Category Archives: Russia

Questions and Answers from Lent 2018: A Compendium

Q: Is it true that after the fall of the Soviet Union, Communism was replaced by Orthodoxy?

A: If only it were so! The rotten fruit of Communism (in which probably no-one any longer believed, except for old people and some in a few remote provinces), was 95% replaced by Mammonism, what is called Western consumerism, and 5% by living (and not nominal) Orthodoxy. This is no surprise, since it took Communism three generations to destroy 95% of Orthodoxy. As I have said many times over the last 27 years since the fall of Communism, it will take three generations to restore Orthodoxy there even to the very low pre-Revolutionary level (unless there is a sudden miracle, which we are all praying for). And we do not want the level of before the Revolution, because that is precisely what caused the Revolution.

Orthodoxy then was marked by the betrayal of the aristocratic elite, whether liberal or conservative, who exploited the poor masses, and by mass nominalism, by Theological Academies which the ever-memorable Metr Antony of Kiev (himself slandered as a heretic by some of today’s ‘Orthodox’ academics!) called ‘the graves of Orthodoxy’, by seminaries with thieves like Stalin in them, by simony, ambition, careerism and by priests who were not priests but ‘popy’. (418 such ‘priests’ actually defrocked themselves immediately after the Revolution, proving that they had no faith, but were just State civil servants, ritualists making money from the naïve). Mass Orthodoxy has not been restored in Russia because there has not yet been mass repentance. The Tsar and his followers are still slandered in the mass media and not least by notorious, pseudo-Orthodox academics in today’s Academies of Theology and seminaries. Careerism (often taking the form of ecumenism) and love of money have revived. Even the monastic revival only concerns only some 10,000.

There is very far to go. The spiritual disease of nominalism is rampant in today’s Russian Church. Only when another 100,000 churches have been built, superstition and ritualism are overcome, shopping malls are no longer built, people dress decently in the streets, abortion is outlawed, the education and health systems and the media reflect Orthodoxy, the State has returned to the Orthodox calendar and such righteous people as St Maria (Vyrubova) of Helsinki and Elder Nikolai (Guryanov) have been canonized, will we be able to say that ‘Communism was replaced by Orthodoxy’.

Q: Why are so many Eastern Europeans so passive as regards Church activities?

A: This is the fruit of Communism, State control, among many people. Many do not think that they are the Church – which they are. They expect everything to be done for them, by ‘professionals’, from clergy to paid choirs. Such nominal Orthodox think of the Church as a ‘show’, a piece of ‘theatre’, just like the aristocrats from before the Revolution.

Q: Do you agree that the main problem of Orthodox life in the Diaspora is the jurisdictions?

A: No, definitely not. Jurisdictions are just an effect, not the cause. The cause is the mentality of what I would call ‘clubbism’, which is the bane of the Church in the Diaspora. Yes, it is nice to be with the like-minded, but that is not what the Church is about. It is about the salvation of the soul from evil. Yes, I agree, in so-called Orthodox countries (they do not exist any more), you will find different sorts of parish in the same town and those parishes are sociologically defined, but in the Diaspora it is much worse. Thus in this country you can find parishes which are in fact Greek clubs (usually subdivided into Cypriot clubs, Cretan clubs and mainland Greek clubs), Romanian clubs, Russian clubs, Serbian clubs, ex-Anglican clubs, ex-Anglo-Catholic clubs, ex-sectarian clubs, liberal Anglican clubs, upper-middle class intellectual clubs etc. This bane of the Diaspora comes from the fact that people do not seek the Kingdom of God first, but put their own interests above it.

Q: Why did Christ say the words: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me’?

A: Until the time of Christ all human souls went down to Hades in death. Here they were held captive in torment. Thus, at death Christ in His human nature felt forsaken by God, for Hades is the place where God is not because He is rejected there. Thanks to Christ, Who, as sinless, the devil could not hold captive, all in Hades who accepted Christ’s message were freed. This is what we can see on icons of the Resurrection, Christ freeing humanity through Adam and Eve. This is what we mean by the harrowing of hell.

Q: What is the origin of the word Lent?

A: It is the Old English word for spring (‘lenctan’) and it means the period when the days lengthen – Lent and lengthen are the same word. However, already in ancient time it came to mean the spring fast. Lent therefore is the English for ‘the Great Fast’. This is why it is absurd to talk about ‘the Great Fast’, like Fr Alexander Schmemann did (English was his third language).

Q: Why is sitting with crossed legs or standing with your arms behind your back not acceptable in Orthodox churches?

A: Quite simply because such an attitude does not denote a prayerful attitude. We should stand with our arms by our sides.

Q: Can you see a visible difference between Patriarchal and ROCOR priests?

A: Yes, you often can, quite literally. The Patriarchate (like the Rue Daru jurisdiction also) hands out awards like confetti! It is a standing joke in Moscow about how grey-haired ROCOR priests have almost no awards, while Patriarchal priests, twenty years younger, are covered with them! Such are ROCOR bishops!

Q: What words would you like on your gravestone, apart from your name and date?

A: What an unusual question, though I think I was asked the same thing before. I would like the words: ‘The truth will set you free’.

Q: What is the first thing you have on Easter Night, once Lent is over?

A: A mug of milky tea.

 

The Future of the World and Crimeanization

President Putin won the second term of his second presidency by some 76% of the vote on a high turnout. It was no surprise and, as some noted, the hateful and slanderous anti-Russian campaign conducted by the British Establishment in the two weeks before the election no doubt helped him win by such a large margin (1). Apparently, for the anti-Christian British Establishment, which in its gross incompetence is taking five years instead of two to free the UK from EU tyranny as democracy asked, you are guilty until proven innocent. So President Putin’s popularity, unlike that of envious Western leaders, remains undimmed. However, what sort of challenge could Russia now have to meet?

The Russian Federation is a multinational land, by far the largest in the world, with ports leading to three oceans, the Pacific, the Arctic and the Atlantic, and to many seas. It is an Empire, but, tragically, a betrayed, ruined and sabotaged Empire, an Empire of lost territories and citizens cruelly separated from it, an Empire of martyrs – and so the leader of today’s Christian world. What is its geopolitical destiny? With huge and underpopulated territories, it could absorb Christian refugees from around the world before the end – its Polar Star could become a guiding star for those fleeing persecution. This is a calling, which we may call ‘Crimeanization’. What does this word mean?

Here we refer to 2014 when the Federation offered the people of the Crimea the chance in a free referendum to return to Russia, from which they had been forcibly separated by Communist tyranny sixty years before. They voted massively to do so, returning Russia in full to the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, the Dardanelles, the Mediterranean and so to the Holy Land and Jerusalem. Thus, the project to restore not just lost and devastated ancestral Russian Lands, but all Orthodox to the Christian Empire, beckons. The task of ‘Crimeanization’ means gathering together all who wish to join Russia voluntarily, not necessarily in a political union as the Crimea chose, but above all in a spiritual union.

At the present time the agents of anti-Christian States are filling the world with endless wars, murders, poisonings, plots, slanders, threats, depriving it of even the most basic spiritual and moral values. Russia today faces the task of cleansing this secularist cesspit, into which the world has been lowered since the tragedy of 1918, when the last Christian Emperor and his Family were slaughtered. If there is repentance, ‘Crimeanization’ means that Russia could become a beacon of hope for the spiritually persecuted, not just in Eastern Europe, or in the Western world, but on all continents. Russia could become a beacon, at one and the same time, of the grace of Tradition and of social justice.

The task of those who oppose the Church is to bring hell up to earth. This is what they have visibly been doing all over the world over the last hundred years. From the creation of World Wars and the slaughter and mutilation of hundreds of millions in them and in the abortion holocaust, to the creation of weapons that can annihilate all living things on earth, this is the task of the forces of hell. This is their preparation for the coming of Antichrist, so that he will feel at home on earth. However, the task of the Church of God, now centred in the multinational Russian Federation, is to bring heaven down to earth, in preparation for the Coming of Christ, Who will be victorious. Fear not!

Note:

1: In 2012 at the Russian Embassy in London only 22% of voters chose him; last Sunday 52% did so. Only in the Caucasus did turnout drop: from 99% to 92%.

 

 

 

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem…

Woe unto you, scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites!…All these things shall come upon this generation. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them who are sent to thee, how often I wanted to gather thy children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, but you did not want it!

Matthew 23, 29, 36 and 37

Just as he had promised before he was elected, President Trump has now recognized occupied Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State. His Modern Orthodox Jewish son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, and now Jewish daughter, Ivanka, are pleased. The rest of the world is in consternation and in the Arab world violence can be expected. Let us not forget that in Jerusalem in November 2016 the revived Sanhedrin sent President Trump and President Putin a petition about the restoration of the Third Temple. The Sanhedrin press spokesman, Rabbi Gideon Weiss, said at the time that the election of Mr Trump had made the dream of restoring the Temple a reality. He added that ‘the American and Russian leaders could lead the peoples of ‘the global world’ to peace by building the Temple’.

Meanwhile, in the centre of ‘the Christian world’, a Council of nearly 400 Orthodox patriarchs and bishops in the main ‘Temple’ of Moscow, attended by all the Local Orthodox Churches except for Constantinople and Greece who refused to attend (more Local Churches than attended the so-called ‘Council of Crete’ in 2016), has just concluded. The Council was addressed by President Putin, the first time in over 300 years that a Patriarchal Council has been addressed by a Russian leader. The President then met the leaders of the Local Churches, like a new Constantine, the first Christian Emperor. President Putin appears as the protector of the whole Orthodox world, and has just won back Syria through defeating terrorism there and co-operating closely with the regional powers, Turkey and Iran.

After the Moscow Council, which commemorated the centenary of the restoration of the Russian Patriarchate, so much worked for by Metr Antony (Khrapovitsky), and so gathered the Orthodox children together, Patriarch Theophil (the name means ‘friend of God’) of Jerusalem is today visiting the city of Ekaterinburg. Today is St Catherine’s day and the name of the city means ‘Catherine’s fortress’. It is also of course the place of martyrdom of the last Christian Emperor, Nicholas II. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the prominent ‘friend of God’ and pious Orthodox layman, Konstantin Malofeev, has stated that just as 100 years ago those who sought the restoration of the Patriarchate to resist the coming atheist onslaught were victorious, so we too ‘must convince contemporary Russian society that if Russia is to remain a sovereign country, the restoration of Tsardom is just as indispensible’.

He that has ears to hear, let him hear.

 

A Message on the Tragedy of 1917 from the English Borderlands of Holy Rus

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

When Will the Russian Federation Become the Empire of Rus?

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

Elder Nikolai Gurianov

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The War We Wage for our Christian Empire of Holy Rus

On the centenary of the 1917 Western-organized coup d’etat which overthrew the Christian Empire of the Third Rome and led to the martyrdom of the Imperial Family and millions of others, attempts by our enemies to create divisions in contemporary Russian Church and Society have intensified. These enemies are financed from abroad; they are programmed to destroy both the Russian Federation and its foundation, the Church. The war is being fought openly, militarily and bloodily, in Syria, in the Ukraine and in parts of the Caucasus, but it is also going on ideologically in Russia and throughout the Russian Orthodox Church worldwide, by manipulating those who are on the fringes of the Church.

The aim of these enemies is to destroy all that remains of Holy Rus, the Third Rome. These enemies are Westernized liberals, pseudo-intellectuals (‘intelligenty’) the self-appointed Russian ‘social elite’ (in fact the decadent scrapings from the bottom of the barrel) such as Nemtsov, Radzinsky, Uchitel and their followers like ‘Pussy Riot’. This is a repeat of the situation just before 1917. Tired of attacking the Russian liberation of Syria from Western-backed terrorists and Russian support for freedom in the Ukraine from the violent persecutions of the US-installed Zionist Kiev junta, they are now trying through their media, ‘creative’ (= destructive) art and cinema to sully the image of the Tsar Martyr Nicholas.

They accuse us Orthodox faithful of worshipping the Tsar as God! In reality, no such ‘Tsar-worshippers’ exist. They make use of the marginal half-hearted and Halfodox intellectuals among the clergy, in the Spiritual Academies and seminaries and among the unChurched though baptised masses. These enemies deny the ritual killing of the Imperial Family in 1918, they deny reality. In the same way they also rejoice at the present final destruction of the fragments of the old Orthodoxy in Western Europe, and instead promote atheism, transgenderism, a ‘post-Christian’ Europe, where the masses have lost all faith and former churches have become mosques, shopping centres, casinos and nightclubs.

Our enemies make use of deluded liberals and Russophobes like Fr George Kochetkov, Fr George Mitrofanov and their handful of followers, who are given prominence by the anti-Church media in their foreign-owned, anti-Putin newspapers like Moskovskoe Ekho and Moskovskij Komsomolets, on their notorious Western-financed portal-credo website and their TV and radio stations. These are the heirs of the clerical traitors who welcomed the February 1917 palace revolution and the abduction and imprisonment of the Tsar and his family, the ‘revolutionaries in cassocks’. They accuse the Tsar of all the misfortunes that befell Russia over the last 100 years, denying that such as they are in fact to blame.

However, there are also young (and not so young) hotheads, with ‘zeal not according to knowledge’, filled with absurd conspiracy theories. Like old calendarist sectarians, which in fact they are, they refuse to commemorate Church hierarchs and berate them. They are supported by those who suffer from the nationalist delusion that Tsar Ivan IV, through whom Metropolitan Philip of Moscow was martyred, was a saint or, even more absurdly, that the apostate antichrist Stalin was such. Bitterness and sarcasm, expressing no love or sympathy, and isolationism mark their lives. Many of them are under the influence of Protestant Creationism, which is ironic, given that they are claim to be anti-Protestant.

The main complaint of the zealots is that they do not agree with certain words and actions of a non-dogmatic, i. e. non-essential, nature of Patriarch Kyrill. This is illogical. Firstly, the concept that the Patriarch must agree with them in everything is pure pride. Why this disagreement? Perhaps because they are right, but more probably because they are wrong. This intolerance denies the simple fact that in any case there is no reason why we have to agree with our Patriarch on every detail. There will never be any identity of opinion between any two people. In this obsession with opinions we find once again pure Protestantism. They disagree, so they protest and go and start their own sect, condemning all others.

The Church does not depend on us or on any Patriarch, whoever he may be; we are all here today, gone tomorrow. The Church belongs to God and She was here long before us and will be here long after us. In order to justify themselves, the zealots dogmatize everything. Thus, if you do not believe that God created the Universe in six 24-hour periods (like fundamentalist Protestants), you are a heretic. If a baby is not baptised exactly on the fortieth day of its life, you are a heretic. If you shake hands with a Roman Catholic (again this is Protestantism!), you are a heretic. There is no end to the anti-logic of the zealots. They have hot heads, but cold hearts, what they need is just the opposite.

Outside such marginal extremists, the Orthodox are led by hierarchs like Metr Benjamin of Vladivostok, Metr Agafangel of Odessa, Metr Vincent of Tashkent, Metr George of Nizhny Novgorod, Bishop Tikhon (Shevkunov), any of whom could become the next Patriarch. Then there is the laywoman, Natalya Poklonskaya, the much admired deputy of the Russian Parliament and heroine of the Crimea. We see that Russia is today the last bastion of the Church of God and so of Christianity in the world. Our war is against those who have destroyed the Church in the West over the last thousand years and are now trying to destroy the Church in the Middle East, in the ‘soft’ Balkans and even in parts of the Ukraine.

The enemies of our Church want schisms, manipulating those on the margins, whether they are naïve and unthinking zealots, or treacherous and Russophobic ecumenist liberals. We must understand that either we are with the Tsar, that is, with all the New Martyrs and Confessors, all the multinational host of saints of the Russian Church, with the holy elders and the Christian Empire of Holy Rus, or else we are, consciously or unconsciously, traitors and helping the enemies of our Church. In accordance with the prophecies, we believe that the war waged by our enemies against the Church of God and Russia will, if there is repentance, end with the rebirth of the multinational Empire of Holy Rus. Amen.

From Recent Correspondence (September 2017)

Q: What is the Russian Orthodox view of patriotism?

A: As President Putin has put it: ‘For Russians […] patriotic sentiment, the sense of national belonging that is now, to their sorrow, being eroded in certain European countries, is very important’. In today’s Europe, the attention of those who seek to preserve their national identity, those who are patriots and nationalists in the best sense of the word, is fixed on Moscow. Conversely, those who yell the loudest about a ‘Russian threat’ and ‘European unity in the face of Russian aggression’ are precisely those who want to destroy European faces and borders and reviving identities, like that of Catalonia, as they are oriented towards the EU headquarters in Brussels and the White House.

Russia is the Motherland of patriotism in Europe and in defiance of the artificial denationalisation imposed by Western-imposed Soviet Communism, it is returning to the old mission of keeping the flame of national identity in Europe alight, preserving it as a Europe of homelands and not a public thoroughfare. Although the State-run media like the BBC try to slander all moderate patriots as ‘Neo-Nazis’ and ‘the far right’, in reality there are very few ‘Neo-Nazis’ and ordinary people, both on the normal right and the normal left, are patriots. 52% of British people voted for Brexit, surely even more would vote for Brexit today, given Juncker’s recent speech on the abolition of Europe (‘Eurofederalism’) in Brussels.

Q: Why is the West so aggressive?

A: The West is far more aggressive than many people even realize. Its wars of aggression are always camouflaged by code-names. For example, the multinational Western invasions and Western wars of aggression against Russia are variously known as ‘The Teutonic Crusades’, ‘The Napoleonic Campaign’, ‘The Crimean War’, ‘World War One’, ‘World War Two’ etc. In the same way, today the USA has a ‘Department of Defense’, and yet no-one has ever tried to invade the USA and that Department is notorious for its Offense.

Britain’s ‘Ministry of Defence’ has similarly always spent its time invading and bombing countries far away, all in the name of ‘national security’. Apparently Britain has invaded some 150 foreign countries in its history! This British Establishment aggressiveness goes back to its founders, in their so-called ‘Battle of Hastings’, which did not take place in Hastings and should actually be called ‘The Norman Invasion and Occupation’ or ‘The Defeat and Rape of England’.

The roots of this Westernwide aggression go back even further than 1066, to the anti-Christian Charlemagne, who revived the dead pagan Roman Empire – the model for all aggressive, asset-stripping and war-based systems – under the code-name of a ‘classical revival’. He told his people that they were superior to Christians (‘Greeks’) and also to anyone else, because the Holy Spirit came from their leader, the Pope of Rome, whom Charlemagne had made infallible with his filioque ideology. Later this mythical superiority was spread downwards to anyone who agreed with the Western Establishment and anyone who was ‘Western’ was thus considered superior. ‘Black, brown, red and yellow peoples’ were inferior and therefore could be enslaved and massacred by ‘White’ Western people. Here is the fruit of the filioque, from the Crusades to Iraq.

Yet another example: On 25 September the BBC programme ‘Beyond Belief’ (Radio 4, 4.30), the programme I spoke on twice after the Pussy Riot blasphemy, the subject was ‘The Persecution of Atheism in Russia’! I could hardly believe what the BBC has come to. It really is Beyond Belief! Not content with supporting the US installation of lesbian politicians and Zionist atheists as leaders in Eastern Europe, from Serbia to the Baltics and the Ukraine, the BBC are now directly plugging Western atheism in Russia, where a few decades ago Western Marxist atheists martyred 600 bishops and 120,000 clergy, under the pretext of ‘freedom of speech’.

Q: What worries you most about the situation of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church? Ecumenism?

A: Definitely not ecumenism. That is a bedtime fairy-tale for old people. It was abandoned as a failure long ago. No, it is something else. Let us try and understand the context in which we live.

We live in the fourth century. We in the Russian Church have come out of persecution and are being recognized, moving forward into the rest of the fourth century. (Unlike the West, where the heterodox have been in the fourth century and are now heading backwards towards the third century and persecution by various atheist emperors). What was the problem in the fourth century? There were no outward enemies, but there were inward enemies, all those who swam with the tide, the ‘fairweather Christians’ who joined the Church for their careers, for worldly advantage. Martyrdom is largely over for us: the ‘easy way’ to salvation has gone: all we had to do was to be killed. For a believing Orthodox that is not a problem. This is why in the fourth century, there was a huge growth in monasticism. Opportunities for martyrdom were mainly over, but the faithful still needed the real thing.

In times of peace we face not outward enemies, but inward enemies, as we in the Church Outside Russia, know only too well. We in our part of the Russian Church did not face martyrdom, what we have faced for nearly 100 years is inward enemies. We faced multiple schisms, by modernists (in the Paris Jurisdiction and in the USA), then by old calendarists (in the USA, France, South America and Great Britain), we faced racism and nationalism (the policy of excluding certain people from the Church because they had ‘the wrong blood’), we faced careerism, false brethren and slanders, backed by certain bishops. This type of persecution is insidious and calls on us to be confessors and not martyrs. That is much more subtle.

We have a great example in St John of Shanghai, who was put on trial in a secular court by so-called ‘ROCOR’ bishops, clergy and people. Shame on them! But who came out of this affair a saint? It is the insignificant and derided little man on the court bench who prayed: the others are, at best, forgotten. Something similar happened to Fr Seraphim (Rose), who faced persecution from inside. Our greatest enemies have always come from inside the Church. Our enemies confess not the Orthodox Faith, they confess ‘religion’, the outward ritualistic system of phariseeism, spiritual dryness and literalism, together with a systemic personality cult and academicism, sometimes homosexual, all of which persecute, mock and despise any authentic, living spiritual experience.

The souls of these go dry at Pentecost, they feel nothing, not the rushing wind of the Holy Spirit, not new green life, but they rattle off the prayers to the Holy Spirit without feeling, looking at their watches. These people have no Love, no Theology, no Knowledge of the Living God (St Alban), no compassion, all they have is their ill psychology, which they use for self-justification and persecution of the righteous.

Today we can see such tendencies inside Russia (and among some of its representatives outside Russia). Careerism, the interest in ‘awards’, rationalism, knowledge only of the outward, Spirit-free academicism, the rush for ‘degrees’, the salt that has lost its savour. It does not matter whether the tendency is new calendarist and modernist or old calendarist and traditionalist, it is the same anti-spiritual tendency.

Q: Was the Russian emigration a good thing?

A: Its causes were of course bad and émigrés suffered. But the spiritual life of the emigration itself was very mixed, both pure and impure. In the 1930s St John of Shanghai reckoned that only 10% of the emigration was Churchly. This corresponds to my own experience. Many Russians were ‘White’ only inasmuch as they were greedy for money and property and had no time, either for the Faith or for the Tsar, whom so many of them had actively betrayed. Many were racist and nationalistic, opposed to multinational Rus, so denying the words and commandments of the apostles to go out into all the world and teach and baptise ‘all men’.

There are still parts of the Russian emigration which have not returned to the Russian Church and, incredibly, are still on the Catholic calendar, which was introduced by the masonic Anglicans into Constantinople for a fee of £100,000 in the early 1920s. Still no repentance for such unspeakable spiritual decadence! In years to come we shall be amazed that any of this was possible, let alone justified by ‘theologians’, ‘the great and good!’

And yet the emigration also produced saints. As ever, I will say to you: Follow the Saints! Yes, the rest existed and exists. Ignore them, let the spiritually dead bury the spiritually dead. There can be no nostalgia for them. Follow the Chains of Love and you will set your soul free. The Russian emigration was caused by evil, but God’s Providence can always make good from evil.

Q: Is it true that ROCOR has never had a scandal?

A: I do not know who told you such a fairy tale. Sadly, very sadly, just think about the Antony Grabbe scandal in Jerusalem, about the consecration of Valentin of Suzdal (I remember how Archbishop Antony of Geneva prayed for a snowstorm so that his plane could not take off and he would not have to take part in his consecration under obedience), about Grabbe’s bishop-father who ended up in a right-wing sect outside the Church and banned anyone from attending his funeral, about the defrocked….

Q: What would you like to see the Orthodox Church do as a whole?

A: Publish statistics and facts! For example, I reckon that there are about 800 Orthodox bishops, 80,000 priests and 217 million Orthodox. However, these are merely informed guesstimates and I do not know the truth. I have no idea how many deacons, monks and nuns there are in the Church and in each Local Church. I would be very grateful to see some central statistical Orthodox authority issuing such information. (If any readers can correct my estimates, please will they contact me).

Q: In the light of what happened in Crete in 2016, what should be done about the state of the Orthodox episcopate, where there are so many who are clearly unprincipled?

A: That is of course a question for the episcopate, not for me. However, my suggestion would be something like deposing all bishops who do not confess that:

1. The Orthodox Church alone is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

2. The application of the canons which state that if they have been appointed by secular authorities (e. g. the State Department in Washington), they must be deposed.

3. The application of the canons which state that if they practise simony, they must be deposed.

4. The application of the canons which state that if they practise homosexuality, they must be deposed.

5. That if they are freemasons, they must be deposed.

Q: You are educated, how can you believe in heaven and hell?

A: We know from the unique revelation of the New Testament that God is Love. Therefore, it is clear that heaven is the presence of Love and hell is the absence of Love. It is very simple. It is even clear from this that heaven and hell, although in undeveloped forms, already exist on earth. People create their own heaven and hell. Please forget the primitive notions of atheists about heaven and hell that you seem to have. It reminds me of the incredibly primitive peasant Khrushchev who said that Gargarin had proved that God did not exist because he had been in space and had not seen Him! The only thing that this proved was Khrushchev’s own primitive ignorance and spiritual blindness.

Q: Why does the Church have rituals? Surely they are unnecessary?

A: The angels do not have rituals. So why do we? Obviously, because we are not angels, that is, we have bodies, a material nature. All people have rituals. Protestants have rituals (sit down, stand up, prayer, hymn, guilt-making sermon, collection of money to pay for the guilt, which is merely a copy of Catholic indulgences), secularists have rituals, parades, processions, the opening of Parliament, both military and civilian etc. Let us therefore make sure that our Church rituals are beautiful and meaningful.

People will always make rituals to worship something higher and greater than themselves, whether the True God or an invented one – drink, football, the sun on the beach, a human ideology…As we know that we are inferior and need to worship something, so let us worship the True God and not such false gods.

A: What is the situation in the Ukraine now?

A: I have not been there for a year now, but with the persecution of most of the people (‘ethnic minorities, of whom over 50% are Russian’), the continuing civil war, the fleeing of millions abroad (especially to Poland and Russia) and the fact that the government is propped up only by US money and money from US organizations like the IMF, I think the future is grim. It seems probable to me that in a few years from now, the country, which is an artificial conglomerate founded by Lenin and Stalin, will split between Russia, Poland, Hungary and Romania, leaving a possible Little Russian rump around Kiev.

Q: What are we to make of the recent hurricanes in the Caribbean and the earthquakes in Mexico?

A: There have always been such events. When you hear ‘the most powerful hurricane for 100 years’, it means that there have already been others at least as powerful in recorded history. None of this is the first time, it is just that the media are here to report these events. But the Caribbean and Florida are well known as places of crime, gambling, prostitution, drug-dealing and money-laundering. It is clear that only Faith can avert such catastrophes, not vice. Nearly 70 years ago on Tubabao St John of Shanghai protected that island from a typhoon through his prayers, going around the island with the cross and praying. This is what needs to be done here. But is anyone doing this?

In the USA some fear a great eruption in Yellowstone that could almost wipe out life in North America, or an earthquake in San Francisco. But what do people do in these places? Do they pray, do they repent? Some of course yes, but it seems that most just have more and more hubris. Just like Pompeii of old. Just like the Tower of Siloam. Little wonder that people speak of ‘Eurosodom and Gomorrhica’.

Q: Whose side are you on in the Brexit conflict between the Chancellor Philip Hammond and the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson?

A: That is a political question. All I can say is that I support neither of them. The Anglo-Turkish Old Etonian Boris Johnson is, despite his Russian Christian name, a fanatical Russophobe who supports a new Cold War. As regards the multi-millionaire Philip Hammond, I knew him personally, as he was in the same year in the same college in Oxford and also born in Essex (though at the wrong end). Even then, as a teenager, he was quite a ruthless careerist. True, he has done very well for himself in this respect, but has not yet got the top job, which is what he wants. However, regardless of that, both of these politicians are pro-British, i.e., anti-English, which is because they are pro-UK Establishment. The last pro-English politician I can think of is the long ago-retired Sir Richard Body. I am not sure that there is a single pro-English politician left in Parliament today.

Q: Should we be worried about the conflict between the USA and North Korea?

A: For the moment there is no conflict, just mutual insults. What worries me is that both leaders have terrible inferiority complexes that produce paranoia. One wants to be taken seriously as a President, instead of as a horse-trading businessman of limited intelligence, the other is a shy man who is trying to live up to his father and grandfather in cruelty, bluster and everything else. And his country is surrounded by aggressive US ships and planes (the USA is not surrounded by North Korean ships and planes), which only deepens national paranoia.

They both remind me of Kaiser Wilhelm who also had a terrible inferiority complex, caused by his deformed arm and his profound jealousy of Great Britain, and so started the Great War, with all its appalling consequences. ‘Inferiority complexes’ (= the sins of jealousy, vanity, selfishness and pride) cause many problems in world history. They are dangerous. As for these leaders, you should give children toys to play with, not guns, missiles and nuclear bombs. That is worrying.

Mathilde

He who loves the Tsar and Russia, loves God. If you do not love the Tsar and Russia, you will never sincerely love God.

Elder Nikolai Guryanov (+ 2002)

We all knew that between the hundredth anniversary of the overthrow by Western-backed traitors of the legitimate government of the Russian Empire (February 2017) and the hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Imperial Family (July 2018), significant events would occur in Russia. The Satanic power would not rest idle, but would continue to attempt to destroy the present timid restoration of the Church, of Russian Orthodox consciousness and so of the multinational Orthodox Empire. Western-minded atheist liberals – 7% of the population of the Russian Federation – but who control most of the media and many ministries and departments of State – have therefore made an anti-Orthodox film, a piece of sick, atheist porno-propaganda which they promote as ‘art’.

The film concerns the 1892 romance between the then youthful but future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II and a Polish ballet-dancer called Mathilde Kshessinska. Naturally, the Satanic director has, with the help of a German porn-actor as the unmarried future Tsar, fictionalized and sexualized a romance, so creating blasphemy. With the launch of the film naturally scheduled for late October, the hundredth anniversary of the bloody Bolshevik overthrow of the upper-class revolutionaries of February 1917, intentions are clear. Everything that was good about pre-Revolutionary Russia and about today’s Russia must be discredited. Clearly, Western backing is behind thus, just as it was behind the 2012 pornographic ‘Pussy Riot’ blasphemy (the English name of sex and violence shows clearly who was behind that), or for that matter the 1917 ‘Revolution’ itself.

Western liberalism, with its systematic intolerance of all spiritual values, has unchained Satan, giving him the freedom to destroy all spiritual and moral content that remains in the world. This is the mystical meaning of all world events over the last 100 years. This process began in February 1917, when the pro-Zionist British government of the time overthrew the Christian Empire in Russia and opened the way to the Satanic twentieth century with its Great War (which Russia would have ended in 1917, had the Tsar not been betrayed and overthrown) become a World War. There followed artificial famines, massacres and a Second World War with concentration camps, Atomic Bombs and ever since worldwide misery. Since the British began to lose everything after 1917 and gradually transferred power to the American Empire, it has been the latter that strives to dismantle today’s Russian Federation, planting its puppet terrorist-states on its borders.

For the Federation is the heir to the Russian Empire, and it is the apostate rival American Empire that stands behind the pornography of Pussy Riot and Mathilde. In the meantime the Russian Orthodox patriot, heroine of the Crimea and State Deputy, Natasha Poklonskaya, has been trying to have the film banned. A major Russian cinema chain has done so, frightened of violence from the outraged. However, violence has already taken place, though it remains unclear whether this was not in fact violence organized by the Western-backed film-makers and sponsors in order to try and discredit the legitimate, responsible and non-violent Orthodox opposition. The real significance of the film is to show us how far contemporary Russia still has to go in order to free itself from Western liberal delusions.

The mere fact that the film has been made and may be shown proves the power of the Sodomite Western lobby inside the Russian Federation. All this comes at a time when certain elements have infiltrated the fringes of the Russian Orthodox Church and are trying to influence Her. These elements, Western-educated and Western-influenced, usually academics and often young homosexuals, think that they can betray the Church to Western influences, both Vatican and secularist, firstly by watering down the Faith with intellectual platitudes, secondly by old-fashioned ecumenist overtures to the West. These shallow-faithed and marginal victims of Westernization will not survive. There are far too many faithful clergy and people who oppose them inside Russia, as well as in the Church Outside Russia in the Western world.

These upstarts who think they know better, know nothing compared to the village greybeards. Above all, however, they cannot even begin to take on all our saints, among them the New Martyrs and Confessors, more of whom are yet to be canonized. The Western liberals can preach their ideology of death as much as they like: but the Royal Martyrs are far, far stronger than their pathetic moanings. God, not man, is in charge of history. The Cross is triumphant. Let any hothead, who thinks that he is higher than the Church of God and is tempted into schism in opposition to the liberal clique and their pensioner backers, whom he mistakenly associates with the Church of God, think again. As the impious Emperor Julian the Apostate said: Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!

The Vatican in Crisis is Desperate for Russian Orthodox Support

Protestantized and liberalized, ever more under its present head, Roman Catholicism is in crisis. The recent visit of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, to Russia on 21-24 August ‘to build bridges and increase mutual understanding and dialogue’ illustrates the crisis. Alarmed at the virtual Fascism being preached by Ukrainian Uniats (just as in the 1940s) and, on the other hand, its virtual Protestantization in the Western world, the Vatican is seeking a way out of its self-imposed crisis.

With regard to the visit, the Vatican stated that: ‘It is now a question of walking together in the Gospel footsteps, multiplying opportunities for fraternal encounter, exchange of views and experiences, proclamation of the Gospel, and co-operation in service to human society’. Clearly, this is Diplomatspeak for: ‘We are in a mess, our churches are empty, in Europe we are finished, help us’. Since his appointment as Secretary of State in 2013, Cardinal Parolin has also visited Belarus, the Caucasus, the Baltics and the Ukraine.