Category Archives: Russian Church

108 Years of Treason and Cowardice and Deceit

The Romanov throne was destroyed not by young bomb-throwers or forerunners of the Soviets, but by the bearers of aristocratic surnames and court titles, bankers, publishers, lawyers, professors and other public figures.

Chapter 16 of the Memoirs of Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich

Foreword

We are now in the fifth year of the disastrous and tragic war between Russia and the Ukraine. Between one and two million soldiers are dead. Of one thing we can be certain, this war would never have happened, indeed it would have been unthinkable, in the time of Tsar Nicholas II, because he represented not petty and hateful nationalist division, but multinational peace and unity.

In the meantime, pray for Amvrosy and Vladislav, young men in their twenties, dragged off the streets of Kiev by violent and overpaid thugs of the regime two weeks ago and now forced to the Front after two days’ training. They do not want to die needlessly. They do not want to fill the pockets of Ukrainian officials, warmongering Western politicians and arms-dealers with billions of dollars. Their only hope is surrender to the vastly superior Russian forces. Their mothers of these two young men, who live near my house in Kiev, are frenetic. But at least D. is safe in Portugal, and so is his brother in Norway. They got out in time over the mountains. Lord have mercy! Let us now return to our subject.

Slandered by Propaganda

Nicholas II is one of the most slandered people in history. He most certainly was not weak, indecisive, incompetent, stupid, or dominated by others, as atheist Western and Soviet propaganda portray. Every attempt to slander him with lies has been overturned. Thus, the tragic stampede after his Coronation, leaving 1,389 dead resulted from aristocratic incompetence, compared to the 2015 stampede in Saudi Arabia which left at least 2,400 dead; the unprovoked attack on Russia by Japan was plotted by the Western Powers and turned into a costly Russian victory, with Japan bankrupted by costly Western arms.

As for the 100 and more who died from the crowd of 3,000 in 1905, that was nothing to do with the Tsar – he was not even in Saint Petersburg when Marxists hid behind stolen church banners and icons ‘in a peaceful demonstration’ and opened fire on troops, who returned fire; the terrorist revolts of 1905 and their 9,000 victims were the result of guns smuggled into Russia for atheist revolutionaries paid to destroy Russia. As for World War I, this was the fault of Berlin, which supported the Austro-Hungarian attempt to genocide the South Slav peoples, and had been planning a War for years.

Socio-Economic Success

Even before he was crowned, Nicholas had worked for the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway and the remarkable opening up and settling of largely empty Siberia. Nicholas II reigned over an accelerating Industrial Revolution that led to a nearly 50% rise in the ever more prosperous Imperial population. This was accompanied by eleven reforms, including the huge agrarian reform, the reform which led to the massive growth of free education and literacy, which had reached 56% by 1916, and the introduction of a free health service in 1898, 50 years before the UK, and a social security and justice system.

The Tsar was a radical moderniser, who reigned over the electrification of his Empire, with the development of hydroelectricity, submarines, rocketry, radio, the first helicopter designs, monoplanes and bomber aircraft. Under the Tsar life expectancy reached 68. By 1913 he had brought Russian Imperial agriculture to be Europe’s breadbasket and its economy to be the world’s fourth largest, which is what it is again only today. By all accounts, by 1950, when the Tsar would have been 82 years old, the Russian economy would have overtaken that of every other nation, including that of the USA.

Foreign Policy

In foreign policy Nicholas II was the only world leader who promoted international peace, founding the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 and, though mocked, was called ‘the apostle of peace’. This was the beginning of many international treaties and the regulation of war. He had an excellent double education in law and military affairs, knew European history very well and spoke five European languages fluently. He also defended nations as diverse as Thailand, Ethiopia, Morocco, Persia, Tibet, Afghanistan, Hawaii and the Boers from aggressive Western colonisation and asset-stripping.

The Tsar also tried to find peace in the warring Balkans, with their divisive German puppet-kings, through establishing a Balkan Union. His diplomacy had long been successful in avoided the international conflict that the warmongering Western nations wanted to start in powderkeg Europe with its rival imperialisms in 1912 and 1913. His policy here was to balance each nation against the other. That he finally failed in this was not his fault. Tragically, it was not possible to stop the European attempt at suicide, when Europe absolutely wanted to commit suicide.

Projected Spiritual Reform

The Tsar wanted to debureaucratise the Church administration, which had opposed the canonisation of St Seraphim of Sarov, and to restore the Patriarchate. He failed, as he was opposed by the petty ambitions, jealousies, rivalries and quarrels of the State-loving episcopate. He had little time for the empty ritualism of a Church, where if anyone who took communion more than once a year would be eyed as a fanatic. He defended the pious name-glorifiers of Mt Athos, who were hated by loveless episcopal bureaucrats, who were backed by the largely atheist aristocrats. Both groups betrayed him in 1917.

He saw eighty-one saints canonised in twenty years against only five canonised in the previous 175 years. By 1917 there were 1,256 monasteries, against only 631 in 1890, 117 million Orthodox, with 163 bishops, over 115,000 priests and deacons and 78,767 churches – against only 39,700 in 1890. Tsar Nicholas made generous personal gifts to all the Local Churches which he wanted to free from ethnic narrowness. By 1898 there were 22,000 Orthodox in Japan, Orthodox missions in Korea and China, and seventeen churches had been built in major Western cities, including in Nice and New York.

A Military Genius

Nicholas II, a military man by training, was forced to become commander-in-chief of the Russian forces in August 1915, replacing his utterly incompetent and foul-mouthed overgrown cousin. That was the treasonous Grand Duke Nicholas, a snobbish, atheistic and anti-Semitic aristocrat, who treated his despised troops as cannon fodder, just like the Allied generals on the Western Front. His incompetence had led to the shell shortage and the retreat from the Carpathians in early 1915. Having taken 2 million Austro-Hungarian prisoners, by 1916 Tsar Nicholas had won the greatest Allied victory of the War.

If only his timid General Brusilov had had the courage to follow through on the Tsar’s carefully planned breakthrough in 1916, Austria-Hungary could have been knocked out of the war. Russian troops would have liberated both Vienna and Berlin by 1917. Unlike Napoleon who reached Moscow and later Hitler who almost did, the enemy in World War One did not reach Russia. They only occupied eastern Poland, Lithuania and what is now Catholic western Ukraine and western Belarus, where satanic anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place – none took place in Russia, though huge ones took place in Berlin and Vienna.

His armies suffered only some 50% of the casualties of the Allies on the immobile Western Front. This was despite the fact that his troops faced the vast majority of the German Army on a highly mobile Front that was half as long again as the Western, as well as facing the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans. Nicholas II failed on the very verge of victory in early 1917, as Churchill recorded. However, he failed only because of the ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’, as the Tsar described it, of decadent and Russophobic aristocrats, corrupt generals and bureaucrat-bishops, supported by the ‘Allies’.

Afterword

When Tsar Nicholas and his family were murdered 108 years ago on 17 July 1918, the order for it had gone out from financiers in New York. The victim of ‘treason and cowardice and deceit’, the world is still suffering from his murder. Without his overthrow, there would not have been a World War Two, let alone today’s tragedy. Without that, we would be living in a far different world.

Of this St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, who proposed his canonisation in the mid-1930s, wrote: ‘That blackest crime, which was committed against the Tsar, must be effaced by fervent veneration for him, glorifying his feat. The Russian Lands must kneel down before the humiliated, the slandered and the martyred….Then the Passion-Bearing Tsar will be granted great boldness before God and his prayer will save the Russian Lands from the disasters borne by them….Innocently shed blood will regenerate Russia….A restored Russia is needed by the world, which has lost the spirit of life and trembles with fear, as before an earthquake’.

17 July 2026

 

 

 

 

The Restructuring of Europe

Foreword: Reason Replaced by Ideology

The elite of the contemporary Western world seems to be in the grip of insanity. Its political and media elite, paid by arms dealers, is irrational. This irrationality is the result of its unrealistic ideology driven by hubris, the same hubris which lay behind the insane and suicidal German invasion of Russia in 1941. This insane wishful thinking states: ‘We must destroy ourselves by rejecting cheap Russian energy and food because Russians are subhuman’.

The roots of this ideology are in the arrogant delusion or fairy tale ‘narrative’ that the West is superior to ‘the Rest’, that Western culture is better than all others. This came from the superior military technology that the West used to possess. This military advance led hypocritical European settlers to call Slavs, Muslims, Native Americans, Africans, Asians and Aborigenes ‘savages’ and genocide them. Now even its military superiority is over, as we can see in Iran.

Four Great Powers?

According to IMF figures, the Gross Domestic Product of China by PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is about $44 trillion, of the USA some $32 trillion (without finance, insurance and real estate, in reality probably about $20 trillion), of India nearly $19 trillion and of Russia $8 trillion (its vastly underestimated military production means that it is probably about $10 trillion in reality). These are the four largest economies in the world, the Four Powers.

In today’s world reality, of these Four Powers, the three former Regional Powers, China, Russia and India, have become or, in the case of the narrowly nationalist India, whose anti-Muslim nationalism is hindering it, is becoming, Great Powers. And one Great Power, the USA, is fast becoming a Regional Power. This follows its successive routs in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and the Ukraine, the results of its irrational and hateful ideology of superiority.

As a result, the tribute-paying (that is, tariff-paying) Western European vassals and court jesters of the American King Donald are becoming even more irrelevant than their master. As we can see from the collapse of the much-divided NATO and planned US occupation of the last large European colony, Greenland. If Western Europe is to survive, its leaders will have to reverse their ideology and to depend on Russia for energy and food and on China for goods.

The radical contraction of the influence of Western Europe, delusional in its wishful thinking, and the end of NATO will also mean the long-awaited end of the much-hated EU. The whole south-eastern quarter of Western Europe, centred on the largely Orthodox Carpathians and Balkans, will be connected to the Chinese economy by rail. The impoverished Baltics may follow to embrace China, and after them south-western Europe – Spain, Portugal and Italy.

The Borders of European Countries Redrawn: The Ukraine

However, none of this can happen until Western Europe’s old imperialist and racist elites, who hate Russia, China and all the ‘savages’ in the ‘jungle’ (they consider that they alone are in the ‘garden’), have collapsed in coming elections or in civil unrest. The First World War ended in injustices, which caused the Second, which also ended in injustices. As a result of those injustices, we now face the Third Recasting of Europe, which still seeks justice.

Firstly, the Soviet-invented Ukraine is over. The tyranny of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev, supported by the West, will end. The Ukraine resembles tiny Wales, in the sense that 83% speak Russian as their first language and only 17% speak Ukrainian as their first language and have some limited Russian. And this is about the same as the proportions of those who speak English and Welsh in Wales, where only 17% speak Welsh better than English.

The war in the Ukraine is at last ending after Putin’s long years of diplomatic dithering. We suggest that the nine provinces of Novorossija may return to Russia, and, in a deNATOised (= deNAZIfied) and demilitarised form, the province of Chernivtsy may return to Romania, Zakarpattia may return to Slovakia and Hungary, and the three provinces of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and the western halves of Volyn and Ternopil as far as Pochaev may return to Poland.

The remaining eleven provinces, 40% of the old Soviet Ukraine, the real historical Ukraine in the centre, could retake their historical name of Kievska Rus, resembling a Southern Belarus, also landlocked, again as demilitarised zones. In return, the main beneficiary of land transfers, Poland, could grant a narrow land corridor to Kaliningrad. As for the Russian parts of Moldova like Transnistria and Gagauzia, they could by referendum be ceded to Russia.

In EU Europe

The three Baltic States are collapsing economically and therefore demographically. After the fall of the USSR, the Germans bought out and then closed the Baltic factories and their young people were forced to emigrate to live as wage-slaves in Western Europe. The Baltic elites must stop attacking Russia and grant their Russian minorities their human rights, or else be occupied, the American-appointed, poke-the-bear, puppet elites removed.

Then there are the massive injustices of ex-Yugoslavia. A whole set of non-viable countries were invented by the divide and rule US: Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia. Parts of Serbia were stolen by Croatia. Albania remains the poorest and most crime-ridden country in Europe. These all survive with a permanent NATO and UN presence, which is what prevents justice being done. Here there must be confederative resolutions with justice for all.

In Western Europe, there are four obvious cases of countries which have long sought independence. These are (a Reunited) Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, all at last to be freed of London-based British tyranny. The end of an oppressive and artificial union would mean freedom at last for all the peoples involved. No doubt, given their common history of oppression, they could co-operate together in some loose Confederation of Four Sovereign Nations.

There is also the case of Catalonia, long oppressed by Madrid centralism. However, there are also questions about the artificial, British-invented, post-Waterloo union of Belgium (in fact, the Netherlands, France and a small part of Germany), about a still not denazified West Germany (only East Germany was denazified), which perhaps should go from a Federation into a Confederation, a small part of Austria that is Italian and parts of Slovakia that are Hungarian.

The Restructuring of the Church: Twenty Local Churches?

Kievska Rus should receive autocephaly because few there will ever tolerate hearing the hated Russian Patriarch’s name at services. They will boycott any Russian churches there. If Kievska Rus is granted autocephaly, then Belarus should receive autocephaly too. The three Baltic States and Finland could also form an autocephalous Baltic Orthodox Church. This would mean three new Local Autocephalous Churches, their number going from sixteen to nineteen.

The Romanian Orthodox Church, the Polish Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of the Czechs and Slovaks would have to take responsibility for the Orthodox in the parts of the Ukraine which returned to them. Carpatho-Russians in eastern Slovakia would be greatly reinforced. Any Orthodox who live in the small part of Zakarpattia, which would return from the old Soviet Ukraine to Hungary, could join the Orthodox Diocese in Hungary.

In the Non-Slav world, we think that the administration of the Patriarchate of Constantinople should move to Northern Greece, perhaps to the town of Ouranoupolis, ‘the City of Heaven’, at the foot of Mt Athos, from which it could at last obtain a monastic episcopate. After nearly 200 years the Church of Greece could return to it. And the Patriarchate of Alexandria should be decolonised by Greeks and Russians and become a black African Patriarchate.

As regards the new Moldova, in an ideal world the Russian and Romanian Patriarchs would together grant its Church autocephaly. In return, Western Europe, already with nearly fifty bishops, could at last receive a new Local Church, to be led by the majority Romanian Church, despite Greeks and some Russians wishing to remain in irrelevant national ghettos, whose nationalism puts them outside Church unity. Then there would be twenty Local Churches.

Afterword: Ecclesioclasm – The Sin Against the Holy Spirit

Certain members of the elite of the Orthodox world are in the grip of insanity, that is, of irrationality. This is the result of their passions for power, money and lust. We say certain members, because only the secularists are in the grip of this insanity, which is the sin of Infallibility, common among secular-minded people, because they have no humility. They say: ‘We do not care for Christ, we only care for our careers, honour, ambition, villas, cars and carnal lusts’.

These are the hireling clerics, the wolves in shepherd’s clothing, who are filioquists, as they consider that they are the source of the Holy Spirit. This is the sin against the Holy Spirit. They place themselves above the canons as despots, who recognise no laws, certainly not the law of Love. They are seized by schismatic anti-Conciliarity. This is the heresy of ‘Pneumatomachy’, of the rejection of the Holy Spirit, breaking the Church by their ‘Ecclesioclasm’.

 

 

 

More on Fr Seraphim (Rose)

The latest article by Sergei Chapnin, Canonization and the Act of Betrayal,  https://publicorthodoxy.org/2026/05/11/canonization-and-the-act-of-betrayal/ highlights the catastrophic identity crisis of the new ROCOR. Having ejected the old traditional ROCOR priests (yet another one has left the tiny Western Europe Diocese, mainly staffed by converts and Moldovans, this time for South America), the latest crop of American bishops has no idea of what ROCOR was and is. The proposed canonisation process for Fr. Seraphim Rose (1934–1982), the first possible convert-saint of recent years, unlike the wonderful non-convert St Olga of Alaska. As Sergei, press officer of Patriarch Alexei II, who loved the old ROCOR ever since his visit to us in 1997, points out:

The decision to move toward Fr. Seraphim’s glorification forces ROCOR to confront the inner logic of his own ecclesiology—and it is precisely here that the Synod may already have stepped into a trap….I suggested that ROCOR is now opening the way to a political canonization, responding to a specific demand for ideological Orthodoxy in the contemporary American context.

Sergei refers here to the sectarian and schismatic ideology of the new, post-2017 ROCOR. He continues:

A church body that has severed itself from the ecclesiological horizon within which Fr. Seraphim understood truth, apostasy, and fidelity cannot quietly edit away the sharpest lines of his worldview and then glorify him as though no contradiction existed. In his own eyes, the present ROCOR would no longer obviously belong to the “genuine Holy Orthodoxy” of which he wrote. And if a church community has lost its own living bond with what he regarded as true Orthodoxy, then it has also lost the spiritual right to deliberate about his sanctity. In that light, a canonization carried out by the present ROCOR would appear, from within Fr. Seraphim’s own ecclesiological logic, not as a triumph of holiness, but as a cheap spectacle.

In 2021 we left the new schismatic American ROCOR after the old ROCOR had been assassinated by American converts. We duly returned to the Western European Archdiocese, from which we had been loaned in 1988, our 2007 mission to return ROCOR to canonical communion completed. When Metropolitan Jean was forced by Moscow career politicians to abandon us after fifty years of fidelity to the real Russian Orthodox Church, he issued us with letters of canonical leave, which took us at once to the Patriarchate of Romania. Unlike Russian bishops, Romanian bishops at once blessed our missionary work, did not try to steal our churches and even awarded us, not persecuted us, for resisting theological schism.

 

 

NOTHING HAS CHANGED: ON THE RUSSIAN CLERGY ON THE EVE OF THE REVOLUTION

From the Memoirs of St. Mardarije (Uskoković)

Fpr those who do not know the Russian Church and Russian history well, below is the key to everything. Having read it, you will understand why the Russian Revolution, with the brutal persecution of Russian Orthodox, carried out mainly by baptised Russian Orthodox, took place.

Mitred Archpriest Andrew Phillips

St Mardarije (Uskoković)

The future St. Mardarije (Uskoković) (1889–1935), the first Serbian bishop in the United States and Canada, spent more than ten years in Russia on the very eve of the revolutionary events that brought tragic and unprecedented trials to the Church. The uniqueness of the young Serbian hieromonk from Montenegro lay in the fact that during his years of study and service in Russia he interacted with a remarkably broad circle of public and ecclesiastical figures, from Volhynia and Kishinev to Kiev and St. Petersburg. As a vivid and exceptional personality, he was welcomed into various homes and circles and spoke extensively with bishops and other representatives of the Russian clergy. At the same time, he was always filled with ardent love for the Russian Church, Russia itself, its spirituality, history, and culture, to which he became deeply spiritually akin in the fullest sense.

Hieromonk Mardarije (Uskoković)

He began early to write and speak about various problems in society and Church life. It is possible that his judgments and actions were marked by a certain youthful fervour and naivety, but they were also entirely sincere. The young servant of the Church soon revealed a gift for preaching, which was especially appreciated by the Russian flock. Several collections and pamphlets by the future saint were published in Russia, and he himself took part in the Local Council of 1917–1918. As a man deeply immersed in Church life and personally acquainted with it from within, the future bishop wrote with pain about certain phenomena he observed.

It is interesting that the young hieromonk repeatedly expressed his views on the state of the Russian clergy and on relations between bishops and priests in private conversations with outstanding hierarchs and pastors of the Church in Russia. Many of them listened to his assessments with attention and interest; some agreed, while others disagreed less with his conclusions than with the practical steps he proposed for changing the situation as he saw it from distant Montenegro. Nevertheless, the memoirs and descriptions of the future saint are of special value, first and foremost because they illuminate important aspects of the life of the Russian Church on the eve of the terrible trials that befell it after the Revolution, and they compel us to reflect on what lessons and examples we may draw from the tragic experience of the Russian clergy more than a century ago.

The memoirs Incomprehensible Russia was written by St. Mardarije in the 1930s, though it is possible that it was based on periodic notes written earlier and later assembled into a unified work. Its English-language text, entitled Incomprehensible Russia, was discovered only relatively recently and is dated 1935. A Serbian translation was published in 2017 with the blessing of Bishop Longin of New Gračanica and Midwestern America at St. Sava Monastery in Libertyville.

From the Chapter ‘On the Russian Clergy’

Representatives of the Russian episcopate, for the most part, very rarely descended from their thrones into the midst of ordinary life. Avoiding contact with common people, they also tried not to allow the lower clergy to come too close to them.

Such aloofness was explained by the belief that close interaction with parishioners and priests could undermine the authority of the “princes of the Church,” whereas distance only elevated them further.

Only a few fortunate members of the lower clergy ever received a “gracious” invitation to dine at a bishop’s table. Fewer still were those who could freely visit a bishop expecting a warm reception.

The attitude shown toward me by the higher Russian clergy was, of course, exceptional. To this day I gratefully remember the hospitality with which certain bishops and the rector of Kazan Cathedral, Archpriest Ornatsky—who was not only a priest but also a philosopher—received me. But things were quite different with the Russian priesthood generally, as I repeatedly observed while traveling throughout Russia.

Yet there are no rules without exceptions, and among the one hundred and thirty Russian bishops there were notable exceptions to the rule I have described of proud isolation. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the Russian episcopate was divided into two classes: those who kept themselves apart and enjoyed a lifeless authority sustained by vanity formed the first and much larger class, while the second, smaller group consisted of those unconcerned with their own dignity, who believed in spiritual communion with the people and regarded the clergy not as subordinates but as fellow labourers in the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.

This smaller group did not lose authority; on the contrary, it raised its authority in the eyes of clergy and parishioners alike by creating a living bond of mutual love and respect in place of the armour of cold formalism. How far the first group stood from the meek image of the Savior, walking through the wheat fields of Galilee with words of love on His lips and seeing nothing degrading in washing the feet of His disciples. Nothing but mutual love and faithfulness explains why the Lord’s disciples were ready and glad to die for Him.

I recall a typical example from the first, larger group, which I once witnessed in a bishop’s reception hall.

In a large round chamber, petitioners and visitors stood waiting along the walls, as was customary in the offices of ministers and government officials, while important and highly placed persons were received in the bishop’s private study.

After some delay, the bishop appeared accompanied by a secretary carrying pencil and paper. The bishop began walking around the room while the secretary followed behind, taking notes concerning the business of the petitioners.

At first the bishop was cold, dry, and formal. Suddenly something displeased him in one of the priests who had come with a petition, and he unleashed the full force of his anger upon him. The petitioner was stunned and too frightened to gather himself and explain; besides, the bishop gave him no opportunity to do so.

Nearby stood a rural priest with an ascetic, deeply wrinkled face resembling one of the fathers of the ancient Church. It seemed as though St. Anthony the Great, Paul of Thebes, or Pachomius the Great had come there from the Egyptian desert. In his aged hands he held a petition requesting the ordination of his grandson so that he himself might retire.

But he could not withstand the bishop’s fury. Trembling, he dropped the petition from his weak hands, as though expecting that the bishop’s wrath would soon fall upon him as well.

Distressed by this sad and unseemly scene, I turned my gaze toward the corner of the reception room, where there stood a blessed icon of the Savior, who patiently endures even those who have sinned deeply.

Although the bishop kept an icon of the Savior in his reception room, I saw no evidence that this stern, thunderous hierarch carried that image within his own heart.

During my years in Russia I encountered bishops from both groups, and now I would like to sketch a pair of contrasting portraits.

I remember one bishop from the first group very clearly, because I studied together with him.

As an academy student he distinguished himself in nothing except his enormous stature and thunderous voice. In these he had no equal.

Lacking particular spirituality, he paid great attention to the external appearance of a priest. If one of his fellow students—a monk gifted with talent, spirituality, and a true pastoral calling—merely trimmed his beard, our future bishop sharply criticized him. His own beard was always very large, since he regarded it as a necessary outward symbol of three qualities he himself did not possess: piety, spirituality, and monastic restraint.

Even during his student years, while still only a monk, he openly declared that he expected to become a bishop. At the time this amused us more than impressed us. But he had influential friends, and after graduating from the Theological Academy he advanced through the ecclesiastical hierarchy twice as fast as normal. A talented graduate without connections needed about ten years to reach a bishop’s see. He achieved it in four. He quickly became a vicar bishop, and soon afterward received his own diocese.

Before departing for his diocese, he summoned representatives of the diocesan clergy to the capital in order to instruct them regarding the ceremonial arrangements for his solemn entry into his new episcopal residence. Everything was carefully prescribed, and they returned with detailed instructions on how he was to be received generally and, in particular, how he was to be greeted at the diocesan border.

Before boarding the train, he changed his appearance, replacing his modest black monastic cassock with a purple one and decorating his mighty chest with all the honours he possessed.

The train arrived at the station, where officials had gathered on the platform awaiting the new bishop. His personal railway carriage, adorned with flowers and branches, stopped opposite a special reception area, and from it emerged the bishop in solemn procession, immediately surrounded by the crowd ordered to greet him.

At the appointed hour he arrived at the cathedral for the solemn liturgy, where a great crowd awaited him, including clergy, officials, and military officers. Seeing his immense stature—for physically he resembled Ilya Muromets—and hearing his powerful voice, those present imagined that a giant both of spirit and body stood among them.

But disappointment awaited them. At the conclusion of the brief service the bishop addressed the people, as was customary. His voice carried beyond the cathedral walls, but his words were banal, empty, and devoid of spiritual meaning.

An even greater disappointment awaited those who sought an audience with him the next day. Despite carefully prepared letters of recommendation, it proved far from easy to obtain access to the new bishop. By the evening rumours had spread throughout the city and diocese that a steel barrier, embodied in the secretary and the bishop’s lay brother-assistant, had arisen between the bishop and his flock. Visitors had to pass through the purgatory of double interrogation. Moreover, it was their practice not to admit petitioners and not even to listen to those seeking spiritual support. Such people were sharply dismissed: “The bishop should not be troubled over trifles.”

Nor did the bishop himself show much hospitality toward those wishing to visit him—whether bishops from other dioceses or former fellow students, even those who had become outstanding preachers.

He politely declined such visits. In this way he succeeded in protecting not only his cathedral but the entire diocese from visits by authoritative, energetic, and talented individuals.

Thus he became a highly successful representative of the first group of bishops already described.

And now—a portrait of a very different kind of bishop, a man who made an unforgettable impression on me.

A large crowd of people, myself among them, waited beneath the warm spring sun for the arrival of the train. That day too there was a crowd, but with one important difference. The people had come not because of an episcopal order, but voluntarily, having heard many good things about him.

Animatedly conversing, everyone watched intently as the train approached the platform, then rushed toward the last carriage, where governors and bishops usually travelled.

We waited for the bishop to appear. A minute passed, then another. Our impatience grew, but no one emerged onto the platform. Someone bolder asked the conductor and then turned to us and announced that the bishop had arrived in a third-class carriage attached directly behind the locomotive.

Without losing a moment we hurried there, but it was too late. The bishop had already left the station through a side exit, hired the first cabman he found, and gone to the cathedral.

At first those standing in the cathedral were perplexed by his modesty and simplicity of dress. But the opening words of his address explained everything. His speech was fiery, and the hearts of the listeners “burned within them” (Luke 24:32). Some even wept. The sermon concluded with the words of the Great Shepherd: “Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28), to which the bishop added: “Believe me, the doors of my home will always be open to all who are in need of help and counsel.”

Those present at the reception of the new bishop departed with warmth in their hearts and the joyful news: “This new bishop is right for us.”

In the first months of the Russian Revolution, a phenomenon occurred in many dioceses that at first glance seemed surprising. Priests gathered together to vent their anger against their bishops. I witnessed such scenes many times, but I was not surprised. In those dioceses no spiritual bond united bishop and flock, and there was nothing surprising in their desire to replace a worthless bishop with a better one. In some dioceses the bishops were better, and everyone knew it.

During those revolutionary days I attended an assembly in one such diocese. At the mere mention of the bishop’s name, thunderous applause broke out, although he himself was a thousand versts away in Petersburg on diocesan business.

I understood well what had provoked such an ovation. Several years before the Revolution I had accompanied him on an inspection tour through the diocese. He visited peasants in their humble village homes. He spent much time with his clergy, instructing them, paying attention to their children, and explaining to their wives how they might become true friends to their husbands and help them bear the heavy burden of responsibility. With interest and love he asked about their troubles and emphasised the importance of their labours for the welfare of the Russian people.

It is no wonder that when the Revolution began, priests and laypeople unanimously demanded the return of absent bishops such as this one. They knew they could rely on him in difficult times.

 

 

 

 

 

After Imperialism, Commonwealth: The Russian Church After the Dissection of the Soviet Ukraine

Introduction: The DeSovietisation of the Ukraine

The Soviet Ukraine was a creation of three bloody tyrants, Lenin, Stalin and Khrushshev, between 1922 and 1954. It is the decisions of these tyrants that the West has supported all these years. That Ukraine was always divided into three parts, Eastern, Central and Western. After the conflict there is over, quite possibly this year, the Eastern part (with the south), called Novorossiya, will return to Russia; the Central part and some of the Western part will become the New Ukraine, which we shall call Kievska Rus, a mirror image of the equally landlocked Belarus to the north; most of the Western part will return to Poland, Hungary (and perhaps Slovakia) and Romania, from where Stalin stole it. But what will happen to the Russian Church, deprived of several thousand churches and priests in Central and Western Ukraine? Having identified with the militant Russian nationalism of the Russian State, the Russian episcopate of the Russian Orthodox Church has lost the loyalty of Ukrainians.

The Defeat of Post-Soviet Centralisation and the Remedy of Autocephaly

Why would those Ukrainians continue to be subject to the Muscovite Church of Russians, who have killed or maimed their grandsons, sons, husbands and fathers? That Russian episcopate has in general renounced Non-Russian nationalities, whom it has in effect either ignored or else persecuted. It has renounced the Orthodox in Kievska Rus (mainly the old Central Soviet Ukraine), and in the west of that Soviet Ukraine. In the latter, Orthodox who live in areas which return to Poland will rejoin the Polish Orthodox Church, any who return to Slovakia will rejoin the Church of the Czechs and Slovakia, those who return to Romania will rejoin the Romanian Orthodox Church (some already have), and those who return to Hungary will have to be awarded Autocephaly in a new Hungarian Orthodox Church. As for the Orthodox who live in an independent Kievska Rus, they will also need Autocephaly, which they have already de facto had since 2022, thus creating an eighteenth Local Church.

Thus, that Russian episcopate has also renounced the multinational Russian Church of the emigration, which I served for 47 years, and its heroes like St John of Shanghai and his successor Archbishop Antony of Geneva. It has renounced all the others who carried the mission of the Church to Non-Russian nationalities, including the Estonian-born Patriarch Alexiy II, who in 2003 saw the Russian Church in Western Europe as the foundation-stone of a new Autocephalous Church there. That episcopate has therefore renounced the remains of the Russian emigration. The smaller part, based in Paris, is now destined to merge into a larger Non-Russian Orthodox Church of Western Europe (see below). The larger part, based in New York, completely out of control and unchecked by Moscow, has lost its way in uncanonical disorder, identifying with sectarianism, the pedophile warmongering Trump regime and the CIA, several of whose assets belong to its clergy.

Moscow has also renounced its own emigration, most of which is in Western Europe, but also in Northern America and Latin America. This is heavily dependent on Moldovans, especially so in Ireland and in Iberia and Italy, where both bishops are Moldovans. For Orthodox in Moldova are returning to the Romanian Church, some 300 parishes leaving Moscow so far. Once Russian troops arrive in Odessa, after which NATO, the EU and the UK will begin to collapse, that return to the Romanian Church in the face of Russian nationalism will turn into a rush. The Russian nationalist episcopate has also renounced Orthodox in the Baltics, who need independence (autocephaly). It is also renouncing the Orthodox in Belarus and in the five stans of Central Asia, in both of which some voices are asking for new autocephalies. This means that the Russian Church will be reduced from 145 million faithful to 105 million.

Virtually all of these will be living in the Russian Federation and in a Novorossiya reunited with that Federation. Just a few will be left living outside it, attached to Russian embassy and consulate churches in and around the capitals of the Western world, in Japan (20,000?), South-East Asia (20,000?) and in China (100?). As for those in Africa, Moscow will have to negotiate autocephaly for Africans with the Patriarchate of Alexandria, with the mutual exit of interfering and imperialistic Greeks and Russians alike. An African Patriarchate of Alexandria, with an administrative centre perhaps in Kenya, will follow. Thus, there will be autocephalies for Kievska Rus, Belarus, Central Asia, the Baltics, Hungary, Western Europe (under the majority – the Romanian Church), Northern America, absorbing the renamed OCA, and Oceania (both under majority Constantinople) and in Latin America (under majority Antioch).

Conclusion: The Defeat of the ‘Princes of the Church’

This will create twenty-four Local Orthodox Churches instead of sixteen as now, with two of those, the Patriarchate of Alexandria and the OCA, renewed and reconstituted. The eight new Autocephalies will cover Kievska Rus, Belarus, Western Europe, Central Asia, Hungary, Latin America, Oceania, and the Baltics. The Russian Orthodox Church will have been humbled, taking its place as one of the renewed Family of Churches. It will have lost its imperialist temptation to dominate all, just like discredited Constantinople. Both Patriarchates were contaminated by Imperialism. Both will have to accept that they are merely parts, however large, 50% of the whole Church, and however ancient, dating back to Constantine, of a Family of equals, a Commonwealth. This will see restored the Catholicity of the Church, a Family in communion with each other and the defeat of imperialist and nationalist centralism.

 

 

Half a Century in the Orthodox Church in Western Europe (2)

Fleeing the Extremes

The first Christian Emperor was called Constantine. The last Orthodox Emperor was called Nicholas. He was overthrown in the so-called 1917 Revolution, that is, in the palace coup of the aristocratic traitors to the Tsar, orchestrated by the British ruling class. As a result, all the Orthodox Churches, which the Tsar had protected when still in power lost their protector and were called either to martyrdom or else to confessordom. Once infiltrated, the Churches had to resist either the CIA, by confessordom, or else of the KGB, by martyrdom and their earlier equivalents. (Earlier they had had different names, but they were still engaged in the same intrigues). Our balancing act has meant avoiding both these extremes. In our context this has not yet meant becoming martyrs, but it has meant becoming confessors.

Combating the extremes has on the one hand meant avoiding and combating globalism, liberalism, modernism, freemasonry and Vatican-style perversions and, on the other hand, avoiding and combating sectarianism, phariseeism, hateful censoriousness, political ultra-conservatism and Old Ritualist style obscurantism. Both extremes are marked by anti-Christian ‘bishops’, who are in fact thieves, homosexuals and pedophiles. Thus, we fought against the influence of the liberal modernists in the Orthodox Churches in the 1970s and 1980s and then against the sectarian pharisees in the Orthodox Churches in the 1990s and 2000s, until Russian Church unity was achieved in 2007. This was a victory over both extremes, a miracle. But the devil does not like miracles and those who announce that God is Love.

The devil attacked the Greek Church of Constantinople through nationalist racism, called ‘phyletism’ in Greek. However, he attacked the Russian Church, replacing faith and piety with the negativity of nationalist politics, which led to State-orchestrated ritualism, rigid militarism with its blind obedience and harsh punishments, instead of integrity. Professional choirs assured that everything was provided and the people were made passive, without responsibility. From there it was only one step to anti-clericalism. As they say in Russian, ‘mnogo popov, malo batjushek’, ‘there are many fake priests, but few real ones’. And so in the Russian Church, persecution always comes from the bishops. Thus, the Russian Church isolated itself and fell out of communion and catholicity with the 15 other Local Orthodox Churches.

The USA

Thus, our 2007 victory was to give us only temporary respite, a decade of peace. The programme of Americanisation, or more precisely of Trumpisation, of the American Synod of the Russian Church, known as ROCOR, began in 2017. It sent out its US agents to the still ‘unreformed’ (= normal and traditional) parts of ROCOR in Western Europe and Australia to transform these too into ignorant and arrogant convert crazy zones, like themselves, who yearned to create a rigid and ritualistic sect. This all coincided, and not coincidentally, with President Trump’s first term of belligerent Americanism and also with the second phase of the infiltration of ROCOR by the CIA. The latter activated its sleeping agents in the American Synod and recruited new ones, sending them out worldwide to what is an ecclesiastical NGO.

The Age of Trump also coincided with the consequences of the earlier activities of the notorious Mossad agents, Maxwell and Epstein, who worked hand in hand for the greater glory of worldwide Zionism. Epstein was before his murder the model psychopath: charming, superficially brilliant, very manipulative, narcissistic, a pathological liar, with no sense of empathy, a ruthless pervert and a cynical egomaniac. His psychopathic spirit became the standard for the Age and for the CIA agents in question. So much for the psychopathic narcissists of the USA and its Epstein regime. What of the other half of the Western world, Europe and the UK? Here we have not narcissistic psychopathy, but the creeping power grab of centralising Sovietisation, the old megalomaniac temptations of power and money.

Europe and the UK

Immediately after the fall of the SU (Soviet Union) at the end of 1991, the EU (European Union) was founded. The demons behind the former Union had simply fled westwards to an easier prey, the new Gadarene swine of Western Europe. Russia was no longer attractive, as it cast off the yoke of compulsory atheism. Thus, with the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, the EU became a geopolitical project. Instead of a trading community, it had become the political wing of militaristic NATO. The creeping centralising Sovietisation and Epsteinisation of the EU, obvious in its practices, was also clear in its vocabulary. Thus, the (European) Council is the translation of ‘Soviet’, the EU Commissioners mirror Soviet Commissars, the oligarchy mirrors the nomenklatura and the ‘narrative’ mirrors ‘the Party line’. SU = EU.

As for England, it continued on its historic cycle. In 597 it was converted to Christ from that Old Rome, which still openly condemned universal pretensions. In 1066 it was converted to barbarianism from Norman France, sponsored by the ideology of the new schismatic and ‘universal’ Rome, which stifled Christ with the Pope and England with Britain. In 1535 it was converted to anti-sacramentalism from Luther’s neo-pagan Germany. In 2004 it was converted to imperial delusions from Nazi Ukraine and its orange revolution. The cycle is repeated every 469 years. Today, the British Establishment is trying to revive its long-lost past glory, which was not glory, but shame. This imperialism is repeated all through the ex-imperialist Western European ruling class, nostalgic for its delusions of greatness.

The Collapse of Kiev Creates Regime Changes in the USA, Europe and the UK

What the ruling elites in both the EU and the UK have not understood is that all unions break up. The Soviet Union, the USSR, broke up. So did Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and now the Ukraine, so will Belgium, the EU, the UK, and quite possibly the US. The Four Nations of Britain and a reunited Ireland can work together, not in a Union or a Federation (which is a half-way house from a Union, as is the semi-Soviet Russian Federation), but in a Sovereign Confederation, the Ionan Confederation, IONA, the ‘Isles of the North Atlantic’. England must yet depose the British monarchs who have ruled it for so long, invited by the merchant-oligarchs of the City of London from Germany to become an Imperial House, but the Imperial Age is long over and so are they. A new Sovereign England must restore its own English Royal House.

As for the EU and the UK, they are entirely dependent on the black hole of the Kiev regime. They have bet everything on that loser, playing at the casino wheel of geopolitics, without knowledge and understanding, but with a fanatical and blinding, ever-expanding ideology of European unionism. But every time that Europe falls to union, and it is always a fall, whether under Napoleon, or Hitler, or the EU, it then sets about attacking Russia. ‘Europe’ always attacks European Russia, because Russia does not conform to the morally and financially bankrupt ideological narrative of the Eurocommissars. This is why they do not want peace. War is their self-justification, as only war gives them a unifying purpose. However, the Russian Federation frustrates them immensely, for it is playing the long game against the Kiev regime.

Moscow’s methodical advance by attrition, metre by metre, keeping its losses very low, is because it is awaiting the political collapse of Kiev, which will precede its military collapse. (This was why Germany, Britain and France, as Japan had tried in 1904-5, first brought about Russian political collapse in 1917, since political collapse always precedes military collapse). When political Kiev collapses, its army will have nothing left to fight for. Then, Russia will take over most of the old Soviet Ukraine at little cost, allowing Poland, Romania, Hungary and perhaps Slovakia to take back the far western fragments of Stalin’s Ukraine which used to belong to them, as they wish. And then there will be regime change, not in Moscow, but, ironically, in peace-hating Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and wherever Kiev Fascism was supported.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Return to Civilisation?

I want ordinary Western citizens to hear me: You are told to blame Russia for your problems. That is a lie. Your hardships are the result of your own elites’ greed and their selfish interests. We are not responsible.

President V.V. Putin, 3 February 2026

Introduction: The New Attraction to an Old Church

Like other Orthodox priests, two or three years ago, after the end of covid, I began to be contacted by young people. They were nearly all males under the age of thirty and some were only teenagers. They all wished to join the Orthodox Church, which they did not know, but had heard theories about in internet podcasts. I have always told them to start coming to church (none of them had ever been before), all our teaching and theology are in our services. However, most of them never want to set foot in a real Orthodox church. It is all an internet theory. Only a few decide to come to church and wanted to stay. Those I receive into the Church.

The Return

Over the last twelve months I have received four such inquirers, though only one under the age of eighteen, with the permission of his parents, who were present at his reception. This is hardly a ‘mass baptism’. The word ‘mass’ should only be used for groups of 100 + and in any case I do not practise rebaptism, as it is against the Orthodox Creed. But it is equivalent to a ‘group reception’. Why is this happening now? Why do they want to join the Church and, hopefully, eventually actually become Orthodox? It is the first time in fifty years that numbers of local people have wanted to join the Orthodox Church. Where does this all come from?

Interest in the Orthodox Church and Faith is becoming more common in North America and Great Britain, where spiritual and so social decomposition are far advanced. A real mass reception/baptism of 200 took place in the Greek Church in England last year. This is all about a return to civilisational roots, which we have been inviting for fifty-two years, even since our first writings in 1974. However, this return to civilisational roots is worldwide, not only here. Why? It is the result of the collapse of both Globalist ideologies, of Western Communism in 1991 and of Western Capitalism in 2022, though the processes go back long before that.

The Return to Roots: China and One Century of Humiliation and India and Two Centuries of Humiliation

To say that China is Communist is today absurd. ‘Communist’ may be the name of the ruling Party, the CCP, and the national flag makes reference to that old-fashioned ideology, but it is not at all the reality. The Chinese State is today a Traditional Confucianist State, going back millennia, which runs a form of enlightened State Capitalism, overseen by ‘Emperor’ Xi, who provides efficient and very advanced national infrastructure. China is returning to National Tradition, after its ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of the West and after a generation of Maoist Marxism, which was the revolt against the West and which ended in 1979.

To say that India (Hindustan) is the world’s largest democratic State also twists the truth. It cannot help being the world’s largest State as it is the world’s largest country and, yes, Indians do vote ‘democratically’ in their hundreds of millions for its ancient civilisational values, Hindu Nationalism. This is the return of Indians to their civilisational roots after two centuries of humiliation, exploitation and colonialism at the hands of the British and then the two generations of revolt against it and search for identity after 1947. Hindu nationalism is the return to Indian national identity, millennia of tradition – and it is also inevitable.

The Return to Roots: Russia and Three Centuries of Humiliation

To say that Russia is Capitalist or Communist is today absurd. The reality is that the Russian State has since 2022 been returning to Imperial Russia, not so much to the Russia of before 1917, but to that of before 1721, which ran on a form of contractual State Capitalism. Russia is returning to the Tradition, as Tsar Nicholas II wished, after three centuries of humiliation by the West, by two centuries of Westernisation, then by three generations of anti-Russian Western Marxism and a generation of Capitalism. Today Russia has closed the window on the West, since the West has closed its window on Russia, whose militaristic ideology is for now that of ‘the Russian World’.

The Russian Orthodox Church is attached to the Russian State. Today Russian Orthodox clergy bless tanks, missiles and guns for what they see as the Russian liberation of the Ukraine from NATO. Unlike in the Tsar’s Russia, whose last representatives we knew well, though as in Soviet Russia, where the Church was controlled by the State, today’s Russian Nationalist Church is concerned only with Russians. True, certain of its senior clergy have not been cleansed of Western-style corruption and sexual perversions. That will come. Today’s Russian Church is no longer interested in Non-Russians – unless they are in Africa, where the Russian State has plans.

The Return to the Real West

But what does civilisational return in the West mean? As we have been writing and saying for fifty-two years, the West can only return to its roots, and that means to real Christianity, which was here a long time ago. That cannot mean going to a woke woman Archbishop of Canterbury, who succeeds an archbishop who did not know if he believed in God and shielded a pedophile, nor can it mean going to a Pope, whose antecedents invented infallibility only 150 years ago. It means returning to the ancient Orthodox roots of the West, to the first millennium, beyond the manipulations of the barbarian elite which has run the West for a thousand years.

After the 2016 resisted assassination threat against me from MI5, the ‘happy vassals’ of the Establishment tried to get me by destroying me through a CIA hack. The old Establishment did not want to give up. The potential assassins know that the collapse of the Western world Titanic does not mean that Europe and North America have been humiliated and defeated. They know that it means that the anti-Christian Western elite has been humiliated and defeated. And they belong to that. The defeat of the elite is a matter for rejoicing for us, the people. It means that we might yet return from the nightmare of the old elite and see for a new elite.

The Return from Sodom and Gomorrah

With the release of a heavily redacted part of the Epstein files, it is now clear to all that that old Western political, royal, business and media elite is morally bankrupt, riddled with satanic pedophiles, Zionist perverts to the core and even worse. ‘Robert Maxwell’, real name Ludwig Hoch, murdered or suicided, was a MI6 and Mossad agent, like his compatriots, the devil Epstein, the ‘Prince of Darkness’ Mandelson (Mendelssohn) and the French Jack Lang. The dirt that Epstein collected on Western elite perverts, engaged in orgies and satanic rituals, they used for blackmail. We need a new elite. A native Royal House is awaited in England after a millennium.

There should be no surprise at the perversions of the Western elite. They have long been rumoured. The British Saxe-Coburg Gotha Royal Family alone has recently provided the pervert Prince Albert Victor, the debauched Edward VII, the Hitler-saluting Edward VIII, the pervert Prince George, Duke of Kent, the notorious Mountbatten, the tragic Margaret, Diana and Harry and now the awful Andrew. The UK alone has in the last sixty years gone from the abortion holocaust of nearly 11 million lives to supporting the two-year long Gaza holocaust of some 250,000 lives. So they offer up to satan age-old child sacrifices too horrible to describe.

Conclusion: The Future Restoration of Russia

Meanwhile, the Iranian Theocracy, supported by Russian and Chinese warships, has scared off the Great Satan and the battleships of the blustering  bully/coward are again in full retreat, proving all Mossad’s and Trump’s Zionist threats empty. And China grows daily in strength. And Russian nationalism grows. Thus, the Russian Church has betrayed and abandoned Non-Russians, who had to leave it after generations of faithfulness to Christ. But all the prophecies agree that a Russian Tsar is coming to cleanse it from such impurity and other Western-style perversions to restore the multinational, Imperial Way. No Empire can be built on narrow Nationalism.

 

 

Russian Orthodox Church Disunity

The Orthodox Church is the bimillennial Confederation of Local Christian Churches, each largely covering one nationality, one language, one culture and one territory, Russian, Romanian, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Arab, Albanian etc. Today there are sixteen Local Orthodox Churches in all and some have flocks in Western countries as a result of emigration, which has taken place either for economic or for political reasons. Over fifty years ago, in the 1970s in England, I was able to join the Orthodox Church through the émigré Russian Church, an emigration which had taken place after 1917 for political reasons.

Cut off from Russia and cut off from new emigres by Soviet atheism, the dying Church in the Russian emigration was really the only Local Orthodox Church which accepted or needed to accept Non-Russians. (Other Local Churches would generally not even accept those of another nationality. Since then, barriers to other nationalities have to some extent been broken, but that is another story). However, as a result of the political nature of its emigration, the émigré Russian Church was split into three warring parts, none of which was in communion. They were split by political beliefs, which is the only reason why Churches split.

The largest and most international émigré fraction was called the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), composed of anti-Communist emigres and centred in the USA. Then came a smaller part which we may call the Paris Emigration (PE), centred in France and composed of emigres who favoured a Western liberal political system for Russia. Finally, there came by far the smallest part, called the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), composed of emigres who, though members of the Church, out of patriotism turned a blind eye to Soviet atheism. What is the position now, 35 years after Soviet atheism?

The ideology of Soviet atheism was replaced by another ideology, Russian nationalism. Nevertheless, as a result of the fall of Soviet atheism, both ROCOR and PE came into communion with the MP and, briefly, with each other. This was based on sympathy for Russia, but not on full sympathy, as the Westernised descendants of both émigré groups today represent not Russian nationalism, but, respectively, US nationalism and Western liberalism. And for this ironic reason the very aggressive and ideological ROCOR group is no longer in communion with the PE. Thus, division continues, again because of politics.

Thus, even if ideologies have switched from what they were when the Soviet Union existed, they are still here. Having worked for fifty years to bring the three warring émigré groups together, the present lack of communion is tragic for me. Sadly, the younger generation of ROCOR is so Americanised, one might say, narcissistically and imperialistically Trumpian, that it does not accept any views other than its own. Such sectarian exclusivity betrays a vision of the Church which is opposed to the Church as Christian communion and sees it as an exclusive and intolerant sect which condemns and punishes all who disagree.

As regards the fall of the MP into nationalism, this was a logical development from the old Soviet nationalism of the period before the fall of the USSR, but in a new form. Soviet nationalism was paradoxical for Orthodox, as how could Christians be loyal to Soviet atheism? However, this Russian nationalism is also paradoxical. It makes of the Church an Army, a spirit of militarism, ritualism and clericalism, according to which everything is literally uniform, in which there is no place for personal spiritual inspiration and diversity. All isms quench the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth and Love, and nationalism is no different.

Thus, all three parts of the Russian Church illustrate divisiveness and exclusivity through the adoption of different political ideologies, tragically putting Caesar above Christ. Until all three parts of the Russian Church revert to full Orthodoxy, abandoning political or nationalist ideologies of any sort, there will be no general Orthodox unity. The sign of the reversion of the Russian Church to Orthodoxy will be in its recovery of Catholicity, that is, in its renewed and visible communion with the peoples of all other Local Churches. Once we see that, we shall see a renewed and valuable Russian contribution to Pan-Orthodox unity.

 

 

 

The Continuing ROCOR Schism and the new Canonical Russian Orthodox Bishop for Britain

In December 2020 the New York-based ROCOR (those initials used to stand for the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) of the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) consciously engineered a schism by forbidding communion with its sister Western European Archdiocese of the Moscow Patriarchate, based in Paris. Thus, ROCOR cut itself off from communion with canonical Orthodoxy, from the catholicity of the Church.

ROCOR lost everything because of its crazy converts. This single act of folly resulted almost immediately in ROCOR in England losing well over half its Diocese, 5,000 people in six parishes, with twelve clergy. They included the senior priest of the Diocese, with 36 years of faithful service to the Russian Orthodox Tradition and the Russian Tsar, who had played a role in the crucial and long-awaited canonical reconciliation of ROCOR with Moscow in 2007.

Although the Moscow Patriarchate itself declared that ROCOR’s act was insanity, it did nothing to counter it and a senior Metropolitan in Moscow instructed all who had quit ROCOR to join another Local Orthodox Church. This was a suicidal act of support by the MP for the ROCOR schism and a stab in the back for its decades-long missionary work in Western Europe. Thus, in obedience, we all fled the new, uncanonical ROCOR and joined another Local Orthodox Church, of which many were only too happy to take us.

Since then, the new sectarian ROCOR (apparently now standing for the Russian Old Calendarist Church Outside Russia) has refused to repent. As a result, it has now lost another subdeacon (and future priest) in Northern Ireland, a priest in Canada and a priest in the USA. All were converts, who had recently come into the new American ROCOR. Without any sense of history, they had never known the old canonical ROCOR, which was an integral part of the Orthodox Church and Tradition.

All of this is a replay of ROCOR’s Boston schism of 1986, exactly as the late Fr Seraphim Rose had time and again warned would happen back in the 1970s. Then some sixty small parishes of rootless people left ROCOR for old calendarist sects, just as other smaller groups would later leave in 2000 and in 2007.  The Protestant-style 1986 schism was a clear consequence of sectarianism among ungrounded ROCOR clergy and converts. Those who took part in it had no knowledge of the Tradition and so fell away from the Church into old calendarism.

These schisms are what happens when you abandon communion and concelebration with the Canonical Local Orthodox Churches, that is, with the mainstream of the Church. Now the chickens are coming home to roost again, for when ROCOR bishops claim that no other Orthodox bishops apart from themselves are Orthodox, what can their uninformed converts conclude? Only that, if there is ‘One True Church’, it must be schismatic, not one which is in communion with others, even if only on paper, like ROCOR.

The viewpoint of the schismatics is the only logical one for their sectarian mentality, which makes even the calendar into a dogma of the Faith. When their ROCOR bishop – although on paper in communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church – publicly declares that the Greek Patriarch is possessed by demons and that he personally hates Romanians and half-hates Moldovans, what can you expect from his followers? His converts demand logical behaviour of him, that he abandon communion with all others formally, not just in words. Otherwise, they see him as a hypocrite, as they publicly say.

These schisms are the clear result of the new ROCOR’s rejection of the Orthodox Tradition, the Tradition confessed by St John of Shanghai and his successor as the ROCOR Archbishop of Western Europe, the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. They quite naturally concelebrated with everyone. Here today is the result of the crazy convert policy of the very ignorant bishops of the new American ROCOR. With no love for others, they fall out of communion with all, like judgemental pharisees.

Little wonder that in despair at the behaviour of the new ROCOR, Moscow has now gone ahead and at last consecrated its first local bishop in Britain. Bishop Augustine MacBeth is for its Archdiocese of Western Europe (the former Rue Daru jurisdiction) of the MP. Given the ROCOR schism from Moscow’s Archdiocese of Western Europe and its refusal to accept and respect local people and local languages, relying on convert Americanisms with their theological and historical ignorance and google translate to communicate, Moscow had no choice but to consecrate a canonical Russian Orthodox bishop from the local population for the local population.

Of course, it is all too little and much too late, as the Orthodox left for another Local Church four years ago, as advised by the MP Metropolitan Antony (Sevryuk)! Then the Moscow Patriarchate refused to receive those who had quit the schismatic ROCOR even in the face of the sectarian and hate-filled actions of the new ROCOR episcopate.

Since then, the former members of ROCOR, zealous for canonical communion and the catholicity of the Church, forced to join another Local Church by the new ROCOR fanaticism and ignorance of the Tradition, have gone from strength to strength. Now we live in canonicity, in the mainstream of the Orthodox Church and concelebrate with all (though not with the schismatics), far from the tiny ghettoes of crazy convert bishops, their clergy and their incessant scandals.

On the Six Divisions in the Russian Orthodox Church in the Diaspora

In the twentieth century the Russian Orthodox Church outside the borders of Russia split into six groups, three splits took place for ethnic reasons and three splits took place for political reasons.

The Three Non-Russian Ethnic Divisions

Firstly, there was quite a large Carpatho-Rusyn group in the USA, founded by immigrants who had been forced into Uniatism. They had arrived in the US from 1880 on, not from the Russian Empire, but from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Once in freedom in the USA, most of them returned to Russian Orthodoxy (the strongly Uniatised did not and were called by the absurd term ‘Ruthenians’). The return was for two reasons. Firstly, an infamous Roman Catholic Archbishop in the USA, called John Ireland (1838-1918), refused to let the Carpatho-Rusyns have married clergy and, secondly, he tried to steal their churches from them. As a Roman Catholic bishop (just like ROCOR bishops today), he did not understand that Carpathian Orthodoxy is founded on churches built or paid for by the people for the people. In real and not clericalist Orthodoxy, the hierarchical principle is always balanced by the congregational principle.  Led by the future saint, Fr Alexis (Toth), most people returned to the Church. The People’s Orthodoxy always triumphs over greedy clericalist bishops, who have the State mentality and dreams of power and riches. The Carpatho-Rusyns came to form a group known as the Metropolia and then from 1971 on the OCA (Orthodox Church in America).

After 1945 there formed second and third groups, a small Belarussian group and a very large and also very nationalistic Ukrainian group, mainly in Northern America, but also to some extent in Western Europe and elsewhere. After the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1991, most of the Ukrainian group, hating Russians, ended up under Constantinople. The small and weak Belarusian group more or less died out.

The Three Russian Political Divisions

As for the ethnic Russians in the Diaspora, after 1917 they too split into three. Initially, until the 1990s and renewed emigration, the smallest group was the Moscow Patriarchate group. This was at the centre of Soviet patriotism, which after 1991 transferred to Russian Federation patriotism. Many in this group never dared contradict whoever was in power in Moscow, whether they intervened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan or the Ukraine. A blind patriotic loyalty even to an atheist regime (!) prevailed among some in this Church. For them, the Russian Patriarch is an ethnarch, in the same way as the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople is an ethnarch. For example, when Orthodox in Latvia were recently obliged by the local government to stop commemorating the Russian Patriarch, many there stopped going to church. I was asked if people should continue to attend churches there. I answered: If churches there continue to commemorate Christ, then of course they should attend them. Clearly, for many, the commemoration of the Patriarch was much more important than the commemoration of Christ. This is a parallel to the Roman Catholic attitude to the Popes of Rome. For them too the Pope is the head of the Church. No Pope, no Church! And the same ‘phyletist’ disease is present among some in Constantinople, Moscow and elsewhere.

The second smallest group in the Diaspora after 1917 was the Paris-centred group. This was led by Westernised aristocrats and intellectuals, mainly from Saint Petersburg, who had betrayed the Tsar, organised the first ‘Revolution’ (palace coup) to overthrow him and showed loyalty to Western values such as liberalism, ecumenism etc. In general, they showed little interest in fasting, monasticism and piety. This is now an even smaller group, as it has largely died out.

The largest émigré group, called ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, also Russian Orthodox Church Abroad or in Exile), was always anti-Communist. However, since being anti-Communist is not the same as Orthodox Christianity (to the amazement of some of them!), this led them into deviations and perversions, such as Nazism, then the CIA, NATO, the Republican Party and American Imperialism. The erroneous idea was that anyone who was anti-Communist was their friend. That hatred blinded many of them to the fact that all those movements embodied hatred for Russia. And yet these people were supposedly pro-Russian! After multiple scandals in ROCOR over the last decade, involving narcissists, homosexual and pedophile clergy, this group has also become very small. Many have left it in disgust at its anti-Christian ethos and so it has in recent years become a rather irrelevant fringe group and a very great embarrassment to its Mother-Church in Moscow.

As for us, we continue to confess our loyalty to Christ and His Saints, the New Martyrs and the New Confessors, in faithfulness to St John of Shanghai and his successor the ever-memorable Archbishop Antony of Geneva. In 1975, we were already venerating the still uncanonised (after some 50 years!) New Martyrs and Confessors. Moscow refused to canonise them, like the two other groups – refusals all from lack of spiritual freedom. Apart from some quite exceptional individuals such as St John of Shanghai, all three groups also refused to venerate the Saints of the first millennium West when it was still Orthodox.

After the long overdue reconciliations with Moscow and apparent unity of the three ethnic Russian groups between 2007 and 2018, in the 2020s, the situation worsened sharply, as nationalism, Russian, American or French, seized hold of the leadership of the three groups. Moreover, as a result of Soviet-style nationalist centralisation, the Russian Church began to suffer from further splits with Orthodox in Estonia, the Ukraine, Moldova and Latvia. These splits spread everywhere outside the borders of the Russian Federation, among all who felt they had been treated as second-class citizens by the Centre and its emissaries. This left the Russian Church drifting rudderless and heading for shipwreck, as we continually described at that time.

Although we ordinary clergy and people were left leaderless and abandoned by politicians instead of pastors, we shall never respond to lies with lies, to slanders with slanders, to hatred with hatred. But neither shall we remain silent in the face of lies, slander, hatred, schism and sect. We shall continue to defend our canonical communion with the mainstream, all the Local Churches of the Orthodox Faith, and defend the spiritual freedom of our clergy and parishioners to be in communion with the whole Conciliar Church, to guard our Catholicity, and to keep the memory of the Saints, who are the identity of our Church. And in our case they are the identity of our England, as also of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. And no foreign sectarian and schismatic interloper from the USA has impeded us from so doing.