,000, on the River Tura in the province of Tobolsk in Western Siberia. (This is on the same latitude as the far north of Scotland). The town had been founded in the early 17th century, if not before. It had been named after its church dedicated to the Protecting Veil (‘Pokrov’) of the Mother of God, which had been due to a miracle worked by her there.

Pokrovskoe is only 50 miles from Ekaterinburg, less than 200 miles from Tyumen, 340 miles from Tobolsk and 1500 miles east of the then Russian Capital of Saint Petersburg, Gregory’s ancestors had been living there since at least the 17th century, but originally came from the north of European Russia, in the region of Vologda. The surname ‘Rasputin’ refers to a fork in a road, where his ancestors must have lived. This was a common surname and in 1887 no fewer than 33 families in Pokrovskoe bore it. His father, Efim, whose grandfather had been a priest, was a peasant farmer, courier and churchwarden, like his father before him. He had been born in Pokrovskoe in 1841 and married Gregory’s mother, Anna Parshukova, on 11 February 1863. She came from the nearby village of Usalka, along the road to the north-east.

Apart from working the land and fishing, like other local peasants Efim also worked as an official courier, ferrying people and goods between the nearby important towns of Tobolsk, some 340 miles away, and Tyumen. His son was to do the same. As was commonplace all over the world at the time, the couple had many children, but seven died in infancy and early childhood and only two, Gregory and his youngest sister Theodosia, survived. Gregory was a very sickly child, but was remarkable for his perspicacity. Like the vast majority of people then, he was not formally educated, as he was needed to work, and he remained illiterate into early adulthood. However, his father was literate and would read the Gospels and the Lives of the Saints to his family in the evenings.

It was from these that Gregory, with his excellent memory, came to know the Gospels by heart. He was pious and kept the commandments. The accidental death of a cousin in a tragic accident in childhood made him all the more serious. At the age of 15 or 16 he went off by himself on pilgrimage (a walk of two weeks) to the relics of St Simeon of Verkhoture, who became his favourite saint. These relics were venerated in the very large St Nicholas Monastery in Verkhoture, famous in Western Siberia, nearly 250 miles to the north of Pokrovskoe. Following this, it seems that Gregory stayed in this monastery as a layworker for some time but he discovered, as he later wrote, that his calling was to find salvation in the world.

It was on another pilgrimage, to the Monastery of the Sign in Abalak near Tobolsk in 1886, that Gregory met a pious peasant girl named Praskovya (Paraskeva) Dubrovina. She was three years older than him and came from a neighbouring village. After a courtship of a few months, they married on 2 February 1887. Gregory was eighteen. It was a happy marriage. Gregory was an excellent husband and father, an honest peasant, working the land, fishing and driving as a courier like his ancestors. The couple had seven children, though only three survived past early childhood: Dmitry (b. 1895), Matrona (b. 1898) and Varvara (b. 1900). (Like so many others, Praskovya, Dmitry and Varvara were all to die cruelly in Soviet conditions, but Matrona emigrated and died in Los Angeles in 1977, aged 79).

Gregory’s spiritual father was the locally renowned Elder Michael (from 1906 on called Makary) (Polykarpov) from St Nicholas Monastery in Verkhoture. From him he learned the prayer of the heart which he used. Later he would have other spiritual mentors. Later slanders that Gregory was a horse-thief (a very serious crime in Siberia which would have been severely punished) are baseless. In fact, his only weaknesses were that he smoked, considered normal at the time, and would on occasion drink a little too much, as was common among peasants. Praskovya remained in Pokrovskoe throughout Gregory’s travels, prolonged absences and rise to prominence, remaining devoted to him until his death, respecting his piety and his destiny.

 

  1. Gregory the Wandering Pilgrim: 1893-1903

After the upsetting death from scarlet fever of his first-born Adrian, aged four, in 1893 Gregory returned to the monastery in Verkhoture. Here he met more elders, Frs Adrian, Elias (now locally canonised), Evdokim and of course Elder Michael/Makary. His conversation with the latter gave him peace after his son’s death. It was Fr Michael who was to understand what Gregory’s destiny was and would later send him on his Imperial mission to Saint Petersburg. As Fr Makary, he was himself later to visit Saint Petersburg twice and in 1908 met the Tsarina and in 1909 the Tsar. He made an impression of simplicity, humility and holiness on all. He was to repose on 19 July 1917.

On Gregory’s return from the monastery, where he had stayed for perhaps as long as three months, all noticed a great change in him. Others found him ‘abnormally’ pious, he constantly prayed, giving up smoking and even the occasional use of alcohol. (However, it seems that he did accept some alcohol again towards the very end of his life from ‘friends’ who insisted on him drinking with them). His complete renunciation of alcohol for over twenty years would in 1907 lead him to found a branch of the Temperance Society in his little town and play an important role in the nationwide Temperance Movement (Fomin, Vol IX, p. 53). He considered that alcoholism was the curse of Russian life.

It was now, after 1893, that Gregory began visiting many holy places of Russia as a wandering pilgrim, always on foot, covering up to 30 miles a day, repeating the prayer of the heart and sleeping under the stars. For some nine years, like many others, Gregory made pilgrimages to Russia’s holy places, visiting Abalak, Tobolsk, Verkhoture locally, and, much further away, Sarov, Optina, Kazan, Kiev, Odessa, Mogiliov, Pochaev, Moscow and Saint Petersburg, fasting and praying as he went, living off alms, fighting against temptations, confessing and taking holy communion in the monasteries. In all the holy places he met bishops and well-known elders.

He related that he had had a vision of St Simeon of Verkhoture, met St Nicholas in the forest and that he had heard the voice of the Mother of God. He said that nature had taught him to speak to God and learn of His wisdom. For the first three years he wore heavy iron chains, but he stopped doing this, as he found the chains did not make him humble. Inbetween these pilgrimages, some of which lasted for months, he would stay at home with his wife and children, living the life of a peasant. During his absences, his father did his work for him. In these years a small group of other Orthodox, primarily family members and other local devout peasants, some ten in number, would pray with him on Sundays and holy days, listening to the accounts of his pilgrimages, changing their ways.

Digging out a cellar beneath his father’s stable, Gregory made a makeshift chapel, covering it with icons. Gregory would pray here, fighting against the devil. Metr Veniamin (Fedchenkov) wrote in his memoirs (p. 153) that it was here that Gregory obtained the gift of working miracles. His wife greatly respected him and never interfered, knowing that her husband had some special and unique calling and destiny, a mission to accomplish. In other ways, Gregory remained a peasant, direct and simple, taking great pleasure in fishing. However, he was renowned for his generosity and hospitality, helping the poor. His doors were open to all and in Pokrovskoe he was respected as a prosperous and devout peasant.

One day, it seems in 1902, working in the fields at home, Gregory had a radiant vision of the Mother of God, as in the Kazan Icon, and she blessed him. Gregory set up a cross on the site of the vision and set off for advice to his spiritual father, Fr Michael. The latter told Gregory: ‘God has chosen you for a great feat, in order to strengthen yourself for this, you must go to Mt Athos and pray to the Mother of God.’ Gregory set off with a pious close friend from a nearby village, also a wandering pilgrim, Dmitry Pechorkin, who had considerable influence on Gregory. Having arrived on Mt Athos, where his uncle was a monk, Gregory stayed for many months, his friend Dmitry becoming a monk with the name of Daniel. However, Gregory was not tempted to stay, being disillusioned at the monastery by the sight of monks sinning (as I saw in exactly the same place exactly three generations later, in 1979). But Gregory did give up eating meat after this pilgrimage.

 

  1. On the Way: 1903-5

On his return, most probably in November or December 1903, Gregory went to Saint Petersburg and met the future St John of Kronstadt at St John’s Convent, founded by Fr John. Gregory had with him a letter of recommendation from, it seems, Elder Michael in Siberia. Gregory made a profound impression on Fr John and stayed at the Convent for some time. Fr John said that he saw in Gregory ‘a Divine spark’ and that he had a special mission as ‘God’s chosen one’. He also gave Gregory his blessing to help others and be ‘his right hand’. (This meeting was later much misreported by Gregory’s slanderers). Another source says that Fr John asked for Gregory’s blessing and told him that his destiny would be according to his name – Gregory means ‘vigilant’ in Greek.

Those who knew both of them noted their same penetrating eyes, as can be seen in their photographs. Moreover, their destiny was similar: both were prophets, both were slandered as debauchees (Fr John had been ordained at the age of 26, but was not appointed rector of his own church until he was in his sixties; so history repeats itself) and both were loved by the friend of the Tsarina, Anna Vyrubova. Indeed, after Fr John’s repose at the end of 1908, Gregory was, in Anna’s words, to inherit from Fr John the prophetic task of delaying Russia’s suicidal slide into the atheist abyss. For once Russia had renounced its Christianity in favour of Western secularism, its self-destruction would be certain. In early 1905, Gregory went to see Fr Michael/Makary again. He confirmed that Gregory’s path would be to find salvation in the world and that ‘great feats awaited him’. Gregory did not stay at home for long, but set off for Kiev.

It seems that it was on his way home from Kiev that Gregory stayed for a while in Kazan. This may well have been connected with his earlier vision of the Kazan Mother of God, who was directing him. Here he met the future hieromartyr Bishop Theodore (Pozdeevsky) and the holy elder Gabriel (1844-1915) of the Seven Lakes Monastery (now also canonised) and other churchmen from the Kazan Theological Academy. These included four future bishops of the future Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia: Metropolitan Nestor (Anisimov), ‘the Apostle of Kamchatka’ (1885-1962), who also received and then ordained Nicholas Gibbes to the priesthood, Bishop Michael (Bogdanov), Metropolitan Melety (Zaborovsky) of Harbin, who came from near Pokrovskoe, and the saintly Archbishop Tikhon (Troitsky) of San Francisco (1883-1963). (The latter was succeeded by St John (Maximovich, + 1966), whose ancestor was St John (Maximovich) of Tobolsk, who almost exactly fifty years before his descendant’s repose, in June 1916 became the last saint to be canonised by Tsar Nicholas with the vital support of Gregory and against the views of certain liberal bishops).

Here he also met the famous and pious Korean missionary Bishop Chrysanth (Shchetkovsky – 1869-1906). Bishop Chrysanth gave Gregory a letter of recommendation to Bishop Sergiy, Rector of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy at the St Alexander Nevsky Monastery (and future Patriarch), and to the Inspector of the Academy, Fr Theophan (Bystrov), the confessor of the Imperial Family. So it was that Gregory made his way on foot to Saint Petersburg and finally met Bishop Sergiy at the Monastery in October 1905, probably meeting Fr John of Kronstadt once more. Here he was introduced to a number of different churchmen, including Fr Theophan. The young Fr Theophan was at the time much admired for his spirituality and sincerity, even by atheists, and was well-known to spiritual-minded aristocrats in Saint Petersburg.

Fr Theophan was so overwhelmingly impressed by Gregory, of whom he had previously heard as ‘the prophet from Siberia’, that he invited him to stay in his home and Gregory became one of his most important friends in Saint Petersburg. He openly considered Gregory to be a saint. Fr Theophan told many that Gregory was quite exceptional, an Old Testament prophet and a man with gifts of prayer and holiness, which were usually granted only to the most experienced monks. As Shelley later wrote (p. 69): ‘There was so much of the Old Testament prophet in Rasputin that it may not be wrong to compare him to one of those strange, rugged seers who played so great a role at the courts of the kings of Israel’.

Thus, Gregory became known to the future Patriarch Sergiy and the future Metropolitan Benjamin (Fedchenkov), who was then a young student, and many other bishops and churchmen, as well as aristocratic laypeople. They were all of the same opinion that Gregory was a man of God and an elder. All noticed his simplicity, frankness, truthfulness, sincerity, purity, unusually penetrating eyes which looked straight through people, with a remarkable perspicacity and visionary power of prophecy. They were also astonished by his knowledge of the Scriptures and even more by his understanding of them. Although Gregory had not studied, he understood much more than those who had studied.

 

  1. The Wandering Pilgrim at the Emperor’s Court: 1905-1906

Soon Gregory met some of Fr Theophan’s spiritual children, the Montenegrin women involved with the Tsar’s cousins, the Grand Dukes Peter and Nikolai Nikolayevich, whom they married. All four of them, like many European aristocrats of the time, were obsessed by the supernatural. Naively trying to draw them away from the dangers of the occult, Fr Theophan warmly recommended Gregory to them as a man of God. Thus it was that the self-interested and highly ambitious Grand Duke Nikolai introduced Gregory to the Tsar and his family on 1 November 1905 at the Peterhof Palace, hoping to gain some advantage from this introduction. (When he did not, he and his previously divorced wife from 1908 on began slandering Gregory, just as the Grand Duke, like many others, had also slandered the future St John of Kronstadt as a debauchee).

The Tsar recorded his first meeting with Gregory in his diary, writing that he and Alexandra had made the acquaintance of a man of God – ‘Gregory, from Tobolsk province’. They had been deeply impressed by him and indeed the meeting had lasted for three hours. The meeting occurred at a critical moment in his reign, during the barbaric, anti-Russian terrorist campaign, which murdered thousands and came on top of the treacherous Western-backed Japanese attack on Russia and sabotaged Russia’s victory. It also notably came after the Tsar’s offer to abdicate and become Patriarch had been refused by the bureaucrats of the Holy Synod, who did not want to have a Patriarch. Shortly after this first meeting Gregory returned home to Prokovskoe.

His second meeting with the Imperial Family took place eight months later, on 18 July 1906. On this visit to Saint Petersburg, Gregory also met Fr John of Kronstadt publicly again, though it seems that they also met several times privately; Gregory openly considered that Fr John was a saint and wrote about him as such. At this time Gregory stayed for some months with the future New Martyr Fr Roman Medved and his family in Saint Petersburg. Fr Roman was a friend of Fr Theophan, well-connected at the time, and he greatly valued the healings and the extraordinary prophecies of Gregory, all of which came true. It was while staying with them that in August 1906 Gregory healed the daughter of the Prime Minister Stolypin after a terrorist bomb attack on his home in which 24 people had died.

After this, Gregory asked to be allowed to present the Tsar with an icon of St Simeon of Verkhoturye, the much-venerated Siberian saint. This he did at their third meeting on 13 October 1906, when he met the Imperial children for the first time. Here too was a prophecy, for an icon of this very saint stood in the shrine outside the Ipatiev House where the Imperial Family was to be martyred on 4/17 July 1918 – only fifty miles from Gregory’s home. This third meeting was Gregory’s first visit to the Palace and the Tsar again recorded the very strong impression made on the Imperial Couple by Gregory in their hour-long conversation. Gregory’s attitude to the Imperial Family was to be not just respectful, but full of love. He never boasted of his acquaintance with them and was always discreet.

On 15 December 1906 Gregory petitioned the Tsar to be permitted to modify his very common surname to Rasputin-Novy (not Novykh, as some mistakenly have it). The new name meant ‘Rasputin the New’. This was so that others in the village of Pokrovskoe or nearby, some also called Gregory Rasputin, would not confuse him. Tsar Nicholas swiftly granted the request, little knowing that almost exactly ten years later Gregory would be assassinated. At the end of 1907 the Tsar’s infant son and heir, Alexei, then aged three, had a crisis of haemophilia (passed down from Queen Victoria, Alexandra’s grandmother). His doctors could do nothing for him. However, Gregory, alerted by the Empress, stopped the bleeding and eased the pain of the Tsarevich. Gregory was to heal him again on several other occasions, for example in March 1912, October 1912 (see below), July 1913, September 1914, December 1915 (see below), February 1916 and April 1916.

The Tsarina and her closest friend, the devout Anna Vyrubova (1884-1964), who in Finnish exile became a nun and is venerated by some as Mother Maria of Helsinki, soon became convinced that Rasputin had miraculous powers. His enemies, left without any explanation for the miracles, nonsensically suggested that Gregory had used hypnosis or some secret herbs to stem the flow of blood! The conviction that he had miraculous powers became especially strong when Gregory healed at a distance, without even being present. Moreover, Gregory correctly foretold that once the heir had reached the age of twelve in 1916, his illness would dissipate and that he would be able to live a normal life as an adult. This was a great consolation to his parents and indeed after 1916 the prophecy came true. Even after his murder, Gregory would appear to Alexei in dreams and comfort him. The link between the two was very close indeed.

 

  1. Eldership: 1907-1916

After the first meeting in 1905 and the two meetings in 1906, altogether three meetings between Gregory and the Tsar and Tsarina took place in 1907, five in 1908 and five in 1909. They became even more frequent after this, whenever Gregory was in Saint Petersburg and not at home. In 1911, 1912, 1913 and 1914 Gregory was invited by the Tsar to the Crimea, beloved by the Imperial Family, where he visited them. At some point now the Tsar granted Gregory the right to wear a small priest’s cross, which he wore around his neck on a cord (not a chain); his service was that of a pastor. Their meetings would usually take place in the modest home of Anna Vyrubova, the Tsarina’s friend who lived near the palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Anna, a woman filled with compassion and much mocked for her simple piety, became a close disciple of Gregory, so much so that during the First World War she would see him at least once or twice a week.

At this time, whenever he was in Saint Petersburg, Gregory lived with various families until he moved into a modest apartment with very modest furniture, which did not even belong to him. In 1910 his two daughters moved in with him so that they could receive a good education in Saint Petersburg, which Gregory greatly valued. Gregory would get up early every day to go to church. His diet consisted of black bread, dried bread, sometimes with jam he had been given, sometimes with fish and vegetables, such as cabbage, gherkins, radish and onion. Cabbage with gherkins was his favourite dish. He never ate meat or dairy produce. Here and in these conditions he received those who came to him for advice. Gregory received those who came to him for advice for hours, from eighty to several hundred people a day.

He especially received the poor, but also generals, students, priests, journalists, ministers, officers, aristocrats, merchants and pious women of all sorts. Some of Gregory’s visitors were sincere and deserving; others were intriguers and crooks. Any money that visitors gave him he always passed on to those in need. With gifts of money he also built the school and an extension to the church in his native Pokrovskoe. The Grand Duchess Anastasia, wife of the Grand Duke Peter Nikolayevich, gave him money specifically to build a solid two-storey house for his family, when she visited him there in 1907. (This house was purposely destroyed by the atheist authorities in 1980, fearful that it would become a place of pilgrimage, just like the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, demolished just before this by the drunkard Boris Yeltsin).

Gregory was like a breath of fresh spiritual air amid the stultifying bureaucracy of the State Church world of Saint Petersburg. Here, even more than elsewhere, the Church suffered on the one hand from spiritually suffocating moralism and ritualism, and on the other hand from spiritually suffocating liberalism and modernism under its notorious careerist Metropolitan, the liberal Antony (Vadkovsky). This was spiritual death. This was clear in the Theological Academies, which had become ‘the graves of Orthodoxy’ (in the words of the prominent churchman, Prince N. Zhevakhov), and the seminaries which produced atheists, as described by Metropolitan Antony (Khrapovitsky) and Zhevakhov of the Holy Synod in their memoirs. Gregory soon gained many disciples in this spiritual desert. From 1910 on he was talked about by all.

In October 1912 the Tsarevich Alexei developed a haemorrhage in his thigh and groin after a fall while getting out of a boat at the royal hunting grounds at Spala near Warsaw. For three weeks he lay between life and death, in severe pain and delirious with fever. In desperation, the Tsarina asked Anna Vyrubova to send Gregory (who was at home in Siberia) a telegram, asking him to pray for Alexei. Gregory wrote back quickly, telling the Tsarina that ‘God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much’. To the astonishment of the doctors, who had been quite unable to do anything, Alexei’s bleeding stopped the following day. It was another miracle.

Gregory’s many healings seemed to come straight out of the Acts of the Apostles. Among others he offered to heal Prince Yusupov, one of his future murderers, of his illness, but he refused. Gregory became well-known, receiving many invitations to speak at aristocratic salons. He gave advice, he consoled, acting as an Elder, both to simple peasants, merchants and aristocrats, as well as to the Tsar himself, speaking with the authority that many clergy – bureaucrats, ritualists and careerists – then quite lacked, as the Tsar noted. Little wonder that in 1913 Gregory was to consider that the bureaucratic Synod had been excessive by far and downright wrong in its violent persecution and repatriation of hundreds of simplistic but still profoundly pious ‘Name-Glorifier’ monks from Mt Athos. Gregory interceded for them and made their lot easier. The repatriated Name-Glorifiers included Monk Daniel Pechorkin, who was later martyred by the Soviets.

In 1907, 1911, 1912 and 1915 there appeared booklets of Gregory’s writings, consisting of short works on Christian piety and reflections and on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Constantinople, taking in Ephesus, Patmos, Rhodes, Cyprus and Beirut, from February to May 1911. These were written down and edited from the words of the semi-literate fisherman Gregory (like Peter of Galilee) by various disciples, including the Tsarina herself, from 1911 on. These works have been collected and republished in our own days. Totalling over 100 pages, they show that Gregory was fully Orthodox, a sincere and righteous man who knew the Holy Spirit. Gregory did not mention political matters in his writings or indeed in his talks, as he had no interest in either the political left or right. He simply supported the Tsar and wanted all to be reconciled under him. For him the Tsar and Russia were the same, according to his mystical faith in the Tsar as God’s Anointed.

 

  1. Jealousy and Slander: 1907-1916

Social climbers and aristocrats were frustrated that Gregory was unbribable – not least the Prime Minister Kokovtsov, who was to offer him a colossal bribe of 200,000 roubles to leave Saint Petersburg, and saw it rejected. Whenever given honest money, Gregory devoted it to others and to the church and school in Pokrovskoe. His home there became a centre of hospitality for wandering pilgrims and local people, who long after recalled Gregory as ‘a holy soul’. However, even in 1907 the local clergy, well-known for stealing money and getting drunk (the two besetting sins of the worst clergy at the time), had become jealous. They never did services on time, when they did them at all, and their attitude was dry and ritualistic. Unable to preach, they never gave any spiritual food to their flock, who duly ignored them and the village church. These local clergy invented various slanders, such as that Gregory belonged to a strange (possibly by then fictitious) sect of orgiastic flagellants, called ‘khlysty’.

Although their slanders were supported, as does happen to the righteous, by their Bishop, Antony (Karzhavin), a dry formalist who was also jealous of Gregory’s real faith and popularity, there was no truth in them. Fortunately, Gregory was strongly defended by the pious clergy of his Diocese as ‘a righteous and holy man, a benefactor and man of zeal’ (these clergy are listed by Fomin in Vol III, p. 481; one of them, Fr, now St, Augustine (Pyatnitsky), a friend of Gregory, was to be martyred in 1918). However, these slanders were eagerly picked up in Saint Petersburg by those of ill-will and jealousy, who by discrediting Gregory thought to discredit the Tsar. They had been influenced by others and Gregory had come too late for them. For well before Gregory’s arrival in Saint Petersburg, various charlatans with their occultist movements, such as spiritualism and theosophy, had become popular among the capital’s pagan aristocracy. Many of them were intensely curious about the occult and the supernatural generally.

Thus, despite their initial fascination with the peasant Gregory and invitations to their salons, the decadent Saint Petersburg elite never accepted him. They were notable rather for their intense hatred of the Tsar and their desire to seize power for themselves. Gregory was far too loyal to the Tsar and too strict an Orthodox for the aristocrats and bureaucrats of Saint Petersburg, who were intensely jealous of him. Of them Gregory said: ‘These people will ruin Russia. They hate the Russian peasants like cattle. They are not Russians. They speak our tongue and cross themselves in the Orthodox way, but their hearts are foreign’ (Shelley, p. 67). Gregory was appalled by the belief of these aristocrats that grace can be found through self-flagellation. Often heavy drinkers, the aristocrats were shocked by Gregory’s vigorous and successful combat against alcoholism in the Russian Temperance Movement from 1907 on.

At first, Gregory had literally been lionized in the Capital like an exotic animal, but Gregory disturbed the aristocrats by telling the truth. Jealousy gradually came to the fore and by 1910 jealousy had turned to open slander. Foul slanders concerning Gregory began from 1910 on, becoming ever more vile, especially from 1912 on, insinuating depravity between Gregory, the Tsarina and Anna Vyrubova, using forgeries, fake photos, fake memoirs, a fake diary, fake letters, fake photographs and at least one double of Gregory to support their lies. These lies are repeated to this day by Radzinsky, but hack-writers had a field day even then. Interestingly, the slanderers always accused Gregory of precisely their own vices, especially alcoholism and sexual depravity. As Shelley says in his memoirs on p. 53: ‘I realised that the fearful things attributed to Rasputin were, in many cases, the actual doings of his accusers. Perhaps no man in history has been so furiously calumniated’.

The well-connected slanderers enlisted the support of their friends in the Secret Police, who had in any case as a matter of routine been following Gregory since 1909, whenever he met the Imperial Family in Saint Petersburg. As their predictable reports had initially consisted of tedious lists of dates and times of Gregory’s meetings with his various spiritual children of all conditions, from 1912 on fictional episodes were inserted, with accounts of salacious meetings (Bokhanov, Chapter XI). The corrupt General Dzhunkovsky had overall responsibility for these fictitious episodes, which seem to have been written by Beletsky, the Director of Police, or by a hack-writer employed by him, perhaps a journalist called Duvidzon. In any case, they ceased in February 1916, when Beletsky was fired.

These episodes also introduced lies about gross interference by Gregory in matters of Church and State, appointing Ministers and Metropolitans alike for bribes. The reports also invented the lie that Gregory wished to become a priest. These episodes, held in Russian State Archives, are all in typed form, having been edited from the original handwritten notes. Platonov gives an extensive analysis of these reports, noting that there is absolutely no corroboration of them, for example, from supposed prostitutes. They are badly constructed and the scandalous episodes, both salacious and political, are clearly interpolations, as they describe completely bizarre events, which have no logical link to observations before and after them and many can clearly be disproved.

It was only when these reports became available at source in quite recent times was it realized that they are entirely fictitious. In slandering Gregory, both right-wing aristocrats and bureaucrats and left-wing journalists and politicians, members of the ‘Duma-Sanhedrin’ (the description used by Elder Nikolay (Guryanov)), saw an opportunity first to discredit and then to depose the Tsar and so to seize power for themselves. Regardless of whether the slanders came from right-wing aristocratic money-grubbers (some of these even dared to call themselves ‘monarchists!) or left-wing terrorist power-grabbers, the two sides of the same worldly coin, they were all designed to make Gregory into their scapegoat – an excuse to attack the Monarchy.

A few who did not know Gregory actually believed these slanders out of naivety, but most believed them out of sheer ill-will. For example, in one notorious rigged-up incident in June 1915 in a Moscow restaurant/night-club called ‘Yar’ (‘Fury’) a Gregory look-alike disgusted everyone with his debauchery and drunkenness (Bokhanov Chaper IX). Naturally, the tabloid press and all others haters of the Monarchy reported that this was Gregory, although in fact Gregory was not in Moscow at the time (Mironov, pp. 120-127 and Platonov, Chapter 5). Other reports made out that Gregory frequented prostitutes in Saint Petersburg. In reality the figure in question was a look-alike, for at the time Gregory was at home in Siberia 1500 miles away (Dehn, p. 95). The use of doubles became especially common in the last year of his life (Platonov, Chapter 7).

 

  1. Believers in Gregory: 1907-1916

Gregory remained tenaciously single-minded despite all the attacks; he knew that he had to do what God had sent him to do (Fomin, Vol IX, p. 162). Those who knew him by far the best, the Tsar and Tsarina (and their Children, inasmuch as they were aware of anything), never for one moment believed the slanders about their ‘Friend’ (See pp. 349-352 of Vol VIII of Fomin’s research). As Shelley wrote (p. 26): ‘To the vast majority of the Russian aristocracy, and especially to the intelligentsia, he (Gregory) was a monster of iniquity. To  a very select few – those, in fact, who had personal relations with him – he was a saint and the protagonist of a great ideal’. His plan of action: ‘The rejuvenation of Orthodoxy and Autocracy and the welding of the throne with the Russian people’ (Shelley, p. 32).

It was impossible for the Tsar and Tsarina to see in one who was clearly a prophet, healer and miracle-worker a man of evil life. Like Gregory, the Tsar and Tsarina were profoundly hurt by the treachery of the aristocracy around them, expressed in their ability to believe such fabrications. The Tsar and Tsarina were both slandered in exactly the same way as Gregory. A few, like Anna Vyrubova, restored to life by Gregory after her train crash on 2 January 1915, or the Imperial chaplain Fr Alexander Vasiliev, remained faithful, considering Gregory to be a saint.

Another of Gregory’s defenders was the missionary preacher, monarchist and future New Martyr, Fr John Vostorgov (+ 1918), who called Gregory ‘a true Christian’. As one who was also slandered for being faithful to Orthodoxy, the Tsar and his Fatherland, Fr John defended Gregory, who in turn supported Fr John. Another defender was the new Bishop of Tobolsk, Bishop Aleksiy (Molchanov) (+ 1914), who in November 1912 concluded the then still unfinished diocesan report on Gregory started by his predecessor with the words that the accusation that Gregory belonged to an orgiastic sect was based on ignorance. As an expert on sects, Bishop Aleksiy had clearly seen through the jealousy of the former bishop and unworthy local clergy, who had accused Gregory of sectarianism. Bishop Aleksiy dismissed and replaced these clergy.

There were also other bishop-friends of Gregory, the devout Bishop Barnabas (+ 1924) (Nakropin) who like Gregory did much to promote the canonisation of St John of Tobolsk, Bishop Aleksiy (Dorodnitsyn) and Bishop Palladiy (Dobronravov), Bishops of Saratov and Tsaritsyn. They had both studied in Kazan, known as a missionary centre, and Gregory had met Bishop Aleksiy there in 1905. The latter would become the rector of the famous Novospassky Monastery in Moscow, which was closely linked with Gregory. The Bishop died in prison in 1922 and many consider him to have been a saint. Then there were Bishop Vladimir (Sokolovsky-Avtonomov – 1852-1931), who was shot by the atheists, and Bishop Seraphim (Golubyatnikov – 1856-1921), who much admired Gregory. Those who knew Gregory and knew him the best were the very ones who spoke and later wrote the most appreciatively of him.

These included, for example, his daughter Matrona, his spiritual children Anna Vyrubova and M.E. Golovina (whose invaluable record was published in Paris only in 1995, some 30 years after she died). Also, the pious missionary Metropolitan (now St) Makary of Moscow revered Gregory, recognising in him a righteous Orthodox and ‘a holy man’. In 1917 this Metropolitan was uncanonically deposed by the Kerensky regime, which notoriously meddled in the Church’s internal affairs and tried to manipulate the 1917-18 Moscow Church Council. Contemporary believers in Gregory include the ever-memorable Fr Dmitry Dudko and my late friend, Fr Vasily Fonchenkov, formerly the rector of our parish in Salzburg.

One who for a long time believed the slanders, but had also actually known Gregory, was Fr Theophan, his former admirer. Fr Theophan is a typical case of the intellectual from a well-off family who has read and understood everything theoretically, but has had it easy in life, living in a cocoon. Therefore he had never had to struggle and so suffer; as a result he did not have that vital spiritual experience which comes from suffering and which is called spiritual maturity. The result is naivety. The reason for his complete change of view was precisely his gullibility in believing slanders against Gregory made in 1909, something for which he would later bitterly repent as an archbishop in the emigration in France.

Another case of a churchman and former admirer who then believed the slanders but lived to repent was the future New Martyr, Bishop Germogen (Dolganov). He was renowned for his utter sincerity, but also extreme and sometimes blind zeal, passion, almost rude frankness and also poor administrative skills, for which he was later dismissed. Having met Gregory in 1908, he became upset by Gregory’s unwillingness to be manipulated by him for his then right-wing political plans. What he did not understand was that Gregory was neither of the right or the left, but a real monarchist. In any case, at the end of 1911 he fell out with Gregory.

After the Revolution Bishop Germogen repented for believing these slanders, following a vision of Gregory to him in his temporary exile (Zhevakhov and Platonov, p. 285) and so cleansed himself before he too was martyred – as Bishop of Tobolsk, the very diocese of Gregory. Here Bishop Germogen was drowned in the river by the Bolsheviks. The funeral service for him was to take place in the very chapel built onto the church in Pokrovskoe which Gregory had paid for. Such had become the mystical connection between the two. Bishop Germogen was buried in the very tomb that had contained the relics of the last saint canonised by Tsar Nicholas, St John of Tobolsk, the ancestor of our spiritual guardian, St John (Maximovich). Bishop Germogen is now a New Martyr.

 

  1. Unbelievers in Gregory: 1907-1916

Several politicians and aristocrats like the Grand Duke Nikolay, who during the War publicly threatened to hang Gregory, though even in 1915 still considering him ‘amazing’ (Fomin, Vol IX, p. 214), hated him. So did the powerful, scheming clique around him. These included the Ministers of Internal Affairs, the amoral social climber Khvostov and the notorious General Dzhunkovsky, the Director of Police Beletsky and the treasonous politicians Guchkov, Rodzianko and Lvov. There were also others at Court, like the disturbed intriguer Sophia Tyucheva, sent from Moscow to slander Gregory, who could not stand Gregory – though this spinster only saw him once and never once talked to him.

In self-justification these intriguers all deliberately slandered Gregory. Among churchmen who believed the slanders there was the highly political future Metr Evlogy (Georgievsky), who never met Gregory. Another case was the Metropolitan’s friend, the notorious modernist and freemason Fr George Shavelsky. Yet another was Metr Vladimir (Bogoyavlensky). However, he was cleansed, becoming the first bishop to become a New Martyr, in Kiev. All these relied on hearsay to form their opinions, just like the Tsar’s secular-minded Danish mother and his sister Ksenia and her lover.

Tragically, the Tsarina’s very naïve and undiscerning sister, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who lived in Moscow, also believed the slanders. She too suffered from that selfsame disease as Fr Theophan – lack of experience. Never having met Gregory, she had been completely convinced of Gregory’s depravity by a whole clique of Protestant-minded individuals who surrounded and manipulated her with their rationalism (for the full list of them, see Fomin, Vol IX, pp. 392-395) and tried to persuade her that the Church needed Protestant-style deaconesses. These even tried, and failed, to compromise the trusting Gregory in restaurants in both Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The intriguers included two Moscow priests. Elizabeth’s unusual naivety would in time be cleansed by her sacrifices, confession of the Faith and victorious martyrdom.

However, by far the worst case of slander against Gregory was that of a former admirer and entirely unrepentant Fr Iliodor (Sergey Trufanov). Out of jealousy he fell out with Gregory in December 1911 and proceeded to slander him. In 1912 he renounced the Faith and the Church and fled the country. As a result of public slanders, especially those made by Iliodor, on 29 June/12 July 1914, the day after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo and so on the eve of the First World War, another attempt to assassinate Gregory took place. A young peasant woman called Chionia Guseva, mentally deranged from syphilis, which had deformed her physically, attempted to murder Gregory by stabbing him in the stomach outside his home in Pokrovskoe.

As Fomin recounts in hundreds of pages in Volume VI of his study, Gregory was seriously wounded and for a time it was not clear that he would survive. Indeed, he suffered for long afterwards. However, certain newspapers rejoiced and even announced that Gregory had died. Nevertheless, after surgery in hospital in Tyumen, where in 1892 he had worked as an assistant during a cholera epidemic, he recovered. Guseva claimed to have acted alone, having read about Gregory in slanderous newspapers, which were in fact guilty of inciting her to murder. Believing him to be a rapist, a ‘false prophet and even an antichrist’, she had acted. In reality, Guseva was a follower of this self-exalted Fr Iliodor, the controversial and notorious extreme right-winger, immoral adventurist and the greatest of all of Gregory’s slanderers.

Once a close friend of the naïvely zealous Bishop Germogen, Iliodor too became a slanderer of Gregory, after the latter had refused to support him and fell out with Gregory at the end of 1911. A ferocious anti-Semite and political intriguer, Iliodor had been part of a group in the aristocracy who had attempted to drive a wedge between the Imperial Family and Gregory. The police believed that Iliodor had played some role in the attempt on Gregory’s life and he was banished from Saint Petersburg and defrocked, fleeing the country before he could be questioned about the attempted murder. Guseva was found to be not responsible for her actions due to insanity and was committed to a mental hospital. (When released by the equally insane Kerensky government, in 1919 she attempted to assassinate the saintly Patriarch Tikhon). As for Iliodor, he married and ended up as an impoverished janitor in New York, dying in 1952.

 

  1. The Path to Victory: 1914-1916

Like all practising Orthodox Christians, Gregory saw salvation as dependent on our seeking first the Kingdom of God. Therefore, he was opposed to war, both from a moral point of view, but also as something which leads to political, economic and social catastrophe. Thus, in 1912 he had already pleaded with the Tsar to oppose a potential war with warmongering Austro-Hungary. A war was being urged by the militaristic Germanophobe Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolayevich. Gregory’s opposition probably played the main role in avoiding war then. In 1914 he also directly opposed the Russian entry into the Kaiser’s War, though his influence was much limited by his enforced Siberian absence from the Capital.

Indeed, some have seen in the assassination in Sarajevo and the attempted assassination of Gregory on the next day not a coincidence, but an organised plot. However it may be, from his hospital bed in Tyumen in July 1914 Gregory sent some twenty telegrams to the Tsar (these are collected in the book of his writings, ‘The Chains of Love’), prophesying that if War broke out, it would be the end of Russia and the Tsar. He even considered that if Guseva had not nearly murdered him in Pokrovskoe, he would have been able to travel to Saint Petersburg and war could have been prevented. His prophecy (‘Just give us another ten years’), correct in every detail, as were all his prophecies, was not heard, such was the militarism of the aristocracy, especially of the ultra-ambitious and remarkably rude Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolayevich, who had always wanted to be Tsar.

Deliberately twisting Gregory’s peace-making Christian opinions, during World War I Gregory became the focus of slanders about unpatriotic influence at the Court. The Tsarina, who was of Anglo-Hessian, not Prussian, descent, was also slandered as acting as a spy in the enemy’s employ. In fact she was a Russian patriot and had long despised the Prussian unifiers of Germany for destroying her native and independent Hesse. Indeed, once war had broken out, Gregory stated several times that it had to be continued to the end and to victory, which was quite possible for Russia, though at great cost to the peasant-soldiers. The incompetent Russian generals (just like their French and British counterparts, ‘donkeys leading lions’), the other corrupt and ultra-rich aristocrats and meddling bureaucrats run by the aristocrats and their minions, all contributed to Russian losses in the War.

The jealous and anti-Christian politicians and journalists (most of them Non-Russians) were hostile to Gregory’s spiritual influence on the Tsar. And this in a land where there was no censorship or libel laws, unlike in Western Europe. Their intrigues and lies in the newspapers were to weaken support for the Imperial Family. Their lies were all aimed at attempting to seize power for themselves and destroy the Church, as they had been plotting for decades, as had already occurred in the failed Decembrist conspiracy of aristocrats in 1825. The situation was only saved when in August 1915 the Tsar himself successfully took over the command of the Army, as he had wanted to do from the very start.

When the Tsar assumed leadership of the Imperial Army, sacking his utterly incompetent uncle the Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolayevich, hope of victory came. The Grand Duke, whose disastrous military leadership had caused setback after setback at the Front, had in fact been planning a coup d’etat with the help of treasonous ministers and the notorious Protopresbyter George Shavelsky. They were much opposed to Gregory, who was supported by the living spiritual forces in the Church, so many of whom were to become New Martyrs. Thus, in November 1916 the Optina elder and now saint Anatoly (Potapov) had said in Petrograd that it was not God’s will for Gregory to be removed from his position.

On 3 December 1915 another incident occurred with Alexey. The boy lay bleeding profusely. On 4 December Gregory again intervened in prayer and reassured the Imperial Couple that all would be well. Again, to the astonishment of the powerless doctors, Gregory was to prove to be right. On 6 December Gregory was able to get to the Tsarevich’s bedside, made the sign of the cross over him and he was healed. The Tsar’s sister, Olga Alexandrovna, confirmed this in her memoirs, unable to give any explanation, but simply confirming the fact. Many others agreed with her. Meanwhile, the Tsar had greatly improved Army morale, stabilised the Front with a successful operation in September 1915 and rearmed the troops ready for 1916.

 

  1. The British Establishment Intervenes: 1916

There followed the Tsar’s hugely successful 1916 summer offensive, usually miscalled the ‘Brusilov Offensive’, which was by far the most successful Allied offensive of the War. In December 1916 the Tsar addressed his Armed Forces, underlining his determination to fight against the invaders until ethnic borders had been reached in Eastern and Central Europe. He was determined to ‘deprussianise’ Germany, restoring independent German principalities. Constantinople was to be freed after 450 years and a free, reunited Poland would be established. The British elite were by now greatly alarmed, seeing that a victorious and rearmed Russia was poised to win the war in 1917.

Given their own incompetence on the Western Front, bogged down in trenches in a murderous stalemate, the British saw that Russia would soon liberate Vienna, Berlin and Constantinople, their forces arriving on the border with France. Thus, Russia would control all of Europe as far as France and Italy, so becoming the main European Power. Although it had been delayed by the British and US-backed and armed Japanese attack on Russia in 1904, it would also become the main Asian Power. British Establishment jealousy of Russia, now on high alert, went back to Tudor times, but had reached a high point in the nineteenth century. Then in imperialist paranoia after the Indian War of Liberation of 1857-58, known in Britain as the ‘Indian Mutiny’, Britain had invaded Russia in the disastrous so-called ‘Crimean War’ in 1854 and invented ‘The Great Game’.

This imaginary and murderous scenario, not at all a game, had suggested that Russia was about to liberate British-enslaved India. This is what led to the repeated and failed British invasions of Afghanistan, the British massacres in Tibet in 1903-4 and the British arming of Japan with dreadnoughts, inciting it to war against Russia. This paranoia, led by Disraeli among others, had created an incessant campaign of ethnocentric stereotypes, racism and mythmaking to make out that ‘the Russian bear’ was ‘Asiatic’, ‘dangerous’, ‘primitive’ and its rulers were tyrants – unlike those of the British Establishment! Russian rulers were always the main objects of British propaganda, just as nowadays, with the absurd but self-justifying NATO propaganda that President Putin is about to invade today’s US-owned Eastern Europe!

Therefore, the British government, led by the notorious sexually-obsessed Lloyd George, hatched a plot against Gregory. It would use its spies in Saint Petersburg, including especially a certain Oswald Rayner (all of them are catalogued with their photographs by Fomin on pp. 302-325 of Vol IX of his study) to undermine the Tsar and so Christian Civilisation. The first step would be to assassinate the Tsar’s spiritual mentor, Gregory. For this their agents would naturally remain in the background, hiding behind the treasonous services of local Anglophile Russian aristocrats, who had always sought power for themselves (Zhevakhov, p. 197).

Thus, the Allies would be able to set up a puppet-regime in Russia, led perhaps by the Germanophobe Grand Duke Nikolay Nikolayevich and other traitors among the Grand Dukes. Thus, Russia with all its wealth would at last be theirs, achieving, as Lloyd-George openly proclaimed in Parliament after the overthrow of the Tsar, ‘one of our main war aims’. The main British helper would be the ultra-wealthy aristocrat, homosexual and transvestite admirer of Oscar Wilde, Prince Felix Yusupov.

Backed by many aristocrats, Yusupov actually knew Gregory and crucially had been at University College in Oxford (just over sixty years before this author; his daughter died in 1983 in the small town outside Paris where I then lived). Furthermore, it was in Oxford that Yusupov had already met Gregory’s future assassin, Oswald Rayner. Yusupov was heavily involved in occult practices (see his chilling drawings of demons in Fomin, Vol IX, p. 269). Moreover, he was married to the Tsar’s niece. (This marriage was obviously a disaster and after it the famous Yusupov family died out, for there were no male descendants. Yusupov continued to cause great scandal in the Russian emigration in France with his transvestite activities).

 

  1. The Murder: December 1916

There had already been several attempts on Gregory’s life. The first had been on 16 December 1911 (the same date as his murder five years later), the second was a plot involving General Dumbadze in the Crimea, the third was Guseva’s in 1914, as we have related, the fourth was on 7 January 1915 when a car had ‘accidentally’ collided with Gregory’s sleigh, and a fifth was an unrealised plot by the notorious Minister of Internal Affairs, Khvostov, in February 1916. This time was different. Rayner and the other spies in Saint Petersburg were under the command of the British spymaster and future minister, Samuel Hoare. All were supervised by the treacherous British ambassador Buchanan.

Realising that Gregory’s Faith made him a threat to their planned seizure of power, Yusupov, the Tsar’s cowardly nephew, the bisexual anglophile Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich Romanov, an extreme right-wing politician called Vladimir Purishkevich (‘only the wall is further to the right than me’), helped by a lawyer and senior freemason V. A. Maklakov and their friends, Sergei Sukhotin and Dr Stanislav Lazovert, concocted a plan. Purishkevich had for years been plotting to overthrow the Tsar and replace him with a weak puppet like Dmitry Pavlovich, whom he could control with his Fascist inclinations. He had been known to say: ‘As long as Rasputin is alive, we cannot win’ (Mironov, p. 107). Their plan, with British approval, was ready by the end of November 1916.

All of them wanted to dethrone the Tsar and replace him with a powerless, right-wing puppet of their choice, rather as in the case of the German-British monarchy. British spies were only too happy to support them. They would torture Gregory and then use the British spies to finish him off in December 1916 in the Yusupovs’ Moyka Palace, before the victorious Russian year of 1917 could begin. The forthcoming Russian victory would thus be turned into the Russian catastrophe, for without these traitors there would have been no mass genocides under Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Khrushchev. Thus, shortly after midnight on 17 December 1916, Yusupov would and did lure Gregory, who remained trusting, but felt a dark premonition, to his Palace under false pretences.

Here Yusupov ushered Gregory into the basement, where he offered him tea and cakes, some of which he thought had been laced with cyanide by the anti-Tsar Maklakov. To Yusupov’s surprise, Gregory was not affected. This was because the legally-minded Maklakov had not supplied cyanide, but aspirin, as he was frightened of being implicated and found out as a result of the talkative Purishevich’s inability to keep the plot secret. At around 2.30 am Yusupov excused himself to go upstairs, where his fellow conspirators were waiting. Taking a revolver from Dmitry Pavlovich, Yusupov returned to the basement. Here, pointing to a medieval Italian crucifix on a wall in the room, Yusupov told Gregory that he had ‘better look at the crucifix and say a prayer’. Then he shot him in the chest.

Probably it was at this point that the conspirators began torturing him. Wounds to his eyes, ears and sides can only be understood as torture. Believing him to be dead, they then drove to Gregory’s apartment with their accomplice Sukhotin wearing Gregory’s coat and hat, in an attempt to make it look as though Gregory had returned home that night. On returning to the Moyka Palace, Yusupov went back to the basement. Suddenly, Gregory, only wounded, staggered up and tried to defend himself against Yusupov, who freed himself and fled in cowardly terror upstairs. Gregory went outside to the Palace courtyard before being shot dead by a panicking Rayner and collapsing into a snowdrift. Gregory died of three gunshot wounds, the last of which was Rayner’s close-range shot to his forehead.

Thus, in the early morning of 17/30 December 1916, Gregory was murdered by British spies and jealous aristocrats, who opposed the prophet’s Christian Faith, the Christian Tsar and Christian Russia. Whether representatives of the Russian aristocracy or the British Establishment, they had all put themselves above Christ and so destroyed Russian Civilisation and its underlying authentically Christian values. The conspirators wrapped Gregory’s body, drove it to the nearby Petrovsky Bridge and dropped it into the Malaya Neva River, with the idea that people would think it had been a drowning accident. However, news of Gregory’s murder spread quickly, as the clumsy Purishkevich had spoken openly about Gregory’s murder to two soldiers and a policeman who was investigating reports of shots. Purishkevich urged them not to tell anyone.

 

  1. The First Shot of the Russian Revolution: 1916-1918

The next morning an investigation was launched. When two workmen noticed blood on the railings and a support of the Petrovsky Bridge and a boot was found on the ice below, river police began searching the area for a body. It was found under the river ice on 19 December/1 January, approximately 200 yards downstream from the bridge. Gregory was recognised at once. The frozen fingers of his right hand were folded in the form ready to make the sign of the cross. Large crowds, mainly composed of women, gathered to take water from the river which they considered had been made holy by the blood of a martyr. Popular veneration had begun; only the aristocrats and middle classes rejoiced at the death of a peasant. Ordinary folk were horrified at the murder of one of their kind. A few, instinctively, realised that the Monarchy was finished, for only Gregory had been supporting it. With his murder, all was over.

An autopsy was conducted by Dr Dmitry Kosorotov, the city’s senior autopsy surgeon. The report that he wrote was lost, but he later stated that Gregory’s body had shown signs of severe trauma, including three gunshot wounds – one of which had been sustained at close range and to the forehead. There was also a slice wound to his left side and several other injuries, many of which Kosorotov felt had been sustained post-mortem. Kosorotov found a single bullet in Gregory’s body, but stated that it was too badly deformed and of a type too widely used to trace. He found no evidence that Gregory had been poisoned and found no water in Gregory’s lungs – reports that Gregory had been thrown into the water alive were incorrect.

Gregory was buried on 21 December/2 January in the grounds of the Imperial Palace at Tsarskoe Selo. Bishop Isidore (Kolokolov), now a New Martyr, led the funeral liturgy. The burial site was next to the foundations of a small and unfinished church to be dedicated to St Seraphim of Sarov, who had been canonised on the insistence of Tsar Nicholas. Anna Vyrubova had wanted to build the church with compensation money she had received from her railway accident in 1915. The funeral was attended only by the Imperial Family, still reeling from the horror of the murder and the treason of those well-known to them, not least a Romanov, and by a few of their intimates. However, in March 1917 Gregory’s body was exhumed, his hands still like those of a living person, and incinerated on a bonfire on orders of the Kerensky regime which had replaced the rule of God’s Anointed (Bokhanov, pp. 31-34).

This destruction of the body was in order to prevent Gregory’s burial site from being a shrine for the faithful, as it had already become, and has become again since the fall of the atheist yoke in Russia. Already in early 1917 a brochure had appeared in Saint Petersburg about Gregory, calling him ‘The New Martyr’. Thus, his body met the same fate as the bodies of the Imperial Family, whose remains the Bolsheviks also tried to consume by fire. In life as in death, they shared the same destiny. Gregory had made several prophecies about his murder, which he had been expecting. Thus: ‘Do you know that I will soon die in terrible sufferings? But what can be done? God has assigned me the great feat of dying for the salvation of my dear sovereigns and Holy Rus’.

Significantly, he had also prophesied: ‘They will surely kill me and all of you will also die. They will kill all of you. And Papa and Mama’ (the Tsar and the Tsarina). ‘I have a premonition that I will leave you before 1 January (1917)…If Russian peasants, my brothers, kill me, then you the Russian Tsar have nothing to fear…But if aristocrats and nobles kill me and they shed my blood, then their hands will remain stained with my blood….’. (Platonov, pp. 159-60). The British Establishment and their equally amoral Russian aristocrat puppets had now opened a Pandora’s box. For Gregory was only the first martyr of the palace revolt of the traitors, deChristianised aristocrats, generals and politicians, which became known as ‘The Russian Revolution’. Their treason would lead to millions and millions of martyrs, an irremovable stain on world history and on their consciences.

On the eve of the Revolution, but before Gregory’s murder, Maria Golovina, one of his closest disciples, had asked him if there would be a Revolution. He had answered: ‘Only a small one, if I am here to stop it, but…’. (Fomin, Vol VIII, p. 340).  In other words, Gregory’s murder meant there was no longer anything to stop those processes of spiritual decay which in the end would lead to the deaths of tens of millions in the Soviet Union. As Tsar Nicholas himself repeatedly said: ‘If it were not for Gregory’s prayers, they would long ago have murdered me’ (Fomin, Vol VIII, p. 350). Just as they had murdered his grandfather, Alexander II. Those who finally succeeded in murdering Gregory would have the blood of far more than just one man on their hands. However, our hope is in the Lord: ‘Fear not, for I am with you; I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you’ (Isaiah, 43, 5).

 

Afterword

After his murder Gregory continued to be vilely slandered, both in Soviet Russia and in the Russian emigration. (And it is those who tried to censor even this modest work!). He was especially slandered by exiled Saint Petersburg and Baltic aristocrats in Paris and other Western capitals – not least by those bearing the surname Romanov. Instead of repenting for their treason and slanders, they blamed Gregory for the fall of the Russian Empire and, particularly, for the loss of their personal power and wealth. In reality, they were themselves to blame; like the Western Powers whom they represented, they had not understood that when Russia is no longer Christian, then it is militantly atheistic. Unlike in Western culture there is nothing inbetween; authentic Christian culture in Russia is not going to be replaced by Western secular culture. Destroy authentic Orthodox Christianity in Russia at your peril.

These slanders continue among their descendants to this very day, over 100 years later. Within my memory their descendants in Paris would refuse even to talk to Gregory’s great grand-daughter, Laurence, who lives there. Gregory is still slandered as a drunk and a debauchee in books, articles, plays and films, both in post-Soviet Russia and in the West. Today some extremist right-wingers with their pro-Nazi ideology use him as a peg for their anti-Semitic nationalism (their excuse being that most of the first Bolsheviks were Jews). Others, including contemporary, so-called ‘Orthodox’, academics, infected by anti-spiritual Protestant-style rationalism, use him as a peg for their Soviet-coloured anti-Tsar prejudices.

Pharisees and scribes, all of them. They are all merely repeating the errors of the murderers, the right-wing nationalist and pseudo-monarchist Purishkevich and the liberal Oxford graduate Yusupov, notorious for his scandalous depravity, both before and after the Revolution. They were supported both by anti-German British assassins and left-wing Bolsheviks. All of them, right or left, are in fact just the two sides of the same anti-Christian coin. That is why they all slander Gregory, as they also slander the Tsar-Martyr Nicholas and his Family, who was murdered not in Saint Petersburg or Moscow, but far away, along the road from Gregory’s Siberian home.

On the other hand, there are those Orthodox who love the Imperial Martyrs, especially in Saint Petersburg and Ekaterinburg, and who also venerate Gregory as a saint, usually under the name ‘St Gregory the New’ or ‘The Martyr Gregory’. The apartment where he last lived in Saint Petersburg, at 64, Gorokhovaya Street, and the place of his burial have become places of pilgrimage for them. However, there is very little veneration for him among the masses, among whom his name is still slandered. Among the episcopate there is as yet no call for his canonisation, despite some sympathy expressed by a few, icons painted (as early as 1931 – Fomin, Vol IX, p. 473), services composed and prayers invoked by the few.

Naturally, any possible future canonisation is out of the question until the facts are better known and veneration of the Imperial Martyrs themselves spreads, creating popular reverence. Until that moment, Russia will never recover from her apostasy and its resulting endemic corruption, injustices and poverty. As for the rest of the world, it will continue to be blinded by its delusions of self-belief and self-justification, which have now brought it to the verge of extinction. As Elder Nikolai (Guryanov) said: ‘As the Truth of God begins to be revealed, so everything in Russia will change’. For only once all has changed among the Russian masses, will the Monarchy be restored there, so that the vital changes in the rest of the world can then follow.

We cannot forget that in August 1917 the Imperial Family sailed past Gregory’s house in Pokrovskoe, as they were taken into exile. The next year, on Palm Sunday, 14 April 1918, the carriage which took the Tsar from his Gethsemane to his Golgotha, from his captivity in Tobolsk to his martyrdom in nearby Ekaterinburg, passed by Gregory’s very house in Pokrovskoe, again exactly as Gregory had prophesied (Dehn, p. 96 and Fomin, Vol IX, p. 411). In passing by, it was blessed by Gregory’s faithful widow, Praskovya. Later the Tsarina and the Grand Duchess Maria followed him along the same road. Gregory and the Imperial Family were inseparable, even now they followed the same road. May God grant repentance and spiritual purity to all to see that road and the Truth of God.

Bibliography:

Although many books have been written about Gregory Rasputin, mainly in the last century, there are few in any Western language which bear a resemblance to the truth, being works of sensationalist tabloid journalism, anti-Russian political propaganda, or else forgeries. Exceptions are the reprinted ‘The Real Tsaritsa’ by Lili Dehn, Shelley’s ‘The Speckled Domes’ of 1925, and the now unobtainable Memoirs of Gregory’s daughter, Matrona, published in French in 1925, uncorrupted, unlike the German, English and particularly awful Russian versions, the latter published in 2002. Perhaps the most valuable document to translate would be the also now unobtainable 112-page Memoirs of Mounia (Maria) Golovina, who like the Tsarina expressed the mystical understanding of Gregory, first published in French in Paris in 1995, but written decades before. The works below are in Russian, except for those by Cook, Cullen, Dehn and Shelley:

Bokhanov A. N., Rasputin, Fact and Fiction, Moscow, 2006

Cook Andrew, To Kill Rasputin, 2005

Cullen Richard, Rasputin, The Role of Britain’s Secret Service in His Torture and Murder, 2010

Dehn Lili, The Real Tsaritsa, Nabu Press, reprint, 2011

Fedchenkov Metr. Benjamin, One the Edge of Two Eras, Moscow, 2004

Fomin S., Gregory Rasputin, An Investigation, 7 Volumes + plus an invaluable eighth volume of sources called ‘Our Dear Father’, which includes Gregory’s biography written by his daughter Matrona and the defence of Gregory by M.E. Golovina, and a ninth volume or album with all known images of Gregory and further information about his murder, Moscow, Forum, 2007-2015

Mironova T., From Beneath the Lie. A Slandered Life. A Slandered Death, Vesti, Saint Petersburg, 2005

Platonov O., A Life for the Tsar, Rodnaya Strana, Moscow, 2015

Rasputin-Novy Gregory E., The Chains of Love, Articles, Letters, Reflections, Sayings, Saint Petersburg 2017, (254 pages in Pocketbook Format)

Shelley G, The Speckled Domes, Episodes of an Englishman’s Life in Russia, New York 1925 (In 1950 George Shell, which was his real name and not Shelley, became an Old Catholic bishop).

Zhevakhov N.D. Memoirs, Saint Petersburg, 2014.

Internet:

The best source for a very extensive number of articles on Gregory Rasputin-Novy, by authors like Yury Rassulin, Igor Yevsin, Fr Sergiy Chechanichev, Fr Alexander Zakharov and others, is the Russian national website: http://ruskline.ru/

 

Akathist to the Holy Martyr Gregory the New

Kontakion I

Called from the furthest bounds of East and West by the Most Holy Mother of God through her Image of Kazan to become a faithful servant of the Double-Headed Eagle, thou didst journey as a pilgrim to the holy places of the vast Orthodox Lands, even to the earthly Jerusalem, fearing God, honouring the Tsar and having compassion on the people. When the Spirit came down on thee, thou didst not forsake thy calling even unto death, acquiring boldness before the Lord and praying for those who sing to thee: Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Ikos I

Coming forth from the village of the Intercession of the Mother of God, thy destiny was revealed to be as an intercessor for the Imperial Family, O martyr Gregory, by thy prayers opposing the efforts of the dragon to overthrow the Christian Emperor and bestow his Empire on the beast from the bottomless pit. In wonder at thy service and protection beneath the veil of the Mother of God, we sing to thee thus:

Rejoice, thou who didst heal the heir to the throne after earthly doctors had laboured in vain.

Rejoice, thou who didst heal the future hope of the Christian Empire through thy prayers.

Rejoice, thou who didst turn the sorrow of the Empress into joy by the Holy Spirit.

Rejoice, thou who didst not seek any earthly reward for thy labours.

Rejoice, thou who didst imitate the mystical feat of the great martyr George.

Rejoice, thou who didst bear thy name as an evil for the sake of the Lord’s Anointed.

Rejoice, thou who didst obtain from thy Lord a new name that shines like a star in the heavens.

Rejoice, thou who didst speak words of the Lord as a prophet of the New Israel.

Rejoice, thou who made the slanders and blasphemies of the enemies of Christ into salvation.

Rejoice, O spiritual warrior and companion in the battle for Sovereignty.

Rejoice, O invisible companion of the Emperor’s prayer.

Rejoice, O good and faithful servant even unto death.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 2

Seeing the Christian Empire troubled and shaken by the enemies of Christ, thou, O martyr Gregory, wast revealed after the repose of the Righteous John of Kronstadt as a new prophet to denounce the spiritual impurity of the Emperor’s foes and confirm the good estate of his faithful subjects, singing to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 2

Having the mind of the saints of old, whom thou didst love, and concealing God’s gifts from the world behind the foolishness of the Cross, thou wast beloved by the Emperor and Empress. Slandered by the spite of apostates and the jealousy of traitors, thou, O blessed one, wast no friend to the dark forces that hated Christ. Teach us also by the knowledge that God inspired in thee to withstand temptations, the enemies of Christ and the devil, singing to thee thus:

Rejoice, O man of God, honoured by Imperial friendship.

Rejoice, O messenger of the will of God, revealed to the Emperor.

Rejoice, O treasury of the Wisdom of God, hidden from the world.

Rejoice, O servant of Christ, whose nobility was far greater than that of princes.

Rejoice, O bee made wise by God, who gathered mystical nectar from the Emperor’s flowers.

Rejoice, O sweetness feeding the lovers of honey with holy honeycombs.

Rejoice, O faithful keeper of the Sovereign Empire against the servants of Antichrist.

Rejoice, O untiring guardian and zealot of ancient piety against the demons.

Rejoice, O converser with the Imperial Family.

Rejoice, thou who didst suffer for the good order of the Empire.

Rejoice, O meadow of virtue cultivated from generation unto generation.

Rejoice, O fool for Christ blessed by God amid the intrigues of Babylon.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 3

Raised up from a distant province for thine Imperial destiny by the Divine Love of Providence, thou, O blessed Gregory, admiring the Redeemer, didst witness to Him. In thy vigilance, as prophesied by the Righteous John according to thy name, thou didst sacrifice thy soul for thy Imperial Friends, prophesying and calling out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 3

In thee the Sovereign Family found a new intercessor, a new prophet and a new martyr, for thou, O faithful Gregory, wast revealed to be a forerunner of the Imperial Martyrs, like them slain in the darkness of the night by the base in a basement. As the offering of thy soul for the Emperor was accepted, now pray for those who call out to thee in this wise:

Rejoice, O trusted intercessor for the Imperial City come from a lowly village.

Rejoice, O protection against those who plotted to slay the Emperor.

Rejoice, thou who gavest thy life for the Tsar as a protomartyr.

Rejoice, thou who didst suffer at the hands of those who then martyred the Imperial Family.

Rejoice, thou who didst repeat the famed patriotic feats of old.

Rejoice, thou who didst mystically sacrifice thy soul for the Emperor.

Rejoice, thou who didst accept royal hallowing from God.

Rejoice, thou who wast revered by thine Emperor and Empress as a man of God.

Rejoice, thou who wast crowned on earth with a crown of thorns.

Rejoice, thou who wast crowned in heaven with a royal crown.

Rejoice, O friend of the ancient and sacred union of Emperor and people against apostates and traitors.

Rejoice, O spiritual offshoot of the Imperial Family.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 4

Rightfully spurning the wisdom of the world as vainglorious and impure and preferring the foolishness of the Cross, thou, O blessed one, didst denounce the lies and delusions, intrigues and evil schemings of those who had rejected Christ and didst pray with the greatest simplicity for those who sing to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 4

Hurling slanders and blasphemies at the Emperor who had been crowned by God, in their folly the traitors forced the Anointed of the Lord from his ancestral throne and led him like a lamb from his Gethsemane to his slaughter. Seeing the depth of thy love for the Emperor, who looks down on us now, we sing to thee, O Gregory, thus:

Rejoice, thou who in thy life with the Imperial Family wast falsely accused of every sin and vice.

Rejoice, O ever-watchful guardian of the Ruling Family who suffered for the sins of Russia.

Rejoice, thou who art not parted in death from their heavenly glory.

Rejoice, O gatekeeper in the heavenly mansions, guiding those who are called to speak of the Imperial mystery.

Rejoice, thou who denouncest unfaithful ministers before the Imperial Family.

Rejoice, O stumbling block for those gone astray from Christ, who even now scorn the Emperor’s glory.

Rejoice, thou who didst abide night and day in prayer for the Christian Ruler.

Rejoice, O never-slumbering eyes of the Tsar, delaying the appearance of Antichrist.

Rejoce, O holy standard of all the faithful servants of the Emperor.

Rejoice, O denouncer of treason, cowardice and deceit.

Rejoice, O humble ploughman who didst put thy hand to the plough of the Empire.

Rejoice, O mystical shield and protection of the Christian Emperor.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 5

Like a star shining forth from the Russian Lands in the distant east and moving on its God-given course to Christ, thy soul, O martyr Gregory, burned like a bright flame amid the delusions of the spiritual night in the west, going before the Emperor who cried out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 5

Seeing thee going before the Emperor as a prophet and fool for Christ, and witnessing to the grace of God resting on His Anointed, in their folly the traitors turned on thee like wolves in order to part thee from the Emperor. Wondering at the many miraculous acts of Divine Providence which guide the Christian Empire, we sing to thee thus:

Rejoice, O pilgrim who during many years prayed at the holy places.

Rejoice, O sower of the noble seeds of beauty, goodness and truth among the Orthodox people.

Rejoice, thou who didst mystically see the Imperial destiny of Holy Rus.

Rejoice, O fisherman, who gavest wise counsel to those caught in thy spiritual nets.

Rejoice, thou who didst come like a prophet unto thine own and wast not known by them.

Rejoice, O pearl of great price who was cast before swine.

Rejoice, thou who didst love God, Tsar and Empire.

Rejoice, O citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem.

Rejoice, thou who didst worship in the Holy Land and the earthly Jerusalem.

Rejoice, O pilgrim to Patmos, where John the Theologian saw the vision of the last times.

Rejoice, thou who didst eclipse the dark star of the enemies of the Tsar with the Sun of Righteousness.

Rejoice, thou who gavest sight to those made spiritually blind by the world.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 6

False brethren, weak in faith and cold of heart, did not wish to honour the see of Tobolsk, but thou, O wondrous Gregory, zealous for the greater glory of the Empire, didst intercede before the Tsar for the glorification of the holy hierarch John Maximovich, who is wonderful among the saints, calling out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 6

By thy prayers and intercessions before the Emperor, the light of Christ shone forth from the shrine of the holy relics of the sainted John of Tobolsk, for thou, O martyr Gregory, didst diligently labour to keep thy land faithful to the Tsar; through thy intercessions forsake not us who call out to thee such things as these:

Rejoice, O fulfilment of the mystical prophecies of Holy Rus for all the peoples of the world before the end.

Rejoice, thou who didst proclaim the city of Tobolsk to be Christ’s.

Rejoice, O hope of the land that suffered the blood of idolatry in former times.

Rejoice, O intercessor for the Empire made white by the red blood of the first martyred Tsar.

Rejoice, O spiritual guardian of the prison, which received the Imperial Captives.

Rejoice, O native of the land where mystically met the earthly and heavenly paths of Emperor and prophet.

Rejoice, thou who didst bear chains on thy body like a hidden schema.

Rejoice, thou who tookest the sanctuary of Tobolsk from its enemies with the sword of the Spirit.

Rejoice, thou who didst work many wonders and healings in thy lifetime.

Rejoice, thou who gavest repentance to the hierarch Germogen, appearing to him after death.

Rejoice, thou who didst mystically accompany the Tsar through the land of Tobolsk.

Rejoice, thou who lookest down on us from Heaven together with the Imperial Family.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 7

Desiring that all should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, thou, O blessed one, didst guide both the good and the bad through life’s sorrows, giving spiritual treasures to the faithful, who call out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 7

Christ showed thee to be a new passion-bearer, for thou didst not render any of thy persecutors evil for evil, praying for them and making ready for the Day of Judgement. Help us to escape the horrors of Gehenna that await Satan and his henchmen, as we call out to thee thus:

Rejoice, O generous almsgiver who didst love the poor.

Rejoice, thou who didst bar the gates of hell for the faithful.

Rejoice, thou who didst help the poor and naked.

Rejoice, thou who gavest every good gift for Christ and the Tsar.

Rejoice, thou who hast the exceeding great power to console in sorrow.

Rejoice, thou who didst call the rich and powerful to repentance from their spiritual impurity.

Rejoice, thou who dost ever sorrow for all who were guilty before the Tsar and sinful before God.

Rejoice, for none who came to thee with faith departed sorrowing and unconsoled.

Rejoice, thou who in wisdom didst conceal thy deeds from traitors with the foolishness of the Cross.

Rejoice, thou blessed by God who wast wiser than the enemies of Christ, the world and the devil.

Rejoice, thou who didst appear deaf and mute before those who insulted thee.

Rejoice, thou who didst pray for the enemies of God before the Day of Wrath.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 8

Seeing thy life of struggles and labours in the world through the eyes of spiritual impurity, O holy Gregory, some fell into temptation, for they heeded the words of the enemies of Christ, whose slanders against thee described their own vices, raising up a persecution against thee and thy spiritual children, who call out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 8

Thou didst endure all the filth and torment of the enemies of Christ with valour, O martyr Gregory. Struck by cutting words and piercing slanders sharper than swords and spears, thou didst accept bodily wounds, foreknowing thy violent death at the hands of enemies of Christ and traitors. As thou didst smite the old dragon, who rose up against the Christian Emperor with the Cross of the Lord, pray for us who call out to thee thus:

Rejoice, O protomartyr, against whom the demons inspired slander in every enemy of Christ.

Rejoice, thou whose life God had already preserved from death.

Rejoice, thou who didst bear the feat of martyrdom by the power of Christ.

Rejoice, thou who wast pierced in the side like the Saviour, with the cross in thy hands.

Rejoice, thou who wast thrown down beside a dead dog according to the evil custom of the enemies of Christ.

Rejoice, thou who wast cast into a freezing watery grave.

Rejoice, thou whose body was buried by the Imperial Family in a place of honour.

Rejoice, thou whose body was taken up and burned by the enemies of Christ, so having suffered both ice and fire.

Rejoice, for the enemies of Christ slew thee in a basement at night like the Imperial Martyrs.

Rejoice, for apostates and traitors of the Imperial line were guilty of thy peasant blood.

Rejoice, thou who wast raised up from afar for an Imperial destiny.

Rejoice, thou who didst beforehand show the Emperor a martyr’s end.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 9

Having shared and passed through every temptation of thine Imperial Friends by the grace of God, thou didst confess the Imperial mystery of the Incarnation, O blessed Gregory, which none knows, save the pious Orthodox who truly confess Christ and so are faithful to the Tsar, singing to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 9

All the long words of orators and all the airy works of philosophers are unable to express the depth of the spiritual impurity of those in seats of authority, who had lost the Orthodox Faith and so fell into envy, spite, slander and treason against the Emperor, the Empress and thee; but as for us, we see and honour only the glory of thy cross and call out to thee thus:

Rejoice, thou who didst share the Imperial burden before their Golgotha.

Rejoice, thou who didst eat at the Emperor’s table.

Rejoice, thou who didst choose the path of loyalty to the Emperor, refusing the pieces of silver of the traitors.

Rejoice, thou chosen out of distant Siberia who becamest one of the Ruler’s own.

Rejoice, thou who didst look on the Emperor and Empress as a faithful son.

Rejoice, O holy new prophet blessed by God to protect Sovereign Rus.

Rejoice, for thou didst shame those who shamed Holy Rus in the sight of the whole world.

Rejoice, thou who wast rewarded by the Empress.

Rejoice, thou who voluntarily tookest on thyself the sorrows of the Emperor.

Rejoice, thou who didst gain the envy and spite of the enemies of Christ.

Rejoice, thou who wast the Emperor’s faithful servant.

Rejoice, for thou wast one of those of whom the world is not worthy.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 10

God entrusted thee with the protection of the Christian Emperor, the faithful Empress and their godly children, O prophet and wonderworker Gregory. Thou didst stop the issue of blood of the heir, shedding thine own blood instead, that with the piety and holiness of the Orthodox spirit thou couldst feed the souls of thine Imperial Friends, who call out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 10

In their cunning and jealousy the enemies of Christ, greedy for power, tried to build a dividing wall of slander and lies between the Emperor and the people, that they might slay first him and then them, but thou, O wise one, pulled down that dividing wall, interceding for the people before the Emperor and showing the people to him, thus interceding for us too, who call out to thee such things as these:

Rejoice, for the Imperial Family were among thy spiritual children.

Rejoice, for in thy person they mystically adopted the Russian people.

Rejoice, O wise and patient mentor of thine Imperial disciples.

Rejoice, thou who didst savour their souls with the salt of Divine grace.

Rejoice, thou who didst teach the Imperial Family prophecy and holiness.

Rejoice, thou didst bless them with the simplicity of wisdom.

Rejoice, O offshoot of the Church sacredly grafted onto the Imperial vine.

Rejoice, thou who by thy grafting dost break off the withered branches of the Church.

Rejoice, thou who gavest a good answer for thy sacred pledge.

Rejoice, for thou makest us too, who honour thee, the Emperor’s friends.

Rejoice, thou who mystically askest for the Tsar’s forgiveness for those who betrayed him.

Rejoice, for in thee we await the restoration of the nobility of old.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 11

Loving the Church and partaking of the Holy Mysteries more eagerly than of all the treasures of the world, thou, O Gregory, tookest up thy cross of serving the Emperor in accordance with thy destiny appointed by Divine Providence, calling out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 11

The hierarchy was divided; brave and humble-minded missionaries, serving the Tsar and the people in east and west, blessed thee with warm hearts; proud and self-admiring functionaries, serving themselves and the worldly in ease and wealth, despised thee with cold hearts. Praying for the enlightenment of scribes and pharisees, we honour thy memory and that of all those faithful to the Imperial Family, singing praise to thee in this wise:

Rejoice, thou who wast mystically raised up from among the people by the Emperor.

Rejoice, thou who wast blessed by many faithful hierarchs such as Aleksiy, Makariy, Pitirim, Barnabas, Isidore and Melchizedek.

Rejoice, O pleaser of God, who didst honour Christ our God in every place of His dominion.

Rejoice, thou who hadst spiritual power, shaming the powerless wisdom of this world.

Rejoice, O unmercenary builder of the church in thy home village.

Rejoice, thou who didst love the Mother of God and wast zealous for piety.

Rejoice, O resolver of disputes, not with the booklore of scribes and pharisees, but with simplicity of heart.

Rejoice, O peacemaker sent by God among the disorder of men.

Rejoice, thou who didst fulfil the prophecies of the holy wonderworker Seraphim.

Rejoice, O lover of the Scriptures through the Spirit, who gavest the name of God all glory and honour.

Rejoice, thou who didst receive from Christ the gift of discernment.

Rejoice, thou who didst fight the serried ranks of heretics.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 12

By thy prayers increase the grace of intercession of Christian Emperors for the whole world, O martyr Gregory, for the prayer of the righteous avails much. After God had raised thee up from among the people to shame the apostasy and so lack of love of the rich and powerful, the treason of princes, the cowardice of generals and the deceit of the fleshly-minded ushered in an age of bitter persecution, but of sweet glory for the faithful, who called out to God: Alleluia.

Ikos 12

Singing of the wonders worked in thy life by the grace of God, the healing of infirmities, the casting out of evil spirits, the granting of victory in battle, the foretelling of things to come, the consoling of the sorrowing with a single word and wise counselling for all life’s needs and cares, we call on thee, O wondrous Gregory, cease not to pray for us who are scattered across the face of the earth, awaiting the coming restoration of the Christian Empire and the new Tsar, who will sweep away the unworthy and the unfaithful, and calling out to thee such things as these:

Rejoice, O wise husbandman of the Imperial garden.

Rejoice, O fence against the thorns of the rich and powerful.

Rejoice, for no man has ever been slandered in his life like unto thee.

Rejoice, for even after thy martyrdom those who honoured thee were slandered.

Rejoice, O spiritual cloth with which every tear is wiped from every eye.

Rejoice, that evil words against thee may be forgiven.

Rejoice, O mystery of peasant nobility, tilling the earth of the soul.

Rejoice, O faithful servant of the holy ones of God.

Rejoice, for by thy martyrdom the dragon was run through.

Rejoice, O bright star of Siberia and martyr for Holy Rus.

Rejoice, for the Imperial Family loved thee.

Rejoice, O fair flower from the Imperial meadow.

Rejoice, O martyr Gregory, friend of the Emperor and guardian of the Empire!

Kontakion 13

O glorious new martyr and wonderworker Gregory, by the cross of foolishness for Christ’s sake and voluntary suffering thou didst defeat the dragon, like the martyrs George, Theodore and Mercurius of old, and as the friend who fought for the Emperor of the Russian Lands thou dwellest with the holy ones in eternity, pray for the servants of Christ that by thine intercessions we unworthy sinners may also be accounted among the number of the friends of the Emperor, singing to Almighty God: Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

The above kontakion is read three times, then the first ikos, followed by the first kontakion.

Prayer

O holy new martyr and wonderworker Gregory, the Emperor’s friend who fought against the traitors who took Holy Rus to the depths, show the foes of the Orthodox Lands both on the left side and on the right side the might of the double-edged sword of Divine justice. May they not destroy the holy seed of Sovereignty, may the Christian Empire and Emperor be restored for all before the end, still mightier than before, according to the prophecy, through thine intercessions and the prayers of the Imperial Martyrs, that all who love the Name of God in Orthodox wise all over the world may make glad forever. Amen.

Troparion, Tone IV

O friend of the Emperor, who fought for Christian Rule, / thou didst appear as a fool for Christ to the world, / which did not know thee and evilly slandered thee. / O holy passion-bearer and martyr Gregory, / as thou didst offer thyself up as a sacrifice to Christ for the Emperor, / so pray for us that we too may be delivered from the injustices of enemies, / becoming the friends of the Sovereign Emperor // and seeing the Resurrection of Holy Rus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Western Captivity is Ending: The Restoration of Orthodoxy is Gathering Strength

Introduction: Miracles

In 2007 the Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) and the Church inside Russia were miraculously reconciled before me, as I stood confessing ex-Soviet generals and others in the miraculously rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Then, as a priest from the Rue Daru Archdiocese concelebrated, I did not think that it would take that Archdiocese another twelve tumultuous years to return to its Russian Mother Church. However, this miracle too has come about – in 2019 – and its Archbishop Jean has now become Metropolitan Jean. Who cannot be moved to see his photo, with that of the distinguished Protopresbyter Anatoly Rakovich and others, at last reunited with the Russian Church? Here are joy and triumph come from the grace of God.

True, his Metropolia is tiny, with only some sixty, mainly small, parishes, largely in France, but also in Belgium, the Netherlands and England. Nevertheless, it is both historic and important, as it includes many who have worked tirelessly for the Orthodox evangelization of mainly French-speaking countries in Western Europe, translating, presenting the Faith and celebrating the Liturgy. This unity became possible only after 2000, once the New Martyrs and Confessors had been canonized in Moscow. This meant that the Church inside Russia and its representatives abroad would now progressively be unshackled from enslavement to the State and from renovationism by their veneration for the New Martyrs and Confessors, who witnessed to Christ against both.

The Past

Thus, the century from 1917 on until today of colossal Orthodox decadence is coming to an end. Marked successively by the forced introduction of the Roman Catholic (‘new’) calendar, the spread of ecumenism, the shortening of the Liturgy, the dismantling of iconostases, the installation of chairs and pews in churches, the establishment of a largely homosexual and anti-monastic episcopate who persecute married clergy and monks alike, the contempt for the canons and the services and the absurd ideology of Eastern Papism, all led by Constantinople, controlled and manipulated  by Anglo-American geopolitics, and aped by others equally weak in faith, the decadence is ending. We thank God for this grace, for it comes from Him, not from men.

We naturally welcome this historic event with a joy beyond words. We helped in the fight against the double-bladed sword of renovationism and sectarianism everywhere, despite phenomenal injustices and persecution. Only our native Eastern English stubbornness helped; others, including a ROCOR Archbishop, told me that they would have given up long ago and walked away from the disgraceful and scandalous. The fight was harsh, the combat was rude. The Centre in Moscow, held captive by Communism and betrayed by renovationist internal enemies both inside and outside Russia, was occupied, the barbarians were inside the City. There was no alternative for those faithful to Russian Orthodoxy but to join one of the two Non-Moscow émigré groups.

The first group was the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR, worldwide and embracing over 85% of the Russian emigration. In the late 1940s, its Synod moved from Europe and has since been based in New York. Sadly, from the 1960s on it was to spend a long period darkened by the accession to power in it of those promoting Cold War sectarianism, phariseeism, ritualism, nationalism and CIA-funded politicking. In 2007 the sectarians left for the only place they could go – to various old calendarist sects. ROCOR now appears to be turning into the Russian Orthodox Church of the English-speaking world. Now dominated by the new immigration, the old largely having died out, the sectarian mentality has today been consigned to the dustbin of history.

The second group was Rue Daru, geographically limited to a few countries in Western Europe and embracing less than 15% of the Russian emigration. It has always been based in Paris. Founded by anti-Tsar, revolutionary, Saint Petersburg aristocrats, liberals, intellectuals and freemasons who soon broke away from ROCOR, it was from the start contaminated by a Western captivity to Protestant, pseudo-intellectual renovationism and fanatical Russophobia. This it later spread to the ex-Uniat Metropolia in the USA, which, today called the OCA, is only now freeing itself of its captivity after over fifty years. Now dominated by the new immigration, the old largely having died out, the renovationist mentality has today been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Conclusion: The Future

Today Metropolian Jean stands with authority, the aggressive enemies of Orthodoxy like the Fraternite, Struve, Behr and others who so persecuted and mocked us, gone. The obstacles they presented fell with their deaths and despite a few neo-renovationists, 1960s rebels against their émigré parents, agents of Western spy services, those married to or paid by Roman Catholics or arrived from Moscow in the 1990s with a political axe to grind, or naïve converts, nothing now stands in the way of restoring Orthodoxy and abandoning the hopelessly old-fashioned half-Catholic/half-Protestant ‘Euro-Orthodox’ mentality. This means restoring the Russian Tradition, abandoning the Catholic calendar and other liturgical and canonical eccentricities.

The remains of émigré Russian Orthodoxy, ROCOR in Western Germany, Switzerland and Great Britain, Rue Daru in France, and Moscow everywhere, are now in the One Russian Church. The Church has been cleansed; parasitic, secularist-minded elements have fallen away. The bad old days are over. Persecution by racists and renovationists is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. We have now moved a step closer to establishing a United Russian Orthodox Exarchate in Western Europe, faithful to the Tradition, venerating the local saints in the local languages, the foundation of the restored future Orthodox Church of Western Europe, our combat against the traitors and their injustices, and our dream of nearly fifty years, done. This is a miracle of God.

 

Most of a Life

Foreword

I may live another twenty or thirty years, but equally my time on earth may come to an end tomorrow, next week, in a month’s time, or next year. No-one knows, but I have no illusions. Now that I am coming to an end, it is fitting to set down the three tasks of my destiny which have filled my unworthily lived days. It is my belief that others will more effectively continue these tasks after me, just as many others worked on them both before me and at the same time. And although, not always in positions of power, they worked far more efficiently and with far greater success than me, it has often felt as though I were totally abandoned in these tasks. I never chose them – they fell to my lot despite my clear manifold human weaknesses and equally clear unsuitability and unwillingness to fulfil them.

With the Saints

My first task has been the modest contribution to spreading the veneration of the Saints of Western Europe in the Church. This meant fixing them in locally-issued calendars, praying and writing their lives and compiling, collecting and celebrating their services and icons. This was a bitter battle and cost me enormously, for resistance from all sides without exception was very harsh. Isolation was my lot. There were – and are – so many who resist the saints. Altogether, above all by the reposed Monk Joseph (Lambertson) whom I much encouraged, services were compiled to nearly one hundred saints or groups of saints of Western Europe who did not yet have one. Victory came slowly and over forty years later several such saints were included in the official Russian Orthodox calendar, with more to follow.

Church Unity

My second task has been to help contribute to the restoration of the unity of the two parts of the Russian Church and to call others outside it, for example those who had fallen away in Paris, to unity with it. My part was very, very minor, of course, but it must have helped, for people told me it had. Having visited the Soviet Union twice in the 70s and seen the lamentable state of much of the Patriarchate in England and France, I could see that nothing could be done until the fall of the Soviet Union. Only that would bring the liberation of the hostage episcopate there. So it was only in 2000 that it repented for its compromises with the atheist government and so its failure to recognize the New Martyrs and Confessors earlier, as well as for its politically-motivated compromises with heterodox.

Equally, however, the Church Outside Russia would have to reject decades of the spiritual impurity of sectarian politicking with the treacherous and tragic Vlasov movement and its CIA backers, as well as its own embarrassing failure to canonize the New Martyrs until as late as 1981. Victory came only in 2007 with the Act of Canonical Communion, signed in the presence of thousands of us in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, the Russian Patriarch and President and longsuffering clergy of both parts of the Church in attendance. That Cathedral had been built to commemorate the 19th century Orthodox victory over the French atheist Napoleon and rebuilt to commemorate the 20th century Orthodox victory over the German atheist Marx. Thus, the Cathedral became the place of a threefold victory.

A Life for the Tsar

My third task has been to help contribute to the restoration, now inevitable, of the Orthodox Empire, based in Russia under the coming Tsar, just as St Seraphim of Sarov prophesied nearly 200 years ago. This has been and is, if anything, the hardest of all. This is because it involves the Incarnation, that is, the political, economic and social ramifications of our understanding of the Incarnate Christ. Resistance here is ferocious and mocking, for our struggle is with the Devil himself. Firstly, we must defend the holiness of Tsar Nicholas, both in life and in death. Secondly, we must defend all those faithful to him, many not yet canonized. Thirdly, we must promote his shining vision, which was a century ahead of its time but tragically interrupted for a blood-soaked century by ‘treason, cowardice and deceit’, as he described.

Afterword

Some might say that then all has been completed. This is not so. The task for Rus, to spread veneration for the Western saints of the first millennium Church is to develop much further. The task for Faith, to see the full unity of the Russian Orthodox Church in Western Europe in a single Metropolia, the foundation of the future new Local Church, helping build up a little part of it in my native East of England, is nearing its conclusion, but is not complete. Finally, the task for the Tsar, to explain his holiness and defend his healing vision of justice and balance after a century of global injustice and wars, which resulted directly from his overthrow by internal traitors, so-called allies, Great Britain, the USA and France, and enemies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and to implement that vision, so long delayed, has only just begun.

 

When Will the Russian Federation Become the Empire of Rus?

He who loves the Tsar and Russia loves God…He who does not love the Tsar and Russia will never love God sincerely.

Elder Nikolai Gurianov

We Orthodox Christians of the Empire of Rus suffer, for through sin we lost our earthly leader one hundred years ago. Then fell the Third Roman Empire, Holy Rus. Since then there have been many schisms and vain rivalries in Local Churches, attempts to meddle everywhere and human foolishness and weakness of every sort. Thus, at the present time the last bulwark of the Christian world is only a republic, called the Russian Federation, as it has no Emperor and is not even ready to choose a new Emperor, as many still reject the former Emperor-Martyr.

All of us Orthodox Christians who have been deprived of earthly leadership belong to this Empire in spirit and eagerly await its reconstitution. For whatever our earthly passports say, all conscious Orthodox Christians belong to this Empire, for it is our identity. When it is restored, then the whole world will find its balance and peace once more. But when will that be?

The Empire of Rus will be restored when its three main parts have repented for all that was and is alien to Orthodox Christianity, in the centralized pre-Revolutionary Empire and Soviet Union and in the Wild East corruption of the post-Communist Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus. Like the other parts, the Russian Federation is very far from being an Orthodox country: alcoholism, over 600,000 abortions a year, corruption, divorce, ecological disaster, foul language (ABCDEF) simply reflect the lack of church-going among the baptised but still unChurched masses.

Superficial Orthodox Christianity leads but to the Ukraine. For there large numbers of baptised prefer a religion of Fascist nationalism and folklore to the real Orthodox Christian faith. The result of such shallowness is schism and civil war, with hatred expressed by so-called Orthodox Christians for real Orthodox Christians, who are threatened with persecution by the nationalists.

And if the Empire of Rus is not restored, then the end of the world will be at hand.

Written on this sixth day of October in the 2017th Year from the Incarnation in the County of Suffolk in the Eastern Region of the Kingdom of England in the Empire of Rus.

 

Questions and Answers from Recent Correspondence (August 2017)

Q: It is now the centenary of the 1917-18 Moscow Local Church Council. What are your thoughts?

A: This was an important event because that Council at last restored the Patriarchate. (This happened twelve years after Tsar Nicholas II had already offered to restore it, but certain bishops had at the time shown themselves unready for the restoration and had openly rejected his offer. They had become State-dependent. That was a tragedy). However, having been prepared for years under the Tsar, it is sad that this Council finally took place not under his reign, but under the ‘democratic’ tyranny of the traitor Kerensky, who had deposed both the Metropolitans of Saint Petersburg and Moscow and whose minions interfered in the Council. Any view of the Council must be mixed because of the political interference and pressures on it, but among those who took part, there were saints, future martyrs. These we revere, especially St Tikhon the Patriarch.

Q: In your writings you call for the restoration of the Orthodox Empire and yet you dislike imperialism, for example, British imperialism. Surely this is a contradiction?

A: I have made it clear that I strongly dislike and totally reject Western-style/Soviet-style (it is the same thing; Marxism was a Western ideology) centralist imperialism. However, the restoration of the Orthodox Empire is not about some crude Western-style imperialism, but about the fulfilment of Russia’s Christian duty. This is Russia’s God-given duty only because no other Orthodox people is large enough or strong enough to do this. God gave Russians such a huge part of the world with so many resources so that they could defend Christianity, obviously not for some narrow racist glory. As the Beatitudes say: Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. The Russians lost the Christian Empire in 1917, precisely because they had lost their meekness.

If the Romanians or the Serbs or any other Orthodox people were strong enough, then I would support them. But they are obviously not strong enough and multinational enough, concentrating instead on building the highest church in the Balkans and playing up to the Americans. This is provincialism and primitive nationalism. Only the Russian episcopate, whatever its faults, is multinational. Take for example the Patriarchate of Antioch: every single bishop in it is an Arab and it cannot be otherwise. Other Local Churches are the same, from Georgia to Greece.

The all-inclusive, multinational, multilingual Orthodox Empire, that of worldwide Rus (or Romaiosini), has to be restored because only it can counter the Anti-Christian Empire which is today centred in Washington (before in London). Only the Orthodox Empire can hold back Antichrist.

All Orthodox should support it, rather than sidelining themselves in marginal and fringe groups with their narrow, ethnic, Balkanized politics or policies dictated and bishops appointed by the US State Department. This includes some people on the spiritual fringes of the Russian Church, which has two sets of enemies and traitors: modernist liberals and narrow Russian nationalists. Both of them equally reject the multinational and imperial (‘ecumenical in the Orthodox sense) calling of the Russian Church, each in their own provincial way.

Q: Is such a view important to Russians as well as to Non-Russians?

A: It is vital. For instance, most Russians in this country do not come from Russia itself, but are Russian-speakers from the Baltic States, the Ukraine and Moldova, in other words, from fragments of the Russian Empire. One of their greatest difficulties is their search for an identity. The Soviet identity has long since gone, they have no identity with the Russian Federation, as they generally do not have Russian nationality. As for the new countries where they were born, they do not belong to them, finding them provincial, narrow and basically dependent American colonies and in any case they have been rejected and made into second-class citizens by their chauvinistic, Russophobic, US puppet governments. They belong to something much greater, this is to Rus’, to the multinational Christian Empire. Our nationality is Russian Orthodox, whatever our passports may say. Passports are merely State documents. They will not get us into heaven, the only place we need to go. We have a spiritual passport, which says ‘Orthodox’ on it. And that is far more important.

Q: Would you say that you see Western Europe through Russian eyes?

A: Only inasmuch as Russian eyes are Christian eyes. It is interesting that you suggest this, but it does suggest that you misunderstand the word Russian. I have no interest whatsoever in Non-Christian Russia and Non-Christian Russians (as an Orthodox, naturally I use the word Christian in its real sense, i.e. its sense as Orthodox). That is why I never visited Russia between 1976 and 2007.

About three years ago a certain elderly member of the Paris Jurisdiction in this country accused me of failing to respect the British Establishment and put it first in my views. This made me laugh, but it was also very sad because it meant that he was disobeying the Gospel and failing to put the Kingdom of God first (he should have read the Sermon on the Mount). Such liberals are always erastians, putting the anti-Orthodox State first, as did the ‘Liberal Democrat’ Kerensky in 1917.

I look at Western Europe, including the British Isles and Ireland, through Christian (= Orthodox) eyes. Read St Bede the Venerable – he does the same, dating his writing according to the reign of the Christian Emperor in New Rome. I do the same: I live in the Suffolk district of the East Anglian province of the Kingdom of England of the Christian Empire of New Rome. The fact that New Rome is now in Moscow and no longer in Constantinople is not the point. The point is that we must be consistent and real Orthodox, refusing to reduce the Church of God to some exotic, liberal, disincarnate fantasy spirituality, the path of spiritual delusion, or else to some racist nationalism (phyletism), but being faithful to the Incarnation of the Church’s teaching. Otherwise we are not faithful to the prayer ‘Our Father’: ‘May Thy will be done on earth, as in Heaven’. Either we are Christians or else we are not.

Q: Is it true that globalization is controlled by Jews? And how do we counter it?

A: No, it is not true. That is racist. Many people are in charge of globalization and the New World Disorder, though I doubt if they number more than a million worldwide and perhaps far, far less. Certainly, globalization (which used to be called Americanization) is pro-Israel and many of its leaders are atheist Jews (Zionists) and globalization is essentially a codeword for Zionism, but the majority of people involved are not Jewish and certainly not believing Jews. The point is that most Zionists in the world are not Jewish at all, but simply people who have fallen into Satan’s invention of One World Government.

We counter globalization by building up the Church, which is at once multinational (interpatriotic) and local (patriotic), unity in diversity. This is the spiritual meaning of our lives.

Q: I have been shocked by certain words and acts of your Patriarch Kyrill, who met the Pope in Cuba last year. Surely that is indefensible?

A: Any Patriarch is here today, gone tomorrow. The Head of the Church is Christ, not any Patriarch, whoever he may be. I have to say that I have always failed to understand a mentality which says that personal opinions must always coincide. I may have personal opinions that differ from those of my Patriarch. So what? In such a large Church as ours, differences of opinions are inevitable. We do not belong to a tiny sect, in which all personal opinions have to and can coincide. This is pure Protestantism, Convertism, Sectarianism. This says: ‘You do not agree with me, therefore I am leaving you and will go off and found my own Church’. There has to be tolerance on inessentials. What are the essentials? They are all listed in the Creed. That is what we believe; the rest is opinion, inessentials.

There is in such a view which demands absolute agreement in everything a certain pride: ‘He does not agree with me, therefore I don’t like him’. This suggests that the speaker actually believes that others must agree with him because he is always right! That is not how Christianity works. For example, I do not write because I want people to agree with me. I know that that is impossible because I am so often wrong. I write only in order to provoke thought and prayer. If I cannot do that, then I will cease writing for others.

Patriarch Kyrill met the Pope once. The Patriarch of Constantinople meets him constantly. So what? I shop in a supermarket where one of the cashiers is Roman Catholic and I talk to her. Does that make me a heretic?

In any case those in the Russian Church who have a somewhat 60s mentality are dying out. Read Metr Benjamin of Vladivostok, Metr Vincent (Morar) of Tashkent, Metr Agathangel of Odessa: these are Orthodox hierarchs, loved by all.

Q: Is Ecumenism not a threat to the Church?

A: Ecumenism is dead here, laughably old-fashioned; it seems to be just alive only in less Westernized places, in Greece, Romania, Serbia. Here it lives, but only among old people, very old people. I never hear the word nowadays, it was alive in the 60s, 70s and 80s. That’s not where things are at nowadays.

Q: As a Russian living in England, I recently visited some Anglican churches and I had to keep stepping around stone and metal slabs with graves under them. But English people told me I could walk on them. I was horrified. Why do Anglicans walk on their dead?

A: I presume it is something to do with the Protestant refusal to pray for the departed, and so their lack of respect for them, and it is this that makes them able to walk on graves.

Q: Do you have any favourite sayings or proverbs?

A: Yes, I do. I have thought about your question for several days. Here is a selection of such favourite sayings, all of which I know to be true from observing life:

You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

If you spit in the air, it will fall back on you.

Be nice to people on your way up because you may meet them again on your way down.

No pains, no gains.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

I also have favourite sayings, which, as far as I know, are personal and come from my own experience:

There is only one mistake: not to learn from your mistakes. (From my own life).

Do not destroy something until you have something better to put in its place. (A lesson for those who invade Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya etc etc).

You cannot build spiritual life on fantasy. (This comes from observing intellectuals who join the Church but never become Orthodox).

Russia, The Russian Federation, The Soviet Union, The Russian Empire, Rus and Holy Rus

Introduction: Russia

There is considerable confusion between the various terms used to describe most of the territory of Northern Eurasia, generally known by the name of Russia. This is a very loose, geographical term. Used imprecisely, it can denote either the Russian Federation, or the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire. Thus the term ‘The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia’ (ROCOR) was used to mean ‘The Russian Orthodox Church Outside the Russian Empire’ (although it is increasingly coming to mean ‘The Russian Orthodox Church in the Anglosphere’ (ROCA?)). Let us look at the three temporary political formations which the term ‘Russia’ can be used to cover and how the term relates to the spiritual term ‘Holy Rus’.

Three Temporary Political Formations

The Russian Federation

The Russian Federation (1991 – present) is simply the present three-quarters of the old Russian Empire and is the result of the dismemberment of the old Soviet Union a generation ago. It is a temporary and the contemporary version of the country that covers most of the territory of Northern Eurasia. Sadly, the Russian Federation inherited the sad Soviet ‘abcde’ legacy: alcoholism, (a)bortion, corruption, divorce and environmental degradation, though it is successively fighting against all of them. The Russian Federation is an intermediate State organization that will inevitably die out and, at best, be replaced by something superior or, at worst, something inferior.

The Soviet Union

The Soviet Union (1917-1991) inherited much that was good from the old Russian Empire, for example, free and high-level education and medicine, social justice, anti-colonialism. However, its disastrous, atheist, German Jewish ideology of centralist Communism was utterly genocidal from the beginning and many, many millions lost their lives in repression, torture, persecutions and artificial famines and its vicious persecutions of the Church produced millions of martyrs. Its inherent injustice and corruption led to many falling into alcoholism as the only escape from it. When it collapsed through betrayal after three generations, more of the remaining heritage of the old Russian Empire, both in territorial terms and in terms of values, was also lost.

The Russian Empire

The Russian Empire (1721-1917) covered a vast multinational Northern Eurasian territory, one sixth of the world, with at its height territory even on three continents. However, it collapsed after the betrayal of the elite of the Empire in 1917. It then developed into the tragic atheist Soviet Union which decayed three generations later, also by betrayal. The betrayal of Imperial Russia after less than 200 years was carried out by aristocrats (the ancestors of today’s oligarchs and the descendants of the medieval boyars), merchants (today’s businessmen) and bureaucrats (the ancestors of Soviet apparatchiks and later today’s corrupt officials). All these proved to be for the most part traitors and turncoats, seeking their own egoistic advantages.

Conclusion: Holy Rus

The historical term Rus means the territory of the East Slavs, which today means the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Belarus. However, the spiritual term ‘Holy Rus’ (sometimes imprecisely translated as ‘Holy Russia’) denotes anywhere in the world where Russian Orthodoxy is confessed. This includes not only the Russian Federation, the Ukraine, Belarus, but Moldova, parts of Kazakhstan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and communities in the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany, England, France, Argentina and scores of other countries on all five continents.

Holy Rus is our identity, that of the Christian Empire. Although this Orthodox identity encompasses different languages and locally-venerated saints, this diversity is held in unity by our faithfulness to the Russian Orthodox Tradition, Holy Rus. All temporary political formations contain spiritual impurity, none measures up to Holy Rus, not even the Russian Empire, which came closest to it. Our goal of building up the Kingdom of Heaven on earth is to build up Holy Rus and everything is measured by this criterion.

1916-2016: 100 Years of Saints and Traitors

Introduction

100 years ago there began the last stages in the greatest injustice in world history – the betrayal of Imperial Christian Russia. Then on the point of victory in the First World War and so of liberating New Rome, called Constantinople, and also the Holy Land, it was also about to liberate the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany, so undoing the injustices in Central Europe and the Balkans and in the tyrannical Second Reich of Bismarck, so reconstituting a free Poland, and perhaps also righting the injustices of Western colonization worldwide. Had it not been betrayed, there would never have been any Bolshevik genocide (millions of dead), no Third Reich and no Hitler, no World War Two, no Teutonic holocaust of the Slavs (30 million dead) or of the Jews (over 5 million dead), no American fire bombs and atom bombs on Japanese civilians (1 million dead?), no Communist China (30 million dead?), no abortion holocaust (100 million dead?), no……

In May 1945 one Russian soldier – he later became a priest – was standing in the ruined Reichstag in Berlin. Surrounded by incredible destruction, but also great relief, victory had come at a huge price on the Russian Easter Day, which that year had coincided with the day of the feast of St George the Victorious Soldier-Martyr. There, in the Reichstag, the soldier saw Tsar Nicholas II surveying the scene, examining every detail, thinking that in 1917 he would already have stood there, surrounded however not by destruction but by an intact capital of culture. The ghost of Tsar Nicholas has haunted Europe ever since it betrayed him in 1917. He has been here all the time, to this very day, looking with eyes of pity at the merciless destruction and self-destruction of the Western world, as it sinks into its self-made abyss. Betrayed at the last moment in 1917, according to a plot prepared in detail in 1916, he looks on the lost souls and cultural heritage of the Western world and his heart weeps.

Inside Russia

The first sign that the plot had been implemented was the assassination of the peasant-healer Rasputin in December 1916, betrayed by decadent Russian aristocrats, who hated the Christian peasantry, and murdered by British spies, who hated Russian Orthodox. Financed by its enemies (Germany and Austro-Hungary) and by its ‘allies’ (Britain, France and the US, who had already financed Japan’s transformation into militarism and its murderous attack on Russia in 1904), sabotage and treason laid the Tsar’s Russia low. In 1917 this developed into anarchy (the so-called ‘Revolution’), which was created by ‘liberal’ opportunist traitors in February and exploited by ‘Bolshevik’ opportunist traitors in October. Anarchy (falsely called ‘Revolution’) was fabricated in the salons of the jealous and the ignoble, grand dukes and princes, generals and politicians, freemasons and lawyers, industrialists and bourgeois – ‘have money, want power’ – traitors to the people and their Tsar.

All of them were utterly unfaithful to the three (three because Trinitarian) tenets and principles that had upheld the Christian Empire of the Tsar. These were: the Faith (uncompromised Orthodox Christianity); the Tsar (the Anointed Christian Sovereign); and Rus (the multinational Christian Empire). As atheists and apostates, they committed sabotage and treason with regard to all these values, which represent Faith in the Father, the Incarnation of the Son and the Presence of the Holy Spirit. Those who remained faithful to these three tenets inside Russia were the New Martyrs and Confessors and those who venerated them. The salt of the earth, they were the ones who were to begin the great restoration that has been under way since the official fall of Bolshevism twenty-five years ago, but in fact long before, from the moment of their exploits. Thus the traitors were countered by the saints and, although the traitors still do not understand how or why, the saints always win.

Outside Russia

After the anarchy, there began the resistance and then the defeat and so emigration of those known as ‘White Russians’. Once in the emigration (though even before), it could plainly be seen that here too there were saints and traitors. To the left hand side there fell away those who betrayed the Faith and the Tsar. To the right hand side there fell away those who betrayed the Faith and Rus. On the left hand side were the renovationists, who so hated the Russian Church that they left Her, compromising Her Faith, and so hated the Tsar that they actually justified their treason, which had led them into the self-punishment of exile. On the right hand side were the nationalists, who so hated the Russian Church that they made Her into a narrow nationalist flag, forgetting Her multinational mission, and so hated Rus that they allied themselves with its crazed Teutonic enemy, not understanding that the victory of 1945 was the people’s victory, the victory of repentant Rus.

There were also those who understood that the task of the emigration was to keep faith with all three tenets. We knew that as long as all three principles were respected, all would be well and it would be simple to reunite with Russia once it was free again and restoration had begun, with the New Martyrs and Confessors officially venerated there. We understood that the Faith could not be compromised by heresies, dreamy and disincarnate renovationism and personality cults, regardless of the fact that we lived outside Russia. We understood that the memory of the Tsar, the universal Christian Emperor, had to be kept for restoration, in order for a new Christian Emperor to come and oppose the worldwide evil that has been unleashed ever since Tsar Nicholas was deposed. We understood that our mission is to make Rus universal, worldwide, regardless of race and language, and that our mission is among the people and must not be compromised by political Establishments.

Conclusion

In our own times we are seeing a daily miracle: over the last 25 years we have seen in the Russian Lands what we and those before us had been praying for over the previous 75 years, the slow restoration of the Tsar’s Christian Russia. Yes, it has been a slow and tortuous process, with many hesitations, deviations and falls, but the general direction has been right. This process of restoration is of course far from over, indeed, in many respects it has only just begun, but the icons of the New Martyrs, including those of the Royal Martyrs, are everywhere. As the new Cold War NATO occupies the Ukraine and Estonia, attempting to destabilize governments from Macedonia to Moldova and Armenia to Kazakhstan, and prepares to attack all along the Russian borders, its aircraft and submarines, tanks and troops everywhere threatening resurgent Russia, the last bastion of Christianity in the world, we see the desperation of the world’s elite in its bid to impose its New World Order.

Having destabilized all Latin America and much of Africa, striving to undermine China and India and using tides of poor Muslim immigrants to threaten European identities, having destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq, Libya and Syria, and attempting to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church and Faith, the satanic New World Order’s proposed Orthodox Council has led only to our clear identification of the unrepentant traitors in our midst – by waiting for them to reveal themselves, we now know who is ready for cleansing. The tiny but immensely powerful elite that stands behind the USA, the EU, NATO, the whole Western world indeed, and pulls the strings of its media, puppets and all the deceived and gullible, knows that if Russia resists it successfully, its aim of global domination and control will be foiled and the coming of the Kingdom of the Great Deceiver, Antichrist, that it knowingly and unknowingly seeks will be postponed, perhaps even for many years to come. May it be so, O Lord.

The Imperial Orthodox Faithful

A generation on after the fall of the atheist government in the Soviet Union, the Russian Church has made extraordinary progress in rebuilding and restoring itself. However, as we have frequently written: as it took three generations to destroy Imperial Russia, so it will take three generations to restore Her and even longer to do better, only thus ensuring that the atheist nightmare can never be repeated. The atheists produced a country where all ideals, ambitions and hopes were destroyed and so male alcoholism and female abortion were both normal. Although the statistics show dramatic improvements in these areas, the country is still paying a very heavy price, as can be seen from the still relatively low life expectancy and demography. As for church-building, what has been done is remarkable, but we cannot be satisfied – at least another 100,000 churches are required and another 100,000 priests – and that is only in the historic Russian Lands, let alone in the many lands of mission for the Church worldwide. We have no illusions, we have very far to go in order to gather in the peoples before the now rapidly approaching end.

As ever, the Church, not of the world, but still in the world, is squeezed between two opposing tendencies, the two sides of the same superficial coin. On the one hand, there are the spiritually superficial and primitive, but intellectually sophisticated, the disincarnate dreamers and ‘heaven-dwellers’, liberals and ecumenists, philosophers in prelest and mantra-repeating name-worshippers, left-wing renovationists and modernists, Parisians and Kochetkovites, who love each other, new suicidal Gapons, essentially rationalistic Protestants, who are clearly not of this world, but neither are they at all, as they deludedly imagine they are, of the Kingdom of Heaven. On the other hand, there are equally spiritually superficial and primitive, but materially sophisticated, the worldly State-worshippers, pro-Stalinists, anti-Semites (yes 90% of the Bolshevik leaders were atheist Jews, but it was baptised but unChurched Russians and an apostate Georgian seminarist who obeyed their Satanic orders), ritualists (both Old and New Ritualists), fanatics, narrow sectarians, pharisees, superstitious and nominal, golden dome and gilt worshippers, who do not know that making the sign of the cross and sprinkling yourself with holy water before you sin does not bless that sin.

In the middle stands the Church, ever crucified and ever resurrected, not of this world, with the saints and martyrs in heaven and on earth, but committed to sanctifying this world and transfiguring State values into Church values, the balance kept by parish and monastic life together, both vital to any healthy Church, as we saw already in the fourth century and again in the nineteenth century. Carried by women for 90% of the time, the Church has yet to reach out to men and Church them. Too much is about attachment to externals, the reduction of the Faith to rituals, to putting the flesh above the spirit. Such superficiality is always followed by nemesis, the result of refusing Divine Protection and choosing human foolishness. The invasion of Kievan Rus by the barbaric Mongols and of Rus by the even more barbaric Teutonic Knights some 800 years ago, the Polish Invasion just over 400 years ago, Napoleon’s invasion just over 200 years ago, the so-called ‘Revolution’ nearly 100 years ago, Hitler’s invasion 75 years ago and the invasion of the Ukraine two years ago and the US-appointed junta in Kiev, all witness to the results of a merely superficial Orthodoxy.

For the way ahead we need to look to the best of Russian Orthodoxy, spiritual but also incarnate. This has always followed three (three because Trinitarian) tenets. These are: firstly, the Orthodox Faith in her integrity, so without the compromises that have befallen the modernists and ecumenists, who follow the secularist Western world and not the Gospel of Christ; secondly, the Imperial ideal, incarnate before the February 1917 coup d’etat of aristocratic Duma masons and treasonous generals, today only hinted at in prophetic gleams and shafts of light, but eagerly awaited in the coming Tsar; and thirdly, the Orthodox people, of all races and tongues all over the world, inside the Russian Lands and outside the Russian Lands, all spiritually united by and owing spiritual allegiance to Holy Rus’, the Christian Empire. We are the Orthodox Imperial Faithful, we are the Church, sinners but repentant, strict because faithful, but open because we know about human weaknesses. May God forgive us and lead us to victory before the end.