Category Archives: Russia

Elections or Insurrections? The Future of the European Elite after its Dramatic Defeat in the Ukraine

In the American organised war against Russia in the corrupt Ukraine, they are now running out of troops, with over 1,130,000 dead or seriously injured Ukrainian proxies. The average age of those remaining is 43, and men (and women) are being kidnapped off the streets. The situation is like that in early 1945 in Berlin. Advised by US and British PR companies since 2014 and directed by NATO commanders, the Kiev regime is killing Russian civilians in terrorist attacks. However, Western mercenaries are also being killed, with sixty French soldiers dying in their hotel in Kharkov last week. Meanwhile, Kiev is persecuting the Church and has stolen or wrecked many hundreds of churches, setting up a US-created fake Church of gangsters instead. The bankrupt West has no arms left to give, so the latest Western idea is to steal $300 billion of Russian assets. In Russia, war crimes trials are being prepared for Western leaders, who created and financed this war.

We see videos of priests praying and giving communion to Russian troops in a forest clearing and Ukrainian troops on horseback, as they have no other transport. These are scenes reminiscent of the Second World War and of partisans. Meanwhile, in Kiev, a palace revolt is under way, which could lead to the murder or else exile of President Zelensky and his replacement by a secret policeman. Zelensky had already banned elections due in March, making of himself a dictator, as he had already outlawed all other political parties and opponents have died in the Secret Police prisons or been assassinated. As for Western Europe, both the anti-democratic EU and the UK, it is in recession from its own suicidal sanctions, supposedly made against Russia. NATO is split, with Turkey, Hungary and Slovakia taking anti-American views. As for the USA, it faces internal chaos from political rivalry (not least in Confederate Texas) and a whole series of foreign wars of its own making. Such are the dramatic times we live in.

The European vassals of the NATO-controlled EU and UK are in total panic. However, the void of leadership is not only in Europe, but also in Washington. Those ‘in charge’ do what they are told by ‘donors’, the financial and military interests who are the power behind the senile throne. The elite has at last realised that it will not win in the Ukraine and has recently admitted this in their New York Times rag. However, the tactical victory is massive: enormous profits made from making useless arms; gutting European industry and sovereignty; reducing Europe to the status of a lowly vassal; time to find new proxy warriors against Russia – from Polish and Baltic fanatics to more ISIS fanatics. Nevertheless, as Max Weber wrote over a century ago, although Protestantism was the path for the rise of the West, its death, following the total loss of faith in it and therefore in Western self-belief, is the cause of its disintegration and defeat.

After 700 days of a tragic conflict, only the time-scale of the Russian victory over the US-installed Kiev regime in the Ukraine is uncertain. Nobody who is not deluded thinks that the defeat of the West in the Ukraine is a matter of ‘if’, only of ‘when’. In the first half of 2024 or in the second half? The Western elite has lost the war it created in the Ukraine and paid hundreds of billions of its taxpayers’ money (without consulting them) for it. Once more it has been humiliated: Saigon, Kabul and now Kiev. As for Non-Russian Europe, US-installed leaders there have bet on the wrong horse, whether von der Leyen, Borrell, Scholz, Macron, Sunak, not to mention the crazy puppet-leaders in Eastern Europe, especially in the Baltics, Poland and Bulgaria. The only exceptions are Hungary and now Slovakia, whose leaders are not US-installed, but installed by the people. Will other European countries follow their lead and become free and independent?

Total Russia victory is coming, with the winner dictating no negotiations, no ceasefire, no stalemate, no frozen conflict, but total Western defeat. Now that the Western attempt to take over the Ukraine has been lost, what are European electorates going to do about it? Ideally, the peoples of Europe could at last get rid of the globalist slaves of the US political and banking elite, whom the US has infiltrated into all levels of European governments over the last twenty years, ever since the ‘old’ Europeans opposed the US genocide in Iraq in 2003. If the hoodwinked and brainwashed electorates awoke, they could elect patriots, even if the globalist-owned media accused them of being racists and ‘far-right’. The ultra-liberal Fascist Establishment perverts who support LGBT, State lockdowns, deindustrialisation, climate change extremism, Ukrainian Nazism, the Zionist genocide of Palestinians and uncontrolled immigration, could at last be cast aside.

All depends on the consciousness of the peoples of Europe and their will for freedom. Will they wake up after the decades of decadence of bread and circuses? How many of them actually realise they are being zombified by the State-run media? How many of them realise that there is no real democracy, only a choice between two candidates of a neo-feudal oligarchy, that they have been labouring all these centuries under the yoke of the rich, now the vassals of US dictators, who want globalist dictatorship? The new multipolar world of BRICS, soon to be 20 or even 40, could help Europeans to wake up, but only if those Europeans want to be woken up and throw off the feudal yoke they have suffered from for a thousand years. In 2024 fifteen countries in Europe will hold elections. It is time for their electorates to look forward, not back, and to elect free patriots who are independent of the globalist poison and want sovereignty.

The US elite appears to want a worldwide war, a world war. It started a war against Russia through its Ukrainian Nazi proxies, it arms Israel to carry out genocide in Palestine, in Gaza and the West Bank, with US aircraft, bombs, shells and bullets, it is bombing Qatari-backed Yemen which has stood up to protect the Palestinians. Now it is threatening Iran, Iraq, China, India, Africa and Latin America which have not attacked anyone. On top of that, it is putting out the myth that President Putin wants to conquer not only the Ukraine, but also the whole of Europe. In reality, President Putin, the most popular man in Russia, wants Europeans to be responsible for themselves, to start behaving as adults, to treat Russians as human-beings, to throw out their US oppressors. Preferably this would happen through elections. The fear is that the European electorates are so frustrated that they may launch violent uprisings, real revolutions against their Establishment elite.

How is the Western elite trying to head off the risk of the insurrection of its peoples, to ensure that the ‘plebs’ do not revolt against it? Bread and circuses, consumerism and the media, worked for a long time, but eventually people have begun to see through them and are now tiring of being lied to constantly. The Western elite’s policy is Project Fear. In the US this Project was called ‘Russiagate’, a non-existent scandal manufactured by the Democratic Party in order to discredit the Republican President Trump. In Western Europe Project Fear is: ‘The Russians are coming to get you’. In other words, the elite continues to use the Ukraine to maintain control of their Uniparty regime, relying on the old fear of the Communist Soviet Union. This only works among very old people who remember the ‘Communist threat’ and ‘better dead than red’. Russia is still the bogeyman, used by patronising parents to intimidate their too independent children.

There are forces in every European country which are resisting. These forces used to be small minorities, however in several European countries they are becoming larger minorities. People are starting to ask questions. If the electorates continue to be insulted and condescended to, using the irrelevant distraction stories of the State-run media, those minorities will grow. If we take the example of the UK, we can clearly see that the Uniparty Establishment of Conservatives, Labour etc have exactly the same policies, none of which is going to solve the real problems of the UK’s ever more rapid decline, State bankruptcy (massive debt), the refusal to implement Brexit, deindustrialisation, the collapse of infrastructure (the failed health system, potholed roads, useless railways, rip-off and bankrupt privatised utilities such as the Post Office), mass immigration, refusal to confront absurd wokeness and the denial of Kiev Nazism and Israeli genocide.

This situation is mirrored in different and yet strangely similar ways in every European country. Will there be elections or insurrections? As the elite at last grasps that it has lost its absurd attempt to extend its Western dominion to the Non-Western Ukraine (just as they lost to extend it to Non-Western Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), it is in a state of panic. Now it is trying to re-assert its tyrannical control over the parts of the West which it used to control. We shall see in the coming years the misdeeds of the UK and EU dictatorships, themselves merely puppets of the US globalist dictatorship. If the peoples want back their sovereignty and do not want to be absorbed, colonised, manipulated and impoverished by their neo-feudal, oligarchic, globalist, LGBT elites, in one way or another we will reclaim that sovereignty despite them. Revolution is in the air, but it does not have to be violent. It is our hope that the collapse will be peaceful and smooth.

Moscow will win against and finish off not just Nazi Ukraine, but also the much-divided NATO, profiting from the window of opportunity identified by President Putin in early 2022. Then the Ukraine, woken up, will side with Russia against the Western elite who betrayed it. The example of the dezombified Ukraine is to be followed by the peoples of the West, who have also been betrayed by the Western elite. Of course, those who resist the tyrannical elite will be labelled by them and their media hirelings ‘far-right’ or ‘apologists for Putin’. In reality, we have common sense. The elite does not, it has ideologies, fantasies and delusions. We are family people who love our families, we are patriots who love our countries. The elite does not. However, we also have a sense of social justice and compassion for others. The elite does not. Above all, we believe in God. The elite does not. The elite is Europe’s ‘assisted suicide’. We are not.

The Russian Orthodox Church After the Ukraine

Introduction: After the Special Military Operation

One of the outcomes of the ten-year old American war against Russia in the Ukraine will inevitably be great changes in the Russian Orthodox Church, often known as the ‘Moscow Patriarchate’. The first outcome could be precisely to change the name of the Moscow Patriarchate, which is a temporary Soviet name, perhaps to the ‘Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus’, which refers back to the seventeenth century history of Russia. New Jerusalem is a restored historic monastic centre with an international background just to the west of Moscow. Such a name change would be the final step in the Patriarchate losing its often unpleasant, centralising Soviet associations and Moscow-centric image.

The second outcome could be to restore to the priesthood and diaconate those who were ‘defrocked’ over the last three years, either because they had political disagreements with the Russian State, or because their bishops were schismatics, thieves, perverts, womanisers or persecutors of truth-telling clergy. Before being ‘defrocked’, they had been forced to transfer as refugees to the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople or to the Romanian Orthodox Church, or elsewhere. (Why such bishops are not defrocked for committing such serious misdeeds – priests would be defrocked automatically if they did – is a problem that needs to be addressed by all the Local Churches. Recently we saw yet another example of episcopal impunity in the case of a Metropolitan Joseph of the Antiochian Church in North America. Convicted of such above crimes, he was simply retired!)

The third outcome would be a further and more radical restructuring of the Russian Orthodox Church, in order to take account of the real post-Soviet, international world. The possible forms taken by such a restructuring, overdue by more than 30 years, are outlined below.

Autonomisation and Internationalisation

After 2008 the Russian Orthodox Church went through an initial process of restructuring, which can be called ‘Metropolitanisation’, that is, Localisation, the establishment of Local Metropolias covering large geographical areas, each led by a Metropolitan with an archbishop and several diocesan bishops who help him. This has led to the consecration of over 200 new bishops in the Church. This was a move away from the previous 300 years, when there were few bishops and great centralisation.

It is our suggestion that there should be a further stage in this process, at last recognising ecclesiastically that the old unitary State of the Soviet Union long ago ceased to exist and is now divided into fifteen different, independent republics. Such a further move away from the old centralisation could be called ‘Autonomisation’. This means the granting of Autonomy (Independence) to Russian Orthodox in various ex-Soviet and Non-Soviet countries and groups of countries outside the Russian Federation.

At present Autonomy means that a Church is independent, except that the Mother Church has the right to select the head (Metropolitan) of the Autonomous Church, that all the clergy in the Autonomous Church must commemorate the Patriarch of the Mother Church and that the Autonomous Church must obtain its myrrh from the Mother Church. However, Autonomy could be redefined only to mean that the Mother Church selects the head of that Church. The two second conditions could be made voluntary. Thus, commemoration of the Patriarch by bishops or priests would be voluntary and each Autonomous Church would have the possibility to make its own myrrh, if it so wished.

Some may ask why would only Autonomy be granted and not Autocephaly (full independence)? This is because Autocephaly is only possible on five conditions. These are: If an Autonomous Church is not on a territory shared with other Local Churches, if it is large enough (it should have at least four bishops), if it is in politically stable conditions with fixed borders, if it is spiritually mature, that is, has many parishes and an established monastic life, and, above all, if the majority of its members wants such Autocephaly. (Autocephalisation on territories shared with other Orthodox has to be worked out at a Council of all the Local Churches, though it can come much sooner on non-shared territories).

Two Autonomous Churches already exist within the Russian Orthodox Church. These are the small Church of Japan and the tiny Church of China, both established because of the total political independence of Japan and China from Russia. In order of geographical proximity, ten more Autonomous Churches, recognising international realities, could be:

  1. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This would cover the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox population in the New Ukraine (Malorossija?), now under Metr Onufry of Kiev. This would be the old Ukraine, but probably minus the nine new eastern and southern provinces: Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhie, Kherson, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Nikolaev, Odessa, which would revert to Russia (five already have done so), and minus the four new provinces in the west: two, Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk, going back to Poland, one, Chernovtsy, going back to Romania, and one, Zakarpatie, going back to Hungary. In other words, the New Ukraine would basically be the historic, pre-Soviet Ukraine.

However, this Autonomous Ukrainian Church, covering less than half the territory of the post-1922 Soviet Ukraine, could also be responsible for two Exarchates. These would be all the remaining Russian churches in Moldova (most churches there are joining the Romanian Church, perhaps only 15% will end up remaining under the Russian Church) and all the churches in Hungary, which, if the border change happens, would nearly all be from a former part of the Ukraine. Given its size and recent history, this Ukrainian Orthodox Church could probably soon become Autocephalous, if it is desired by clergy and people, once it has found political stability, just like the Polish and Czechoslovak Churches, which received their Autocephaly from the Russian Church in the last century.

  1. The Belarussian Orthodox Church. This would replace the present Belarussian Exarchate and cover the Belarussian Orthodox population in Belarus. Given its size, this Belarussian Orthodox Church could probably soon become Autocephalous.
  2. The Baltic Orthodox Church. This would cover the Russian Orthodox population in four countries, that is, the three Baltic countries and Finland.
  3. The Central Asian Orthodox Church (CAOC). This would cover the large Russian Orthodox population in the five republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
  4. The Western European Orthodox Church (WEOC). This would cover the Russian Orthodox population in the twenty-one countries below. It would include the Paris-based Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe and the non-schismatic churches of ROCOR. This group used to be canonically Russian Orthodox, but sadly, after entering into canonical communion with Moscow, it first rejected the Metropolitanisation or Localisation which the Patriarch and all of us wanted, as a result going into schism (from the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe), by introducing the scandalous practice of rebaptising other Orthodox, thus totally discrediting itself and becoming a sect. As we suggested in 1988, the WEOC, centred in Paris, could consist of eight archdioceses and have a considerable number of diocesan metropolitans, archbishops or bishops in the following groups of countries, according to language and culture:

Gallia: France and French-speaking Southern Belgium, Luxembourg and Monaco (centred in Paris).

Germania: Germany and Austria (centred in Berlin).

Iberia: Spain, Portugal, and Andorra (centred in Madrid).

Italia: Italy, San Marino and Malta (centred in Rome).

Iona (Isles of the North Atlantic): The British Isles and Ireland (centred in London).

Scandinavia: Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland (centred in Stockholm)

Netherlandia: The Netherlands and Northern Belgium (centred in Amsterdam).

Helvetica: Switzerland and Liechtenstein (centred in Geneva).

  1. The African Orthodox Church (AOC). Centred in Kampala, this would cover the Russian Orthodox population of the whole African Continent.
  2. The Northern American Orthodox Church (NAOC). This would cover the USA, Canada, Greenland, Bermuda and St Pierre et Miquelon and include the churches of the former OCA, whose tomos of autocephaly will have to be revoked anyway. This revocation will be necessary because, after over fifty years and despite the best intentions and efforts of many, the territorially ill-defined OCA has not been successful in bringing all Orthodox in Northern America together, which is what it was created for. As it is on shared territory, that Soviet-era tomos has never been accepted as canonical by the majority of Orthodox there. In this it has not been helped by a narrow ideology and grave pastoral errors made in the past. There is one Metropolitan in the Russian Orthodox Church, at present much under-used, whose diplomatic and linguistic talents could be of vital import here in solving the problem of this heroic, pioneering, but failed attempt to create a Local Church. Unlike the old OCA, the NAOC would also include churches which are at present under the Moscow Patriarchate and the non-schismatic churches of ROCOR. This group used to be canonically Russian Orthodox, but sadly, after entering into canonical communion with Moscow, it first rejected the Metropolitanisation or Localisation which the Patriarch and all of us wanted, as a result going into schism (from the Russian Orthodox Archdiocese of Western Europe), by introducing the scandalous practice of rebaptising other Orthodox, thus totally discrediting itself and becoming a sect.
  3. The Latin American and Caribbean Orthodox Church (LACOC). This would cover all Russian Orthodox in Latin America and the Caribbean, with populations speaking Spanish, Portuguese, English, French and Dutch, as well as local languages, especially in Central America.
  4. The South-East Asian Orthodox Church (SEAOC). This would replace the present international Exarchate of the same name.
  5. The Oceanian Orthodox Church (OOC). This would cover all Russian Orthodox in Oceania.

Conclusion

A Patriarchate of New Jerusalem and All Rus would consist of one Mother-Church, covering the population of the Russian Federation, with a Family or Confederation of Twelve Autonomous Churches. In due course, Autocephalisation on non-shared territories could follow, but only if the five necessary conditions (see above) were met. As we have said above, Autocephalisation on shared territories would have to be worked out at a Council of all the Local Churches and would require great diplomatic skills and an supranational, and not nationalist consciousness.

The Seven Ages of Rus’ and its Future after the Fall of President Zelensky

https://ruskline.ru/news_rl/2023/12/30/ot_rusi_do_rusi__ot_rasputina_do_putina

Introduction: East Slavdom

Over a millennium ago the West Slav peoples, Sorbs, Czechs, Poles and Slovaks, were gradually forced under German pressure to become proto-Roman Catholics, nowhere so obviously as in Moravia, where Germans forced out Orthodox missionaries. On the other hand, the South Slavs – Bulgarians and Macedonians, Serbs and Serbian Montenegrins, though not the Croats and Slovenes, who again under German pressure had to become proto-Roman Catholics – are members of the Orthodox Church.

Three times more numerous than the West and South Slavs combined, with vast lands, at present called the Russian Federation, Belarus and the Ukraine and known in history as Rus’, the East Slavs are also members of the Orthodox Church. We can identify seven ages in the history of these East Slav lands, or Rus’, of which the seventh age has only just begun. These seven ages are:

  1. Pagan Rus’: – 988

The East Slavs were nature-worshipping pagans until 988, when the first of them were baptised in Kiev by Orthodox Christian missionaries from Bulgaria, Constantinople, Moravia, Hungary and Carpatho-Rus (most of which is for now called Transcarpathia). This event is known as ‘The Baptism of Rus’’. However, in reality the baptism of the whole East Slav people took generations and paganism continued in superstitious vestiges for centuries.

  1. Kievan Rus’: 988-1283

In order to survive, the then main East Slav principality, called Kievan Rus’, had to resist both eastern and western, both Tartar-Mongol and Western Roman Catholic, aggression. The authority of the Grand Princes of Kiev, ‘the mother of the cities of Rus’’, was also undermined by the attacks of treacherous princes from different principalities around Kiev, who with their followers vied for power in fratricidal struggles.

After nearly 300 years, in the mid-13thcentury Kievan Rus’ was finished off by the invasions of the Tartars and Mongols. From there East Slav power was transferred to northern Rus’, to Novgorod and above all to the better protected Muscovy, named after the trading waterway of the Moskva River and its centre in Moscow (meaning precisely ‘waterway’).

  1. Muscovite Rus’ 1283-1682

Geographically, Muscovy, which after being ruled by Grand Princes became a Tsardom under its first Tsar, Ivan IV (reigned 1530-1584), was relatively small in size. However, it began to expand northwards to the shores of the White Sea and then eastwards through Kazakhstan into Siberia, and later would reach the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The Muscovite ideals were ‘Holy Rus’ and ‘the Third Rome’, the ideals of incarnating holiness among the East Slavs and so being a bastion of the True Faith. In order to survive against so many enemies from Western aggression, especially from Poles and Lithuanians, and with a change of ruling house from Rurikids to Romanovs in 1613, which was forced on it by treasonous boyars (aristocrats) and foreign invasion, Muscovite Rus’ became isolated.

After nearly 400 years, from the 1650s on, this isolation led to a split from the Russian Orthodox Church with the formation of apocalyptic Old Ritualist sects. They wanted to keep old rituals, out of keeping with the wider Orthodox Church, seeing themselves as the True Church. The Old Ritualists, often led by merchants, wanted isolation and did not want to know about the majority of Orthodox. Despite this extreme, and the extreme of treasonous boyars, who conversely had become obsessed with Polish and Italian influences coming in from the far west of the present Ukraine, which had been forced into becoming Roman Catholic by the Poles, the Tsardom of Muscovy evolved into an Empire.

  1. Imperial Russia: 1682-1917

Although Russia was not proclaimed an Empire until 1721, in reality Imperial Russia began in 1682 with the reign of Peter I (‘the Great’). Though he did much for Russia’s secular greatness and power, he also denigrated the Church, abolishing the Russian Patriarchate and subjecting the Church to a Protestant-style Minister of Religion, and generally promoted Western influences, such as serfdom. This Imperial period led to the great expansion of Rus’ to the west, taking part of largely Jewish eastern Poland and all Finland, to the Pacific east and to the Muslim south. Hence the need to change its name from ‘Rus’’ to ‘Russia’, in order to include all these Non-East Slavs. The Non-East Slav peoples were controlled by a centralised administration in Saint Petersburg, which caused dissent among them. The end of this period saw rapid industrialisation, making Russia into the fifth largest economy in the world and well on its way to becoming the first, with high levels of literacy among the young.

Seeing the appalling decadence and hedonism of the upper class in Peter I’s capital of Saint Petersburg, its last Tsar, Nicholas II (1868-1918), looked back with nostalgia precisely to pre-Imperial Rus’ and especially to the father of Peter I, Tsar Alexis (1645-1676). Indeed, Tsar Nicholas II named his only son after him, reconciling some of those who used the old rituals with the Church, working towards the restoration of the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate, building churches in the national style of that previous age and reforming Italianate church singing and iconography according to the older standards.

Tsar Nicholas II was betrayed by those who disagreed with and openly mocked and slandered his desire to return to roots and revive the old ideal of Holy Rus’. They scorned his Faith and the radical unity of peasantry and Tsar, which he cultivated. These aristocrat-traitors, whose mentality had been spawned by Peter I, allied themselves with the West, with British spies and politics, with French language and culture. This is why most of them ended up in Paris after 1917. The Tsar was left inside Russia, refusing to leave his homeland out of patriotism, and so was murdered with his whole family. Imperial Russia had lasted barely 200 years.

Imperial Russia contained the seeds of its own destruction and was felled by its internal contradictions between Holy Rus’ and a centralised, Western-style Imperial State, so well portrayed in nineteenth-century Russia, which was split between Slavophiles and Westerners. This can be seen in its literature, especially Dostoyevsky’s prophetic novels, ‘The Possessed’ or ‘The Brothers Karamazov’. Nevertheless, Imperial Russia also reached cultural heights, symbolised by the poetry of Pushkin, the novels of Tolstoy, the music of Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov and the lives of the last Romanovs, martyred by Western-inspired atheists in 1918.

  1. The Soviet Union (USSR): 1917-1991

Although formally founded only in December 1922, in reality the USSR began with the two Revolutions of 1917. As a result, the word ‘Rus’’ became archaic and even the word ‘Russia’ was largely replaced by ‘Soviet’. With a highly oppressive and militant atheist ideology imported from Germany, it created millions of New Martyrs and Confessors, who died under sadistic Non-Russian dictators, such as Lenin, Stalin and Khushchev. The multinational, but highly centralised USSR was founded on an ocean of blood. However, thanks to the immense sacrifices and patriotism of its peoples, in 1945 the USSR was victorious against Western Nazism. Tired of being invaded by the West, it set up a buffer-zone Empire in Eastern Europe to protect itself, also oppressing the peoples of that zone.

The USSR did prolong the pre-Revolutionary ideals of the last Tsar and his programme of social justice, full employment, free education, free health care, accessible culture and support for exploited Western colonies. However, it fell after only three generations because of its oppressive centralism and the treason, greed and corruption of its elite, the ‘nomenklatura’. The members of this ‘nomenklatura’ were those who wanted Western consumerism: Money, money, money for parasites, thieves and traitors.

The nomenklatura had already come into being by the 1970s. I can remember them then, with their vulgar and amateur aping of bourgeois Western ways and clothes, shopping in Berjozka shops. In the 1980s they helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, betraying the social justice that was its greatest legacy, fighting against the patriots who, curiously, were largely centred in the KGB.  Having lived in the USSR, I was not in principle against its fall, as it had persecuted the Church and all its peoples, but I believed that that fall could only be on condition that something better would first be put in its place. I follow the principle that you do not destruct until you first construct.

  1. Post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and Belarus: 26 December 1991-24 February 2022

Here we can give very precise dates for the beginning and the ending of this sixth incarnation of East Slavdom, of post-Soviet Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Tragically, instead of keeping the best of the old USSR, full employment, free education, free health care, accessible culture and support for the exploited Third World, once the nouveau-riche nomenklatura had taken long-coveted power and renamed themselves ‘oligarchs’, imitating rich Westerners, they simply put in place a poor-quality imitation of the corrupt West. They kept only all that was worst in the old USSR, its centralisation, alcoholism, abortion, corruption and divorce on demand. It was the worst of both worlds.

National assets were stolen (‘privatised’) by the ‘oligarchs’ and tens of millions of abandoned Russians found that they had become disliked and discriminated against in new, foreign-controlled countries, especially in the Ukraine, where Russians numbered over 50%. Western companies made a killing inside Russia and the Ukraine, tens of millions of people were robbed of their savings and pensions and millions died of poverty, despair, alcoholism and in nationalist wars in the Caucasus, which were directly provoked and supported by the West. It was one of the greatest thefts of natural resources and identity in the history of the world.

However, from 1994 on in oligarch-free Belarus and from 1999 on in the Russian Federation, but not in the oligarch-owned Ukraine, patriots came to power. They gradually began to develop something better to put in place of the monstrous crimes that had taken place after the collapse of the USSR. However, this was a generational project and could not be rushed. Only in early 2022 was the project ready to be implemented, if necessary. A New Rus’, purged of parasites, thieves and traitors, began to take shape, although some of its institutions still have to be cleansed of corrupt mafias, infiltrators and spies.

These compromising traitors were just like the aristocrats, generals, politicians and professionals who had coveted power in 1917 and overthrew the Tsar. Just as the aristocrat-oligarchs and bourgeois elite of traitors, who had implemented the Western-planned February 1917 palace revolt, caused chaos, civil war and destruction and then irresponsibly ran away to the West, so too did the oligarchs. Post-Soviet Russia ended with their treason, the oligarchs fleeing to London, New York, Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

  1. The New Rus’: 24 February 2022 – Until Repentance Stops

With the New Rus’, we turn full circle, away from Russia and back to Rus’ and the restoration of the fundamental unity of East Slavdom. The New Rus’ was born on 24 February 2022, the first day of the SMO (Special Military Operation), the operation to liberate the one still occupied part of Rus’, the Ukraine. It had to be freed of its US-run, US-financed, US-trained and US-armed Neo-Nazi militarists, largely Galicians from the far west of the Ukraine, formerly part of Poland. These Neo-Nazis were the puppets used by the US elite, who hoped to destroy President Putin, However, in reality, they made him great and destroyed President Zelensky instead.

If the New Rus’ were to survive and thrive, it had to be decompromised and cleansed of the post-Soviet Westernised traitor-oligarchs. Almost at once after 24 February 2022, traitors ran from the birth of the New Rus’. Tens of thousands of the Russian nouveau-riche upper class headed for Georgia, Kazakhstan, Finland, Serbia and elsewhere. They hated the New Rus’, because they could no longer go skiing in the French Alps in the winter, to Florida for summer holidays, to their villas and use their bank accounts in London, Nice, Malaga, Sofia, Nicosia and Podgorica. True, most, it is said 85%, have since returned, realising their error. However, millions fled from the Ukraine, one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

No longer able to sweep the Ukrainian catastrophe under the carpet until the next US elections, the delusional USA and the heavily censored US-run Western media are now abandoning the American proxy war in the Ukraine and its puppet leader. President Zelensky faces assassination, like all dumped US puppets. We are on the threshold of recovering the unity of East Slavdom after the civil strife between brothers in the Ukraine. East Slavdom is what the Belarussian President Lukashenko calls the ’Union State’, but we know it as ‘Rus’’. The Russian Federation and Belarus, stretching from the Polish border to the Pacific, are going to be joined by a New Ukraine, perhaps to be renamed ‘Malorossija’. This latter will be a State similar in size to Belarus and not the Soviet Ukraine, which existed only between 1922 and 2022.

The principle of self-determination would be followed. Thus, the east and the south of the old Soviet construct will return to the Russian Federation. The Romanians of Chernovtsy and the Hungarians of Transcarpathia could well return to their motherlands. As for the only real Ukrainians, who are Greek Catholics and live in their two or three provinces ‘on the edge’, ‘u kraja’, and who have caused all the trouble, they can return to Poland, if the Poles want them back. These ‘Ukrainans’, or border people, are in fact West Slavs. The East Slavs do not want them, for they are not part of Rus’.

Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. As they say in Russian ‘Bog ljubit troitsu’, ‘God loves threes’. This is the New Rus’, the Union State of the East Slavs, of nearly 200 million people, stretching from the Baltic and the Black Sea to the Pacific. There is no intention of taking over other, Non-East Slav, lands. That is only the base propaganda of Western scaremongering of ‘Russians marching through Europe’. The age of the Soviet Union with its imperial buffer-zone in Non-East Slav Eastern Europe is long over, as also is the age of Imperial Russia. We have come to the reconstitution of ‘Rus’, hopefully to be founded on the ideal of ‘Holy Rus’.

What of those East Slavs who live in other countries, outside East Slavdom, in, say, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania or Moldova, where they constitute smaller minorities, of between 2% and at most 25% of the population? The New Rus’ hopes that their human rights will at last be guaranteed and protected through the establishment of friendly relations by their governments with their giant neighbour: The New Rus’. After the Russian liberation of the Ukraine, Russians will surely gain the respect and co-operation of those governments which have oppressed their Russian minorities in the past. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan such friendly relations already appear to be the case. And the New Rus’ already has great influence outside itself through the Russian-founded BRICS. Once US influence fades in Europe and Central Asia, all these countries will surely be led by new US-free elites which will realise the need to improve relations with the New Rus’.

Thus, we come to the New Rus’, free from the West, knitted together by the Orthodox Faith. Whenever that Faith has been weak or even denied as an ideal, the East Slavs have quarrelled amongst each other, giving rise to civil wars between princes/boyars/aristocrats/oligarchs. As a result, successive enemies have invaded and taken over. Invasions have only happened when there has been no internal unity. For a house divided cannot stand. This is a warning. If repentance for the past ceases, the New Rus’ will also fall.

Conclusion: Towards Holy Rus’

Just over 100 years ago Imperial Russia ended with the murder by British spies, a right-wing fanatic and a transvestite aristocrat of the first victim of the Revolution, a peasant-prophet and healer called Rasputin. His surname means ‘the parting of the ways’. However, the New Rus’ is being founded by a man called Putin, whose name means ‘the way’. The New Rus’ is indeed a national ‘way’. However, the New Rus’ is also an economic, technological, military and diplomatic Superpower and is closely allied with the other world Superpower, China. For in this new world the very troubled USA is being reduced to just a regional power.

Although founded as a national East Slav Union, the New Rus’ can play an international role in the world, especially in an American-free Europe. With the coming collapse of the already panicking American-chosen EU and UK elites and their replacement by patriots and sovereignists, the New Rus’ could call Europe to repent, it could do missionary work. Various countries like Hungary and Slovakia are already showing the way. Perhaps tomorrow this will come in the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Germany, Italy and France.

For this, however, the New Rus’ will need, after ‘the way’, a leader with a spiritual, not a nationalist, vision. A new leader, an actual Tsar, would have to cleanse the Russian Church of American and other traitors, all the fifth columnists and sectarians, supporting those who oppose them instead of persecuting us, and protect all the Local Orthodox Churches, which the Russian Orthodox Church must co-operate with and not dominate. He, the leader of the New Rus’, would be the ultimate destiny of Rus’. If we may paraphrase: ‘Six Ages of Rus’ have fallen, the Seventh stands and an Eighth there shall not be’.

 

America, the Ukraine, Russia, the Church: Temptation, Tragedy, Challenge and Opportunity

Foreword

The world is now becoming a post-globalist world. The Globalists (Americans) have been defeated by the Sovereignists. Despite the attempts by the US elite, the power behind the throne, to keep the embarrassingly senile Biden in power until after the next elections, the Ukraine is collapsing (and Gaza genocided by American bombs) and so Biden too will Biden. First in Russia, then in Hungary, then in Slovakia, now in the Netherlands, the Sovereignists are in power. They are increasingly strong in Germany, Italy and France. Union is off the cards. Confederation is the order of the day, as the real New World Order. Sovereignty is beyond the artificial and absurd divisions of left and right, inventions of the Western oligarchies (the mythical ‘democracies’) in order to divide and rule. Sovereignty is what both Russia and China have, though the Globalists falsely call them ‘autocracies’. The Western world has yet to recover its sovereignty. It still can, if it takes the opportunity to return to the Holy Trinity, the model of unity in diversity, what politicians today call multipolarity.

The American Temptation

The American temptation was Empire building, not just in one region, but universally or ‘globally’, as it proclaimed. Let us leave the north to the ice and build ‘from sea to shining sea’, they said. So they stole half a Continent from the natives, whom they slaughtered, bought from a desperate Napoleon, grasped the south from Mexico, began a Civil War with 600,000 dead and invaded small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. This culminated in a four-year war and dropping its atom bombs on the big island of Japan in 1945 in order to dominate the Pacific. At the same time, they conquered and occupied the peninsula of Western Europe in 1944-5, which victory followed its expeditionary experiment of 1917-18. The 1945 double victory meant its victory over half the world. The USA was a Superpower. It still had to conquer the heartland of Eurasia, which it thought it had done in 1991, becoming the only Superpower. This was a delusion and it duly proclaimed it as ‘the end of history’. This proud triumphalism, a Non-Jewish Zionism, was failure, for the fall always follows pride – delusions are always countered by reality.

The American Empire depended on using expendable proxies, puppets whom it flattered and told that they were superior to their neighbours. These puppets were hired do the dirty work for the US. Through them it could divide and rule, sowing chaos and destruction, whether in Latin America, East Asia, West Asia or in ex-Soviet Eastern Europe. However, its agents, from Marcos to Somoza, from Hussein to Bin Laden, from Bolsinaro to Zelensky, would go off script, falling into delusion. The USA has always suffered from a ‘spoilt child syndrome’. The spoilt child always shouts: ‘If I cannot have it, then no-one will have it’. And so they destroy their once much-coveted puppets and toys. This I know from experience with an American. Internationally, it can be seen in Latin America, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, Israel, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, Western and Eastern Europe – now isolated from Russia. However, this spoilt-child syndrome only works in a unipolar world of exclusivism, not in a multipolar world. In the latter there is choice and people can escape US despotism, whose policy of containment fails.

The Ukrainian Tragedy

Now desperate the Kiev government wants to mobilise all Ukrainians between the ages of 17 and 70, Berlin-style, and, barbarically, women. The latter are already being killed on the front, where poorly trained and poorly equipped troops without air support, average age 43, are being forced to commit suicide against vastly superior Russian forces. Kiev dead already number between 500,000 and 600,000 and more and more are deserting. The needless death of these troops is a war crime. President Zelensky, like Hitler suicidally forbidding retreat despite military advice, is also isolated and unhinged in his bunker, having banned elections, delusional with his Messiah complex. His PR advisors have told the Western media that Russians have tried to assassinate him five times. Of course, this is nonsense. Zelensky, the brilliant and well-paid actor but utterly incompetent politician, is the greatest asset of the Russians. He may well be assassinated, only by US-backed Ukrainians, which assassination can then be blamed on Russia. The Ukraine has now lost 20%, of its territory, taken back by Russian forces after being ruled by the Ukraine for up to 100 years. But since Kiev refuses to negotiate, it will lose even more.

If the Ukrainians manage to continue losing, they could lose up to 50% of their territory or even more. Russian forces are waiting to fill the vacuum once the Kiev forces collapse and move forward to the River Dnieper and, if necessary, cross it. Whatever happens, Kiev will be forced to surrender unconditionally. There will be no negotiated settlement, as Kiev refused this constantly for eight years. The new, post-Zelensky government in the Ukraine will have to agree to and sign the Russian conditions. It is indeed time to end ‘the magical thinking about Russia’s defeat,’ by which headlines the Wall Street Journal means ending its own delusions and fantasies and those of the whole Collective West and their carefully censored media since 2014. As we have been predicting in over 116 published articles between March 2022 and October 2023, the West is being routed in the Ukraine. Kiev is the second Kabul and even worse in humiliation. As a result, the failed elites in the US and in Europe will fall. NATO and the EU are therefore finished; they were only ever post-1945 relics. Their time is up. Europe’s future is Eurasian and Confederal.

Indeed, the reign of the official Western media like the BBC, used by Western Establishments as propaganda mouthpieces, weapons of mass deception, are over. People are seeing through their lies. The US and the EU made a fatal mistake in forcing Russia into a close alliance with China through their aggression. It was delusional Western hubris that called Russia ‘a gas station with nukes’. Its booming economy has now overtaken the depressed German economy, cut off from cheap energy by US sabotage. As a result of the rout of the Collective West in the Ukraine, worldwide all recognise that there are three Superpowers: China, Russia and USA – and in that order. It is two against one. Queueing up not far behind them are India, the Muslim World, Africa and Latin America, with largely unpopulated Australia left as the natural resource reserve for the great East Asian Superpower – China. Europe discounted itself by allying itself with the US as vassals and client states. Now US failure and humiliation are shared by its lapdogs, Germany, France and especially the UK. France and the UK are to lose their places on the UN Security Council.

The Russian Challenge

Militarily, economically and diplomatically, this is a triumph for the Russian Federation, a Superpower and not ‘a regional power’, as the US President Obama contemptuously called it only a decade ago. Russia is in fact the leader of what used to be called ‘The Global South’, the 90% of the new multipolar world which is Non-Western. Through Russian-founded BRICS +, Russia is the toast of Asia, Africa and Latin America. They too want independence from the neo-colonial West, now that Russia has shown the way through its superiority. It is Russia, backed by China, which with BRICS troops will make peace in West Asia between Palestine and Israel and at last, inevitably, give the Palestinians justice and a homeland. The US is isolated at the UN and has failed because it was one-sided and supported the injustice of Israeli genocide. The US has failed both to divide Europe from Russia and failed to divide and colonise Russia, which was its aim in using Ukrainian soldiers as pawns to attack Russia and die for Washington. However, winning the war in the Ukraine and defeating American Europe is one thing. Russia must also win the peace.

In the Ukraine, this means no occupation of the real Ukraine, where real Ukrainians live, in the north-west and centre-west. It also means that all the Non-Ukrainian parts of the pre-2014 Ukraine, created by brutal Soviet dictators and whose brutality the Collective West has so fervently supported, where Russians, Poles, Romanians and Hungarians live, will at last be able to return to their homelands. They will leave the real Ukraine, about half the Soviet Ukraine. As post-Soviet Russia learned its lesson not to oppress Non-Russian peoples and has never had the slightest intention of occupying the real Ukraine, let alone other Eastern European countries (Zelensky’s Ukraine was in no way defending the West ‘against the Asiatic Muscovite hordes’; that was pure racist propaganda), the peoples of Europe are going to see the real Russia, instead of seeing it through the eyes of their US-selected elite of nonentities, who constantly lied to them. With people’s governments in Europe, a new agreement could be reached, with the abandonment of NATO and mutually beneficial security guarantees.

This means the repeal of the illegal anti-Russian sanctions and respect for the human rights of Russian minorities in all European countries, especially in the Ukraine, where the Orthodox Church has been banned. Tragedy remains. Apart from the unnecessary sacrifice of a whole generation of well over a million Ukrainian men, killed or crippled, Ukraine will need rebuilding – and repopulating. Eight million and more fled Zelensky’s tyranny and his hated SBU secret police and many were needlessly made to fear Russia because of Western propaganda. They emigrated, first to Russia, then to Poland, Germany and elsewhere in Western Europe. The death toll for Russia could well reach 40,000 dead. There were also the 14,000 Russian-speaking civilians massacred by the US-installed Kiev regime in the Donbass since 2014. Apart from this, there is the whole question of the once multinational Russian Church. In February 2022 its leadership took a Russian nationalist stance. This meant that Non-Russians and those Russians who did not agree with the Russian Military Operation in the Ukraine left that politicised Church, some with bitterness.

The Orthodox Christian Opportunity

Clergy and people outside Russia, in the Ukraine, in the Baltics, in Moldova, in Western Europe and one day in Belarus, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, will not return to the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Church will have to decentralise and form a family of new and autocephalous (independent) Local Churches for these peoples. This is the challenge and the only way forward. The Russian temptation was to try and dominate the rest of the Orthodox Church because their Church is by far the biggest and so the most powerful, three-quarters of the whole. God has humbled them and they will be reduced to half of the Orthodox world. Russians will have to return to their saints, to Sts Antony and Theodosius of Kiev, St Sergius of Radonezh, St Nil of Sora, St Paisy (Velichkovsky), St Seraphim of Sarov, the Saints of Optina, St John of Kronstadt, the New Martyrs and Confessors, St John of Shanghai. These are the actual spiritual and moral leaders of the Russian Church. Today the Russian Church is at last heading towards becoming a post-post-Soviet Church, that is, to a Church free of centralisation, nationalism, politics, sect and schism.

However, there was also the Greek nationalist temptation, no less historic in its catastrophic proportions. This temptation, which began as long ago as 1917, was to go the way of the world, that is of the USA. Now God has humbled the Greeks too, making them powerless in worldly terms, for they placed their hope ‘in princes and the sons of men’. Their only greatness is in the saints whom they themselves persecuted, St Nectarios, St Paisios and St Porphyrios, to name but a few. The situation reminds us of the following. Some forty years ago St Paisios the Athonite told a then young man, whom I know well, the following. The young man had been scandalised by the conduct of certain bishops. Fr Paisios told him: ‘When you walk along a path on Athos and come across animal excrement, what do you do? You kick it aside into the bushes so that other passers-by will not tread in it and then you wipe your shoes’. This is what we do today. We shall defeat both sectarianism and modernism, for they all end up in the same way, in the bushes, in sect and schism.

The Force of White Orthodoxy

Foreword: Come a Long Way

Ten years ago on a rainy, autumn evening, the deserted, leaf-strewn pavements shining in the streetlight, I arrived at a small hotel in rue Alexandre I in Alencon in Normandy, France. A puzzled Frenchman asked me: ‘Have you come a long way’? To which I replied with a smile: ‘Yes, I have come a very long way…from the other end of history’. I did not add, but could have added: ‘I am a White Orthodox priest. There must come justice and restoration in Russia, after which justice and restoration will come elsewhere, including here in France too.’

Three Russias

In November 1721 we saw the establishment of Imperial Russia with its enslaving westernised aristocracy. In 1922 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of the Soviet Union, Imperialist Marxist Russia with its enslaving centralised nomenklatura. In December 1991 its injustices led to its fall and the establishment of post-Soviet, American Russia with its enslaving dollarised oligarchate. On 24 February 2022 this Russia in turn fell, the victim of its internal contradictions, caused by its corruption.

The three versions of Russia had lasted 200 years, 70 years and 30 years respectively. Despite great achievements, all three versions ended badly, either in revolution and tyranny, or else in plunder and despair, or else in bloodshed and tragedy. This was because for 300 years none of them had respected its underlying Orthodox Russian identity and its calling to form a Multinational Civilisation. When you go against your true nature, you suffer. That is why Russia has had to suffer for 300 years.

The End of Post-Soviet Russia

The fall of Post-Soviet American Russia is very painful and very bloody, but also inevitable. Of course, there are those who opposed its end. These were the cosmopolitan westernisers and traitors, who last year ran away from Russia, to Finland, to Georgia, to Turkey, wherever they could go. They wanted their American Russia to continue, even though both sides of the Atlantic had ‘cancelled’ Russia. Some of them already lived in the West, some of them were represented in the Russian Church. Over the last year some of them have begun to return, realising that their flight had been based on lack of faith.

On the other hand, there are also the xenophobic Russian nationalists, the Prigozhinites. They too are ending badly, as they desire the restoration by violence of an Imperialist Russia, not understanding that Russia has moved on from Imperialism and Sovietism. They understand neither Orthodoxy, nor the multinational calling of Russia. They do not understand that they will lose everything if they continue clinging on to the disastrous centralism of the past. The Multipolar Age of BRICS has begun. Unipolarity, whether Russian or Western, is over.

The Fall of the Russian Church

The State-minded nationalists, the centralist controllers and their denouncing minders who accompany them everywhere, are over-represented in the Russian Church. Its fate is now on a knife edge because of their errors. Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have written much about the possible restoration of Sovereign Orthodox Russia, the Eurasian bulwark of worldwide Orthodox Civilisation. Shall I see it before I die? Unfortunately, its heart, the Russian Church, is still not free. True, it is no longer captive to anything so crude or primitive as Communism, but instead is captive to something far worse, far more insidious, to 300 years of the dead, corrupting hand of the State.

Thus, the Russian Church is captive to spiritual captivity, practical atheism, love of power and wealth, dictatorship and bureaucracy, arbitrary rule, cultish sectarianism, its believers are exiled, the corrupt take control, intent on destroying the Church. They are Black Orthodoxy. Their feudal despotism, blatant commercialism, clerical careerism, moral corruption and institutional simony are merely symptoms of the sickness, not causes. Here is why we are still very far from the restoration of Sovereign Russia. If it comes, it can only be after the Russian Church has been cleansed by the present very painful and very bloody events in the Soviet-established Ukraine.

The Fall of the West

Over the last fifty years since 1973, I have also written much about the coming millennial turning-point in world history. At last it has come, the fall of the West after a thousand years of its elite’s domination of the rest of the world through their technology of organised violence. It is time for the West to return to itself, to its roots, to its true nature, which is in its saints and in the culture of the spirit. This is the Truth of the West, as I have been affirming for fifty years.

The Truth of the West is not in power and mammon, as, sadly, even some modern Orthodox bishops, self-appointed ‘princes of the Church’, claim. We live far away from the love of luxury, academic theorising and effeminate worldliness of such nominal bishops. We strive to live in accord with the humble spirit of genuine Orthodoxy, of White Orthodoxy, spread from the Egyptian desert to the Atlantic Hebrides, from the East Anglian coasts to the Fen islands, from Sarov forests to Carpathian hermitages.

Afterword: The Multipolar Church

As for me, I shall continue here where God has put me, in the Kingdom of the East of England. It is where I was born and where I belong. Our task is to complete the noble mission allotted us by the last Christian Emperor, to build up the Church multinationally, accepting all inclusively. We are the Free Church, the White Church. We fight off the ‘protocols’ of the evil and the greedy, the scribes and the pharisees, the sectarians and the schismatics, who would close down all our churches and destroy us all. Those who persecuted us and tried to silence us unleashed an irresistible force, the Force of the Spirit, the Force of White Orthodoxy. God is with us.

St Andrew the Fool for Christ

2/15 October 2023

 

 

Questions and Answers on the Third Day of Pentecost 2023 After the Ukraine: Religion, Faith, the Orthodox Church and the Diaspora

Religion and Faith

Q: What is the point of religion?

A: Religion is pointless.

Q: What do you mean? You are a priest!

A: Religion is manmade and man-inspired. It is an invention, an institution, devised for use by States in order to manipulate their populations. This is the opposite of Faith, which is God-made and God-inspired. Unlike Religion, Faith is not devised by men, but revealed by God. The point of Faith is to know and acquire God, Who is Love. All words and phrases such as ‘salvation, going to church, praying, acquiring the Holy Spirit, repentance, redemption, overcoming sin, defeating death, venerating the saints, grace, the sacraments, understanding the Scriptures’, mean precisely this – knowing and acquiring Love.

Faith is then the opposite of religion, whose aim all too often becomes knowing and acquiring hatred. We can see this very clearly in the institutional Religion of the anti-Faith pharisees in the New Testament, who hated and then murdered Christ, the Son of God/Love – they murdered Love. And the modern pharisees, full of the same old hatred, just go on doing this today, as we have seen very recently! If Christ came back, they would most certainly crucify Him again, as the Greek author Kazantsakis wrote 75 years ago.

Q: Why then are there different faiths?

A: All faiths agree that humanity and all creation are at the bottom of the mountain and God/Love is at the top of the mountain. Faith is to help us climb the mountain, resisting all the temptations against Love. We all start at the bottom and inevitably take different paths up the mountain. At the bottom we can find many paths that lead upwards, but how far do they go and how will we best fight off the attacks from the demons who sit along those paths? What is the best and easiest path? Many paths seem to peter out quite soon or end in insurmountable heights and obstacles. And do they all lead upwards anyway? Or do they just go round and round the mountain? Do the other paths join the Orthodox Christian paths at a certain level?

Personally, I have no need to condemn others for taking other paths, as others inevitably do. All I have is my own spiritual experience, that the Orthodox saints have got to the top of the mountain on their paths, despite the enemy of humanity, the devil and his minions. Therefore, I try to follow those paths. As for those who take other paths, it is none of my business. I am not an insecure neophyte who needs to condemn others in order to justify himself.

The Ukraine

Q: Do you support the Russian side in the war in the Ukraine?

A: As a priest, I am on the side of all the suffering and on the side of peace. I cannot be anywhere else. I cannot support killing by anyone. This conflict was begun by the USA through its puppet government which it installed by violence in Kiev in 2014 with the support of its EU/NATO vassals. It is tragic and unnecessary. And sadly, as they say, those who sowed the wind are reaping the whirlwind. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died so far, then there are the hundreds of thousands of maimed, psychologically crippled and bereaved. Let alone the millions of Ukrainian refugees (2 million in Russia) and millions of others in Europe, especially in Poland. And then there are the Russian dead (see below).

Q: Some American converts to ROCOR say that they support the Russian side against the Ukraine because that conflict is a battle for Holy Rus. What would you say?

A: The phrase ‘Holy Rus’ refers to the ancient past. After the ravages of Soviet atheism, it no longer exists – it has not been reconstituted. Today Russia still  has twice the abortion rate of the West and very high rates of divorce and alcoholism. Today, instead of ‘Holy Rus’, we use expressions like the Orthodox Christian world, Orthodox Civilisation, the Orthosphere. And if you kill others, you do not belong to the Orthodox world.

Q: What will happen to the ‘Orthodox Church in the Ukraine’, the OCU, so recently set up by Constantinople with US money?

A: It will die out and disappear because it is a temporary passing phenomenon, born out of the US State Department’s plotting imagination and the refusal by Moscow to give the Ukrainian Church autocephaly – which it almost did in the 1990s. The UOC was only ever a purely political organisation, born of the US-controlled Ukrainian State and the US-controlled Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Q: If you are neutral in this war, why are you convinced that Russia will defeat the Western-backed government in Kiev?

A: Quite simply, because I am a political realist, have sources in the Ukraine, and do not listen to tabloid/BBC/CNN type propaganda, which simply repeats the lies of the Kiev Department of Propaganda, which itself is run by American PR companies.  Look at the facts:

First of all, Russia will win, perhaps even in several months’ time, because this conflict is existential for it, but not at all for the Western elite. In other words, it is everything for Russia. It cannot lose. It has military, economic and diplomatic superiority, the backing of most of the world. It is not repeating the mistakes made by the Russian Empire in 1914, which naively thought that Britain and France were on its side, when in fact they fomented both the German attack and the overthrow of the Tsar, using internal traitors, lack of censorship and malcontents. Russia has learned from its mistakes then, it has at last lost its illusions.

Secondly, so far this is not even a war from the Russian viewpoint, let alone an ‘unprovoked full-scale invasion’, as the propagandists call it. The Russian Army has not yet even fought directly in it. The ‘Russian’ side is composed of the pro-Russian Ukrainian people’s militias from Lugansk and Donetsk (the Donbass), who are fighting for their freedom, Chechen volunteers and the 50,000-strong Wagner Company, which is composed of about 75% ex-convicts and about 25% of professional volunteers, the latter often officers recruited from the Russian Army. It is backed by vastly superior drone-guided Russian artillery, missiles and units from the Russian Air Force and the Black Sea Fleet. The always weak Kiev Navy no longer exists, its last ship was sunk last week, and the always weak Kiev Air Force has been virtually wiped out. Now, in modern warfare, the winner is always the one who has air superiority and can mount a naval blockade.

So far, since February 2022, it seems that some 20,000 pro-Russian Ukrainians and Chechens, 13,000 ex-convict volunteers and 4,000 Russian volunteers have died on the Russian side. Total casualties on the Russian side are therefore about 37,000. However, it appears that the Kiev Army has lost at least 300,000 dead, not including wounded. The ratio is 1:8 or even 1:10. Why? Because of the superiority of modern Russian technology (the Kiev forces have mainly used old Soviet arms or old NATO arms) and its vast quantity. The greatest Kiev defeat so far, greater even than Mariupol, was in Bakhmut, which fell on 20 May 2023 (this defeat was censored by the Western media, like so much else) after nine months of fighting in this horrible war of attrition. The town of Bakhmut, where some 70,000 people once lived, is in ruins. Whole blocks of flats were dynamited by the fleeing Kiev forces, just as they did in Mariupol.

The first NATO-trained Kiev Army was defeated in March 2022 and the war could have ended then. However, the second Kiev Army, rearmed with equipment from the former Soviet, now NATO, bloc in order to prolong the conflict, was defeated in the autumn of 2022. Now the third Kiev Army, armed to the teeth and trained by the US/NATO, is also being defeated. I would give it a maximum of another eleven months, simply because this is a war between Washington and Moscow, being fought on the battlefields of the Ukraine till the last Ukrainian cannon fodder is dead.

Since February 2022, the pro-Russian forces (and even Russia itself, in minor and suicidal incursions by Kiev forces, carried out for propaganda purposes) are being attacked from ever deeper inside Kiev-controlled territory. This means that pro-Russian forces, and probably eventually the million-strong Russian Army itself, will in turn be forced to penetrate ever deeper into Kiev-controlled territory and possibly (and unwillingly) even go as far as the Polish border. After it has set up a government in the New Ukraine, centred in a Kiev independent of the USA, it will withdraw.

Small parts of the old Soviet-established Ukraine (yes, the West is defending a purely Soviet creation in the Ukraine, 32 years after the disappearance of the Soviet Union) may be transferred to Poland, Hungary and Romania. There persecuted minorities have long laboured under Kiev’s dreaded secret police, the CIA-trained SBU. As for the south and east of the Ukraine, whose unhistoric borders were set by the USSR, probably including Odessa and as far as Transdnistria, they will go to Russia. An independent Ukraine, free of the US, will exist. Russia has no desire at all to occupy it, just to neutralise it as a threat to itself and free the Russian areas, part of Russia until 1954 or 1922.

Thirdly, the vast majority of the world either supports Russia (e.g. China, Iran etc) in this operation, or is neutral (e.g. India, Africa, Latin America etc) and does not support the West, which is only 12.5% of world population and whose GDP is quite outmatched by BRICS, even without the rest of the world, which is also dedollarising. Dedollarisation has been caused directly by sanctions against Russia, which have undermined all confidence in the dollar. The debt-ridden West is isolated in its G7 ghetto, its only weapons are boomeranging sanctions, which have caused huge inflation in their own countries, and plots to overthrow popular governments, as recently in the now chaotic Pakistan. The EU head of diplomacy, the unelected Josep Borrell, has admitted twice that the whole conflict in the Ukraine could end in days if the West stopped arming Kiev. By arming the Kiev forces against their own people, the West is simply prolonging the agony. Every death should be on the conscience of the Western elite.

The huge error of the Western elite in all this is its hubris in believing its own delusional propaganda. Russia is a Superpower, with advanced arms the USA simply does not have.

The West has yet to learn to respect different civilisations, which it has not been doing for exactly a millennium, when it definitively began to reconstitute the incredibly cruel pagan Roman Empire and adopted its techniques of ruthless organised violence to conquer and exploit the world (See Note 1 at the end). That organised violence began with its Crusades in the 1030s in Iberia, Sicily, England (in 1066), then in the Middle East and later in southern France, then developed into colonialism and imperialism, continuing to this day. This is clearly not Christian, but pagan.

Even today, what was once called Orthodox Christian Civilisation, however far it is from the actual practice of Orthodoxy – and it is far from it – is radically different from Western-Secularist Civilisation through its cultural values alone. And the fault-line between Orthodox Christian Civilisation and Western-Secularist Civilisation passes through the extreme west of today’s Ukraine, the part that used to belong to Catholic Poland and before that to Catholic Habsburg Austria and, frankly, it should return there.

The Future of the Russian Church

Q: So, after what you see as a Russian military and political victory, do you see the Moscow Patriarchate taking over the whole of the Church in the Ukraine?

A: No, not at all! Whatever the outcome, and regardless of whether I am right or wrong in my view that the Russian State will win against Washington’s war in the Ukraine, the great loser in this whole affair is the Moscow Patriarchate. It is a catastrophe for it, though it still does not seem to realise this.

First of all, the Russian State and the Orthodox Faith (unlike the Moscow Patriarchate) are two very different things. The Russian State wants to destroy anti-Russian Nazism in the Ukraine, so it will gain national security and US bases, biolabs and missiles aimed at Moscow will not exist on its borders. The Russian State wants a militarily and politically neutral Ukraine, like Austria and Finland used to be, before they were forced to join NATO. As regards the Orthodox Faith, it is obvious that the still largely atheist Russian State has no ability or desire to enforce churchgoing in the Ukraine in the future. People in the New Ukraine that may take shape a year from now, perhaps with a population of 10-20 million, will be free to go to any church they want. For most of them that will mean not going to any church at all (as in Russia, where also only about 2-3% go to church regularly).

However, churchgoing Ukrainians will certainly not go to Moscow Patriarchate churches after the conflict in the Ukraine is over, as they see in it an anti-Ukrainian Russian nationalist organisation. For example, just two weeks ago we were in Bari, where we concelebrated at the Liturgy for St Nicholas Day. It was interrupted by about 10 Ukrainians, including a Constantinople OCU priest, who shouted ‘Satanist’ at us. They were shouting not at us Romanians, Moldovans and English, but against the bishop who was from the Moscow Patriarchate. That is how they feel. The level of hatred is that great.

I think that Churched Ukrainians will only attend a future de facto and de jure autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metr Onufry. In other words, Moscow will have to give autocephaly. The present de facto autocephaly may even get recognised by other Local Churches before Moscow actually gives it, exactly as happened with the Polish Orthodox Church in the 1920s (2). The UOC already gets great sympathy from other Local Churches, which see the Moscow Patriarchate as enslaved to the Russian State. The same is true for Russian churches in many other countries, where the Moscow Patriarchate, as a Soviet-era institution, is still in the grip of Soviet centralisation and, as a post-Soviet institution, is in the grip of oligarchic Business. Most Russian Orthodox churches outside Russia also want freedom, autocephaly, from the now nationalist Moscow Patriarchate, not just those in the Ukraine.

All those that received autocephaly from Moscow in the last century, in Poland and in Czechoslovakia and in the OCA in North America (even if the last case is disputed), are pleased to be outside Moscow’s control. So are most Orthodox in Latvia now, even if its autocephaly was uncanonically given it by the Latvian government (again, exactly as in Poland in the 1920s (2))! In Lithuania and Estonia, Orthodox are in great difficulty, as both have schisms, and, as in the Ukraine, this is because Moscow refused to give autocephaly in time, in the 1990s. One post-Revolutionary émigré fragment of the Moscow Patriarchate, the very Moscow-critical, very independent and very Western Archdiocese of Western Europe is also in great difficulty, because it does not have autocephaly and is at present trying to get another three bishops consecrated, but it needs Moscow’s approval. It may not get it.

Another post-Revolutionary emigre fragment, ROCOR, in New York, has done exactly the opposite to the above Archdiocese group, in quite suicidal fashion. Between 1927 and 2007 it had total independence, de facto autocephaly, from Moscow and canonised the New Martyrs and New Confessors. That was an act of spiritual courage and of independence, though it was not strictly canonical, as Moscow had not granted it permission to be autocephalous and canonise saints on its territory.

However, in 2007 an act of canonical unity between Moscow and ROCOR was agreed and signed. I was there. That was good, because it legitimised ROCOR independence and its acts, which previously had been disputed. However, tragically and dramatically, instead of using that de facto and de jure independence and freedom, ROCOR renounced it and came to enslave itself to Moscow. After exactly a decade of missed golden opportunities, since precisely 2017, the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, that spiritual unity has become a purely political union with the Moscow Patriarchate, exactly as Patriarch Kyrill quite specifically described it to a Russian Metropolitan friend in 2018.

As a result of this spiritual surrender six years ago, ROCOR decided to agree to anything that Soviet Centralising Moscow and post-Soviet oligarchic Business Moscow wants. The dollar above Christ. ROCOR has been bought out by money. The more gifts that were accepted, the less freedom it had. Even more tragically, it was not forced into this sell-out by Moscow, it was its own voluntary choice after ten years. What happened? Sadly, seeing how luxuriously the bishops lived in Moscow, they wanted the same. So they sold themselves. At one time ROCOR bishops lived as poor and humble monks. They, all gone now, must be spinning in their graves. How are the once (spiritually) mighty fallen….

Thus, ROCOR has lost its heritage of spiritual freedom and independence. And therefore it will not last much longer, for God is not mocked. Its sectarian extremism and nationalism, that is, the exclusion of all other Orthodox, including Ukrainians, will not last long where it is, outside Russia, in the Diaspora. The Diaspora is unkind to inward-looking, racially exclusive and extremist ghettos. The old humble ROCOR of saintly confessors has been replaced by the ethos of a right-wing American missionary sect, remarkably similar to the Mormons. This is completely alien to others and to all normal Orthodox, Serbian, Bulgarian, Moldovan, Romanian, Greek, who simply ignore it, which is not difficult, as ROCOR is so small. Byzantine-rite Mormonism only attracts the few, the wrong sort, the right-wing sectarian, the negative, not the many, the positive, on whom you can build. Such sectarianism does not export to territories outside the USA, where ROCOR is dying out in one suicidal act after another, from France to South America, from Indonesia to England.

Q: You sacrificed fifty years of your life for the unity of the Russian Orthodox Church, so how do you feel now that you are outside it and it is falling apart?

A: Well, that is not true. I am not outside it. I am in spiritual unity with the suffering Russian Church of the Saints and the New Martyrs and Confessors. I am only outside the Soviet-style administration, which, by the way, has always admired the immensely rich Vatican, like the Statist Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad, whom we remember dying in the arms of the Pope in 1978. This is because it has always admired the mentality of the State-Church or rather the Church-State. Power and riches. Such a view of the Church as a mere political administration based on power and riches does not have any canonical authority, just as forced episcopal signatures have no canonical authority.

As regards sacrificing my life, more exactly I have given fifty years of my life for the Orthodox Church in the Diaspora. In the 1970s and early 1980s I saw the Church of Constantinople reject a future for Orthodoxy by preferring nationalism and politics to transmitting the Tradition to others and to future generations. Now I have seen the Russian Church do the same, with its nationalism and politics, and so it is falling apart. If it continues, the only clergy that will be left are money-minded careerists who have little or no faith. Too bad for them. You cannot impose freedom on those who prefer tyranny, as we know from Dostoyevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. There are those who do not want the Truth to set them free….

However, the Russian Church can fall apart positively, in the sense that it can unburden itself of its Soviet-style centralist administration and instead become a Family or Confederation of free Churches. Fortunately, there are other Orthodox, those of the spirit of the persecuted St Seraphim of Sarov, of the persecuted St Nectarios of Pentapolis, of the persecuted St John of Shanghai, of the persecuted Elder Nikolai (Guryanov), of the New Martyrs and Confessors. Long ago we committed ourselves to them and we will not renounce them and their spirit. We belong to the Persecuted Church, not to the Persecuting Church.

Q: But aren’t you frightened of what those Russians have tried to do to you?

A: St Paisios the Athonite, whom I met on Athos in 1979, said: ‘Believe in God and fear nothing’ (Πίστη στο Θεό και να μην φοβάστε τίποτα). That is what I have always done, come grasping greed, secret atheists, nationalist bureaucrats, modernists, ecumenists, freemasons, covid lockdown enforcers, perverts, spies and schismatic right-wing neophytes. We have seen all these enemies of the Church in power in Her administration from Judas until this very day, but the Church has always triumphed and will always triumph against all these extremists. Fear not!

Q: So does the Moscow Patriarchate have any future?

A: No, as such it does not. It has become a straitjacket and several conscientious priests are leaving it. As I said, the great loser in the conflict in the Ukraine is undoubtedly the Moscow Patriarchate, regardless of who wins militarily. It has lost credit and those clergy who have backed war have lost face. They are seen as militant nationalists, whose spirit is that of that very strange, nationalist, khaki-painted Cathedral of the Armed Forces of Russia, near Moscow (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/20/orthodox-cathedral-of-the-armed-force-russian-national-identity-military-disneyland).

The Moscow Patriarchate has already lost a range of territories, the Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and is now losing Moldova and its Western Diaspora, and in a few years’ time most probably Belarus and Central Asia too, all through politics. It has not followed the Gospel. If you do not follow the Gospel, you will die spiritually. That is the spiritual law. It happens to them all. I have seen it so often over the last fifty years and recently here too. It is spiritual suicide not to follow the Gospel and to attack those in the Church who have integrity.

However, here we have to distinguish carefully between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church. The former is a purely Soviet and post-Soviet institution, like the émigré fragments in Paris and in New York, whose existence was also shaped by the Soviet Union, though by reaction. It is a historical blip, a temporary administrative arrangement that began in 1925 after the death (by poisoning?) of the holy Patriarch Tikhon, whose signatures were also forced. In 50 years’ time, the Moscow Patriarchate will no longer exist. In fact, I do not think any of these three fragments will exist even in 25 years’ time. In fact, I sometimes wonder if they will still exist even in two years’ time, in 2025. On the other hand, the Russian Orthodox Church with its thousand-year history of saints most certainly does have a future. It will continue to be by far the largest of the to-be-extended family of Local Orthodox Churches, even though autocephaly must go to its parts in the Ukraine, Central Asia (based in Kazakhstan), Moldova (if it is not too late – see below) and the Baltics, at the very least. The number of Local Orthodox Churches could then hit 20.

The Diaspora

Q: If they happened, how would such a series of new autocephalies affect the Diaspora?

A: We can already see the effect. The UOC has opened over 40 parishes in Western Europe and will open more. Why? Because Ukrainian refugees refuse to attend churches where Patriarch Kyrill is commemorated. Those Ukrainians who cannot go to their church in London come to us, as we are politically independent, unlike the Moscow Patriarchate and its ROCOR branch. If the Ukraine becomes autocephalous, Orthodox from Moldova and the Baltics will surely also open their own Diaspora churches.

On the one hand, this fragmentation is negative, because it further fragments the Diaspora, destroying the once multinational but now nationalist Moscow Patriarchate Exarchate of Western Europe, based in Paris (whose members are mainly Moldovan, Baltic or Ukrainian anyway). On the other hand, once the Diaspora is cleansed of the US-driven politics of Constantinople and the politics of the old-fashioned Soviet Centralist Moscow and post-Soviet oligarchic Business Moscow, some kind of Diaspora unity can be achieved, a unity which could never have been seen before. Diaspora disunity only ever existed because of politics. Diaspora unity will only ever exist because it will be free of politics.

Both the Greek and Russian Patriarchs are elderly. We await the new generation. God willing, there will be a reversal of policies and a great cleansing from the corruption and perversions which come from power and the love of money, with that taste for luxury products and big black cars.

Q: As you have so many Moldovan parishioners and clergy, how would the existence of an autocephalous Moldovan Church outside Moldova affect you?

A: Politically, Romanian-speaking Moldovans do not want to join Romania, despite the very unpopular US puppet government there. If it joins the EU (as long as the EU still exists), it will join it as an independent country. However, I think it is much more likely that Moldova, together with Turkiye, Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania and Montenegro, followed by Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus once freed from the EU, will join BRICS, the Planetary Alliance of Sovereign States (PASS), or whatever it will be called by then.

This would make a south-east European bloc within BRICS, reuniting that group of countries economically. This will pave the way for the other European countries to leave the doomed and collapsing EU, a temporary post-1945 organisation, and also enter BRICS. We have to go towards the future, not the past. This means economic integration and so political co-operation between Europe and Asia, Eurasia, led by Russia, China, Iran and India, which is inevitable.

However, whatever the politics, given that the Moscow Patriarchate refuses outright to give the Moldovan Church autocephaly, ever more Moldovan parishes are now leaving the Moldovan Church of the Moscow Patriarchate for the Moldovan Church of the Romanian Patriarchate. This latter group, for now called the ‘Metropolia of Bessarabia’, carefully observes all Moldovan customs and keeps the old calendar. It now has some 25% of all Moldovan Orthodox in Moldova. Its bishops are monks.

The movement to it is accelerating rapidly because of the conflict in the Ukraine, because of Moscow’s centralisation, because of corruption, and because of the mistreatment of Moldovans in the Diaspora under the ever more Russian nationalist Moscow Patriarchate. Nobody wants to be treated as a second-class citizen, neither Moldovans, nor English.

The only areas of Moldova where there is loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate is the almost wholly Soviet Transdnistria and the autonomous pro-Russian Gagauz region (the total population of both regions is about 500,000, with an area similar to a large English county). These will join the Russian Federation anyway.

What is possible is that the many Moldovan parishes and their clergy (70 in Italy alone) in Western Europe may leave the Moscow Patriarchate and open some kind of autonomous Moldovan/Bessarabian Archdiocese under the Romanian Church in the Diaspora. The Romanian Orthodox Church outside Romania is now the largest Diaspora Church, with well over five million people, nearly 1500 parishes and over 70 monasteries and convents. Whatever its weaknesses, it dwarves the Russian and the Greek Diasporas, let alone the other Diasporas, which are relatively very small. The Romanian Diaspora is not dying out like them, but is full of young people and children. If the Moldovans join this Diaspora, as an autonomous old calendar Archdiocese under the Romanian Church in the Diaspora, it will grow even bigger.

However, a word of warning. In my lifetime I have already seen two Churches die out. The first was ROCOR in England. I remember how 40 years ago its large London Cathedral (it now has a very small church instead) was full, with 400 people every Sunday; however, the average age was about 80. They have all gone. Today, apart from a few strange converts, ROCOR is populated by those from the ex-Soviet Union who have no ROCOR tradition, the old emigres have all gone. It died out because the old emigres totally failed to hand on their faith to their descendants.

Now, 40 years on, I see the same in the Greek Church. One parish in London that used to get at least 800 people every Sunday even 30 years ago is now down to 30. The average age is also 80. The same problem. Almost the only children in Greek churches in London are Romanian/Moldovan. However, what will happen in 40 years’ time to the Romanians and Moldovans? Will their children and grandchildren fill their churches or will they too be virtually empty?

The Romanian language does have two advantages:  It is a Latin language and it uses the Latin alphabet. As such it is much closer to Western languages in terms of vocabulary and alphabet than Greek and Russian. But that is not enough. The faith has to be transmitted to the next generations. I already do baptisms completely in English for the children of Romanians and Moldovans who came here as children twenty years ago. I have spoken to our bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, about this reality, but as a pastor he is already well aware. For the moment in England there are only four Non-Romanian priests, those of our group. In France and Belgium, however, he has in his Autonomous Metropolia one French bishop and 15 French priests. So there is hope.

 

Notes:

  1. Below are quotations from an account of the history of the Roman Empire some 2,000 years ago. Do they sound familiar? The contemporary oligarchic American Empire comes immediately to mind…..

Might is right and military power is the only international law. The …… had no problem demolishing whatever stood in their way.

Those who opposed ……. domination, and who tried to defend the traditional values of their own people, faced a double enemy: the one without and the one within.

Robber, slaughter and plunder they misname ‘Empire’; they make a wilderness and call it peace.

They were offered …. citizenship, so long as they had enough money and an urban residence.

The unsuspecting Non- ….. spoke of these new habits as civilisation, when in fact they were only a feature of enslavement.

In this way, the 10% of ….. who lived in the cities exploited the 90% who lived outside.

The name of …… citizens, at one time not only greatly valued but dearly bought, is now repudiated and fled from, and it is almost considered not only base but even deserving of abhorrence.

When it came to institutionalised cruelty on an industrial scale, the ……. could teach the others a thing or two.

He makes it quite clear that ………’s objective was the enslavement of the world.

The ideology of that Empire was an ideology of power and world dominance.

….. established its Empire by destroying other civilisations.

……. lived behind frontiers, and what lay beyond was dangerous. That applied as much to their mental world as to their geography.

The Empire was, by this time, an economic basket-case. The machine had to keep feeding itself with plunder.

It’s surprsing his name is not better known in the West. But then, in the West it is only the ….. version of events that counts, and that does not include successful enemies.

….. needed to build an ideology that encouraged people to see their rulers not just as overlords, but as the defenders of civilised values, and they knew a thing or two about propaganda.

…… emphasised its transcendent magisterial authority, its right to judge the living and the dead and to determine people’s fate for all eternity.

  1. https://www.rocorstudies.org/2023/05/30/autocephaly-and-principles-of-its-application-with-reference-to-the-church-of-poland/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=demo-newsletter_1

 

 

 

 

 

The Spiritual Significance of the American-Inspired Conflict in the Ukraine

Introduction: Two Civilisations

The tragic Moscow-Washington war which is currently starting to come to an end after nine years on the battlefields of the Ukraine, where very many Ukrainian men are dying in futility, will continue for another year. The Western arming of the Kiev regime which has prolonged the war by years is the result of the attempt by the Western world to expand eastwards in yet another ‘Drang nach Osten’. Once more the West crossed over the civilisational line which runs through the far west of what is at present called the Ukraine, more exactly Galicia, formerly part of south-eastern Poland, formerly part of the ill-fated Habsburg Empire, centred in Lemberg/Lviv/Lvov. That line separates Western Secularist Civilisation from Orthodox Christian Civilisation. It is a civilisational line which should not be crossed. When France and its allies crossed it by invading what was then the Russian Empire in 1812, it led straight to the downfall of Napoleon. When Austro-Hungary crossed it by invading Serbia in 1914, it caused World War I and, ultimately, the tragedy of 1917, when a Western atheist ideology was imposed by Non-Russians on the former Russian Empire and killed tens of millions.

When Nazi Germany crossed that line by invading what was then the USSR in 1941, it led it to its suicidal downfall, the destruction of Berlin, and to lose World War II. After Washington crossed that same line by overthrowing the democratically-elected Ukrainian government in 2014, Washington suicidally signed the death-warrant of its own US-run, dollar-driven, unipolar Western world. For the centre of Western Secularism is today the American Empire elite  in Washington (however much it disguises itself with euphemisms like the EU, NATO, the G7, the ‘free world’, the ‘international community’, the ‘rules-based order’ etc). And the centre of Orthodox Christian Civilisation (however far it has fallen, lapsed and been deformed and divided) is still in Moscow. Whenever Western Secularism, as ever inspired by the Pagan Roman example, has tried to expand eastwards in order to steal land and exploit resources, whether it was under Charlemagne, the Teutonic Knights, the Poles, Charles XII, Napoleon, Hitler or Biden, it has failed. Such is the case again today. Some people never learn.

The Double Tragedy

Nevertheless, however much we reject Western Secularism, that does not mean that today’s post-Soviet Orthodox Christian world or post-American Orthodox Christian world are to be accepted. Far from it. They are both deeply compromised and flawed, politically dependent on Non-Orthodox Christian mentalities. For a long time those in the Western world who found their spiritual home in Orthodox Christianity and wished to join the Orthodox Church would join one of two Local Churches, either the Russian, whose centre is the Patriarchate of Moscow, or else the Greek, whose centre is the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Neither is very attractive today because neither is free of a secular mentality.

The tragedy of today’s Patriarchate of Moscow is that it has voluntarily become politically dependent on the post-Soviet mentality. Although much of what it does is Orthodox in intention, it still operates in a Soviet way. Hence the strange mixture. Thus, it has gone from being a multinational Church in a multinational country (the USSR) to becoming a multinational but also nationalist Church? That inherent contradiction is killing it. It is less and less attractive to all Non-Russians. The tragedy of today’s Patriarchate of Constantinople is that its leadership has gone from being an Imperial Church to becoming over the last three generations a subsection of the US State Department mentality. Whatever that orders, the politicised Patriarchate in Istanbul agrees with. It is less and less attractive to Non-Greeks.

The Fall Into National Politics

Politicians were put in charge of the Church on earth. Not Churchmen. As a result, several of the Local Orthodox Churches are today riven by territorial, = political and national, disputes. However, the main dispute is that between precisely the Patriarchate of Moscow and the Patriarchate of Constantinople and concerns the territory of the Ukraine. Sadly, the two Patriarchates are not arguing about a territory where successful new missions have been working, they are arguing about a traditionally Orthodox, but today largely lapsed, territory. Sadly, neither are they arguing about who will restore to the Faith the largely lapsed people of that territory, but about to whom ecclesiastical jurisdiction over that largely lapsed people belongs. Meanwhile the actual Ukrainian Orthodox Church under Metropolitan Onufry, to which the faithful belong, is crushed by both sides.

That territory is also claimed by two different forms of Roman Catholicism, Greek and Latin, and a variety of Protestant sects. Little wonder that those two Patriarchates, that of the Russian Federation and that of Constantinople, are engaged in a conflict on Ukrainian territory. This Russo-American proxy war has been allowed by God as a punishment. All are unworthy of the Faith, so there is war, not peace. The conflict is meant to bring both sides, Ukrainian and Russian, back to their senses, for both sides suffer from the same disease of centralisation. This has infected these lands since the 17th century, when the Russian State began persecuting the Old Ritualists in order to impose conformity even to the point of tiny ritual detail. This disease worsened greatly during the Soviet period and since then both the post-Soviet Russian State and the post-Soviet Ukrainian State (the Ukrainian State is a purely Soviet invention) have persecuted minorities.

Nationalism

Today this centralisation essentially results in extreme nationalism. Thus, the Ukrainian State has as its slogan ‘Glory to the Ukraine’, not ‘Glory to God’. And the new nationalism of the Russian Orthodox Church, so far from the old multinational Russian Church of the Tsar’s age in which we were brought up, seems to be intent, consciously or unconsciously, on expelling from itself Non-Russians, and is even proud of such actions. Orthodox Russia has not been restored since the fall of the USSR. There is only post-Soviet Russia. The great tragedy is that the Russian Church, free from State interference, appears to want to take on itself the persecution of those who see a multinational future for the Church. However, a persecuting Church repels, whereas a persecuted Church attracts.

For example, one well-known Metropolitan of the Russian Church openly mocks the Ukrainian language as ‘a dialect’. As a result of such attitudes, even if the Russian State conquered the whole of the Ukraine (which it does not wish to do in any case), Ukrainians would still not attend churches where the name of the Patriarch of the Russian Federation, which is what he has become, is commemorated. Church-going is voluntary. No Non-Russian in the Ukraine is voluntarily going to attend a Russian church any longer, especially if his country has been at war with Russia and his compatriots, however misled, have been killed. In Latvia that Patriarch is already no longer commemorated – by order of the State. In Lithuania several priests have left the Moscow Patriarchate, as in Estonia nearly thirty years ago. How long before Western countries also ban churches which commemorate the Patriarch of Moscow?

Decentralisation

https://spzh.news/en/news/73915-cypriot-hierarch-moscow-should-have-granted-autocephaly-to-uoc-long-ago

Centralisation is voluntary; the Russian State did not force the Church administration to centralise. The two main parts of the Russian Church both had the freedom to proposed a decentralised and multinational future, both in the former USSR and outside it, and openly rejected it, choosing a sectarian future. What we have said also applies equally to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, whose stifling centralism caused so many divisions in history and already in ancient times was in part responsible for the departure of the Copts and the Armenians, as well as the peoples of Western Europe, from the Church. The Church is not a centralised State, but a Family or Confederation of Churches. The Apostle Paul wrote not to a Centralised Church, but to different local Churches, in Corinth, Thessalonica, Philippi, Ephesus, Rome etc. This follows the principle of the Incarnation, that the Church is incarnate locally.

Indeed, several Local Churches have been or still are involved in disputes about the territories they control. These territories include all the former Catholic and Protestant countries of Europe, except for Poland, but including Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. However, these territories also include the Ukraine, Moldova, possibly still North Macedonia and potentially Belarus. Here we do not mention Africa, the Americas, Oceania, as well as Asia, outside the Russian Federation, Georgia and the territories of the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem, which are also in dispute. Essentially, none of these disputes are about geographical problems, but spiritual problems. In reality, those who have spiritual food to give to the people will control any territory in question, not those who pretentiously claim and bully.

Conclusion: The Holy Trinity

In this month, when the post-Soviet Russian State has at long last handed back the Icon of the Holy Trinity, painted by St Andrei (Rubliov), to the Church, surely it is time to begin implementing the unity in diversity, which is the Holy Trinity, into Church life. We await the liberation of the Church from narrow nationalism, in order to lead the whole Orthodox Christian world into freedom, cleansing and deposing unworthy clerics – money-minded businessmen, protocolish bureaucrats, embittered homosexuals and convert schismatics, and rejecting their purely political decisions, which they cloak in their purely political interpretations of the canons

The latter appear for the moment to have taken over the administration of these two Local Churches of Moscow and Constantinople because there has been no-one, no international Synod and no Council, to keep the order of Catholicity. This is apocalyptic, for if this situation continues and no-one brings order on earth because we continue to be unworthy of it, then Christ Himself will come down again from heaven, just as He promised, and end it all. Then there will be a new heaven and a new earth, because of the best efforts of Satan to close churches and destroy mankind, which are so apparent just now. But our God is great because He works miracles.

 

 

Prophetic Views: After World War Three

Introduction: Conditions for Peace in the Ukraine

The present head in Kiev, born in the eastern Ukrainian Krivij Rih in early 1978 and who still speaks Ukrainian badly, is a ‘co-religionist’ (= atheist) of one who was born almost exactly 100 years earlier, some 350 km to the north in Ukrainian Yanovka. He was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, also called Trotsky. Both were sent to foment war in the Russian Lands by the elite of the USA and Great Britain. Indeed, Bronstein died in North America, as his successor may also do.

In an interview with RTVI on 29 March, as also reported on the English-language Pravda website, the Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Mikhail Galuzin, stated that the conflict in the Ukraine can be resolved, but that there are eight conditions (1). These are:

  1. The West must stop supplying weapons to the Armed Forces of the Ukraine (the Kiev Army).
  2. All armed forces must cease hostilities.
  3. All foreign mercenaries must be withdrawn from the Ukraine.
  4. Kiev must renounce any ambition to join NATO and the EU
  5. Kiev must confirm its non-nuclear status
  6. Kiev and foreign governments must recognise the territorial realities that the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, Zaporozhye and Kherson, not to mention the Crimea, are now part of the Russian Federation.
  7. Kiev must restore its contractual and legal situation with the Russian Federation and the civilian infrastructure that it has destroyed since 2014 must be restored at the expense of the West, which was responsible for it.
  8. Kiev and the West must lift all anti-Russian sanctions, withdraw lawsuits, cease legal proceedings against Russia, Russian persons and juridical entities.

So speak the politicians, but what do the men of God say?

The Third World War and the Prophecies of the Saints and Elders

For us it is clear that we are in World War Three and have been for some time. True, some consider that there has only ever been one World War, but in three parts. This generational World War Three, or, as some would have it, World War One, Part III, began in 2014 in Kiev. It broke out on the centenary of World War One (Part I), which effectively began in Sarajevo in 1914, and 75 years ago there was World War Two (Part II), which effectively began in Warsaw in 1939. All of these Wars began further and further to the east, as a result of the Western world’s aggressive expansion eastwards.

Since 2014 the world has been facing a financial crisis, whose roots go back to 2008 and in fact well before, as well as facing the genocide launched by the US-installed Kiev regime and then the global control attempt with the genetically engineered and then leaked covid-19 virus. World War One lasted over four years, World War Two nearly six. If World War Three ends in 2024 as many think, it will have lasted for ten years, the same length as both previous World Wars combined. The prophecies which foretold all these things are, like all prophecies, conditional. Negative prophecies come about because of lack of repentance, positive prophecies come about because of repentance. If there is only lukewarmness towards them, then the timings of the prophecies expand like elastic, which is why the times are always vague, as in the Book of Revelation, for whose fulfilment we have been waiting for nearly 2,000 years.

Many recent and canonised saints from the Russian Lands have prophesied today’s events. Among the saints are Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833), John of Kronstadt (1829-1908), Seraphim of Vyritsa (1866-1949), Laurence of Chernigov (1868-1950), Kuksha of Odessa (1875-1964), John of Shanghai (1896-1966) and Amphilochy of Pochayev (1894-1971). Among the elders, as yet uncanonised, are Fr Tavrion Batozsky (1898-1978), Seraphim Tyapochkin (1894-1982), Christopher Nikolsky (1905-1996) Nikolai Guryanov (1909-2002), Zosima Sokur (1944-2002) and Iona Ignatenko (1925-2012).

All these speak of a Tsar who is coming, some say as the successor to President Putin. It is said that he will lead Russia after World War Three is over. It is said that he already lives in Russia and knows his destiny. Fr Seraphim Tyapochkin, whose blessing I received in Russia in 1976, said that any in Belarus and the Ukraine who oppose Russia are ‘servants of the devil’. He also said that the monks of the Kiev Caves Monastery, under threat of expulsion as I write, also have ‘a weighty word to say and will pray and obtain from God the union of the three brother-peoples’.

Schema-Archimandrite (a title denoting a senior monk) Christopher (Nikolsky) of Tula prophesied of the early 1990s after the collapse of the USSR and the freedom obtained by the Church that: ‘They will adorn the churches. But that will be unnecessary, only prayer is necessary….Open the churches so you can pray. That is all! There is no need to decorate them from top to bottom. That is just a Satanic temptation, we do not need that, we are Orthodox Christians, we need everything that is simpler. We must save our souls, and all that beauty is unnecessary….That luxury is unnecessary, we need prayer, we need salvation’ (2).

This Elder greatly venerated Tsar Nicholas II and his Family and in the 1980s foretold that they would be canonised: ‘The Tsar and his irreproachable servants suffered for us, washing Russia in their blood….The people will pay because we betrayed him’. ‘Gregory Rasputin was a great, great man of God. He will be canonised together with the Tsar and the Tsarevich. He was honourable and great before God; he was slandered’. ‘Russia will prosper, there will be a new Tsar, Russia will rise from the dead and free itself from this Satanic infection…but all depends on our repentance, collective repentance…without repentance a Tsar will not come…before then there will be wars…they want to trample underfoot the Orthodox faith and rub it out into dust…After 2008 time will fly, a year will be like a month, after 2008 be especially humble…Orthodoxy will be gathered together from the splinters and go on its way’.

As for Elder Tavrion, well-known to a close priest-friend, he said: ‘The Church (by this he meant the episcopate) consciously betrayed the Tsar. (This is a fact). It was on the side of the enemy – the crucifiers of Christ….The Tsar bought back Russia through his suffering and death. But Russia will for long reject him. Many bishops will be against his veneration, but after a time they will nevertheless glorify him, but they will not glorify him as he is glorified by God in heaven….but the time will come when the people, not many, will glorify him as is needed…then all will fall down in front of him and weep and ask for forgiveness…and then Russia will rise up from its chains’.

Conclusion

Years ago it was foretold that a worldwide war was coming, a universal revolt, sicknesses and famine, but that the Russian Lands will again be led by a still unknown Tsar and he is already carrying his Cross of service. Elder Nicholas (Guryanov), the saint of the Pskov Lake, called himself the Tsar’s priest, as do many others among us and we indeed have our Tsar’s passports ready. We are soldiers of the future Tsar, still implementing the martyred Tsar’s wishes for the spread of Orthodoxy, interrupted by the judases in 1917. And, as we know, St Seraphim of Sarov prophesied the same 200 years ago.

Even though over a century ago apostate Russians betrayed their Tsar, a betrayal that began at the very top, among the Romanov Family, aristocrats, most bishops of the Church, generals, lawyers, journalists and the professional classes, Russia still has not repented. On the Tsar’s feast day on 4/17 July, most churches are largely empty, icons are decorative but few venerate them. Russia is still asleep – hence this dread conflict in the Ukraine now. The Lord will keep us until the providential day when he appears and lays low our enemies, the enemies of the Church.

 

Notes:

  1. https://english.pravda.ru/news/hotspots/156198-russia_paceful_settlement_ukraine/
  2. Here by ‘adornment’ the holy elder refers to the effeminate decadence with gold and marble that came in to fashion with oligarchs’ money after the fall of the USSR and the homosexual episcopate, which was also prophesied by the Apostle Paul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Capital of the Multipolar World

A Moscow Diary

PEPE ESCOBAR • MARCH 30, 2023

In Moscow you feel no crisis. No effects of sanctions. No unemployment. No homeless people in the streets. Minimal inflation.

How sharp was Lenin, prime modernist, when he mused, “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”. This global nomad now addressing you has enjoyed the privilege of spending four astonishing weeks in Moscow at the heart of an historical crossroads – culminating with the Putin-Xi geopolitical game-changing summit at the Kremlin.

To quote Xi, “changes that haven’t been seen in 100 years” do have a knack of affecting us all in more ways than one.

James Joyce, another modernity icon, wrote that we spend our lives meeting average and/or extraordinary people, on and on and on, but in the end we’re always meeting ourselves. I have had the privilege of meeting an array of extraordinary people in Moscow, guided by trusted friends or by auspicious coincidence: in the end your soul tells you they enrich you and the overarching historical moment in ways you can’t even begin to fathom.

Here are some of them. The grandson of Boris Pasternak, a gifted young man who teaches Ancient Greek at Moscow State University. A historian with unmatched knowledge of Russian history and culture. The Tajik working class huddling together in a chaikhana with the proper ambience of Dushanbe.

Chechens and Tuvans in awe doing the loop in the Big Central Line. A lovely messenger sent by friends extremely careful about security matters to discuss issues of common interest. Exceptionally accomplished musicians performing underground in Mayakovskaya. A stunning Siberian princess vibrant with unbounded energy, taking that motto previously applied to the energy industry – Power of Siberia – to a whole new level.

A dear friend took me to Sunday service at the Devyat Muchenikov Kizicheskikh church, the favorite of Peter the Great: the quintessential purity of Eastern Orthodoxy. Afterwards the priests invited us for lunch in their communal table, displaying not only their natural wisdom but also an uproarious sense of humor.

At a classic Russian apartment crammed with 10,000 books and with a view to the Ministry of Defense – plenty of jokes included – Father Michael, in charge if Orthodox Christianity relations with the Kremlin, sang the Russian imperial anthem after an indelible night of religious and cultural discussions.

I had the honor to meet some of those who were particularly targeted by the imperial machine of lies. Maria Butina – vilified by the proverbial “spy who came in from the cold” shtick – now a deputy at the Duma. Viktor Bout – which pop culture metastasized into the “Lord of War”, complete with Nic Cage movie: I was speechless when he told me he was reading me in maximum security prison in the USA, via pen drives sent by his friends (he had no internet access). The indefatigable, iron-willed Mira Terada – tortured when she was in a U.S. prison, now heading a foundation protecting children caught in hard times.

I spent much treasured quality time and engaged in invaluable discussions with Alexander Dugin – the crucial Russian of these post-everything times, a man of pure inner beauty, exposed to unimaginable suffering after the terrorist assassination of Darya Dugina, and still able to muster a depth and reach when it comes to drawing connections across the philosophy, history and history of civilizations spectrum that is virtually unmatched in the West.

On the offensive against Russophobia

And then there were the diplomatic, academic and business meetings. From the head of international investor relations of Norilsk Nickel to Rosneft executives, not to mention the EAEU’s Sergey Glazyev himself, side by side with his top economic adviser Dmitry Mityaev, I was given a crash course on the current A to Z of Russian economy – including serious problems to be addressed.

At the Valdai Club, what really mattered were the meetings on the sidelines, much more than the actual panels: that’s when Iranians, Pakistanis, Turks, Syrians, Kurds, Palestinians, Chinese tell you what is really in their hearts and minds.

The official launch of the International Movement of Russophiles was a special highlight of these four weeks. A special message written by President Putin was read by Foreign Minister Lavrov, who then delivered his own speech. Later, at the House of Receptions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, four of us were received by Lavrov at a private audience. Future cultural projects were discussed. Lavrov was extremely relaxed, displaying his matchless sense of humor.

This is a cultural as much as a political movement, designed to fight Russophobia and to tell the Russian story, in all its immensely rich aspects, especially to the Global South.

I am a founding member and my name is on the charter. In my nearly four decades as a foreign correspondent, I have never been part of any political/cultural movement anywhere in the world; nomad independents are a fierce breed. But this is extremely serious: the current, irredeemably mediocre self-described “elites” of the collective West want no less than cancel Russia all across the spectrum. No pasarán. They shall not pass.

Spirituality, compassion, mercy

Decades happening in only four weeks imply precious time needed to put it all in perspective.

The initial gut feeling the day I arrived, after a seven-hour walk under snow flurries, was confirmed: this is the capital of the multipolar world. I saw it among the West Asians at the Valdai. I saw it talking to visiting Iranians, Turks and Chinese. I saw it when over 40 African delegations took over the whole area around the Duma – the day Xi arrived in town. I saw it throughout the reception across the Global South to what Xi and Putin are proposing to the overwhelming majority of the planet.

In Moscow you feel no crisis. No effects of sanctions. No unemployment. No homeless people in the streets. Minimal inflation. Import substitution in all areas, especially agriculture, has been a resounding success. Supermarkets have everything – and more – compared to the West. There’s an abundance of first-rate restaurants. You can buy a Bentley or a Loro Pianna cashmere coat you can’t even find in Italy. We laughed about it chatting with managers at the TSUM department store. At the BiblioGlobus bookstore, one of them told me, “We are the Resistance.”

By the way, I had the honor to deliver a talk on the war in Ukraine at the coolest bookshop in town, Bunker, mediated by my dear friend, immensely knowledgeable Dima Babich. A huge responsibility. Especially because Vladimir L. was in the audience. He’s Ukrainian, and spent 8 years, up to 2022, telling it like it really was to Russian radio, until he managed to leave – after being held at gunpoint – using an internal Ukrainian passport. Later we went to a Czech beer hall where he detailed his extraordinary story.

In Moscow, their toxic ghosts are always lurking in the background. Yet one cannot but feel sorry for the psycho Straussian neocons and neoliberal-cons who now barely qualify as Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski’s puny orphans.

In the late 1990s, Brzezinski pontificated that, “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical center because its very existence as an independent state helps transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

With or without a demilitarized and denazified Ukraine, Russia has already changed the narrative. This is not about becoming a Eurasian empire again. This is about leading the long, complex process of Eurasia integration – already in effect – in parallel to supporting true, sovereign independence across the Global South.

I left Moscow – the Third Rome – towards Constantinople – the Second Rome – one day before Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev gave a devastating interview to Rossiyskaya Gazeta once again outlining all the essentialities inherent to the NATO vs. Russia war.

This is what particularly struck me: “Our centuries-old culture is based on spirituality, compassion and mercy. Russia is a historical defender of sovereignty and statehood of any peoples who turned to it for help. She saved the U.S. itself at least twice, during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. But I believe that this time it is impractical to help the United States maintain its integrity.”

In my last night, before hitting a Georgian restaurant, I was guided by the perfect companion off Pyatnitskaya to a promenade along the Moscow River, beautiful rococo buildings gloriously lighted, the scent of Spring – finally – in the air. It’s one of those “Wild Strawberry” moments out of Bergman’s masterpiece that hits the bottom of our soul. Like mastering the Tao in practice. Or the perfect meditative insight at the top of the Himalayas, the Pamirs or the Hindu Kush.

So the conclusion is inevitable. I’ll be back. Soon.

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation by permission of author or representative)

 

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.