Category Archives: Russophobia

Imperial Russia: 1894 – 1914

Our children and grandchildren will not be capable of even imagining the Russia where we once (that is yesterday) lived and which we failed to appreciate and understand – all that might, complexity, wealth and happiness…

Ivan Bunin, Russian émigré author and Nobel prize-winner

Preface

One of the myths of Western propaganda, faithfully copied in every detail by Soviet propaganda, heir to the materialist West in all things – only more consistent than it, is that Imperial Russia was backward. In reality, everything that was good about the Soviet Union, its educational and health systems, literacy rates, absence of unemployment, low crime rate and thirst for social justice, was part of the heritage of the Russia of Tsar Nicholas II; what was bad about it, its atheism and persecution of Orthodox Christian values, came from the West. Some imagine that as Russian Orthodox we must be anti-Soviet; in reality, since we are anti-atheist, we are anti-Soviet only to the extent that Soviet ideology persecutes the Orthodox Church and imposes atheism. We are not anti-Soviet as regards the values which the Soviet system inherited from the Tsar’s government.

Thus, there was a time when we Russian Orthodox in the West supported the anti-atheism of the West. However, as soon as, a generation ago, that anti-atheism began to turn into Russophobia, we began to take another view. Today, the situation is the opposite of the past. The West, led by Washington and faithfully obeyed by its unthinking poodle Europe, part of which it has occupied since 1942 (the ‘friendly invasion’ of Great Britain by 2 million US troops) and another part since 1944 (the D-Day invasion), has become the most virulent centre of atheism in the world. At the same time, today’s Russian Federation has in many respects returned to Orthodoxy. We still, as is only logical, oppose atheism and if that opposes us Russian Orthodox to today’s apostate West and makes us protective of the West’s ancient Christian roots, that should be no surprise. We are consistent.

Introduction

100 years ago Imperial Orthodox Russia stood on the verge of becoming the world’s greatest Power. Only the three European Powers, Great Britain, Germany and France, especially the former with its paranoid Russophobic ‘Great Game’, stood in the way. Indeed, the multinational and territorially continuous Russian Empire had made huge progress since the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in 1894 in all domains, in astronomy, radar, radio (Popov), rocketry (Tsiolkovsky), monorails, ice-breakers (all in the 19th century), petrol and diesel engines, cars, lorries, trolleybuses, trams, diesel tractors and tank designs (both the world’s first).

In the field of aviation the Russian Empire invented helicopters (Igor Sikorsky was the grandson of a priest), the world’s first four-engine aeroplanes, monoplanes, seaplanes, aerodynamics, (in 1914 263 of the world’s approximately 850 warplanes were Russian), airships, parachutes (the world’s first), submarines, electric railways (Russian railways were the cheapest and most comfortable in the world), telegraphy, telephones, television (the world’s first), chemistry (Mendeleev), medicine, physiology (Pavlov was a priest’s son), zoology, geology, oil pipelines and hydroelectricity.

Freedom from a Military-Industrial Complex

On the one hand, the Japanese had almost gone bankrupt as a result of the 1904-5 war which they launched against the Russian Empire as a result of their militarism, which had led to very high military expenditure. This had been encouraged by Western politicians, industrialists and bankers, to whom the Japanese had indebted themselves (but this all rebounded on the West which was to suffer in the Second World War as a result of its greed in arming and selling technology to Japan). On the other hand, Russia’s military expenditure was very low (explaining initial setbacks in both the war against the Japanese invasion and again ten years later in defending itself and Serbia against German and Austro-Hungarian militarism).

Not being dominated by a military-industrial complex like Western countries which relied on it for their economic development, the Russian Empire’s overall military expenditure was less than a third of Britain’s and France’s, less than half of Germany’s and some 25% less than that of Austro-Hungary’s and Italy’s, As regards its naval expenditure, it was a quarter of Britain’s, just over a third of Japan’s and two-thirds of the USA’s. It had proportionately less than half of France’s, Germany’s and Italy’s population under arms and slightly less than Austro-Hungary’s. Its police force was also very small. In 1914 there were seven times fewer policemen than in Britain and 5 times fewer than in France. Crime was also lower. In 1905-6 there were 77 criminals per 100,000 head of population in the Russian Empire, 132 in the USA, 429 in Britain and 853 in Germany.

Thanks to its freedom from the tyranny of a military-industrial complex, Russian productivity increased fourfold between 1890 and 1913; in 1901 it produced 51% of the world’s oil and by 1909 it was the world’s greatest producer of cereals. Between 1892 and 1913 its wheat production had increased by 78% and in 1913 its wheat harvest was 28% higher than that of the USA, Canada and Argentina combined. In 1913 it exported 50% of the world’s eggs, 70% of its butter and 80% of its flax. It also produced over 25% of the world’s wheat, oats and potatoes, 40% of its barley and over 50% of its rye.

Between 1890 and 1910 the Russian Empire’s average rate of growth was over 9%, greater than that of the youthful USA. In 1913 it had the lowest direct taxes in the world, four times lower than in France and Germany and 8.5 times lower than in Britain, and incomes had increased sixfold between 1893 and 1913. In the same period, the length of railways had doubled, as also had its grain harvest. Russian manufactured goods outclassed British and Japanese goods in the Far East – they were both cheaper and better quality.

International Affairs

Internationally, it was Tsar Nicholas who in 1898 had called for an International Peace Conference to be held in the Hague in order to ban, or at least limit, arms. Although this proposal was to become the foundation of the International Court, the League of Nations and then the UN, sadly for the victims of the First World War, the initial proposition was rejected outright and even mocked by aggressive and imperialistic Britain, as well as militaristic Germany, France and Japan

The Russian Empire opposed colonialism and would not allow foreign capitalists there to exploit native peoples or massacre them, as the Western Powers had done in the Americas (putting ‘Indians’ onto ‘reserves’, or concentration camps, a technique today copied by Israel in Palestine), in Africa (massacring peoples born there, as in the Belgian Congo, French North-West Africa, the British Sudan and South Africa, or German South-West Africa) and committing genocide, as in Tasmania. The different peoples of the Russian Empire were respected, not massacred, which is why countries like Hawaii, Siam (Thailand), Tibet, Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and the Boers sought Russian protection or even Russian nationality.

This anti-colonialist policy was later continued by the Soviet Union, which did not invent it, as some imagine from its propaganda, but simply prolonged it. Thus, in 1899 the Russian Empire opposed the seizure by force by the USA of Hawaii, a territory which had previously voluntarily asked to receive Russian protection and even nationality in order to protect it from Western imperialism. In 1900, the Russian Tsar similarly protected Tibet from British imperialism and massacres, placing it under Chinese tutelage. In 1912 he set up the Balkan Union of Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece in order to counter Turkish imperialism and also the provincial nationalism/phyletism of the governments of those four countries. Sadly, the treacherous German King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, egged on by the German Kaiser, soon broke the Union and attacked Serbia.

International Orthodoxy

Between 1894 and 1912 7,546 new Orthodox parish churches, not including chapels, were built and 211 new monasteries were opened. 17 churches were also built in major European cities as a witness to Orthodoxy, some with the Tsar’s own money, as in Nice and as also with St Nicholas church in New York. Tsar Nicholas made generous personal gifts to Local Orthodox Churches and others, including the Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, Montenegrin, Constantinopolitan (Mt Athos), Antiochian, Alexandrian and Abyssinian (Ethiopian) Churches, as well as to the Holy Land (Jerusalem).

By 1914 there were 117 million Orthodox in the Empire, with 48,000 parish churches, some 25,000 chapels and churches in monasteries and other institutions, some 50,000 priests and deacons and 130 bishops in 67 dioceses. The Church had over 35,000 primary schools and 58 seminaries. (By 1917 there were 163 bishops, 51,105 priests and 79,767 churches, including 25,593 chapels and churches in 1257 monasteries and other institutions).

By 1895 there were 22,000 Orthodox in Japan and a seminary. In 1897 an Orthodox mission was established in Seoul in Korea. In 1898 the Nestorians of Urmia in Persia joined the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1903 86 Russian schools were opened in Syria. In 1913, there were 3,812 Orthodox in China and a seminary. Apart from his zeal for the glorification of new saints, in March 1905 Tsar Nicholas proposed himself as Patriarch, which would effectively have restored the Patriarchate almost immediately, if only his offer had been accepted.

Western Russophobia

Western newspapers, often owned by imperialistic bankers, industrialists and arms merchants, loved to attack Russia for the ‘pogroms’. In fact, these did not take place in Russia itself, but above all in Catholic Vienna and Berlin and among settlements of Jews in the Russian Empire (who had taken refuge there centuries ago from Western anti-semitism) namely in Catholic Poland, Catholic Lithuania, Catholic Galicia and Romanian Orthodox Bessarabia (Moldova).

Between the four years of 1903 and 1907 1,622 people were killed in the ‘pogroms’ in the Russian Empire, of whom however only 711 were Jews (the same number of Jews as were killed every four hours and the same number of Soviet citizens as were killed every hour by the Western Nazis between the four years of 1942 and 1945). The other victims were Catholic and Orthodox. Indeed, many of the pogroms were started by Jews, but the Tsar’s government had to constantly intervene between the two sides, usually Catholics and Jews, being as even-handed as possible. Despite the pogroms, the Jewish population rose considerably, in spite of massive emigration, mainly to the USA.

Another object of propaganda was the war launched by Japan, a proxy armed to the teeth by the West against Russia. Thus, the Japanese attack on Port Arthur, in no way different in its treacherous unexpectedness from Pearl Harbour, was greeted with joy by British and American newspapers, since the Japanese Navy had been built and armed mainly by Britain, all part of Britain’s ‘Great Game’ to control the whole world. Although Russia’s much smaller and older Navy did lose naval battles against Japan, its army was beginning to win on land and, if it had not been for the Japanese and Western-fomented troubles which began in 1905, there is no doubt that Russia would have won the war within another year, crushing Japan, as it did in 1945.

Western Support for the Enemies of Russia

The open support for the enemies of Russia can also be seen in the ‘Hull Incident’, when Russian battleships bravely sailed around the world, west to east, to fight against the superior Japanese Navy. Arriving in the North Sea, they were provoked, probably on purpose, by Japan’s British ally and the Russians fired on a British trawler in error. Once the Russians had arrived in the Far East, their small fleet was defeated at Tsushima by the Japanese fleet, twice as numerous and powerful. Breaking the 1899 Hague Convention, nearby Japanese ships refused to allow two Russian hospital ships to pick up wounded Russian sailors and seized the ships as prizes of war instead.

Another instance of extraordinarily biased propaganda occurred when Western newspapers deliberately misreported the tragic events known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. This was during the Western-financed 1905 troubles in Russia, when on 9 January a crowd led by the renovationist Fr George Gapon (who later committed suicide after it was discovered that he was in fact a secret agent), led a crowd to the Tsar’s Palace with a petition, knowing full well that the Tsar was absent, and terrorists in the crowd, hiding behind icons, opened fire on the troops who defended the Tsar’s residence. Many died in the crossfire, possibly as many as 128.

When the Tsar heard of the events, he personally generously compensated the families who had lost members in the crossfire between terrorists and troops. He at once instituted a commission to investigate workers’ needs. However, in comparison, in the next two years several thousand were to die at the hands of terrorists, of whom only a few hundred were captured and punished, many of them fleeing to Western countries, such as Britain (Lenin), the USA (Trotsky) and Switzerland, where they were deliberately protected by the authorities. Even the Edwardian British children’s book ‘The Railway Children’, written by E. Nesbit, sentimentally supported the protection of anti-Russian terrorists in England, which was a reality, for example the formation of the Bolshevik Party in London.

Social Achievements

Free from domination by a military-industrial complex, by 1897 the population of the Russian Empire had reached 129.1 million and the annual rate of increase was then 1.6 million. Some 12% of people lived in towns and cities. The birth rate was 48 per 1,000, whereas in the rest of Europe it was between 22 and 41. By 1902 the population had reached 139 million and by 1913 170 million, an average rate of increase of 3.7 million per year, twice as high as in the decade between 1892 and 1902. Growth had become the highest in the world and it is estimated that by 2000 the population would have reached 600 million.

Education was made free at the start of Tsar Nicholas’ reign in 1894 and between 1893 and 1913 expenditure on education increased by 628%. Between 1902 and 1913 the national education budget was four times higher than the defence budget – a proportion which the Soviet Union was unable to maintain. On the eve of the First World War half of all students at the University of Moscow were educated for free, another quarter received grants. There were then over 39,000 university students in Russia and more women in higher education than in any other country in the world. By 1912 nearly two million children were being educated in over 37,000 Church schools, but there were 130,000 schools altogether, given that since 1908 10,000 schools had been opening every year.

In 1908 70 million books were published in Russia. In 1914 150,000 new titles were published worldwide, of which 32,238 were published in Russia, 25,531 in Russian, the others in other languages of the Empire. This was as many books as in Britain, France and the USA combined. In 1914 there were nearly 150,000 libraries in Russia and by 1920 literacy would have reached some 90%. Unlike in the bureaucracy of the later Soviet Union, the number of civil servants in Russia in 1914 was 336,000 – in much smaller France it was already 500,000. The merciful Tsar Nicholas II never signed a single death sentence during his reign and pardoned a great many who had been sentenced by the courts.

By 1913 medical treatment of the poor was free and virtually every hospital had free wards for their treatment. In 1897 the working day had been limited to a maximum of eleven and a half hours and ten hours if on a night shift (in France the maximum was 12 hours, in Italy the maximum was 12 hours, but for women only, in other countries there was no limit at all) and Sundays were non-working days. There was no unemployment in Russia – just as later in the Soviet Union. By the law of 1903 injuries caused by industrial accidents were generously compensated after more than three days of incapacity. If workers were incapacitated by a serious accident, they were paid a pension two-thirds of their salary. In 1912 the US President Taft publicly declared that ‘your Emperor has created the most perfect labour legislation, which not a single democratic state can boast of’.

Conclusion

Satan has inspired the jealous secularist Western Powers to destroy the Russian Empire in their greedy, anti-Christian bid for world hegemony, whether through their export there of atheist Communism in 1917 or through the export there of their atheist Capitalism in 2014. The only difference is that then it was Great Britain which led the war against Russia. Today it is its younger brother, the USA, which eclipsed Britain, making into its colony in 1942 under Churchill, who was half-American. And ever since the British Establishment has loyally followed orders from Washington, wagging its tail at every one, its prize – crumbs from the master’s table. As can be seen above, most of the achievements falsely claimed by the Soviet Union were in fact the real achievements of the Tsar’s Russia and built on its firm base.

During the reign of Tsar Nicholas, the length of the railways increased by almost 150%, production of coal by 430%, of sugar by 400%, of iron ore by 140%, of oil by 100% and gold reserves grew by 250%, despite the Japanese and then Austro-Hungarian and German aggression in their anti-Russian wars. In 1912 a French newspaper predicted that if the European nations continued to progress between 1912 and 1950 as they had between 1902 and 1912, then Russia would dominate Europe, politically, economically and financially by mid-century. A review in the November 1914 issue of the American ‘National Geographic Magazine’ called Russia ‘the land of unlimited opportunities’. It is to this that today we wish to return. If today’s Russia is faithful to Orthodoxy and Orthodox values, then it will indeed become once more ‘the land of unlimited opportunities’.

Is the West Brave Enough to Resist its Warmongers?

Parallels

July 1914: The West is haunted by the threat of a European War, encouraged by its warmongering tabloid media, a War which risks becoming worldwide.

July 2014: The West is haunted by the threat of a European War, encouraged by its warmongering tabloid media, a War which risks becoming worldwide.

February 1917: The Russian Revolution, orchestrated from the British Embassy in Saint Petersburg, overthrows the legitimate Russian government. Seven months later the Embassy and its Russian puppets lose control of the situation, extremists take control and begin their genocide.

February 2014: The Ukrainian Revolution, orchestrated from the American Embassy in Kiev, overthrows the legitimate Ukrainian government. Three months later the Embassy and its Ukrainian puppets lose control of the situation, extremists take control and begin their genocide.

As Christians in Mosul (formerly Nineveh, the place where the Prophet Jonah once preached) are threatened either with apostasy, high taxes, flight or beheading, they are ignored by the Christian-hating Western world, which brought about their plight through its illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

As Christians in the Gaza strip face genocide from Western-backed Israeli State terrorism, they are ignored by the Christian-hating Western world, which brought about their plight through its use of Israel as a Middle Eastern Crusader colony and a pawn in the great game for Western global hegemony.

As in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, and very nearly in Syria and perhaps in the Ukraine, the West has backed terrorism and created chaos so that it can divide and rule. Millions lie dead.

Facts

Washington’s propaganda machine is in such high gear that we are in danger of losing the facts. One fact is that the separatists do not have the expensive Buk anti-aircraft missile system or the trained personnel to operate it. Another fact is that the separatists have no incentive to shoot down an airliner and neither does Russia. Anyone can tell the difference between low-flying attack aircraft and an airliner at 33,000 feet. The Ukrainian junta does have Buk anti-aircraft missile systems and a Buk battery was operational in the region and deployed at a site from which it could have fired a missile at the airliner. One Russian general familiar with the weapon system offered his opinion that it was a mistake made by the Ukrainian military untrained in the weapon’s use. The general said that although Ukraine has a few of the weapons, Ukrainians have had no training in their use in the 23 years since the Ukraine separated from Russia. The general thinks it was an accident due to incompetence.

The Interfax news agency citing anonymous sources, apparently air traffic controllers, reported that the Malaysian airliner and President Putin’s airliner were traveling on almost the identical route within minutes of one another. Interfax quotes its source: “I can say that President Putin’s plane and the Malaysian Boeing intersected at the same point and the same echelon. That was close to Warsaw on 330-m echelon at a height of 10,100 meters. The presidential jet was there at 16:21 Moscow time and the Malaysian aircraft at 15:44 Moscow time. The contours of the aircrafts are similar, linear dimensions are also very similar, as for the colouring, at a quite remote distance they are almost identical.”

This report has led to speculation that Washington decided to rid itself of Putin and mistook the Malaysian airliner for Putin’s jet. Before you say Washington is too sophisticated to mistake one airliner for another, keep in mind that when Washington shot down an Iranian airliner over Iranian air space, the US Navy claimed that it thought the 290 civilians that it murdered were in an Iranian F-14 Tomcat fighter, a US-made fighter that was a mainstay of the US Navy. If the US Navy cannot tell its own workhorse fighter aircraft from an Iranian airliner, clearly the US can confuse two similar airliners.

So when do sanctions begin against the CIA-installed junta in Kiev, elected by 25% of the population (unlike the overthrown Yanukovich government, elected by 54% of the population), and its banana republic? Or is the Western world really so crazed with its hatred-filled hawks that it wants to create yet another war? Or are there still enough people of goodwill in the West to realize that it is the neo-colonialist EU that has blood on its hands in Kiev (to quote one British politician), as it created this situation, and that it is the neo-imperialist USA, so full of hubris, and its puppet junta in Kiev, that is now bringing the possibility of a Third World War in Europe ever closer? Napoleon and Hitler learned their lessons in Russia. Will the West never learn from them in its insatiable urge for total control of the planet?

A Decisive Moment in History

In order to wipe out the Russians, we must not only destroy their army, wreck their towns and liquidate their State, but it is also vital to kill their culture, deprive them of moral direction, belittle their heroes and force them to forget all their achievements. Only then can this people finally be defeated.

Josef Goebbels

If people lose faith in God, it is a tragedy, and if they do not repent, they die and disappear off the face of the earth. Many peoples have disappeared, but Russia exists and will continue to exist. Pray, entreat and repent! Then the Lord will not leave you; He will save the whole Earth!

Blessed Matrona of Moscow

We live at a decisive moment in history, at an exceptional time, when prophecies are taking flesh before our very eyes. When the Washington puppeteers sent their junta on its blitzkrieg against the people of the eastern Ukraine, it thought that if it used carpet bombing against an intimidated population and destroyed their infrastructure, then they would rise up against the ‘separatists and terrorists’.

This plan did not work. Poroshenko’s (Waltzman’s) American advisors grossly miscalculated when they thought that they knew his subjects’ psychology – they thought that the people would settle for the mess of pottage of comfortable consumerism, for bread and circuses, like Western people. They will not. Like the Mongols, the Swedes, the Poles, Napoleon and Hitler before them, the CIA are wrong again.

Every day the war in the Ukraine takes the lives of civilians, including children. Spilled blood is marking out the future borders. However, although the régime continues to massacre the people in its occupied territories, it has failed to stamp out resistance. In captured Slavyansk and Kramatorsk they have staged mass shootings of residents and of the mothers of Home Guardsmen. Already the angel of vengeance has erased the names of the executioners from the Book of Life.

From a spiritual perspective, a pathological hatred of Russia is understandable. Stating a commitment to ‘traditional values’, in fact to Orthodoxy and Christ, Russia has made Satan gnash his teeth. For more than twenty years he believed that Russia was his. Then, after nearly a generation, at the State level we have seen spiritually informed decisions. Satan wanted Orthodox to continue to bow down before his golden calf, to have no other god but it. He decided to punish Russia with sanctions until it changed its mind.

In the eastern Ukraine we are seeing the Resurrection of Orthodox Rus, a new social system, that which the Tsar-Martyr had tried to introduce before the Revolution, that is, before the Western-organized coup d’etat of February 1917. As then the aristocrats resisted that social system, so today the oligarchs resist it. The oligarchs now face a new generation brought up on the Orthodox White Idea – and that generation is the future Orthodox political élite of Russia. People in the Ukraine long endured economic slavery under the oligarchs without a murmur, but they rebelled against spiritual slavery, against the bloodthirsty Nazi idol erected on the independence of the Ukrainian nation. For idols collapse onto the heads of their devotees.

The thesis of the Russian Orthodox thinker and prophet Ivan Ilyin was that after the collapse of the USSR twenty quasi-states would exist on the sacred sites of Holy Rus, but then ‘a new Russian union would implement a policy based on religious contemplation and spiritual freedom, on justice and fraternal patriotic feelings, and on the dignity of the government, on its power, strength, and universal trust’. He was right. The plans of the global hegemonists are coming to naught.

The Nazi bandits sent by Washington through Kiev are only victims of their own ignorance; the time will come when they will realize who and what drew them to the slaughter. The world’s grandmasters calculated that President Putin would play by the rules of this world. He has not. According to the law of Russian Orthodoxy, when the country is in danger, God chooses to bring the things of this world to naught, the commoner trumps the powerbroker, and those who calculate according to the rules of digital culture the consequences of disobeying the golden calf are proved wrong.

The Poles and the French walked around the Kremlin, then, the fickleness of fate struck them – they had to eat horse-feed. When Napoleon sat in the Kremlin, the French desecrated the holy places, ravaged Russia, but the scales on the eyes of the Russian elite, the allure of the West, fell away. In 1941, the Germans admired the Kremlin through their binoculars. In 1942, Ivan Ilyin wrote the article ‘Why We Believe in Russia’. In 1943, anyone could have written it, but in 1942, in defeat, only Ilyin did. That is, faith saves.

Orthodoxy is not only a gift; it is also a cross. Some people drink the cup of suffering in the name of Russian Orthodox faith, while at the same time others blithely lead carefree lives, wasting their time, not knowing why they are Orthodox. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? (Lk. 13, 4). The Lord warns us. God judges people. His Judgement comes about at the time of our actions, but He does not execute His sentence immediately, God gives people time to repent.

Political frontiers reflect human truths, but often they do not coincide with the frontiers of spiritual civilization. Between Galicia and the rest of the Ukraine there is a frontier, it is a spiritual frontier, that between apostasy and faith. Satan deceives nations with the spirit of national pride. This is symbolized by the Ukrainian Army, most of which refuses to fight or simply joins those whom it is supposed to be fighting. Another 300 have now joined the side of freedom against their CIA paymasters. The worst thing for the hopelessly provincialist nationalist Uniat Galicians is that they still do not realize that they have been judged by God.

War often gives a nation a painful shock. Such a painful shock stopped the Vietnam War. When burial crosses dot the Western and Central Ukraine, serving to subsequent generations as a reminder of how dear the cost of the Nazi hallucination was to the people, then, the mothers of the dead and maimed soldiers will stop the war. Hubris and blind hatred led them to reject federalism, which alone would have allowed people to live within a shared common frontier, as heirs of Kievan Rus.

Feelings overrode reason. Hatred destroys, and only love can create. Thus, Nero hated the Christians, he wanted to immortalize himself in grand architectural monuments and wipe Christians off the face of the Earth, but the persecution only strengthened Christianity in a phenomenal way, while there is nothing left of Nero’s grandiose buildings. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous: but the way of the wicked will perish (Psalm 1, 6).

Adapted from an article by Sergey Moiseev.

Western Peoples, Awake!

We see crucifixions in Syria and decapitations in Iraq, where the Iraqi-Syrian caliphate has been created by Western meddling – for the only ever weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were those taken there by the genocidal Western forces sent by Bush and Blair. In Israel the US-subsidized genocide of the Palestinians – an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – continues, only Nazi-style, with 100 eyes for one eye, 100 teeth for one tooth.
Then there is the Taliban restoration in Afghanistan, made inevitable by the departure of Soviet forces a generation ago, then there are the murderous Islamist fanatics in Nigeria, the bombing of ancient Nubian Christians in Sudan, the Western-sponsored caliphates in Libya and Saudi Arabia and the persecution of Christians in Malaysia and Indonesia….

All these events are little reported and even deliberately ignored by the Western media and the sodomized Western world as a whole. For they have nothing but contempt for Christians and are in any case too frightened of their self-created Islamic minorities, 5%-10% of Western Europe now, and of their oil-rich paymasters in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

However, even less reported and indeed deliberately ignored by the Western media, is the use of poison gas and phosphorus bombs in the Ukraine, as criminals are released from prisons and employed by the CIA-installed Nazi junta in Kiev to murder their own civilian population during and since their recent pseudo-ceasefire.

Armed and financed by the US and Galician Uniats, the criminals sent from Kiev, together with Western mercenaries and Western ‘Special Forces’ (i.e. trained killers) have slaughtered thousands, creating the worst refugee problem in Europe since 1945. And all this in order to implement the ‘plan’ of the Californian ‘think tank’ RAND Corporation for the destruction and then colonization of the third-worldized Ukraine, sowing it with GM crops and using it as a dumping-ground for Western nuclear waste and unwanted immigrants.

Above all, what the Western world does not want to admit is that all the present troubles are the beginning of Armageddon, of World War III, and that this War, just like the previous two World Wars, has been started by the sheer imperialist greed of the Western world. Only this time, unlike the previous two times, the whole of the West is united, not divided as before, against Christian civilization, and is fighting on the side of Antichrist.

100 years ago it was the Germanic world that began the First World War and again 75 years ago it was that same world. But today it is the whole Western world that has joined the Nazis. Some will say that peace-loving Russia is at fault. If in the 1990s it had stood up to the Western invasion and genocide in Yugoslavia, then today there would have been peace in a Non-Yugoslavized Ukraine. But in the 1990s decadent Russia was under the jackboot of a pro-Western regime and not free.

The time may be coming when we, the last Christians in the West, all of us Orthodox, whatever our nationality, will have to make plans to take refuge in our only earthly spiritual homeland, in Orthodox Russia, from the Western Antichrist. We now ask the Russian authorities to prepare to issue us with Russian passports. Only the prayers of us, the people of God, for our own repentance and for the restoration of Russia as the Orthodox Sovereign Power, the last bastion of Christianity left in the world, can now delay the coming of Antichrist, Who is so eagerly supported by all the Western elites. Western peoples, awake – it is now or never!

Archpriest Andrew Phillips
Holy Apostles Peter and Paul 2014

Eurosodom or Euro-Vision?

The news reached me in the USA on Sunday. The Eurovision Song Contest, usually inane but relatively innocent, had been won by a bearded transvestite who could not even sing. There was a clear political conspiracy of systematic jeering of the innocent Russian song. This was sheer provocation. The accelerating repaganization of Europe is now headlong, as it hurtles towards its suicide. What was unthinkable only ten years ago is now a reality. Satanism is here and we can smell his sulphur.

Those who applauded this transvestite declaration of ‘peace and freedom’ and thought that it was a declaration of human rights and democracy could not have been more wrong. As one whom I know who has never liked President Putin told me: ‘I will now vote for him’. The message has indeed struck home in the troubled and divided Ukraine: As President Putin told the Ukrainians: ‘Is this what you wanted: Eurosdom? Then you can have it, but we will remain Christians’. As Europe sinks ever deeper into the pagan degeneracy of Ancient Greece and Rome, the fate of Pompeii threatens it.

Russia is today offering all Western peoples, inside and outside Europe a vision, the true Euro-Vision: a Eurosodom or the vision of a Europe of Tradition. This Song Contest has crystallized the polarization of the Western world. For months now conservative Republicans – paleocons, not the opposite neocons – in the USA have been praising President Putin and ironically and amazingly condemning their own country as ‘the evil empire’. The once implacable enemies of the Soviet Union are becoming the implacable friends of Russia. The same has been happening in Europe. There is developing here a broad coalition of Western citizens, let alone Ukrainian citizens, who now look to Russia for salvation and rescue from Eurosodom.

The clear and deliberate provocation of Eurovision has backfired. It has created support for true peace and freedom, not the ‘peace and freedom’ of Antichrist, but those of Christ, which ‘pass all understanding’ of the new pagans. The Western world thought to make the Ukraine into the battleground between Christ and Satan; in reality it has made itself into that battleground. As never before in the whole of history, Western people who are still spiritually alive, who still have a conscience – and not just the Orthodox among them – are looking to Russia for leadership and support.

Exactly 200 years ago Russian troops liberated Paris from the tyranny of the atheist Napoleon after he had tried to enslave Russia with a multinational European army, 90% of whom died in the attempt. Today, Orthodox Russia is being called on to liberate ‘Paris’ – that is, the whole Western world that is enslaved by its apostasy – once more. In 1814 Paris rang to the cries of Christ is Risen; in 2014 these are once more the only words that can change the Western world. Protestantism is all but dead; Catholicism, its former Pope rejected, has utterly discredited itself despite its recent public relations campaign; there remains only the Church of God, without which there is indeed no Christianity, and Russia is at the heart of the Church, as it has not been since 1917.

Myths about Contemporary Russia

Introduction

The Western ruling elite in both North America and Western Europe is rattled. For the first time since 1917, its totalitarian monopoly of ‘liberal’, ‘West is best’, mythology is being challenged – by Russia and to the pleasure of the real international community, i.e. of everyone outside the narrow Western world. In Western Europe the elite is also frightened by the possible results of the European elections on 22 May, after which it may lose a lot of money. It is therefore pulling out all the stops and resorting to the demonization of and lies about Russia – its stock in trade that goes back to before 1917. Its favourite trick is, in its usual racist way, to present Russia as ‘Asiatic’ and ‘barbarian’- much to the disgust of real and ever more powerful Asian nations.

In reality the problems of Russia of the last 300 years have all been caused by the toxic waste that has been exported to it from Europe. Thus, revolutionary terror and Napoleon came from France, the concentration camp from Britain, Marx from Germany (with Ricardo’s economics, French socialism and Hegel and Feuerbach’s philosophy) and Hitler from Austria, with four aggressive Western invasions of Russia between 1812 and 1941, not counting the fifth one in today’s Ukraine…Here are five myths currently being plugged by the Western elite and the media that is feudally dependent on it, despite the fact that many Western people (‘the plebs’) do not believe them at all.

1. Russia produces nothing and is no more than a Third World country with oil and gas

Oil and gas represent only 10% of Russian GNP – as against 41% for the corrupt and fanatical Western ally Saudi Arabia. Agriculture is 5% of Russian GNP (third largest exporter in the world for wheat despite a difficult climate), industry represents 28% of the economy and the service sector represents 66%. It is also the world’s third largest producer of electricity (nearly twice that of France, where 80% of it comes from nuclear power) and it controls one third of the world’s nuclear construction industry. It has a monopoly of launch equipment for the international space station, has the second largest navy in the world, its search engine Yandex has been ahead of Google and the Kaspersky anti-virus is No 1 in the world. Third World!

2. Russia has never in 1,000 years had any system of rule except totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is an invention of the West – as was feudalism. The Empire of the Tsars was not absolutist (that was French) but, in its best moments, a people’s monarchy. Serfdom, as such, was introduced by the German Empress Catherine II on the basis of Western feudalism and lasted just over 100 years. It was abolished peacefully a few years before the USA abolished slavery and that at a cost of 600,000 dead. You only have to compare the way Russia treated the native peoples of Siberia and the way the USA treated their cousins in North America, massacring them and packing them into concentration camps called ‘reservations’. As regards the Western record in Latin America, Africa and Asia, we only have to think of Spain in Latin America, Portugal in Brazil and Africa, Belgium in the Congo, Britain in India, Tasmania, Canada, the Sudan and South Africa, Germany in what was South-West Africa and France in Algeria, Madagascar and Indo-China. The Orthodox Church always counterbalanced any excesses of the Russian State and the Tsars were forced to obey the Church’s morality – unlike today’s Western presidents and prime-ministers. Today Russia is no less democratic than France, though President Putin is seven times more popular than President Hollande; Western Europe accuses Russia only because it needs a mythical enemy so that its elite can profit from the US umbrella.

The demographic deficit

After the fall of the Soviet Union, so mismanaged by the atheist Gorbachov, and the disastrous decade of Westernisation (and the oligarchs it produced) that followed under the provincial drunkard Yeltsin, there was a huge fall in the birth rate from 1.89 in 1991 to only 1.17 in 1999. However, with abortions falling by one third between 1990 and 2006, since 2009 the population has been rising and in 2012 the birth rate stood at 1.73, higher than in the corrupt and bankrupt European Union. Life expectancy has also risen sharply in recent years and it now stands at 69 and is still on the rise. The great increase in prosperity since 2001 has helped enormously: between 2000 and 2013 the average salary rose sixfold (though, true, there has been some inflation), the rate of poverty went down from 35% to 13% (now lower than in many Western countries) and unemployment stands at only 5.5%, less than half of the EU average. (Of course none of this is true in the westernised Ukraine, where corruption and oligarchs have ruled for 23 years, ever since the country was invented). Seeing the demographic suicide of Western Europe, its selfish ‘childfree’ (not childless) propaganda, its ‘culture of death’ of abortion and euthanasia (John Paul II), and the consequent Muslim takeover, Russia has reacted. For example every child born there means a benefit for the family of 7,000 euros. Here the Russian Church has played a great role in promoting marriage.

The Gulag continues

The Gulag does not exist. Thus, in Russia there are 800,000 in prison – compared to 2.5 million in the USA, where one American in 140 is in jail. In the USA the death sentence exists (500 executions in Texas alone since 1976) – not in Russia, as was the case for most of the period under the Tsars. It was Western Communism, like Western Nazism, that murdered – the main victims by far being Russians themselves. And in Russia there is no Guantanamo.

Russia is immoral

‘Russians are cruel, thieving, dishonest and unable to cope with freedom’. The history of the prejudices of Western anti-Slavism goes back to the mass murderer ‘Blessed’ Charlemagne (ask the Slavic Wends) and the massacres by Western ‘crusaders’ in Jerusalem, New Rome (‘Constantinople’) and in Moscow in 1612. Little wonder that Hitler’s racism was not only against the Jews, of whom he slaughtered at least 5 million but even more against the Slavs, of whom he slaughtered 30 million. Perhaps his violence goes back to the Thirty Years War, when a third of the population of Germany was slaughtered, or is it to the Inquisition, or to the French Revolution or to the two World Wars that Europe started and spread? It seems strange that Russian crime should be targeted by Western countries where crime has tripled since the 1960s. Surely this is a result of Western materialism (the same philosophy that lay behind the Communism that the West exported to Russia), which makes people dependent on ever greater consumerist wants of material things, which has produced the contemporary Western spiritual desert.

Conclusion

At present the Western ruling elite and their feudal media are intent on spreading hatred of Russia. Would the West not be better off co-operating with Russia for its survival, so that it can cast off the shackles of neocon feudal colonialism, save family life from its culture of death and so recivilise itself with the values of bimillennial Christianity, which is still alive in Russia? Or does it really prefer to listen to its grasping and egoistic elite and their subservient and ignorant media and walk the path of hatred, jealousy and suicide? There is the choice.

The Purity of Holy Orthodoxy

The title is an expression used in an inspiring conversation with the ever-memorable Metropolitan Laurus at the ROCOR Council of San Francisco in 2006. Below are a number of recent conversations, both actual and also from correspondence by e-mail, regarding current Church matters, all of which illustrate the search of all conscious Orthodox for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy in the Light of the Resurrection.

Q: What recent changes have marked the Church inside Russia?

A: A generation has now passed since the commemoration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988 and the world-changing events that followed it, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of the passing of that generation, in the last few months there have been major changes, with the retirement in Kiev and St Petersburg of both Metropolitans Vladimir and in Minsk that of Metr Philaret. Thus, all three most senior Metropolitans in the Russian Church inside Russia have retired through age and ill health. This is the end of the old generation of those who were connected with the highly controversial and politically-minded Metr Nikodim (Rotov) of the Soviet period.

Those of his disciples who are still alive have all had to adapt since the Jubilee Council of 2000 with its rejection of sergianism and ecumenism and canonisation of the New Martyrs and Confessors, including the Royal Martyrs, and then the acceptance of the reconciliation between the Church inside Russia and the Church Outside Russia in 2007. In other words we are now entering the second generation since the collapse of secularist-atheist ideology in the Russian Lands and so the resurrection by the purity of Holy Orthodoxy of the crucified Church inside Russia. These three senior posts that have changed hands are symbolic of a more general generational change, as Lazarus’ grave-clothes have fallen off.

Q: What do you mean by ‘Lazarus’ grave-clothes’?

A: I liken the resurrection of the Church inside Russia to the resurrection of Lazarus. This was an incredible and astounding miracle, but we should not forget that Lazarus’ grave-clothes did not smell good because the decomposition of his body had already begun. These grave-clothes are represented by the deathly, Soviet and post-Soviet (not yet Russian), phenomena and problems that have accompanied the resurrection of the Church inside Russia.

Q: What phenomena?

A: For example, inside Russia in the 1990s they were so short of priests that they ordained very easily. There were several disasters here with clearly unworthy ordinations and subsequent defrockings, sometimes for sexual misdemeanours, sometimes for financial misdemeanours. I have met such priests – I know what I speak of. Then there was the confusion between Stalinism and the Church and the total misunderstanding or even rejection of the Royal Martyrs – all as a result of the brainwashing from old Soviet propaganda and lies. Then there have been the phenomena of pro-Catholic clergy (like the assassinated Fr Alexander Men, a suspected Uniat) and the events surrounding Paris-style Russophobes, including the modernist, pro-Protestant Fr George Kochetkov, suspended at one point by Patriarch Alexis as a ‘neo-renovationist’, and the recent scandals concerning Protodeacon Andrei Kuraev and Professor Zubov (a close friend of the late Olivier Clement), who both had to be sacked. These are all people who to some extent still live in the Soviet thought world. They have never managed to shake off the spiritual and intellectual impurity of the past and so make the transition from that old-style Soviet conditioning, paradoxically mixed with a superficial Orthodoxy, to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

The same thing happened outside Russia, where the Church inside Russia had several unworthy and scandalous representatives, uncanonically ordained, or other representatives who are now very elderly as they were appointed in Soviet times. Fortunately, the unworthy ones have mostly died out or been moved, some very recently. According to the 2007 agreement the Church inside Russia has to prepare its parishes outside Russia (except in China and Japan, which is part of its canonical territory) for their canonical handover to ROCOR. His Holiness understandably wants this process to go smoothly, without hurting anyone’s feelings, especially those of the elderly. Therefore it will take a generation before it is completed and all moves to the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Q: Surely there were impurities in ROCOR also?

A: ROCOR had from the start two wings. One was the political wing whose identity was nationalistic, cultural and anti-Communist rather than simply Orthodox; the other wing, which could be called the ‘Johannite wing’, as represented by St John of Shanghai, was the mainstream of ROCOR. Our view was and is Christian. I can remember how the political and nationalist wing dominated in certain parishes, for example at the former ROCOR chapel in Paris or at the old London Cathedral, as it used to be, when it had several members who worked for MI5. Significantly, those parishes have not survived, but died.

This was because the politically-minded elements refused reconciliation with the Church inside Russia in 2007 or even before. As one of our archbishops said before 2007, reconciliation with the repentant Church inside Russia, the Church of the New Martyrs and Confessors, would lead to a ‘purification’ of ROCOR. That is exactly what happened. Spiritual impurities such as extremism, phariseeism, sectarianism and fanaticism could not bear reality and love others or the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, and so that political wing left the Church for various sects. Several of the small communities concerned in North America were dominated by individuals who worked for the CIA or the Canadian Secret Services.

Q: What do you make of current political changes in the Ukraine?

A: Two weeks ago the US removed the gold reserves of the Ukraine. Then the CIA took over a floor in the offices of the Ukrainian Secret Police in Kiev and the head of the CIA, John Brennan, went to Kiev on Lazarus Saturday. The head of the CIA does not visit a foreign country without a very good reason. It was no doubt with the intention of hoping to further destabilise the Ukraine and then run it, just as it did countless Latin America banana republics and Italy and Greece after the Second World War.

Sure enough, just after that, the CIA began issuing black propaganda, sheer lies, for example about alleged persecution of the Jews in the eastern Ukraine or that President Putin had tens of billions of dollars in private bank accounts in the West, implying that he was a thief. Naturally the Western-media were fed those lies and naturally reported them. The Times of London (part of the Murdoch tabloid empire) was especially keen to report these slanders and lies.

For instance, as regards the Jews, everybody knows that the Jews were massacred by the Uniat Ukrainian SS in Galicia, the western Ukraine, which welcomed Hitler and where earlier anti-Jewish pogroms had taken place. These are facts of history. Many members of the Ukrainian (= Galician) SS, with Polish nationality, came to live in the UK and especially the US, after World War II. I know; I met some of them 30-40 years ago; some of them were frightening and admitted to killing Jews.

Today, at least 150 US mercenaries, probably being paid for by the CIA, are active against the people of the Ukraine, given that most Ukrainian soldiers and police refuse to use violence against their own people – indeed 9,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already asked for Russian nationality. Other soldiers in the eastern Ukraine have simply joined the insurrection of the Ukrainian people against the junta. We cannot see this crucifixion of the Ukraine, orchestrated in Washington and Brussels and carried out by their paid puppets in Kiev, as being successful.

Q: Why not?

A: First of all, the Ukraine is bankrupt, which is why the bankrupt US called on the world to ‘save the Ukrainian economy’. But it is too late. Prices are doubling. The poor people of the Ukraine, exploited and impoverished for 23 years by corrupt oligarchs, are spontaneously rising up against the unrepresentative, US-installed, separatist Kiev junta and its terror tactics. That regime seized power from the democratically-elected government in Kiev by violence and murder; now it is facing opposition from the Ukrainian people, who are using the same techniques as it did, in order to seize back power from it in turn. As it is written, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword. But there is chaos.

Q: Does any of this have any significance in Orthodox terms? Is it not all political?

A: All of this is highly significant for us. Today’s Russia is at last just beginning to position itself as a spiritual power, opposing the secularist atheism of the Western elite. This was Russia’s traditional role – to protect Christian civilisation both from Western barbarians and from Eastern hordes. Thus, it repelled the Mongol-Tartar yoke, encouraged moderate Islam, repelled the Charleses, Napoleons and Hitlers, liberating both Paris and Berlin, and supported the Church in the Holy Land, the Patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Outside Eurasia Russia has always helped the peoples of the developing world, aiding them to throw off the yoke of colonialism, as did Tsar Nicholas II during the Boer War in South Africa and also in Tibet, Thailand and Ethiopia. Even the Soviet Union merely continued these policies in Africa (the territory of the Patriarchate of Alexandria), Asia and Latin America.

The Russian Orthodox civilisational model, the Christian one, is quite different from the Western Catholic/Protestant model, which calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. Thus, the ‘civilised’ Judeo-Christian West and ‘Western values’ destroyed the native peoples of the Americas and Africa, enslaving them, massacring them like wild animals, sending them into concentration camps (‘reservations’), as the British were still doing in Kenya and Malaysia in the 1950s. Christian Russia, on the other hand, spreading across Eurasia into Alaska, left the native peoples in peace, not enslaving them or systematically exploiting them, but making them into equal allies. Today Western ‘civilisation’, which has reached its final stage of degeneration in Europe and the USA, has come to a dead end by trying to subjugate the whole world to its ruling transnational atheist elite and its corrupt New World Order pseudo-democracy. That, in fact, only gives a false choice – between one atheist oligarch and another.

Only Russia can potentially deliver the world from this civilisational dead end by providing a Non-Western and spiritual alternative. This is a geopolitical challenge and a historic turning-point. The US military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower’s terminology, has bankrupted itself with its lust for global hegemony and us finally meeting its match in the resurgent Russian Lands. The New World Order, the near-millennial and ever accelerating movement of the Western world to enthrone Antichrist in Jerusalem, has been stopped for the moment.

The Russian Lands (Rus) are, it seems, returning to fulfilling their destiny as the last restraining force in the world, the last bastion of True Christianity. The Ukraine is a litmus paper, an acid test of this. If the Ukraine were to fall, that is, to lose its Orthodoxy, that would lead to the enthronement of Antichrist. The situation is on a knife edge, which is why so many icons in Russia and the Ukraine are at this moment giving off myrrh. We have to understand that today’s division in the Ukraine exists as the result of two historic injustices, which have to be righted

Q: Which are these injustices?

A: These two historic injustices are the events of 1054 and 1917, which are interconnected. In 1054 semi-barbarian, provincial nationalists, filled with the pride, greed and ambition of Roman paganism, rose up in heresy against the Church of Christ, the Christian Roman Empire, and declared that they were the true Church! And persecution followed 1054, with 1204, the sack of New Rome by barbarian Catholics, which in turn led to 1453, the fall of New Rome, not to mention the Western Crusades against the Russian Lands (including today’s ‘Ukraine’), and all the anti-Church horrors that followed, including Uniatism.

The second historic injustice was in 1917 when the descendants of the same provincials performed a coup d’etat in St Petersburg, overthrowing the legitimate government of the Lord’s Anointed on behalf of traitors, cowards and deceivers from inside the country who had lost their Faith. This atheist coup resulted in the martyrdom of the Christian Emperor and the destruction of his Empire, which had been about to end the First European War and liberate Constantinople (so preventing the Armenian genocide), Vienna and Berlin.

The atheist coup of 1917 also culminated in 1991 in the destruction of the legacy of the Christian Empire which had been built up over centuries by the Tsars and their peoples. That 1991 collapse of the legacy of the former Orthodox Empire, the Soviet Union, was inevitable because its atheism had denied the Faith of a Faith-based Empire. Today, in 2014, we are merely seeing the attempt to deepen that geopolitical fall, again using provincial nationalists, this time from the far west of the Ukraine, as its pawns. All that is happening now was prophesied by Solzhenitsyn in 1998. Thus, as he said then, the US and its EU colony want to dismember and separate the Ukrainian part of the remains of the Orthodox Empire, the Empire’s weakest link.

Q: Why is the Ukraine the weakest link of the former Orthodox Empire?

A: The word Ukraine is composed of two ancient Slavonic words meaning ‘at the border’ – though interestingly it could also be translated as ‘on the edge’. It was first recorded in the 12th century in this sense of a narrow strip of borderland and there exists an interesting academic article on its origins and uses for many geographical areas, including the area near Kazan. However, in its modern and non-historical sense – and so a sense completely unknown to the greatest ‘Ukrainian’ writer Gogol – the word ‘Ukraine’ was invented only in the late 19th century by the Hapsburgs. Then it was reused by the Soviets and the Nazis, and today by the US and the EU – by five empires all thoroughly hostile to the Orthodox Church. Indeed, decades ago I met old Ukrainian emigres, adults before the Revolution, who told me that they had never heard the word ‘Ukraine’ until the 1920s, when the atheists brought it in.

The contemporary Ukraine is the weakest link because at present it includes and is now run by never denazified, ultra-nationalist, Uniat Galicia, which until 1939 was part of eastern Poland. This is a schismatic, Catholicised area, which lived under foreign and anti-Orthodox – Polish and Austrian – rule for centuries. The majority of its population, just like that of the rest of Western Europe, now has no concept of uncompromised, unsecularised, non-1054 Christianity, that is, of Orthodox values. Until that area returns to Poland, or else becomes independent, it will continue to create chaos in the rest of the ‘Ukraine’, the 85% of it which is known to history not as ‘the Ukraine’, but significantly, going from east to west, as New Russia, Little Russia and Carpatho-Russia.

Q: So does this mean we should support President Putin?

A: He is only a politician and, like all politicians, he makes mistakes. The Ukraine, in some form or other, has a right to exist as an independent state, just like Belarus. It is an integral part of threefold Rus – Russia, the Ukraine and Belarus are the primary territory of Rus, the three Russias. I suspect that President Putin thinks the same thing. The last thing he wants to have to do is to send in tanks. However, he has to defend his country and Russian people against extreme Western aggression – which is what he did when he restored the Crimea to Russia amid the jubilation of its people. Otherwise the Crimea would have been invaded and occupied by the US military and its ports would have become NATO naval bases, closing off the Black Sea to Russia.

Our objection is not to an independent ‘Ukraine’, but to its domination and division by an anti-Orthodox and unrepresentative, US-installed, puppet clique in Kiev, which would mean that the Ukraine would become just another bankrupt and pillaged Western colony, like Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya etc. Divide and rule is ever the Western policy. Our support should go to the martyred Tsar Nicholas II, as he was the last ruler of All Rus, and not to politicians. We support the saints – politicians only count inasmuch as they support the saints. Again we fight for the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, not for politicians.

Q: Why has the BBC been so incredibly biased in its reporting of events in the Ukraine?

A: Since the Second World War the UK Establishment elite has become the poodle or colony of the US ruling elite (a relationship that the UK Establishment has flattered itself into calling ‘the special relationship’!) and it has taken no account of the peoples of these islands. The BBC, even more than other Western media, is biased because it is an inherent part of that Establishment elite, in the pay of a secularist-atheist regime and its secret services. It is therefore hostile to Christianity, especially to uncompromised Christianity, that is, Orthodoxy, just as it is hostile to the people, from which it is ever more distant.

The BBC has become particularly subservient to the Establishment since it dared to criticise the Blair regime’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, for which the Blairites sacked the BBC Director General and intimidated BBC journalists. Now the BBC just seems to parrot whatever MI5 and MI6 tell it. I know two BBC journalists who have also worked for the secret services, which infiltrated the BBC from its inception in the 1920s; there must be many more of them.

Thus the BBC talks of the Neo-Nazi Uniat Galician terrorists in Kiev, who overthrew a democratically-elected government as ‘heroes’, but calls the Ukrainian citizens who are rising up against foreign oppression and US mercenaries in the south-west, south, east and north, ‘pro-Russian activists!’ Nor has the BBC reported on the wave of dissatisfaction in Kiev at the doubling of many prices and the very large anti-junta demonstrations in Kiev….

Q: Some would say that your views on the Ukraine are political and that Orthodoxy should be apolitical. What would you say to this?

A: Precisely by saying that they are ‘apolitical’, such people are making a political statement. For them Orthodoxy is, like Protestantism, just a personal belief, a private affair, a mere theory or hobby, which has no public and practical ramifications, no Incarnational consequences. This is a denial of the Incarnation of Christ. What they are saying is that Christianity should have no influence at all on society, including on economics and politics, and should just be a set of private opinions or personal fantasies for futile discussion and theoretical debate.

In the meantime, they say, we should just swim with the secularist-atheist tide of US/EU apostasy, to which such people, some of them nominally Orthodox, are spiritually enslaved. However, our Faith, if it is real, has practical consequences. This is what these secularists refuse. For those who are secular-minded, religion has no importance, but for us what counts is the purity of Holy Orthodoxy. The many icons now giving off myrrh in Russia and the Ukraine only prove the spiritual significance of these current events.

Q: With the events in the Ukraine and the new puritanism of political correctness, will there be a witch-hunt and persecution of Russian Orthodoxy in the West?

A: Not yet. We have not yet come to this point; that will come later. Then we may need Russian passports and in any case have to take refuge in Russia in order to get baptized and practise our Faith. But we are not there yet.

Q: So much for the contemporary situation of the Church inside Russia. What is the situation of the Church Outside Russia, ROCOR? Some say that it no longer has any reason to exist, since the Church inside Russia also has parishes outside Russia. What is the role of ROCOR in this new reality?

A: The Orthodox diaspora, whether in Europe, the Americas or Australia, and of all nationalities, has experienced two temptation or deviations in the last 100 years or so. The role of ROCOR is to avoid them. These are the deviations of the superiority complex and the inferiority complex.

The first deviation is that of the nationalist ghetto, of the superiority complex. This means that the Orthodox Faith is preserved as if in a museum, without any reference to the surrounding world (because of the superiority complex towards it), to the reality in which the children and grandchildren of the immigrants go to school and grow up. This ethos can be called the ‘three-generational syndrome’, since after three generations such a faith dies out, as it no longer even speaks in a language comprehensible to the descendants of the original immigrants. ‘Three generations and you are out’. I have seen countless Russian parishes in France and England disappear completely because of this mentality. It was the fate of the old London ROCOR Cathedral (but this will not at all be the case of the new parish that has risen phoenix-like from its ruins), exactly as was foreseen by many in the 1970s and 1980s, but also of many parishes abroad under the Church inside Russia, which are not independent of Russia, as is today’s ROCOR.

The second deviation is that of the conformist ghetto, of the inferiority complex. This means the ‘let’s swim with the tide’ mentality. Again I have seen countless examples in France and England. ‘Let’s give communion to Catholics, after all they are Christians’ (Paris jurisdiction). ‘Now we are in England, we baptize our children in the Church of England’ (as one well-known Russian academic in Cambridge did). ‘After all, we really do not want to be different from the others’. ‘The English do cremations, so we’ll do them as well’ (the old Sourozh jurisdiction). ‘The Protestants have pews in church, so shall we’ (Greeks and Antiochians). This is the deviation of those of weak faith, the ecumenists, liberals and modernists, who do not really believe in Orthodoxy, just like the Uniats. Indeed, the atmosphere in modernist churches (as sometimes in Finland, for example) is exactly that of Uniat churches.

It is to be noted, however, that, initially at least, both these deviations are psychological, and not at root theological, though in a second phase, they are then justified theologically, clearly by a false theology. ROCOR must avoid both these deviations.
Q: So what is the role of ROCOR? What is authentic Orthodoxy in the Western world?

A: Authenticity is faithfulness to the best, and not to the worst, in both attitudes. This means being both traditional and open, both strict and merciful, but without excesses and extremes, which would mean being unfaithful. We must be faithful to the incarnation and to the spiritual, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Our calling, the establishment of authentic European Orthodox culture, as also of authentic American and Australian Orthodox culture, means being both faithful and international = fruitful. ROCOR has an opportunity to do this, depending on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy, that is, inasmuch as we can be both faithful to the Russian Orthodox Church and also be incarnate, settled and permanent here (unlike most parishes dependent on the Church inside Russia). At least, this can be the case, for as long as our spiritual existence is tolerated in the increasingly intolerant West.

Q: Do you have examples of these deviations in the specific situation of Orthodoxy in the UK?

A: Here in the UK we have two ‘renewed’ jurisdictions, those of the Romanian and Russian Churches, which in recent years have increased in size from one parish or a few parishes to many parishes, simply by immigration. However, we also have the older jurisdictions like the Greek, which used to be the biggest but is now beginning to die out, just like the Russian in the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians immigrated in about 1920 and so after 50-60 years, in the third generation, began to die out. The Greeks (more precisely Cypriots) mainly immigrated here in the 1950s and 1960s – 50-60 years ago – and so too are now dying out. This is the ‘three generational syndrome’, which I mentioned above.

There are also two tiny ethnic English jurisdictions under the Patriarchate of Antioch (anti-Greek, anti-Russian, Antiochian’, as some Anglicans say) and the Paris Exarchate (the old Bloomite Sourozh jurisdiction). These are deaneries because they are both only a few hundred strong and mostly composed of ex-vicars and converts from Anglicanism. The Exarchate is particularly weak and small and is tending to die out. They failing to pass on their ‘Anglican-Orthodox’ Faith to children and grandchildren and so are dying. Their possible possible survival can only come from attracting Greeks, Romanians and others, not from attracting Anglicans.

Here I am much more optimistic about the future survival of the Antiochian Deanery, which is rapidly becoming Romanian. However, it still has to ordain clergy who are not ex-Anglican vicars. Here there is a very useful lesson to learn: all ethnic jurisdictions die out – including ethnic English jurisdictions. In other words, successful parishes – of all jurisdictions – are non-ethnic, that is, they live if they accept those whom God sends to them, without ethnic ghettoism, including Anglican or ex-Anglican clubbishness. In other words, they live only if they put the Faith above nationality, only if they put the Kingdom of God first.

Q: Does this mean that the convert movement in the UK has stopped?

A: The convert movement (I would prefer the word ‘trickle’) in the UK was only ever basically in England and it was always very small, concerning at most 2,000-3,000, many of whom were received by various jurisdictions without preparation and soon lapsed. There is still at least one ex-Anglican priest, like the late Metr Antony Bloom, who perhaps is his model, who receives within one week! You can imagine that his turnover is large. In 18 years he has not grown. It is true that the convert ‘movement’ has declined as the old generation of converts dies out, but it has not stopped. What it happening today is that Anglicans have largely stopped joining the Orthodox Church and trying to become Orthodox, which actually they often did not succeed in doing in any case.

Q: Why have they stopped?

Firstly, because Anglicanism is itself dying out, so there are even fewer Anglicans than before. Secondly, because those who are interested generally find Orthodoxy ‘too hard’ and either do not try to become Orthodox (if they try at all) or else give up very quickly, especially if they have been received prematurely by one of the ethnic English groups.

Q: So there are no more converts?

A: There are still converts, but they come more and more from the vast majority of English people who are not Anglicans. However, though there are fewer converts, they are now generally more serious. They are refreshing, blank sheets, without the cultural prejudices and baggage of Anglicanism. Here there is a future. English Orthodox culture could only be born when that prejudiced Establishment Anglican culture was dead. Authentic Orthodox culture could never be built on a compromised, semi-Orthodox, semi-Anglican faith.

Q: How are people being converted today?

A: There are two ways. One is through information about Orthodoxy which is today on the internet and then brings them to Church services. The other is through Orthodox wives whom they marry and who convert them. Orthodox wives are often very good missionaries.

Q: You have not mentioned those who did not support the reconciliation between the two parts of the Russian Church in 2007 and left to join various sects which existed already. How do they fit into the picture? Do they suffer from the superiority complex of the nationalist ghetto? Surely they do not suffer from the inferiority complex of the conformists?

A: They do not belong to nationalist ghettoes, as much as to ideological or psychological, sectarian, ghettoes, usually very Russophobic and very right-wing – such was the case even before they left ROCOR. In the USA, from what one of their bishops proudly writes and tells me, they seem to be linked to the CIA. There are among these people, and most are converts from Anglicanism or other forms of Protestantism, some very sincere and pious people, but also some with psychological problems. It is tragic. Sects are always based on hurt pride which then turns to hatred.

Such protest sects make themselves irrelevant, not only because they are tiny (often fewer than ten in number over the whole country), but also because they have played into the hands of this world by painting themselves into irrelevant corners. They have no influence because they focus so much on small and often ritualistic detail and individual opinions, with a negative, ‘anti-everything’ mentality. What they lack is a conscious, logically consistent and integral Orthodox world view, an overview. That is very important and all Orthodox need to develop such a world view.

Q: Do you think that the Inter-Orthodox Council will actually take place in 2016?

A: On paper, no, especially since the amazing, absurd and pretentious claims of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to the Ukraine, as described in the statement of Patriarch Bartholomew on Palm Sunday, which was surely written by the CIA. In the 1970s there could be no Council because the Russian Church inside Russia was controlled by the KGB; now we have Constantinople controlled by the CIA. That statement alone has surely set everything back until after the death of Patriarch Bartholomew.

However, everything is still possible – if the Greek Churches can overcome their vanity and inferiority complex, which the American State Department so plays on and exploits, and if they and the other Balkan Churches can overcome their phyletism (nationalism). Thus, at present three problems are outstanding and until they are solved they will stop this Council taking place.

Q: Which are?

A: Firstly, there is the territorial dispute between the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Secondly, there is the dispute between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia and, thirdly, that between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church in America (OCA).

These three problems all have to be solved before even a proper agenda (rather than the old, secularist, Protestant-style 1970s one) can be agreed. So 2016 is possible, but the Patriarchate of Constantinople will first have to liberate itself from outside political interference from the US government, which is forcing it to interfere in the Ukraine and Mt Athos, and from the Vatican. So Constantinople must demonstrate that it is free and independent and can actually speak with an Orthodox voice and not a Greek nationalist and Uniat voice. Metropolitans Andrew and Seraphim of the Church of Greece have already warned it about this quite clearly in their 89-page letter asking for the repentance of Pope Francis.

Q: Do you think in this context that the Church inside Russia could take back the autocephaly of the OCA in order to ease negotiations with Constantinople?

A: I think that for the Church inside Russia the OCA is a bargaining counter. We all know that there is a problem with the autocephaly of the OCA, the brainchild (not heartchild) of the highly controversial Fr Alexander Schmemann. Firstly, it was granted during the Cold War by the self-same, highly controversial Metr Nikodim (Rotov), whom we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, and whom the Roman Catholics claim to have been one of their cardinals. So it was dubious from the start.

However, secondly and much more importantly, how can you give a jurisdiction autocephaly when it has been in schism from you for decades (as was the pre-OCA Metropolia) and, above all, when it only includes a minority of the Orthodox who live on the same geographical territory? However, the Church inside Russia will not cede these points if Constantinople does not first abandon its own anti-canonical errors elsewhere, for example on Mt Athos, in the Ukraine, Estonia, Finland and Paris, returning Russian Church property to the Russian Church.

Q: What could happen to the OCA, if Constantinople did stop such anti-canonical interventions?

That would be a miracle, so who knows? I suppose one solution would be to take back the OCA’s autocephaly and grant it autonomy instead. Alternatively, you could wait until the present generation of OCA bishops, many of them in difficult and compromised situations or retired, die out. Then, after that generational change, you could pick up the pieces and reincorporate the ex-OCA into the Russian Church in North America, though letting ultra-liberal, dissident pieces which are perhaps beyond redemption (St Vladimir’s Seminary?) join Constantinople or simply go back to the Episcopalians. The OCA too can only survive if it moves towards being a group based on the purity of Holy Orthodoxy.

Bright Monday 2014

The Gathering of the Nations

Fear not, for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west.

Isaiah 43, 5

What is astonishing to the still loyal and uncompromised Orthodox heart and mind is not that the Western world lovingly cherishes its illogical prejudice that the Russian Orthodox Church is wild, backward and lacking in culture, as it so clearly expressed in local media coverage of the 2006 Sourozh schism. What is astonishing is rather that the Western world lovingly cherishes Antichrist and unstintingly and at every turn consistently advances his cause. For his primary aim is the destruction of the integrity of the Orthodox Church, a cause already advanced by the venality of some in many smaller Local Churches outside the canonical territory of Rus, and which he is desperately trying to advance inside that territory, especially on its outer fringes, using as his tools the madcap schemes of his Western and Westernised dupes.

What the Western world does not understand here is that the downfall of Orthodoxy would lead automatically to the last stage of its own spiritual and so cultural suicide, followed by the eradication of all Christian Faith universally. This is because the Western world, like the rest of the world, is wholly dependent on the rays of light that shine, as if from the Sun, from the Orthodox Church, the One and Only Church, the One and Only Spiritual Sun.

The Western world has long been enslaved to Antichrist, worst of all, without even noticing it. This is the most perilous of states because it indicates total self-delusion. This is the self-delusion of him who says ‘the devil does not exist’, so proving not only that the devil does exist, but also that he is his main servant. The destruction of Russian Orthodoxy, attempted, but by not attained by the Western world from 1917 on, would mean that the forces engulfing it would then engulf the Western world and the rest. Russian Orthodoxy sees the fate of the Western world in its latest foolish outburst of short-sighted self-destructiveness, called consumerism, and knows that thus it dooms itself to destruction – unless it repents before the end, so redeeming itself from its repeated sinful attempts to destroy Sovereign and Imperial Rus since 1917.

If this repentance is weighty enough, then there is still even the chance before the end of gathering together the remnants of all the nations, Orthodox, heterodox and even pagan, and bringing them under the spiritual reign of a restored Sovereign and Imperial Rus. If not, then we will be forced to take refuge, fleeing ‘into the mountains’ from the floods of iniquity and the tides of destruction, our last hope remaining only in the Second Coming.

The Future of Orthodoxy in Western Europe

Russian Orthodox in Western Europe often suffer from the lack of infrastructure and disorganisation of their Church. For example, many parishes suffer because they have no local bishop who speaks the local language, visits his parishes and understands local difficulties, including financial ones. One part of this problem goes back to a time when the KGB (which then controlled Patriarchal churches outside Russia) used Western Europe (and the USA) as a place of exile. In order to counter isolation which results from the lack of local episcopal pastoral care (inter-parish meetings, pastoral conferences etc), parishes have themselves to build up contacts with other parishes. Isolation, parochialism and provincialism are dealt with by being pro-active in this matter.

On account of the lack of understanding local structures and a slow and bureaucratic centralism that can take its place, a lot of patience is needed. Sometimes central authority only reacts if it thinks that it might be losing its parishes. For example the Patriarchate in Moscow was warned for several years about the situation in the Sourozh Diocese in London, but did not react in time or adequately. As a result there was schism. On the other hand, it is disturbing that some believe the Western media’s anti-Russian propaganda that portrays the Patriarchate as compromised with or even feudally controlled by the anti-oligarch Russian State, which is ironically portrayed as mafia-bound, oligarch-ridden and thoroughly corrupt. Why are such absurd things believed?

They are believed because of Western European pride, the idea that in Western Europe Orthodoxy can be done differently, ‘better’, without reference to the Church and the Tradition. This is ‘Schmemannism’, ‘Orthodoxy Lite’, ‘Euro-Orthodoxy’, ‘Halfodoxy’, as in parts of Finland, the Paris Jurisdiction, other parishes of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and also of Antioch (and in parts of the OCA). This is in fact a form of Uniatism, a simplified, homogenised and neutered rite without Orthodox content. It means abbreviated services, no confession before communion, Protestant-style clergy, no iconostases, intercommunion etc. This is the ‘legacy’ of the emigres of the Paris School and their disciples who follow their path. It is the path to schism and apostasy.

This School is the path of illusion, the tediously dry and Spiritless rationalism that does not feed the soul, but only the unspiritual mind, the imagination and sometimes the emotions. This ideology (and it is an ideology) is extremely Russophobic. This is because the Russian Church, which has above all others kept the Tradition intact and uncompromised, is the only thing that stands in the way of ‘Orthodoxy Lite’. Thus, Russophobia exists as self-justification for apostasy. The Paris School, liberal, ecumenical, academic, proud, loves itself and its personality cults, imagining that it loves Christ and His Church. There is enormous spiritual danger in this delusion. Real Orthodox mission in Western Europe is the way of integrity and faithfulness to Orthodoxy, but in the local language.

Refugees to Russia?

There is nothing new in European religious refugees. From the eleventh century on, all who opposed the iron grip of Papism and the blood-soaked Inquisition, fled to remote places. Then, after the Reformation, French Protestants, Huguenots, were forced to flee from Catholic intolerance to many countries, both inside and outside Europe. In the 17th century religious refugees from England, known as Puritans, fled from the local State Religion to America. After 1789 French Catholic refugees made for Russia and other countries, fleeing atheist persecution. After the export into Russia of Western materialism, known as Marxism, in 1917, Russian refugees in turn fled from atheist persecution, settling all over the world, creating a global diaspora. And in the near future, within the next few decades, it seems as though EU citizens and others may yet flee from the dictats of their unelected Eurocommissars, also for religious reasons.

Although the present struggle for the freedom of the Ukraine from these Eurocommissars, whose bribed imported supporters, it is said, were paid 30 euros a day by the CIA to parade in favour of the EU, is looking victorious, the situation elsewhere looks grim. Thus, the peoples ruled by the EU dictatorship and their bankrupt and corrupt puppet governments in Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Bulgaria and elsewhere, are becoming economic refugees all over the world. Elsewhere in the EU, intolerance of Christian values is now such that many faithful Christians in Western Europe are beginning to look with hope elsewhere. But where?

To look to the USA, Latin America or Australia would be senseless, for the wave of intolerance of Christianity, Christian family life and Christian patriotism is just as strong there, as we saw in the recent attacks by 500 abortionists on a Catholic church in Argentina, or the almost daily attacks on Christianity by the secularist authorities and mocking, atheist media in other Western countries. Other parts of the world, either Non-Christian or else poisoned by the history of Western colonialism and all its abuses, are not places where Western people are welcome. The tolerance of sin and evil is in fact intolerance of good, of the spiritual and the traditional. Already the EU has refused to mention Christianity in its Constitution and it continues to attack those who hold dear national identity and national sovereignty all over Europe.

Where then will traditional Christians from Western Europe, even if they are not yet all members of the multinational Russian Orthodox Church, head? The situation may within the next generation reach a point that those last freedom-loving Europeans who still profess spiritual values may feel that the only solution is emigration to the Russian Federation. It is true that there is still much to do here to enlighten Western peoples and relieve them of their prejudices, as they have been zombified for generations by implicit Establishment theories of Western racial superiority and therefore anti-Russian propaganda, for many years cleverly masked as anti-Soviet propaganda. Even recently there was the statement by the warmongering Hillary Clinton that Vladimir Putin did not have a soul; though, true, this only made her look even more ridiculous than she already did.

The struggle against dehumanisation is on. Those who believe that the human-being is made in the image and likeness of God, who believe that each nation has the right to its own identity and sovereign existence, and stand against the forces of globalisation which wish to liquidate the diversity of civilisations, are starting to look to Russia as the source of support and freedom. It has been said that we should live in a multipolar world; it seems that rather we may be heading for a bipolar world; the West and the Westernised (that is secularised) world versus the renewed and free Christian Orthodox Empire centred on the Russian Federation and its free Eurasian Union allies, who, unlike the Western consumerists, affirm that man does not live by bread alone.

Those with traditional moral and spiritual values, family people, farmers who refuse to grow genetically modified crops, teachers who believe that there is a difference between right and wrong, doctors and nurses who refuse to administer abortion and euthanasia, artists who believe that art has a spiritual and moral aesthetic mission, aristocrats who seek to conserve traditional forms of life, architects who want to build structures fit for human-beings and not ants and robots, workers who seek social justice, would all be interested. However, it is also true that although the post-Soviet world has come a long way, it still has far to go to reform itself and restore what Western materialism destroyed after 1917.

Only when it has itself gone further down that path, not only showing resistance to the greedsters and banksters of the New World Order, but also reversing the damage that that Order has done there, especially in the last 25 years, will the Russian Federation attract numbers of religious refugees from the now militantly secularist Western world. We seek freedom for traditional spiritual and moral values and ways of life, incarnate in just, honest, unbureaucratic and uncorrupt economic structures, where family life can then freely prosper. The formation of such structures is only hesitantly beginning in the Eurasian Union. We will have to wait and see if the present tiny trickle of Western religious refugees to the Russian Federation and her allies will yet become the mighty stream, the Moses-led exodus, as has been prophesied.

Orthodox England

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