In this (the defence of defenceless civilians by President Putin after the illegal NATO bombing of Libya in 2011) we see continuity with the foreign policy of Emperor Nicholas II. Today, in our fearful and unpredictable century, when Russia stands on the threshold of menacing trials, let us hope that, according to the testament of Nicholas II, ‘with deep faith in the rightness of our cause and humble hope in All-Powerful Providence’ we will be able to overcome and once more find our country strong in God and Truth.

Petr V. Multatuli, The Foreign Policy of Emperor Nicholas II, p.786, (Moscow 2012)

In the 1970s and 1980s I was able to meet many White Russian emigres who had been adults before the Russian Revolution. They knew exactly what the real old Russia had been like, both the good and the bad – unlike the second generation who often nostalgically idealised what they had not known. Their version was a fairy tale, a Disneyland Old Russia. It was a fantasy born from their politically hostile attitude to the Soviet regime, which was the reality then, and from the defensive inferiority complex of the children of immigrants. In reality, when we look at and compare Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation, one thing clearly stands out: Continuity.

Today President Putin is undeniably very popular, to an extent that Western politicians can only dream of. At least 80% of the Russian population approve of him and those who disagree with him will still tell you that there is no alternative – all the others are worse. In this way he is quite unlike those Soviet and post-Soviet leaders who were disliked or even detested. It can be said that the present Russian President is a Tsar without the title – indeed, even the Russian emblem is the double-headed eagle and the flag is that of the Tsars.

It is a Western propaganda narrative, invented for self-justification and to raise money for its aggressive forever wars, that President Putin wants to restore the Soviet Union. The President has more than once made it crystal clear that: ‘He who does not regret the Soviet Union has no heart, but he who wants to restore it has no brain’. What is his aim then? He knows with all rational Russians that both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Empire are lost to the history books and will not be restored. Nevertheless, the threefold East Slav lands – the Russian Federation, the Ukraine (whatever its future borders and name) and Belarus, which are being united as a ’Union State’, will still form by far the largest country on earth, with nearly 12% of the world’s land area. President Putin’s aim in other words is national, to unite Eastern Slavdom.

The Russian Federation by itself has the largest economy in Europe and is set to become the fourth largest economy in the world, although with less than 2.5% of the world population. This is neither the Russian Empire, nor the Soviet Empire, but it is the ‘Empire of Rus’. Rus is what would probably have been formed under Tsar Nicholas, who, if he had not been murdered in 1918, would perhaps have died naturally in the 1940s, when he would have been in his 70s. (Without his murder in 1918, there would not have been a Second World War). With Poland, Finland, Bessarabia, the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and the five Central Asian stans given independence if they wished, probably the Russian Empire of 1917 would have turned into the Empire of Rus by 1945, as it has done now.

Just as Russia was ruled by Tsar Nicholas, but with an advisory ‘Council of Ministers’, so today Russia is ruled by one man, but with a ‘Security Council’. Just as Tsar Nicholas was a great reformer, promoting eleven reforms – the sale of alcohol, monetary affairs, education, the peasantry, the legal system, the government, religious tolerance, civil freedom, agrarian affairs, the military and healthcare, promoting free medicine and social justice, so beloved by Tsarevich Alexei, President Putin has also been a great reformer. Tsar Nicholas successfully fought off the Western invasion until 1917, when he was betrayed to the West by unpatriotic and disloyal generals, politicians and aristocrats.

Here President Putin learned from history. Tsar Nicholas was brought down by the parasitic class, called aristocrats, who under their Western sponsors meddled and betrayed the Tsar. President Putin has been able to stop the parasitic class, now called oligarchs, from meddling in Western-sponsored politics and treachery. As a result, Russia is today successfully fighting off the current Western invasion. With the disloyal and unpatriotic in exile, President Putin no longer needs aggressive but degenerate Western Europe. Today Russia does not need the decadent West with its LGBT, for Russia is itself the repository of traditional Western values, as the new Orthodox Minister of Defence, Andrei Belousov, has declared.

Just as over four generations ago Tsar Nicholas tried to help the former Ottoman Balkans unite, forming a ‘Balkan Union’ against local chauvinism, and help the Austro-Hungarian Empire decentralise, there is now hope that Russia through BRICS can help South-Eastern Europe, the now independent lands of the former Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. However, perhaps the greatest resemblance between Tsar Nicholas and President Putin is in the Window to Asia, the ‘Great Asian Programme’, which Tsar Nicholas opened. The Tsar began with the Trans-Siberian Railway and the President has successfully begun again, building the Russian alliance with the new Imperial China of ‘Emperor’ Xi.

The first Window was closed by the British, which armed and financed the Western vassal Japan to the teeth, so that it would treacherously attack Russia without warning in 1904. Now the Window is open once more. For the painstaking construction of BRICS, to a great extent the work of Russia, resurrects the whole foreign policy of Tsar Nicholas, whose aim was co-operation, not confrontation. It was the ‘White Tsar’, anti-colonialist to the core, who opposed the British in their horrifying genocide in the Boer War in South Africa, who defended Ethiopia, Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Armenia, Persia, Afghanistan, Tibet (forcing the British invaders to leave), Thailand, and above all China, and would have helped India, had it been possible, to resist Western colonialism.

And now many of those countries have joined or wish to join BRICS. From the martyred Tsar Nicholas II to President Putin, this is Eternal Rus. It fights not only for its own re-creation, but also for the freedom of the whole world from the West, the ideology that the West calls ‘Globalism’. It fights for peace, stability and balance against Western conquest, occupation, plunder, pillaging and dismemberment for the purposes of divide and rule. Today Russia fights for this through the New World Order of Sovereignty and Patriotism. Tsar Nicholas is alive and President Putin is completing the work which he began, but which was interrupted by internal treachery, sponsored by external enemies.