Category Archives: Soviet Union

A Russian Tragedy of Errors

Introduction: Three Fragments of the Church

After the overthrow of the Tsar by traitors in the so-called ‘Revolution’ of 1917, and the ensuing substitution of the Russian Empire for the Soviet Union, parts of the Russian Orthodox Church broke away from it. Although divisions of tiny, temporary ‘catacomb’ church communities formed inside the USSR, divisions were nowhere so obvious as outside the USSR, where there was the political freedom to choose which part of the Church to belong to.

The anti-Soviet Russian emigration split into two warring groups, one quite independent of the rest of the Orthodox Church, the other under the British-controlled and, after British bankruptcy from 1948 on the US-controlled, Patriarchate of Constantinople (1). In any case, both groups were independent of the vast majority of the Russian Church, which was under the enslaved and enhostaged administration of the 99% of the Church inside the Soviet Union. Why did these divisions develop?

The Moscow Patriarchate: Bride of Christ or Concubine of the State?

Like all other Churches the Russian Orthodox Church has had a long history of both dependence on and independence from the State. In this respect, people may think of the independence from the State of St Nil of Sora (1508) and the Transvolgan Non-Possessors (1), of Metropolitan Philip of Moscow (murdered in 1569 on the orders of the centralising Tsar Ivan IV) and of the Old Ritualist schism of the 1660s, which was largely created by reaction to the persecution of the centralising State, which demanded absurd ritual conformity. By 1917 some 10% of the Russian population were declaring that they were Old Ritualists, thus showing the strength of opposition to the centralist State. All the above showed independence from the nationalist State, and many showed faithfulness to Orthodox Tradition, placing the Holy Spirit above corruption.

Under the imperialist Emperor Peter I (‘the Great’) (+ 1725), the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate was abolished and replaced by a Protestant-style Minister of Religion. Soon after this there began the persecution of monastic life, when some two-thirds of monasteries were closed by the German Empress Catherine I (‘the Great’) (+ 1796). Nevertheless, the Church continued to live, under the great St Paisius (Velichkovsky), forced into exile in Romania, and in the Russian Lands, in Sarov and Optina, where new saints appeared, and in Kronstadt, where there began the eucharistic revival, and elsewhere. The grace of the Holy Spirit was active and the deadly bureaucrats of the State apparatus did not manage to quench it, despite their best efforts. They were opposed by Tsar Nicholas II, who, despised and mocked by the bureaucrats in cassocks, had such great saints as Seraphim of Sarov canonised.

However, during this Imperial period most Russian Orthodox omitted to take communion more than once a year and lead an active life of prayer and fasting. Church life became largely an empty ritual, an exercise in ritualism. Here is why the Soviet atheists (most of them, like Stalin, were also ritually Orthodox) came to power: there was no Orthodox conscience and so spiritual resistance to the myths and practices of atheism. Under the Soviet regime, which unsurprisingly admired the imperialist Peter I as their centralising model, the Church was run by the Secret Police. Therefore, the enslaved Church hierarchy of the time adopted a subservient pro-State policy called ‘Sergianism’, in order to ensure its survival. Sergianism was massively rejected by the politically free emigration: hence the divisions. Meanwhile, inside the Soviet Union, ordinary bishops, priests, monastics and faithful people were martyred in their hundreds of thousands.

The remnants of these State-subservient attitudes are still very present in the Russian Church today. For instance, churches in towns and cities usually have professional choirs (if parishioners want to sing, they are forbidden, as in the Russian church in Chiswick, a suburb of London, for example), which reduces the church to a ritualist theatre with a choir to listen to. For example, many ordinary Orthodox in Russia today reproach the Church which appears to be run like a business, the main interest seeming to be profit. Also the centralised hierarchy in Moscow actively opposes clergy who have dissident political opinions from the State about the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. This only creates more scandals.

This centralisation has led to those parts of the Church in independent countries outside the Russian Federation wanting to break away from the centralised control of Moscow. This is for national reasons, for example, there is resistance to the Moscow centralisation on the part of Non-Russians in the Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere. They all seek Church independence and devolution. However, there are also cases of sectarian and schismatic groups which break away from central authority for purely political, right-wing reasons, both inside the Russian Federation, but also outside it, above all in the highly Americanised ROCOR (see below).

ROCOR: Orthodox or Right-Wing?

In 2007 we all at last managed to get the New York-based ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) to rejoin the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate. Otherwise, it would have become a schismatic sect, out of communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. When it reunited with Moscow, it lost some 5% of its 300 parishes. These 5% were extremists who really wanted to be in schism, out of communion with everyone, claiming like pharisees to be ‘True Russian Orthodox Churches’. There were then, and perhaps still are, about four of these tiny squabbling sects, formed in 2007, all cursing each other.

After the wonderful God-sent opportunity of reunion with the bulk of the reviving Russian Orthodox Church and life-giving canonical communion with it for a decade between 2007 and 2017, very sadly, the ROCOR authorities gradually lapsed back into their sectarian temptations from before 2007. Step by step these sectarians took control of ROCOR’s New York Synod in an internal coup d’etat, effectively isolating its ill but charismatic Metropolitan, rejecting all his decisions and using his electronic signature to justify their very strange and deeply uncanonical decisions.

Very sadly, the extremists had learned nothing from being in communion with the Mother-Church for ten years. They had simply camouflaged and justified their pharisaical, schismatic and sectarian tendencies behind their alleged unity with the Moscow Patriarchate. Today ROCOR is out of full communion with Moscow, and so its second state is worse than its first. Instead of Orthodoxy, it has espoused the sectarian American right-wingery of woman-despising ‘Orthobros’ and Trumpism, totally confusing Divine Orthodoxy with mere human conservatism and its lust for money and power.

This pharisaical state of schism and fanatical sectarianism was encouraged by deluded Non-Russian neophytes, who want to be more royalist than the King, more Russian Orthodox than real Russian Orthodox. In reality, these Lutheran and Calvinist sectarians have ended up outside full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, the King they betrayed. They have painted themselves into their own corner, apparently feeling very comfortable in their isolation. Thus, they have renounced their own saints, who were internationally-minded, not isolated, and concelebrated with and gathered together all Orthodox. These include St John of Shanghai and Western Europe, whom the US right-wingers so cruelly suspended and persecuted, leading to his premature death in 1966.

Some suspect that the new ROCOR division has been encouraged by the CIA, of whose largesse ROCOR was a well-known recipient for a generation between 1966 and 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. As participants in the San Francisco ROCOR Council in 2006 we all know that the CIA virulently opposed the ROCOR reunion with Moscow in 2007 and from 2017 on tried to censor and then close this anti-CIA (and anti-FSB and anti-MI5) Orthodox England site through an amateur agent. For a few months he succeeded, causing an international scandal and making ROCOR a laughing-stock among the other Local Churches. Perhaps money exchanged hands here too.

Paris: Orthodox or Left-Wing?

The second part of the Russian emigration which split away from the enslaved Church authorities in Soviet Moscow was the group founded by Saint Petersburg aristocrats and intellectuals and centred in Paris. (Some of them spoke better French than Russian; all spoke fluent French). Originally less than a third of the size of the now US-centred ROCOR, today it is called the Archdiocese of Western Europe of the Russian Tradition. In reality it is very small outside France, as it is practically forbidden to expand elsewhere, and now has only some sixty parishes.

In 2019 it too at last rejoined the post-Soviet Moscow Patriarchate, leaving behind in Constantinople, to our open relief, its masonic and modernist wing with its uncanonical practices, losing not 5% of its parishes, clergy and people, as with ROCOR, but over 40% of its parishes, clergy and people. If ROCOR had lost 40% of its body, then it would have remained in full communion with the Moscow Patriarchate after 2017. Too much of the pharisaical, ‘onetruechurchist’, sectarian and schismatic had remained in ROCOR, thus poisoning its potential. Conversely, the much smaller Paris Archdiocese not only remained in communion, but also, to its credit and unlike ROCOR, remained politically free of Moscow centralisation.

Conclusion: Disloyalty to the Testament of the Tsar

In the history of the last generation of pre-Revolutionary Russia under the last Emperor, it is clear that right-wing extremists played as negative a role as left-wing extremists. For example, plotting together, they murdered the Tsar’s adviser, Gregory Rasputin, who was helping him bring the Old Ritualists back into the Church. But this treacherous extremism can above all be seen in the ensuing history of the tragic Civil War between ‘Reds’ and ‘Whites’. Then both sides committed awful atrocities, as described in any history of that dreadful war, where brother killed brother.

Sadly, just like the Reds, most of the Whites did not support the Tsar: it is reckoned that only 10% of them did so. They were the only real Whites. Most simply wanted their land, property and wealth back from the Marxists. Many ‘Whites’ were quite as openly atheistic as the Reds. As a Russian patriot and real Orthodox, the Sovereign Tsar stood above both Reds and Whites, above and outside the vulgar extremes of both left and right, above and outside their centralisation and nationalism. This is his Testament. This is our heritage. Under him there would have been no tragic war between Russian and American-proxy Ukrainians today.

Notes:

https://orthodoxwiki.org/Maximus_V_of_Constantinople
It is interesting that the enemies of the Non-Possessors accused them of stealing money! Nothing has changed. We know of a very greedy bishop in England today who accused a Non-Possessor priest, who subsidised his parish from his own money, of exactly the same thing! Of course, the bishop never apologised.

The Crisis in the Russian Orthodox Church: Where Are They Going?

Add more evils upon them, O Lord; add more evils upon them that are glorious upon the earth.

Isaiah, 26, 15 (Septuagint)

1917

In February 1917 the Russian Empire was overthrown. Almost automatically, Georgian Orthodox saw their Church recover its canonical status as the ancient Autocephalous (Independent) Georgian Orthodox Church, of which they had so long been deprived by Russian Imperialist politics. As well as this, certain Non-Russian territories of the former Russian Empire were ceded and became permanently independent parts of the new States of Poland and Czechoslovakia. In the ecclesiastical sphere, eventually two completely new Autocephalous Churches were formed out of the old Russian Imperial Church, the Church of Poland and the Church of Czechia and Slovakia, in which countries there were and still are considerable numbers of Orthodox.

As for the few mainly very Lutheranised Orthodox in newly-independent Finland, after 1917 they formed a group of parishes, which chose to be under the Patriarchate of Constantinople, as indeed they still are. As well as this, all of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and territories that belonged to western Belarus, the far west of the Ukraine and the Romanian-speaking area known as Moldova or Bessarabia were ceded. However, all of these were forcibly returned to the USSR as a result of Soviet occupation and then liberation from Nazism between 1939 and 1945, in what was a de facto partial reconstitution of the old Empire by the imperialist Stalin.

Between 1917 and 1945 the Orthodox in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Moldova had encountered various difficulties and political and ecclesiastical changes involving the Patriarchate of Constantinople or, in Moldova, the Patriarchate of Romania. However, by the end of the Second World War their territories all ended up as parts of the USSR, the successor to the Russian Empire, and ecclesiastically were once again put under the Russian Orthodox Church.

1991

Almost exactly seventy-five years later, at the end of 1991, the multinational but highly centralised USSR split into fifteen independent republics. However, only two Local Orthodox Churches existed in those fifteen new countries: the Russian and the Georgian. Thus, the former still had jurisdiction in thirteen different countries outside the new Russian Federation, where there lived millions of Russians but also representatives of other nationalities who were also Orthodox.

It is our view that the Russian Church should have followed the political decentralisation granted by political Moscow to the new countries. Thus, ecclesiastical Moscow should have granted ecclesiastical independence to the Orthodox in those new countries, as indeed some senior Russian figures said at the time. We believe that in this way five new Autocephalous Churches would have been carved out of the Russian Church. These would have been the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Moldovan, the Central Asian (covering the five countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and the Baltic (covering the three countries of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia). (As so few Orthodox lived in the last two new independent countries, Armenia and Azerbaijan, there was only a need there for a few dependency churches under Russia or Georgia).

If this had been done, there would no longer have been one single multinational Russian Orthodox Church, but a new family of seven Sister-Churches: the Russian (by far the largest), the Ukrainian, the Belarussian, the Moldovan, the Central Asian, the Baltic (and the already existing Northern American, called the OCA). These would have come on top of the already existing two Autonomous Churches of Japan and China, later joined by the three much more recent Russian Exarchates in Western Europe, South-East Asia and Africa, perhaps already granted Autonomy. Thus, there would today have been formed a family of Seven Autocephalous and Five future Autocephalous Churches, Twelve Churches in all.

Instead

Instead, we have seen what was once a multinational Russian Church increasingly becoming a national and indeed nationalist Church. Russian flags, unheard of before, are more and more often to be found inside Russian churches. For example, in 2020 a huge new Orthodox Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces was opened in Patriot Park outside Moscow, alongside the aviation museum of the Kubinka air base and a tank museum. This Cathedral can only be called nationalist in its design, which some have called ‘Stalinist baroque’ and even ‘sinister’, and some of its militarist frescoes involving the Red Army are highly controversial and for many very shocking. However, apparently all this is fully acceptable to the once independently-minded, émigré-founded Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR).

Worse still, on 15 August this year, the most recent of ten new monuments and statues of Stalin was unveiled in the city of Velikie Luki near Pskov. This was blessed by priests, one of whom is alleged to have declared that Stalin was great ‘because he had created so many martyrs’. The priests who did this have been rebuked for not having a blessing from their bishop to do so (only because of this?). However, what is even more worrying is that men with such values could have been ordained to the priesthood in the first place. They compare very badly to that pious Ukrainian priest in Moscow who was recently, quite uncanonically and shockingly, ‘defrocked’ for refusing to pray for Russian victory in the Special Military Operation in the Ukraine and instead of that praying for peace. We had thought that all should pray for peace, leaving the rest to God.

It seems as though the whole Russian Church has today been reduced to nationalist politics and centralised ‘protocols’, rules and regulations. We can only imagine the protests that would now be flooding in from the senior bishops of the old Moscow Patriarchate, like Metropolitan Antony Bloom in London or Archbishop Basil Krivoshein in Brussels. They must be spinning in their graves, seeing the utter rejection of the Gospel values they lived for and wrote about and the total destruction and renunciation of all their efforts to create multinational Orthodox missions. Indeed, after a lifetime of devotion to the Moscow Church, Archbishop Basil’s nephew, Nikita, now writes and acts against Moscow nationalism and its Church. It is hardly surprising.

Far Worse Still

However, all of this is as nothing compared to the Church wars that have been triggered elsewhere outside the Russian Federation since the Russian Patriarch Kyrill endorsed in no uncertain terms the eighteen-month-old Russian Special Military Operation in the Ukraine. Last year he even stated that those Russians fighting against Ukrainians, many of the latter Orthodox, and dying in battle, would go to heaven as martyrs, rather like jihadis. So far, some 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers and at least 40,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in this Operation.

This is exactly the opposite of the example of Bishop (later St) Nicholas of Tokyo. After Japan had treacherously attacked Russia in 1904, Bishop Nicholas ordered his Japanese Orthodox priests to pray for the armed forces of Japan (not at all the same as praying for their victory) and himself retired into seclusion to weep and pray, refusing to take part in any public activities. Surely Patriarch Kyrill, officially Patriarch of both Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox, as well as many other nationalities, should have done the same? Who can rejoice at war?

The result is that most Orthodox in the Ukraine, as well as many in Moldova and Latvia, some in Lithuania, Estonia, Western Europe and North America, and even a few in Belarus and the Russian Federation itself, have left the Russian Church. Orthodox in the Ukraine have declared that they are ‘fully independent’ of Moscow and Orthodox in Latvia have been declared to be autocephalous and both are acting so, not commemorating Patriarch Kyrill. Now, the usual completely unChristian ‘anathemas’ and uncanonical ‘defrockings’ are flying around. (Defrocking takes place for acts against morality, not for acts against immorality, though try telling immoral bishops that…).

Typical is the example of the very aggressive and highly controversial Bishop Markell of Baltsy and Falesht in Moldova who has declared the usual, that anyone who leaves the Moscow Church (in this case, for the Romanian Church) is automatically defrocked and ‘has no grace’. As a result, many more Moldovans are leaving him and the Moscow Church in disgust, and he has lost several churches and properties with their income, which seriously concerns him. As a result, the already isolated Russian Church, already out of communion with the Greek Churches, is on the point of falling out of communion with the Romanian Church too. Where are they going? Insanity appears to have seized them.

The Soviet Union Lives On – But Must Die

The USSR had a centrally planned economy. Plans were considered to be ‘rational’, ‘scientific’ and ‘modern’, vital since anything ‘irrational’ was anti-Communist. As a result, the USSR was a top-heavy bureaucratic nightmare, where you queued for hours to get, if you were lucky, essentials for your ‘paradise’. The black market thrived. As a result what in 1914 was about to become the richest and most powerful country in the world by far, went bankrupt because it could not at all supply what the people wanted – staples such as bread and meat. Planning never takes account of what people want, only what bureaucrats and ideologues want. The USA did no better. It planned a completely unnecessary ‘Cold War’. It spent in today’s money trillions of dollars on rockets and arms which it then scrapped. It planned elaborate and costly genocidal wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq with incredible technology – all of these wars it humiliatingly lost against poorly-armed locals. This was because it relied on central planning, not on reality.

Today, all over the apparently prosperous Western world people are queuing outside shops and some shelves are even empty, just as I saw in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. People are told to stay at home, forbidden to travel, are threatened and bullied by fear-spreading State-run media and fined for going out to enjoy themselves or see family and friends. Others are denounced by mean-minded neighbours for attempting to live normal lives and are visited by the bullying police. Soldiers are seen patrolling the streets, sent there by grim-faced politicians. Airports are closed. There is a greatly increased use of food banks by the impoverished, even raids on pharmacies. For some the impression is that we are living under a Soviet dictatorship – which has also closed churches. The USSR lives on. But as May comes, let us remind ourselves of some forgotten facts.

Every year there is seasonal flu. The elderly and the vulnerable stay at home and avoid going out. Although this is now called ‘self-isolation’, there is nothing new in it. Coronavirus, which peaked in the UK over three weeks ago, has so far led to the premature deaths from various diseases of fewer than half as many deaths as were caused by swine flu. In the UK, the monthly average of some 45,000 deaths has been boosted by some 25%. 85% of these deaths occur to those over the age of 70, many of whom were already very ill and had a very low life expectancy due to poor health, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or addictions like alcoholism and smoking. The numbers of deaths decreases very rapidly with age – indeed lethality falls rapidly under the age of 70. Of 30,000 deaths, only 350 have occurred among those aged under 40. The UK has the highest statistical total in Europe, but only because other countries do not list all those whose deaths have been speeded because of the virus, for example, only in some countries they list only those who die in hospitals. In the UK some 1% of the 400,000 elderly who live in care homes have died from the virus. And this although no precautions were taken there until two weeks ago and sick care workers, often from among the poorest in society, work for the minimum wage, unlike in the NHS, because, if they stay at home, they receive virtually no pay. Clapping does not pay for food.

Some ask if the remedy of lockdown is not worse than the illness: mass bankruptcy, mass unemployment and mass depression have been brought on by ideological politicians, who are in love with power, and by bullying and irresponsible media, the State-run mouthpieces. The media spread fear and anxiety with their fake news and intimidating propaganda, and create the temptations of crime in order to survive. They like to say that our lives have been ruined forever, that nothing will ever be the same again, that this emergency situation is permanent. These statements are of course just more lies, which we have come to expect from the media, but they are believed in by the naïve, mainly the elderly and the vulnerable. And they are depressed by them because they believe them. We await the resolution to this microbe crisis, the deSovietisation of our lives and the return to freedom, with prayer.

On the DeSovietisation of the Russian Orthodox Church

There was a time when some people called the (Patriarchal) Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia ‘The Soviet Church’. This was of course absurd. Whereas Soviet means atheist, Orthodox means Christian, and you cannot have atheist Christians. It is absurd as saying ‘Secular Christians’ (although they exist outside the Orthodox Church and are even proud of it). For us Mammon and Christ do not mix. You are either one or the other, as the New Martyrs of the Church inside Russia witness. On the other hand, it is true that some people in the Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia, oppressed by the illegitimate Soviet regime, did take on certain deformities. What were they?

Firstly, the Soviet Union was an imperialist power. Its ideology was that of the Third International, whose agenda was world conquest. Thus, still today among some individuals, supposedly Orthodox, we see a mentality of imperialism and domination, a racist arrogance towards Non-Russian nationalities. More than this, we see a certain love-of-money and prestige careerism with pseudo-intellectualism and banditry among certain clergy, who, as clericalists, treat the faithful with contempt, as a mob or cattle who have to be hosed down, as it were.

Secondly, as a result of this kow-towing to an imperialist ideology, there is among some a centralisation and bureaucracy of paperwork: nothing can be done without authorisation from a distant above and until huge numbers of forms have been filled in. As a result of such a delocalised, top-down system, many good bishops and good clergy can be transferred somewhere else, unsettling and making protest their flock, for whom they have shown pastoral care. This is because the Church administration is run like a corporation or department of State.

Thirdly, there is the disease of superstitious magic, the search for ‘miracles’, which is the result of 75 years of enforced ignorance by the Soviet regime. However, Soviet oppression ended thirty years ago and its continued existence today, in the age of free information on the internet, is simply a sign of voluntary ignorance, laziness and inertia. Therefore, still widespread is holy water idolatry and many other forms of ‘magic’ animism, comparable to those in pagan Africa.

These three attitudes, the will for domination, bureaucratic centralisation and superstitious magic, are evidence not of Christianity, but of love of power and love of money. These attitudes are opposed to the pastoral care for the faithful, to love. And without love, everything else, infrastructure, organisation, administration, websites, books, statistics, photographs, is merely a hollow shell, a house of cards and ‘sounding brass’. If there is no love, as the Apostle says, they are as nothing.

Of course, these attitudes are not at all unique to the Soviet and now post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church dependent directly on Moscow. They can be found in every nation, in every age and in every Church, including in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, as a result of the desire for power and money. For example, they were all clearly manifest in the re-Revolutionary Russian Orthodox Church, as any historian, or anyone who knew the now departed representatives of that age, can tell you. Indeed, many would agree that if that Church fell victim to the Revolution, it was precisely because so many of its representatives confessed not Christianity, but an arrogant racism, a bureaucratic centralisation and a superstitious magic Beware: revolutions can happen a second time.

Москва третий Рим? Взгляд священника Русской Православной Церкви из дальнего зарубежья

Предисловие:Советский Союз и Русь

Многие жители России, особенно пожилые, временами испытывают ностальгию по Советскому Союзу или, скорее, по отдельным аспектам советского государства (конечно, не по очередям за продуктами). И это не удивительно. Распад СССР, подготовленный Горбачевым и Ельциным под контролем США с их политикой «разделяй и властвуй», явился предательством и катастрофой. Безбожники (будь то советские или американские), ответственные за развал Советского Союза, не имели ни малейшего понятия о «Руси» – землях, принадлежавших народам исторической Руси, где Православие всегда было верой большинства.

«Русь», то есть нынешние Российская Федерация, Беларусь, большая часть Украины и половина Казахстана, нельзя было разделять – она должна была остаться единой. Также, в отличие от современной капиталистической России, в СССР были бесплатные медицина и образование, общественный порядок и культура. Однако, те кто предаются ностальгии по социальной справедливости, порядку и культуре Советского прошлого, не осознают, что и порядок, и бесплатные образование и медицина были также при царе Николае II. Все хорошее в Советском Союзе было унаследовано от Российской империи.

Империя в географическом смысле и в духовном

Причиной всех катастрофических ошибок Советского Союза стали его разрушительный и самоубийственный атеизм, гонения на Церковь и все религии. Подавление всего духовного в итоге подорвало культуру, которая всегда зиждется на духовных убеждениях. В результате этого советская элита (как и любые империалисты за всю историю, как и американская элита сегодня) считала, что великая империя имеет только географическое измерение. Конечно, это не так. Великая империя всегда имеет духовное измерение. Таким образом, ошибкой СССР было то, что он перепутал третий интернационал с третьим Римом и попытался построить Рай на земле – «светлое будущее» – без Христа. Алкоголизм, аборты, коррупция, разводы и экологическая катастрофабыли лишь логическими последствиями.

Также, ошибочно приняв империю в географическом смысле за духовную, сегодня многие жители Восточной Европы ненавидят Россию, «империю зла»: достаточно приехать в западную Украину, Прибалтику, Польшу или Румынию, чтобы увидеть таких людей. И, к сожалению, эти ксенофобы ненавидят именно Россию, которую путают с Советским Союзом. Хуже того: некоторые из них питают ненависть к русским, не понимая, что многие русские, ставшие наивными из-за своего маловерия, испытывали комплекс неполноценности по отношению к Западу. Поэтому они стали жертвами большевиков (большинство из которых были нерусские) с принесенной ими извне марксистской идеологией – фантазиями внука немецкого раввина.

То что они путают Советский Союз и Россию отчасти можно понять, потому что некоторые негативные стороны немецкого марксизма СССР были унаследованы с более ранних времен, особенно с эпохи императрицы-немки Екатерины II. Понятия «Православие» и «Русь» так и остались для нее чуждыми, поэтому Екатерина сделала ошибку, присоединив к Российской империи всю Восточную Польшу, но в то же время позволив Австрийской империи контролировать и преследовать православных в Карпатской Руси. Последовали неверные действия в Финляндии, странах Балтии и других местах. Однако все это ничто по сравнению с ужасными промахами СССР в Восточной Европе начиная с 1939 года, которые гарантировали ненависть со стороны местного населения.

Настоящий третий Рим?

Все империалисты на протяжении истории представляли, что великая империя – понятие географическое, а не духовное. Таковым было заблуждение первого Рима с его католическими крестовыми походами и инквизицией, которые в XX веке породили фашизм. Что касается второго Рима с его эллинским национализмом, мы видим пагубные последствия последнего при нынешних фанариотах, которыми манипулируют США. Если Москва претендует на статус третьего Рима, то ей, следовательно, надо стать вторым Иерусалимом, Новым Иерусалимом (который Патриарх Никон пытался построить на реке Истра в XVII веке). Ибо лишь духовное является имперским; географическое же всегда является империалистическим и имеет плачевный конец, как было с первым и вторым Римом.

Таким образом, современную Церковь Руси нужно в первую очередь «перестроить». Русская Православная Церковь сегодня должна показать, что не компрометирует себя и не применяет двойные стандарты. Она может сделать это, подтвердив, что искренне отвергает три еретических «изма», которые сильно нарушали мир в Церкви последние 100 лет: модернизм, экуменизм (которые она переняла у протестантизма) и Восточный папизм (заимствован у римо-католицизма). И прежде чем Русская Православная Церковь сможет отвергнуть что-либо из этого, ей необходимо выйти из «всепротестантского» Всемирного совета Церквей и отказаться от того, что некоторые называют компромиссами с Ватиканом, то есть Западным папизмом.

Церковь всегда страдала из-за слабостей отдельных представителей своего духовенства, ставящих свою карьеру и личность выше Христа. Сегодня крайне необходимо возродить приходскую жизнь, уничтоженную атеизмом после 1917 года (она и до этого зачастую была слаба). Ее возрождение могут осуществить только пастыри, а не карьеристы. Приход – это семья, и финансовая отчетность приходов должна быть прозрачной. Что же касается монастырей и епископата, то здесь не нужны интеллектуалы, безликие дипломаты, бюрократы и «эффективные менеджеры», а тем более– ревнивые «феодалы», не любящие женатых священников. Нам нужны любящие епископы-пастыри. Епископат должен любить, заботиться и проявлять понимание по отношению к священникам и диаконам, избегая несправедливости.

Заключение

Со времени подписания Акта о каноническом общении в 2007 году, основанная эмигрантами Русская Православная Церковь Заграницей с административным центром в Нью-Йорке обновилась. Осуществляется ее преобразование в Русскую Православную Церковь англоязычного мира, Нового света – в основном, в Северной Америке и Океании – как «Североамериканскую Русь» и «Австралийскую Русь». Смелое учреждение в прошлом году Русской Православной Церковью долгожданных Патриарших экзархатов в Западной Европе и в юго-восточной Азии тоже является знаком того, что у Русской Православной Церкви международная миссия.

«Русь Нового света», «Западно-европейская Русь» (формированию которой поспособствовало возвращение Парижской архиепископии к своим корням в РПЦ в ноябре этого года) и «Русь юго-восточной Азии» вполне могут стать реальностью. Однако Церковь на землях старой Руси, особенно в Российской Федерации, Беларуси и многострадальной Украине, тоже должна быть «перестроена». Только таким образом Русская Православная Церковь сможет продемонстрировать, что она в центре здоровых сил вселенской Православной Церкви, что она борется за благочестие и чистоту святого Православия. Москва заслужит любовь как настоящий «Рим», только когда станет духовной империей.

Протоиерей Андрей Филлипс,

Храм свт Иоанна Шанхайского,

Колчестер, Англия

Moscow the Third Rome? A View from a Russian Orthodox Priest in the Far Abroad

Introduction: The Soviet Union and Rus

Many, especially older, Russians are at times nostalgic for the Soviet Union, or rather, for certain aspects of the Soviet Union (certainly not nostalgic for queuing for food). Little wonder they can be nostalgic. The break-up of the Soviet Union by Gorbachov and Yeltsin, carried out largely under American divide and rule supervision, was a treasonous catastrophe. The atheists in charge of the collapse of the Soviet Union, whether Soviet or American, had no concept of ‘Rus’, the lands of the peoples of historic Rus, wherever the majority Faith was clearly Orthodoxy.

‘Rus’, that is the Russian Federation, Belarus, most of the Ukraine and half of Kazakhstan, should have remained united, instead of being divided. Also, compared to today’s capitalist Russia, Soviet Union had free education and medicine and there was public order and culture. However, what those nostalgic for the social justice and order and culture of the Soviet past do not realize is that education and medicine were largely free under Tsar Nicholas II and order was kept. Everything that was good about the Soviet Union had been inherited from the Russian Empire.

A Geographical Empire and a Spiritual Empire

All the Soviet Union’s catastrophic mistakes came from its genocidal and suicidal atheism, the persecution of the Church and all faiths. The persecution of the spiritual undermined all culture, which is always founded on spiritual belief. As a result, the Soviet elite, like all imperialists in history, like the American elite today, thought that a great empire is always geographical. Of course, it is not – a great empire is always a spiritual one. Thus, the Soviet error consisted of confusing the Third International with the Third Rome, trying to build paradise on earth without Christ. The ravages of alcoholism, abortion, corruption, divorce and ecological disaster were only the logical consequences.

Also, as a result of this error of confusing a geographical empire with a spiritual empire, today many people in Eastern Europe hate Russia, ‘the evil empire’: you only have to visit the Western Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, Romania and elsewhere to meet them. And unfortunately these xenophobes hate precisely Russia, confusing it with the Soviet Union. Even worse, some of them hate Russians, not understanding that many Russians, made naïve by their weak faith, suffered from an inferiority complex vis a vis the West. This was why they were among the victims of the mainly foreign Bolsheviks with their alien imported ideology of Marxism, the fantasy of a German rabbi’s grandson.

Their confusion of the Soviet Union with Russia is partly understandable because certain negative aspects of the Marxist German Soviet Union were inherited from before, especially from the German Empress Catherine II. She had no understanding of Orthodoxy and of Rus, and so made the mistake of taking into the Empire of Rus the whole Eastern half of Poland, yet, for example, allowing Austria to control and persecute Orthodox in Carpatho-Russia. There followed errors in Finland, the Baltic States and elsewhere. However, none of this was comparable with the errors of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe from 1939 on. Those errors guaranteed local hatred there.

A Real Third Rome?

Thus, all imperialists throughout history have imagined that a great empire is geographical, and not spiritual. This was the error of the First Rome, with its totalitarian Crusades and Inquisitions which ultimately produced Catholic Fascism in the last century. As for the Second Rome with its Greek racism, we can see its disaster under the US-manipulated Phanariots today. If Moscow is to be the Third Rome, it must therefore first be a Second Jerusalem, a New Jerusalem, as Patriarch Nikon wanted to create on the River Istra in the seventeenth century. For only the Spiritual is Imperial; the Geographical is merely Imperialist and always ends badly, like the First and Second Romes.

Therefore, today the Church of Rus has first to be rebuilt. Today the Russian Orthodox Church must show that it is in no way compromised by or practises double standards. It can do this by proving that it wholeheartedly rejects the three heretical isms which have so troubled the peace of the Church for a century: modernism and ecumenism (adopted from Protestantism) and Eastern Papism (adopted from Roman Catholicism). And the Russian Orthodox Church cannot reject any of these without first renouncing its membership of the Pan-Protestant World Council of Churches and renouncing what some see as compromises it has made with the Vatican, that is, with Western Papism.

The Church has always suffered from the failings of clergy who put their own careers and personalities above Christ. What is needed today is the restoration of parish life, wiped out by atheism after 1917 (and it was often weak before that). This restoration can only be led by pastors, not by careerists. The parish is a family and the financial affairs of parishes must be transparent. As for the monasteries and the episcopate, they do not need intellectuals, wishy-washy diplomats, bureaucrats and ‘managers’, or the feudal and jealous who dislike married clergy. We need loving pastor-bishops. The episcopate must love, care for and show understanding of priests and deacons, avoiding injustices.

Conclusion

Since signing the Act of Canonical Communion in 2007, the émigré-founded Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, based in New York, has begun a renewal. Its establishment as the Russian Orthodox Church of the English-speaking world, in the New Worlds of North America and Oceania, as North American Rus and Australian Rus, and perhaps elsewhere, is potentially under way. Last year’s bold establishment by the Russian Orthodox Church of a long-awaited Western European Exarchate and a South-East Asian Exarchate are also signs that the Russian Orthodox Church has an international mission.

A Rus of the New World, a Western European Rus, helped by the return this November of the Paris Archdiocese to its roots in the Russian Church, and a South-East Asian Rus could all become real. However, the Church inside the lands of Old Rus, especially in the Russian Federation, Belarus and the much-troubled Ukraine, also needs to be rebuilt. Only in this way can the Russian Orthodox Church show that it is at the centre of healthy forces in the wider Orthodox Church, that it fights for the piety and purity of Holy Orthodoxy. Only when Moscow is a spiritual empire will it earn love as a real ‘Rome’.

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

Introduction: Russia

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

Three Temporary Political Formations

The Russian Federation

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

The Soviet Union

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

The Russian Empire

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

Conclusion: Holy Rus

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

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

Europe Has Mutated Into the USSR; Russia Has Become Free Europe (VIDEO)

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/europe-has-mutated-ussr-russia-has-become-free-europe-video/ri18742?utm_source=Russia+Insider+Daily+Headlines&utm_campaign=70135ff0be-Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c626db089c-70135ff0be-183204397&ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&mc_cid=70135ff0be&mc_eid=5c8d1856f4

Globalism versus Spiritual Unity

Why do they so hate Russia, the Orthodox Faith and the Church now? Because they know that Russia will stand up to Antichrist….Antichrist will even fear the Russian Tsar. Russia will be reborn only with Orthodoxy and under the protection of the Russian Tsar. There will be elders pleasing to God, just as there were before, until the end of the world. Such is the prophecy of St Laurence of Chernigov.

Igumen Kheruvim Degtariov

The clash between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism was a clash of ideologies, which, despite all the differences, still had the same external aims: freedom, equality and prosperity. But traditional Russia, with its authority and nationhood, will strive for completely different aims.

Professor Samuel Huntingdon

A Western democrat can very easily have an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. But this would be unthinkable with a traditional Russian. If Russians stop being Marxists, but do not accept liberal democracy and begin to behave like Russians and not Westerners, relations between Russia and the West will once again become estranged and hostile….

The West will never tolerate the rebirth of Holy Rus. It will always try to annihilate us, foisting on us as heroes its one-time agents of influence (to a greater or lesser extent): Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. It will always strive by any means available to blacken and slander our Orthodox Civilization and our holy Tsar, in order through them to besmirch and compromise our Orthodox Church and our present State, blowing them apart from inside. Unfortunately, many in the State and also in the Church still do not understand the direct connection between these phenomena. Our victory can only be achieved when we all go into battle, not for Stalin and Lenin, nor for liberalism and democracy, nor for oil and gas, but for Holy Rus, for our friends, as our ancestors did before us…

It was precisely Moscow that received the great and responsible mission to be the Third Rome, restraining the world from falling into the abyss of evil. This is not some invention or boast. Moscow was in no way better than Kiev or Vladimir when it became the centre of the Russian Lands. The great mission was given to us, not by the rebellious will of man, but by the will of God. Our mission has nothing to do with….so-called ‘Russian nationalism’. Our mission is the rebirth of Russian Civilization, in which all nationalities who so desire unite for life in God and with God, in the world of Goodness and Justice, in which we can stand up to the atheistic and anti-human Western ‘New Order’, whose aim is to annihilate man as God’s creation.

Petr Multatuli, Contemporary Russian Historian

For the peace of the whole world, the good estate of the holy churches of God and the union of all people, let us pray to the Lord.

Petition from the Great Litany

Hearing the above petition, I was recently asked if therefore the Orthodox Church was in favour of globalism, the Oneworld movement towards global unity. This was preached one hundred years ago by the mass murderers Lenin and Trotsky, by the syncretist hippy John Lennon in his song ‘Imagine’ nearly fifty years ago and by the Trotskyite neocons with their nightmarish ‘New World Order’ today. This ‘Order’ is the ideology of the global elite of bankers, industrialists, politicians and hired journalist-trolls. I answered as follows.

There is a great difference between globalism and the spiritual unity of the Church. Indeed, it can be said that there are two sorts of unity. Globalism means outward unity with the inward sameness (‘equality’ or homogeneity), created by the lowest common denominator, that is, by the unity of bread and circuses of the mob. On the other hand, spiritual unity means inward unity with the outward diversity created by the highest common denominator, that is, by spiritual maximalism. Thus, the two sorts of unity are exact opposites.

Globalism is the elitist project of neocons, which in reality began as far back as 1916 through the scheming of transnational bankers, including the Warburgs, the Rothschilds and Schiff, and Anglosphere politicians, including Lord Milner and Lloyd George. Seeing the collapse of old national empires as a result of the suicidal Great European War, they decided to seize power for themselves. They made sure that the new world would be directed by the new aristocracy of oligarchs (some of them actual aristocrats), in other words, by themselves.

After setting up in 1916, their first great project was implemented one hundred years ago in 1917. This was their project of implementing ‘regime-change’ in Russia, a coup d’etat in the vital Eurasian Heartland of the geopoliticians, through their agent Buchanan, the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg. This meant replacing the Christian Empire and the Emperor, who was holding back Antichrist, with a secularist elite on the same wavelength as themselves. So they were responsible for the bloody Bolshevik holocaust.

But they failed in their aims. Their incompetent fifth column of the Russian secularist elite was either killed or else forced to flee into exile by the satanic Bolsheviks. The global elite had managed to create an enemy for themselves in the Bolshevik USSR. So from Wall Street and London they then financed Hitler to destroy it. So they were responsible for the bloody Nazi holocaust. Again they failed, and Berlin was liberated by the Red Army. They had to wait another fifty years to seize the power in Russia that they had so craved.

Their success with the USSR came through the corrupt oligarch nomenklatura (‘some are more equal than others’) traitors Gorbachov and Yeltsin. The latter handed over the rotten and collapsing Communist system to neocon globalists from the USA. But even here their success was short-lived. After the ruination of US-directed privatization banditry (‘shock therapy’), in the Year 2000 the Russian Federation, the battered but main remnant of the Christian Empire, began to rise again from the Marxist ruins by canonizing the New Martyrs.

This is a miracle, which we had long dreamed of. Today, there is hope, but no guarantee, that the Russian Federation will drag up the rest of the former Empire from the ruins of the Western liberal oligarchs. Meanwhile, today, after 50 years since the early 1960s repression of normality, the for too long silent majority of the Western world is striking back against the elitist project. Now the Western world is divided between the neocon globalists and patriots, the latter supported by the Christian values of the returning Russian Empire.

The neocons preach social injustice (camouflaged by PR operatives under the name of ‘the free market’) combined with ‘anything goes anywhere’, satanic immorality a la Clinton, who considers that abortion is ‘kindness to children’. However, the patriots preach social justice and what the globalists call ‘social conservatism’ (= normal values). In this way, patriots of left and right, the ordinary people, are united against the utterly rotten, cosmopolitan elitist centre of the transnational Establishment and its amoral media hirelings.

We are also affected by this on the Church level. As one man, later to become a bishop (now defrocked) of the Constantinople Establishment or Phanar, said to me over 40 years ago: ‘There is no such thing as ordinary people’. At that point I realized that the elite was trying to take over even the Church of God through the soft, new calendarist underbelly of the Paris School world. But the attempt by the Patriarchate of Constantinople to foist on the Orthodox Church the ‘liberal’ (=Fascist) agenda of the elite utterly failed in Crete in 2016.

There the threats by the US-installed Patriarch, a personal friend of Biden and Obama, who have so much blood on their hands throughout the Middle East and the Ukraine, were rejected. The whole project looked like the last gasp attempt of an ageing elite to corrupt the Church before they die. After 100 years, the attempt to impose the project of the mammonist millionaires on the Church has failed. With God’s help, in 2017 we ordinary people will move forward in the restoration of spiritual unity and the destruction of globalism.

Understanding Recent Russian History

We have not forgiven Lenin for anything.

Metropolitan Nestor (Anisimov) of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in China, who ordained Fr Nicholas Gibbes of Oxford and after 1945 spent many years in Soviet camps. His words were recorded by his godson, the writer A.K. Karaulov.

After the Nazi surrender Private Theodore Valikov, then aged 20, had to serve in Germany. In spring 1946 he found himself driving his officer to the main railway station in Berlin. With time to spare he decided to visit the Reichstag where he had not been before. Leaving his friend in the lorry, he entered the large hall on the ground floor and suddenly saw Tsar Nicholas II, standing on the third step of the dais in his colonel’s uniform with epaulettes, a sword at his side, just as he had seen in a portrait of him kept by his pious aunt in his home village. The Sovereign was inspecting the building which had been fought over in the final victory over the enemy. By the time that the soldier had realized what had happened, the Tsar had disappeared. Later he interpreted the vision, saying that it showed that the Tsar was at the head of the victorious army. After the war Theodore was tonsured monk at the Pskov Caves Monastery.

Hieromonk Theodorit (Valikov, + 9 July 2002) in ‘Russia Before the Second Coming’, compiled by S. and T, Fomin, Third Edition, Saint Petersburg 1998, Vol 2, P. 279

Why do they so hate Russia, the Orthodox Faith and the Church just now? Because they know that Russia will stand up to Antichrist…Antichrist will even fear the Russian Tsar. Russia will be reborn only with Orthodoxy and beneath the protection of the Russian Tsar. There will be God-pleasing elders, just as there were before, until the end of the world. Such is the prophecy of St Laurence of Chernigov.

Igumen Kheruvim Degtariov

The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxism-Leninism was a conflict of ideologies, which, despite all the differences, still had the same external aims: freedom, equality and prosperity. But traditional Russia, with its authority and nationhood, will strive for completely different aims.

Professor Samuel Huntingdon

The West will never tolerate the rebirth of Holy Rus. It will always try to annihilate us, foisting on us as heroes its one-time agents of influence (to a greater or lesser extent): Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. It will always strive by any means available to blacken and slander our Orthodox Civilization and our holy Tsar, in order through them to besmirch and compromise our Orthodox Church and our present State, blowing them apart from inside. Unfortunately, many in the State and also in the Church still do not understand the direct connection between these phenomena. Our victory can only be realized when we all go into battle, not for Stalin and Lenin, nor for liberalism and democracy, nor for oil and gas, but for Holy Rus, for our friends, as our ancestors did before us…

It was precisely Moscow that received the great and responsible mission to be the Third Rome, restraining the world from falling into the abyss of evil. This is not some invention or bragging. Mosow was in no way better than Kiev or Vladimir when it became the centre of the Russian Land. The great mission was given to us, not by rebellious human desire, but by the will of God. Our mission has nothing to do with….so-called ‘Russian nationalism’. Our mission is the rebirth of Russian Civilization, in which all nationalities who wish it are united for life in God and with God, in the world of Goodness and Justice, in which we can stand up to the atheistic and anti-human Western ‘New Order’, whose aim is to annihilate man as God’s creation.

Petr Multatuli, Contemporary Russian Historian