Thousands Die in the Ukraine as ‘Europe Sets a Concrete Example of Life Without Christ’

The Western media report only what its leaders want them to report, for example, the strife which the West has caused in Iraq, where, also unreported by the Western media, Christians are being obliterated, as in Syria. However, in Europe, censored by European media, the genocide continues in the Ukraine. A few days ago a junta aeroplane with 49 foreign (EU and US nationals) mercenaries, paid for by corrupt oligarchs, was shot down by Ukrainian freedom-fighters, most of them Christian patriots. In the war, directed from training camps in Poland which is run as a colony by NATO, whose armed masses and fleet now threaten Russia, three days ago 250 died, two days ago 49 and today more than 100.

Orthodox priests are fleeing the Ukraine for Russia as heterodox and schismatics, their clerical leaders included, openly threaten to kill them and destroy their churches. This reminds us that the present borders of the Ukraine have existed for less than a generation and it basically consists of south-eastern Poland joined to south-western Russia. It is then an artificial construct (like EU Europe), created by the monstrous atheist dictators Lenin and Stalin, who were imposed on Christian Russia by the West in 1917 by overthrowing the Tsar. Today, 19 June, Metropolitan Onufry, the Locum Tenens of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, has called for peace and spoken against the atheist EU, which caused all the problems in the Ukraine.

In an interview with the Interfax news agency the Metropolitan spoke of the Ukraine as a ‘buffer zone’ between the Christian world and the Western world. He spoke of current morality in Europe which ‘would bring no good to the Ukraine’. ‘Europe sets us a concrete example of life without Christ. It pays no attention to the Lord’s commandments and what He forbade. On the contrary, it promotes permissiveness, according to which life is guided by human desires and not the Law of God. This is the wrong path… not all human desires are holy…Today the world is basically divided into two camps: one camp consists of people who strive to keep in force and reality moral laws, given to humanity by God for its benefit’.

He continued: ‘However, the second camp tramples down those laws. For example God blessed man and woman, Adam and Eve, in marriage. Not two Adams, not two Eves’. The Metropolitan, who only a few years ago visited us in London, also pointed to the legalization in Europe of single-sex marriage, euthanasia, which he called ‘the legalization of the sin of suicide’, and abortion. ‘If nobody is left on earth to keep the Divine order of life, then human life is doomed and humanity is headed for self-destruction. The laws, which the new European world offers us today, are not acceptable. We cannot collaborate with and join this world. We should keep our unity with those who adhere to Divine law.’

19 June 2014. My grandfather’s 120th birthday. He, born on 19 June, possessed both morality and common sense. As a soldier he took part in the liberation of Baghdad and Jerusalem. Reader, please pray for the repose of Henry.

His Holiness Kyrill, Patriarch of all the Russias, now calls on the fullness of our Church, to all the peoples of historic Rus, to pray

O Lord Jesus Christ our God, look down with Thy merciful eye on the sorrow and great pain of lamentation of Thy children in the Ukrainian land. Deliver Thy people from civil strife, make to cease the bloodshed, turn away impending misfortunes. Bring the homeless home, feed those that thirst, console those that weep, join together those that are divided. Let not Thy flock that are embittered towards their kin be diminished, but grant them swift reconciliation, for Thou art compassionate. Soften the hearts of those that have grown violent and bring them to know Thee. Give peace to Thy Church and her faithful children, that with one heart and one mouth we may glorify Thee, our Lord and Saviour, unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Дорогие братья и сестры, обращаюсь ныне ко всей Полноте нашей Церкви, ко всем народам исторической Руси

Господи Иисусе Христе Боже наш, призри милостивным Твоим оком на скорбь и многоболезненный вопль чад Твоих, в земле украинстей сущих. Избави люди Твоя от междоусобныя брани, утоли кровопролития, отврати належащия беды. Лишенныя крова введи в домы, алчущия напитай, плачущия утеши, разделенныя совокупи. Не остави стадо Свое, от сродник своих во озлоблении сущих, умалитися, но скорое примирение яко щедр даруй. Ожесточенных сердца умягчи и к Твоему познанию обрати. Мир Церкви Твоей и верным чадам ея подаждь, да единем сердцем и едиными усты прославим Тя, Господа и Спасителя нашего во веки веков. Аминь.

Déjà Vu

After the flight (‘the exit strategy’) of defeated Western forces from Iraq, they left behind them a weak and bickering sectarian puppet regime. This had only limited control of the centre of the country around Baghdad and everywhere else the invasion left chaos, bitterness and the desire for revenge. Now that that regime looks like falling to Sunni forces, some in the West must be repenting. Just as the CIA founded Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the 1980s, so the West, through its puppet allies in utterly corrupt Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, has trained and armed Sunni forces in Libya, Egypt and Syria. And now look what is happening.

Western-trained Sunni forces have spread to Iraq and look like seizing power. The Western elite has swiftly dropped all its propaganda rhetoric about an ‘Arab spring’. Its ‘freedom and democracy’ mantra has unleashed a Pandora’s box from Afghanistan to Tunisia, via Libya, Yemen, Bahrein, Syria and Iraq – just as many Middle East experts precisely predicted before the genocidal Bush-Blair 2003 invasion of Iraq. It looks as though the West may now have to ally itself with Iran and the Assad Syrian government in order to defeat the Sunni terrorists, which it itself trained and armed on American bases in Qatar, Turkey and Afghanistan.

In Iraq we now also see exactly what will happen next year in Afghanistan once the humiliated Western forces have fled from there too and when its puppet regime, which even now controls less than one tenth of the country, falls to the people. They will in turn take their revenge on the local, English-speaking, CIA-installed traitors. Just as with a host of CIA puppet-regimes over the last 65 years, in Latin America, South-East Asia, Greece and Italy, it too will fall quite quickly. The same is already happening to the CIA-installed junta in the Ukraine, which it is also trying to turn into yet another banana republic.

Having in the Ukraine found an unprincipled and power-mad English-speaking bandit, who made his money from drug-dealing, prostitution rackets and arms sales (rather like the corrupt rulers the CIA backed in Saigon half a century ago), it backed him. Telling the ignorant and hoodwinked Western public that he had made his billions from ‘chocolate’ (!), the US administration had him elected President with fewer than 25% of the votes, despite a massive US-style PR campaign and strict media censorship. However, he has already slaughtered hundreds in the civil war that he has undertaken and now he faces bankruptcy.

This is because his corrupt regime cannot even pay the foreign, US-trained mercenaries whom it has had to engage to massacre the Ukrainian people – mercenaries are necessary because most of the Ukrainian forces themselves will not kill their own people, as he will. What the West has overlooked in the wars that it created first in Georgia, then in Syria and now in the Ukraine, is that all these countries, unlike Afghanistan and even Iraq, have a large population which has great veneration for the Mother of God. It is She Who has apanages in both Georgia and the Ukraine and a great shrine in Orthodox Syria.

Just as the US failed in its promotion of the tinpot Georgian dictator and torturer, the English-speaking, US-trained Mikhail Sakaashvili, so too it is failing in Syria and the Ukraine. The Russian Crimea, given to the Ukraine by an atheist dictator sixty years ago against the will of the people, did not want to become a US naval base. Now the south and east of the Ukraine, called by history Novorossiya (New Russia), given to the Ukraine by an atheist dictator ninety years ago against the will of its people, does not want to become a US missile base. The US policy of destabilization and genocide is not working in the Ukraine and will not work – as long as its people pray to the Mother of God.

The Mystery of Archbishop Averky

The future Archbishop Averky (Taushev) was born in 1906 in Kazan. Due to the nature of his father’s work, in his youth he travelled all over Russia and grew to love its monasteries, reading deeply. In 1920 the Taushev family fled Russia for the Bulgarian city of Varna. Here, while still at high school, the young man met the exiled Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, who further inspired his love of monastic life. After leaving school the future Archbishop enrolled at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Sofia.

On graduating he accepted a position as assistant secretary in the Carpatho-Russian Diocese in what was then Czechoslovakia. There, in 1931, he was tonsured monk with the name Averky, ordained deacon and in 1932 ordained priest, serving in local parishes. After carrying out various tasks for the diocese, in 1940 Fr Averky was forced to leave Carpatho-Russia. He moved to Belgrade where he taught Pastoral Theology and Homiletics, but in 1945, moving out in front of the advancing Red Army, he arrived in Munich together with the Synod of Bishops of the Church Outside Russia. Here he continued teaching.

In 1951 Fr. Averky was assigned to teaching at Holy Trinity Seminary at Jordanville in New York State. Fr Averky was soon consecrated bishop and in 1960 he was chosen by the monastery to be their Abbot. As Abbot, Archbishop Averky, as he had become, led the curriculum, teaching New Testament and Homilectics, writing and preaching. He also actively participated in publishing the Russian periodical ‘Orthodox Rus’. He reposed in 1976, known for his Orthodox writings and sermons calling to repentance, his saintly life, adherence to the Tradition against ecumenism and extremism, and his conviction that the end of the world was rapidly approaching amid contemporary apostasy.

The mystery that concerns us is why the Archbishop was so convinced that the end was near. After all, forty years on, we are still here. The answer, however, is not complex. Already, over 1950 years ago, the Apostle Paul wrote similarly of the end of the world. Is it possible then that saints can be wrong? In reality, the saints are not wrong. The end of the world has been near on several occasions. Saints and the saintly have intuitions of this and this is precisely why they are sent by God to warn us and to call to repentance. This is what the Apostle Paul did and it is also what Archbishop Averky did. And people did listen to him and others.

In 1981, five years after Archbishop Averky’s repose, the Synod of Bishops canonized the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia. Thanks to their prayers, persecution ceased in the Russian Lands and there began the process of the Rebaptism of Rus. With this act of repentance for the overthrow of Old Russia and its Orthodox foundations three generations before in 1917, the world changed. God gave an extension to the world and the end that had indeed been near in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the holy Archbishop had said, drew back.

Today, with the world situation on a knife edge, with the Western world gripped by the Satanic urge for global military and economic control and seeking to destroy the last vestiges of spiritual life everywhere, with many Orthodox countries like Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria compromised by Western propaganda, with many of the last strongholds of Orthodox piety, including Serbia, Georgia, Moldova and now the Ukraine, under threat, and with Russia only half-way to repentance, it is clear that the end is approaching once more. Now only the Mother of God can extend history and grant us another period for repentance. Now we should turn again to the prophecies and warnings of Archbishop Averky.

Mr Cameron and British Values

Having realized fifty years too late that the idea of Britain is spiritually dead, having refused to do anything to save it from death and having betrayed it time and time again, it seems extraordinary that the present UK Prime Minister is now trying to do something. Defeated in elections by the anti-EU Independence Party and with 100 days to go to the Scottish referendum, when Britain (and therefore the British flag) may well be abolished, he has now suddenly taken to a love of ‘British values’.

Thus, when asked today which values he would like to see taught in UK schools, he today replied: ‘I would say freedom, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, belief in personal and social responsibility and respect for British institutions. Those are the sorts of things I would hope would be inculcated into the curriculum in any school in Britain’.

The problem with Mr Cameron’s ‘British values’ is that though they may still be shared by privileged Eton and Oxford Establishment types like himself, they do not mean much to ordinary people who live in the real world of today. First of all, ‘Britain’ itself is a mythical invention of the self-interested Establishment elite of the 18th to 20th centuries. In the 21st century that has little meaning. If he were to speak about English values (or Scottish or Welsh or Irish values), that might have some meaning.

Thus, what does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a Britain whose Establishment founded an Empire on slavery, massacre and exploitation?

What does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a country where 200,000 abortions – some 6 million since abortion was legalized – are carried out by the State every year?

What does the ‘British’ value of freedom mean in a country whose elite signed away its sovereignty to what is now the EU forty years ago, never allowing the people to vote on it since then?

What does the ‘British’ value of tolerance mean in a country where people are afraid to speak the truth because of the tyranny of political correctness, promoted by every ‘British’ institution, not least its tightly-controlled media?

What does the ‘British’ value of the rule of law mean in a country where we are obliged without consultation to continually meddle in, invade and destroy other countries for no reason at all, where those who oppose such invasions mysteriously die as a result of SIS actions and where our e-mails and phone calls are spied on every day by the ‘security’ services?

What does the ‘British’ value of personal and social responsibility mean in a country where the judiciary, police force, businessmen, the heads of the utility companies and politicians are vetted by the so-called ‘security’ services and are usually freemasons, a closed brotherhood which bars promotion to non-members?

What does the ‘British’ value of respect for British institutions mean in a country where all those institutions are utterly compromised by their history, whether by the ‘Enclosures’ (a legalized collectivist land grab by the rich from the poor), ‘Highland clearances’ (ethnic cleansing), colonial exploitation of Indians and Africans, compulsory deportation of the poor to the ‘colonies’, the British concentration camps of the Boer War, the slaughter of innocent youth in the First World War, the current meddling in and invasions of foreign countries and the massacres of their native populations by bomb and bullet (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya), and subsidized terrorists (Syria) and puppet regimes (the Ukraine), and the continuous lies of corrupt politicians to a people who are not allowed to vote in a system in which their vote would be represented?

Mr Cameron not only needs to define his values before he speaks, but above all he needs to start living them without hypocrisy.

The West is Alienated from Christ and Therefore Intolerant

Many people worldwide have been amazed at the Western indifference and even hostility to the plight of massacred and fleeing Christians in Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and now in the Ukraine. There, 55,000 refugees have fled to Russia in the last 24 hours from the devilish massacres by foreign mercenaries of the Christian people of the Ukraine. The neo-Nazi junta in Kiev, under strict Western control, sends in tanks, murders and maims Christians, refusing to talk to its own people.

Where do this intolerance and hatred for Christianity come from? Surely the West supports Christianity? It used to. And why does President Obama meddle in the UK’s possible decision to leave the atheist EU and Scotland’s possible decision to leave the atheist UK? Why does he threaten and intimidate even Western peoples? Where does this bullying arrogance come from? These riddles have today been answered by the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov.

As reported by the Interfax Religion agency and the sedmitza.ru website, the Russian Orthodox Foreign Minister considers that the West has become antagonistic to Russia because of its return to the Church of Christ. He noted the Russian amazement that the West still equates the Russian Federation with the atheist Soviet Union, whereas ‘the new Russia is returning to traditional spiritual values, rooted in Orthodoxy’.

At the same time, he noted that the ever clearer contradiction ‘between the multipolarity of the world which can be objectively affirmed, and the desire of the USA and the historic West to hang on to their habitual positions of domination, the ever clearer contradiction between the cultural and civilizational diversity of the contemporary world and attempts to foist Western values on everyone’. He added that the West ‘is increasingly breaking away from its own Christian roots and is less and less receptive to the religious feelings of people of other confessions’.

Is Europe Spineless?

A war is going on in Europe. True, wars are going on in Syria, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, all wars directly caused by Western greed for natural resources and consequent meddling. Those countries have been wrecked and devastated, hundreds of thousands lie dead, all because of Western interference and exploitation. But this new war is in Europe. True, there is an old war in Europe, in Serbia, occupied and downtrodden for fifteen years beneath the boots of NATO troops, and tens of thousands there look to Russia for liberation from the ravages of US/EU tyranny. But that war is now a bloodless war of ethnic cleansing and occupation, whereas in the Ukraine it is now horribly violent with mass graves. Parents of the teenage draftees of the so-called Ukrainian Army are rescuing their sons, taking them back home, so they will not be forced to kill their own people or themselves be killed.

The recent Presidential elections in the Ukraine (turnout = 45%), where a Western-inspired civil war is taking place and the ruling neo-Nazi junta controls only a small part of the country, were, apparently, perfectly legitimate. (Yet, the hypocritical Establishments of the West declare that the present Presidential elections in Syria are a ‘farce’, because they are taking place during the Western-inspired civil war there). True, both the wars in Europe and in Syria are not really civil wars as much as wars between foreign mercenaries (in the Ukraine hired by the mafioso oligarch-puppets of the CIA-installed regime in Kiev, in Syria paid for and armed by puppet dictatorships in Qatar and Saudi Arabia) and the martyred people of the Syria and the Ukraine. And the people are being slaughtered in their hundreds by those Godless mercenaries in a genocide, simply because they want faith and freedom.

The US neocon elite plans to make the Ukraine into a testing ground for its GM crops, banned in Russia, as also in the EU. However, the EU wants to bury around Chernobyl its nuclear waste. Already priests are being murdered and tortured, forced to flee from Kiev and Odessa to Russia, they cannot resist the intimidation and threats to their families. Make no mistake – just as in ex-Yugoslavia and Syria, this is a war on Orthodoxy and only, only, the enemies of Orthodoxy, Uniats, sectarians and so-called ‘Orthodox’ modernists (= apostates), rejoice in it. Thus, only a few days ago the pope of Rome, a rabbi, an imam and a Greek patriarch met to conspire. However, on the banks of the Jordan only a few miles away, the actual Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem and a delegation of Russian bishops met to concelebrate. Babylon and Jerusalem just a few miles from each other….

The still unbrainwashed peoples of Europe, resisting the bread and circuses fed to them, are seeking freedom from the federalist EU Fourth Reich dictatorship. In recent days we have seen how the peoples of Europe are beginning to revolt against the EU Babylonian nightmare. Believers of left and right are united, whether it is the leftist parties of Greece, Bulgaria, Italy and Spain (or Paul Craig Roberts and others in the USA) or right-wing leaders like Marine le Pen, Nigel Farage, Helmut Schmidt, Vaclav Klaus (or Americans like Henry Kissinger, Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul). So we can answer the question of our title and say this: the good news is that the peoples of Europe are not spineless. The bad news is that the European Establishments and the EU elite are spineless. Utterly unprincipled. They swim with the tide – and that tide comes from satan.

From Recent Correspondence: May 2014

Q: How do you understand the current civil war in the Ukraine?

A: Whenever the Orthodox world is on the brink of victory, the West intervenes and undermines it, carrying out its genocide. So it was in the mid-eleventh century, a brilliant time of military victory and spiritual prosperity for New Rome and the whole Christian Empire. So it was in Kiev in the twelfth century, when the West tried to undermine its brilliant Orthodox civilization, so it was in Russia when the barbarian hordes from the West invaded in 1612 and in 1812, then again in 1854 in the Crimea, yet again in 1917 when Russia was on the verge of victory, and so today in the Ukraine, where we are witnessing yet another Western invasion and occupation of Kiev. The Western elite cares nothing for the Ukrainian people or history; the Ukraine is just a tool to gain more power, destroying all opposition to its domination by bread and circuses. Thus, its new President-elect is only a puppet – the real governor of the Ukraine, the next state of the USA, is the US ambassador in Kiev.

Q: This is not the version of the Western media.

A: The propaganda being pumped out day and night by the BBC, for example, is quite astounding. They have quite lost their conscience and all integrity. People are turning more and more to alternatives, especially the Internet, which is not censored – not yet anyway. It is worse than in the days of the Cold War; then you knew that the Soviet Union was atheist and persecuted the Church. Now the Russian Federation is becoming Christian and it is the West that is atheist and persecuting the Church and indeed any spiritual or traditional values at all.

Q: Who do you think was originally responsible for the problem in the Ukraine?

A: Stalin and his borders were responsible. Can you imagine a country made up of eastern Poland and western Russia? It was never going to work. It is as though you made one country out of France and Germany. It is not possible. Now a civil war is going on in the Ukraine, with Ukrainian killing Ukrainian. Little wonder that most of the Ukrainian Army refuses to take part or has surrendered to the free Ukrainians in the east; the junta in Kiev has had to bring in foreign mercenaries in the east, the same as those that brought it to power by violence last February. The civil war in the Ukraine will be interminable – until the country falls apart into its natural and quite different parts.

Q: Has the West won anything by meddling in the Ukraine?

A: No – just as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only has it lost a lot of money, which has been poured into the corrupt black hole of Kiev, but also the events in the Ukraine have affirmed post-Communist Russian identity. Before there were many in Russia who wavered in loyalty and were pro-Western. Now 82% support President Putin. I can think of one Church figure, who not so long ago was an ecumenist and papophile, but who is now appealing for faithfulness to the Tradition – like everyone else has always done! Such is repentance for the errors of youth.

President Putin has adopted the Church and its values as his emblem. This is not the Church being taken over by the State, as in the West – it is the Church influencing the State. President Putin has realized that there is nothing else. The US has made a colossal mistake by meddling in the Ukraine. It has lost all support in Russia and also now lost China, so isolating itself even further. Moreover, the US has little support in many parts of the EU itself, even in Germany. It looks as though the West has been following instructions on how to make enemies; at least that is the effect of Western imperialist meddling over the last 25 years. The West has lost international respect.

Q: Are there any other repercussions?

A: Yes, a huge one. The aggressively expansionist West has brought Russia to create the Eurasian Economic Union, with the very wealthy Kazakhstan and Belarus. Now Kyrgyzstan and Armenia want to join the EEU as soon as possible. Armenia is all the more interested since its neighbour and enemy, Azerbaijan, has become a US colony through its Turkish proxy. Other countries have expressed great interest, notably Vietnam and above all China. Generally, the stupidity of the West has thrust Russia into the arms of China. Russia is already one of the largest Christian countries in the world, but China within a generation is due to become the largest Christian country in the world.

Q: But Christian in the sense of Protestant or Roman Catholic, and not Orthodox.

A: Yes, but the spiritually sensitive there will migrate to Orthodoxy, having seen though the Western myths of Protestantism and its parent Catholicism, just as has happened in the West itself. For the moment the Chinese are not spiritually ready, but this will come and they will move to Orthodoxy and to the Russian Church, to whose canonical territory China belongs. I think the same may happen in North Korea (not in South Korea which, like Japan, has since 1945 been a US colony). In addition, once Communist ideology has collapsed in despotic North Korea, as it inevitably will do, as it already has done in China, there will be a need for another ideology and a religious one – certainly not the Western one which is atheist.

Q: Why are both Greek new calendarists and Greek old calendarists at one in condemning the Russian Church and generally being Russophobic?

A: There are five reasons for this. The first is Greek nationalism – both new calendarism and old calendarism are a purely Greek problem. The second is jealousy. For instance they accuse the Russian Church of ‘imperialism’ (!), when they really mean Greek imperialism. The third is extremism – they do not like moderation because they represent two extremes, two isms. The fourth is self-justification; if Russia is ‘imperialistic’, then that would mean that they are not. The fifth is the CIA, which finances both groups to varying degrees. Indeed, one old calendarist bishop in America actually wrote to me a few years ago vigorously defending the CIA and openly told me that many of his parishioners worked for it.

Q: But there is such a thing as Russian nationalism, isn’t there?

A: Of course, there is. We have suffered from it over the last 40 years. There are unChurched Russians who have no understanding of the word ‘Rus’. They confound culture and language with the Faith. As I said at the San Francisco Council in 2006, Rus is the Orthodox reply to globalism. Rus means Orthodox multinationality. Whether among the 100 or so peoples of the Russian Federation, or in Russian canonical territory in Japan and China, or in Alaska (at least among the natives, not among the Anglos), in North Korea, Thailand and Laos, or in the 50 or so countries of the Western world and beyond, which are covered by the Church Outside Russia, you can find Russian Orthodox. Russian Orthodoxy is a world, not a single nationality.

Q: That sounds a bit Roman Catholic.

A: The concept of Rus is not one of papist centralized unity, it is Trinitarian, unity in diversity. As one Russian philosopher put it: ‘The choice is between the Holy Trinity and hell’. We choose the Holy Trinity, not Western (= pagan Roman) centralization.

Q: Doesn’t the support recently shown by the Russian government for anti-EU movements mean that it is allying itself with right-wing movements?

A: Not at all. Both the European left and the European right, all those with actual political beliefs and principles, are alike opposed to the EU, which, as they realize, is only a US colonial project, using Germany as its executive pawn. Those who oppose the neocon EU also want social justice. This is why, in the UK for example, UKIP is not only anti-Brussels but also anti-Washington. Most Russians today bitterly regret the ‘privatizations’ inside Russia in the 1990s, carried out by Harvard–trained or at least Western-style necons. Such asset theft created the oligarchs, who now mainly live in London and Tel-Aviv. The Russian Federation has not forgotten social justice and so also supports the left-wing anti-EU movements throughout the south of Europe.

Q: But surely that is left-wingery and is just nostalgic support for the old Soviet Union?

A: Not at all. If you believe that, you have swallowed one of the main myths of Soviet/Western anti-Russian propaganda. This is that the pre-1917 government did not believe in social justice, that it was against the people. The pre-1917 government was committed to social justice, the literacy rate was nearing 90% and huge strides had been made not only in education, but also in medicine and improving working conditions. Most, if not all, of what was good in the Soviet Union had been inherited from the Tsar’s Russia. By 1917 Russia had already overtaken the West in several areas. The Tsar’s rule was a popular monarchy. Do not forget that it was brought down by the aristocrats, who were losing money and land to the people, just as today the anti-Putinists in Russia are also pro-Western oligarchs (modern aristocrats) who are frightened that they will lose their ill-gotten gains back to the people through populist government.

Q: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the West?

A: I would say ‘cautiously pessimistic’, even though the rate of spiritual decline in the West has accelerated tremendously over the last 25, and even the last 10, years. The West has for a thousand years been held in a cycle of atheist logic. It is captive to it. Everything that we in the Church do is only a delaying action, something that puts off its atheist Babylon. But even delaying it is still a miracle.

Q: What will happen in the West in the end?

A: Today political correctness is already talking of making circumcision illegal. Soon it will be the same with baptism, especially baptism by immersion. We shall be forced to flee to Russia to get baptized, just as St Seraphim of Vyritsa prophesied in the dark days of persecution in Russia.

Q: Do you have any thoughts seven years on from the great events in Moscow on Ascension Day 2007, when the two parts of the Russian Church were administratively reunited after an interval of nearly 90 years, when before there unity had only been spiritual?

A: Our ROCOR Metr Hilarion was brought up in a Diaspora parish of the Church inside Russia. Our ROCOR Archbishop Mark wanted to study in the Church inside Russia. I would not compare myself to them, but I had the same ambition in 1976. However, it was all impossible. The Diaspora parishes of the Church inside Russia were simply not free. I realized this in 1976 in Russia, when I saw the authentic Church and could compare it with non-ROCOR parishes outside Russia and saw scandals in them. One of our ROCOR bishops told me that if he had been treated by representatives of the Church inside Russia as I was treated, he would have left the Church altogether. Today those who caused all the problems are all dead; they have become history in the bad sense, just bad memories. But such was the decadence of that period because of the lack of freedom. A Church cannot live without spiritual freedom.

Fortunately, there was the Church Outside Russia which had kept and cherished that freedom. And today both parts of the Church have spiritual freedom. And that is due to two great hierarchs: Patriarch Alexis II and Metropolitan Laurus. I firmly believe that one day there will be a feast in the Church calendar in honour of Sts Alexis and Laurus, Restorers of Unity. That was, is, and will be a spiritual ascension for us all.

Ascension Day 2014