russia-insider--2020-09-12--Everything You Know About The Last Russian Tsar Is a Massive Lie. Here’s The Truth

`` These members of the upper classes ( and not all were traitors ) were sponsored from the beginning by the West .
The West considered that once its values of parliamentary democracy , republicanism or constitutional monarchy were introduced into Russia , it would become just another bourgeois Western country . ''
This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018 This article originally appeared on a new site about the Christian renaissance in Russia , called Russian Faith .
Father Andrew Phillips , is a long-serving priest in the ROCOR Orthodox church in Essex @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a prolific writer , particularly on Russian history and current events , from an Orthodox Christian perspective .
In this January 2013 article , he answers readers ’ questions about the last Russian Tsar , Nicholas II , debunking decades of deliberate , slanderous lies coming from the media , academia , and governments of the UK , Germany , and America , but mostly from the UK .
For another excellent article debunking this anti-Russian propaganda which is so ingrained in the West , see his fascinating article about Rasputin , whom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ maliciously slandered by Russia 's enemies .
Q : Why are most academics so negative about Tsar Nicholas II ?
A : Western academics , like Soviet academics , are negative about him because they are secularists .
For example , I recently read the book ‘ Crimea ’ by the British historian of Russia , Orlando Figes .
This is an interesting book on the Crimean War , with many well-researched details and facts , written as senior academics should write .
However , the author starts out from unspoken , purely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tsar of the age , Nicholas I , was not a Western secularist , he must have been a religious fanatic , and that his intention was to conquer the Ottoman Empire .
Through his love of detail , Figes overlooks the main point – what the Crimean War was actually about from the Russian side .
All he can see is Western-style imperialist aims , which he then attributes to Russia .
This attribution is a projection of his Western self .
What Figes misunderstands is that the parts of the Ottoman @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were those where an Orthodox Christian population had for centuries suffered under the Muslim Yoke .
The Crimean War was not a colonial , imperialist Russian war to expand into the Ottoman Empire and exploit it , like those conducted by Western Powers to expand into Africa and Asia and exploit them .
It was a struggle to liberate from oppression – in fact an anti-colonial , anti-imperialist war .
The aim was to free Orthodox lands and peoples from oppression , not to conquer someone else ’ s empire .
As for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the eyes of secularists all sincere Christians must be ‘ religious fanatics ’ .
This is because secularists do not have a spiritual dimension .
They are always one-dimensional , unable to see beyond their own secular cultural conditioning , to think ‘ outside the box ’ .
Q : Is this secular outlook why Western historians charge Tsar Nicholas II with being weak and unfitted ?
A : Yes .
This is Western political propaganda , invented at the time and still parroted today .
Western historians are educated and paid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outside that box .
Serious post-Soviet historians have disproved these charges , invented by the Western and the Westernised , gladly repeated by Soviet Communists , as their justification for the dismantlement of the Tsar ’ s Empire .
The only justification for the charge that the Tsarevich was ‘ unfitted ’ is the fact that he was at first unprepared to be Tsar because his father , Alexander III , died suddenly and at a young age .
But he soon learned and became ‘ fitted ’ .
Another favourite false accusation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ namely the Japano-Russian War , called the Russo-Japanese War , and the Kaiser ’ s War , called the First World War .
This is untrue .
He was the only world leader who wanted to disarm , he was anti-militaristic .
As regards the war against Japanese aggression , the Japanese , financed , armed and encouraged by the USA and Britain , started the Japano-Russian War .
It attacked the Russian Fleet without warning in Port Arthur – a name that almost rhymes with Pearl Harbour .
And , as we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ urged on by the Kaiser who was desperate for any excuse to start a War , who triggered the First World War .
Let us recall that it was Tsar Nicholas who for the first time in world history had urged disarmament at The Hague in 1899 , because he could see that Western Europe was a powder keg , waiting to explode .
He was a moral and spiritual leader , the only world leader then who did not have narrow , national interests at heart and was not re-arming at huge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of God , he had at heart the universal interests of all Orthodox Christendom , to bring to Christ all God-created mankind .
Why else make sacrifices for Serbia ?
To have survived , he must have been incredibly strong-willed , as , among others , the French President Émile Loubet remarked .
All the powers of hell unleashed against the Tsar would never have been unleashed to remove him if he had been weak .
Only the strong have to be destroyed , as is confirmed by those who knew him at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that he was profoundly Orthodox , but it is true that he had very little Russian blood , isn ’ t it ?
A : Forgive me , but that statement contains a racist presumption , that you have to have ‘ Russian blood ’ to be Orthodox , a universal Christian .
The Tsar was , I believe , one 128th Russian by blood .
And so what ?
The Tsar ’ s sister answered this very challenge very adequately over fifty years ago .
Interviewed by the Greek journalist , Ian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Grand Duchess Olga explained : ‘ Did the British call George VI a German ?
He had not a drop of English blood in him…Blood is not everything .
It is the soil you spring from , the faith you are brought up in , the language you speak and think in ’ .
Q : There are some Russians today who describe Tsar Nicholas as a ‘ Redeemer ’ .
Do you believe that ?
A : Certainly not !
There is only one Redeemer , the Saviour Jesus Christ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that his sacrifice , and therefore that of his Family , of his servants and of the tens of millions of others who were murdered by the Soviet and Fascist regimes that followed , was redemptive .
Rus was crucified for the sins of the world .
Indeed , the sufferings of Russian Orthodox have been redemptive in their blood and in their tears .
However , it is true that all Christians are called on to redeem themselves through living in Christ THE Redeemer .
Interestingly , the pious but not well-educated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Redeemer ’ also call Rasputin a saint .
Q : Speaking of this , what should we think of Rasputin ?
A : Hundreds of books have been written about Rasputin – nearly all of them by people who never knew him .
I would only repeat the words of the Tsar himself , ‘ He is a simple , good , religious Russian ’ , and the words of the Tsar ’ s sister , Grand Duchess Olga , ‘ He was neither saint nor devil…he was a peasant with a profound @ @ @ @ @ @ @ healing ’ .
The fact that Rasputin was later atrociously slandered , and finally in December 1916 tortured by Russian aristocrats – a sign of just how sick the upper class was – and assassinated by British spies , only helps him in eternity .
Q : But what about all the charges that he was a drunkard , a thief and a debauchee ?
A : Soviet and Hollywood fiction writers , like the Soviet novelist Radzinsky , love this image of Rasputin .
Contemporary historians inside deSovietising Russia have proved that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these charges were slanders , fiction .
Moreover , they were made up not to discredit Rasputin – he was only a pawn in the hands of the slanderers – but to discredit the Imperial Family .
Their logic was that if the Friend of the ruling family could be presented as a thief , drunkard and debauchee , therefore the Family must also be like that , and that therefore they were unworthy , and that they the slanderers should have power .
Such slander was very simple and very primitive .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ depth , believed in it because they wanted to believe in it , because such always prefer slander , scandal and gossip to the Truth of Christ .
Q : If we can come back to our main point , what is the relevance of Tsar Nicholas II today ?
Orthodox Christians are a small minority among all Christians .
Even if he were important to all Orthodox , he would still be a minority interest among Christians .
A : Of course , we Christians are a minority .
According to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the planet , Christians number 2.2 billion – 32 % .
And Orthodox Christians are only 10 % of all Christians , so only 3.2 % of the world population , about one in thirty-three .
However , if we look at these statistics theologically , what do we see ?
For Orthodox Christians , all Non-Orthodox are lapsed Orthodox , who were brought involuntarily by their leaders , for all sorts of political reasons , worldly reasons of convenience , to become Non-Orthodox .
For us , Catholics can be defined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Catholics .
We unworthy Orthodox are the leaven that leavens the lump .
Without the Church , there is no light and warmth of the Holy Spirit to radiate out into the rest of the world .
Just as , even though you are outside the Sun , you can still feel the Sun ’ s light and warmth , so too the 90 % of Christians who are outside the Church are still aware of the effects of the Church .
For example , most of them confess the Holy Trinity and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Why ?
Because of the Church which established such teachings long ago .
Such is the grace of the Church that shines out of Her .
Now , if we understand this , we will begin to understand the importance of the leader of Orthodox Christianity , the last successor of the Emperor Constantine , Tsar Nicholas II .
His deposition changed the whole history of the Church , as also his Golgotha and his glorification today .
Q : If this is the case , why then was the Tsar deposed and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ always persecuted in the world , as our Lord told His disciples .
Pre-Revolutionary Russia ran on the Orthodox Faith .
This was the oil that made the whole engine run .
However , that Faith was rejected by the mass of the Westernised ruling elite , the aristocracy , and many others in the growing middle class .
The Revolution was caused by a simple loss of faith , the engine ground to a halt and exploded for lack of oil .
Most of the Russian upper classes wanted power for themselves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ merchants and middle classes wanted power for themselves and so caused the French Revolution .
Having obtained wealth , they wanted to mount the next rung in the hierarchy of values – the rung of power .
In the Russian context this lust for power , which had come from the West , was therefore based by definition on a blind admiration of the West and a hatred of Russia .
This we can see from the very beginning with figures like Kurbsky , Peter I , Catherine II and Westernisers like Chaadayev @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what poisoned the White Movement , which was disunited by its lack of a common and binding faith in Orthodox Tsardom .
In general , Orthodox self-consciousness was absent in the Russian governing élite , which substituted various surrogates for it , whimsical mixtures of mysticism , occultism , freemasonry , socialism and a search for ‘ truth ’ in esoteric religions .
Incidentally , these surrogates lived on in the Paris emigration , where various figures distinguished themselves in theosophy , anthroposophy , sophianism , name-worship and other very eccentric , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so little love for Russia that they actually went into schism , breaking away from the Russian Church and justifying themselves for so doing !
The poet Bekhteev wrote very sharply of this in his 1922 poem , ‘ Come to your senses , upper classes !
’ , comparing the privileged situation in Paris to that of the people of crucified Rus in the homeland : And once more their hearts are full of intrigue , And once more treachery and lies are on their lips , And life writes into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ treason of the grandees who knew it all .
These members of the upper classes ( and not all were traitors ) were sponsored from the beginning by the West .
The West considered that once its values of parliamentary democracy , republicanism or constitutional monarchy were introduced into Russia , it would become just another bourgeois Western country .
For the same reason , the Russian Church had to be Protestantised , that is spiritually neutralised , or rather neutered , as the West has tried to do with the Patriarchate of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its power since 1917 , as soon as Russian patronage was removed .
These attitudes were caused by the arrogant presumption that somehow the Western model could be universal .
Incidentally , this is the arrogant presumption of the Western elites to this day , as they try to impose their model worldwide , presenting it as the ‘ New World Order ’ .
The Tsar , the Lord ’ s Anointed representing the last bulwark of Church Christianity in the world , had to be removed , as he was blocking the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world .
However , in their incompetence , the aristocratic revolutionaries of February 1917 soon lost control of the situation and within a few months power had descended from them to the lowest of the low , to the criminal Bolsheviks .
These set out on a course of massacre and genocide , of ‘ red terror ’ – just as in France five generations before , only now with far more murderous , twentieth-century , technology .
It was in this way that the motto of the Orthodox Empire was deformed .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Orthodoxy , Sovereignty and People ’ .
This was deformed by Westernised Russians and Western secularists , both then and now , into : ‘ Obscurantism , Tyranny and Nationalism ’ .
Atheist Communists deformed it even further into ‘ Centralised Communism , Totalitarian Dictatorship and National Bolshevism ’ .
What did this motto in fact mean ?
It simply meant : ‘ ( Full-bodied , incarnate ) Authentic Christianity , Spiritual Independence ( from the powers of this world ) and Love for God ’ s People .
As I have said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , moral , political , economic and social programme of Orthodoxy .
Q : A social programme ?
But surely the Revolution came about because there were so many poor people and so much exploitation of the poor by the super-rich aristocrats , and the Tsar was at the head of that aristocracy ?
A : No , it was precisely the aristocracy that was opposed to the Tsar and the people .
The Tsar gave away much of his personal wealth and taxed the rich to the hilt under his brilliant Prime @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for land reform .
Sadly , the Tsar ’ s programme of social justice was one of the reasons why many aristocrats hated the Tsar .
The Tsar and the people were one .
They were both betrayed by the Westernised elite .
This is clear from the assassination of Rasputin , which was the preparation for the Revolution .
In it the peasants rightly saw the betrayal of the people by the upper classes .
Q : What was the role of the Jews in this ?
A : There is an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ – and are – responsible for everything bad in Russia ( and everywhere else ) .
This contradicts the words of Christ .
First of all , the Jews who were involved in the Russian Revolution – and it is true that most of the Bolsheviks were Jews – were apostates , atheists , like Marx , and not real , practising Jews .
However , those Jews who were involved worked hand in hand with Non-Jewish atheists , like the American banker Morgan , or with Russians and many others and depended @ @ @ @ @ @ @ full well that Britain organised the Revolution of February 1917 , applauded by France and financed by the USA , that Lenin was transported to Russia by the Kaiser and financed by him , and that the masses who fought in the Red Army were Russian .
None of these were Jews .
Some people , captives of racist myths , simply refuse to see the truth – that the Revolution was Satanic and that Satan can use any nationality , any of us , for his poisonous works , Jews , Russians @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but makes use of any who surrender their free will to him for his ‘ New World Order ’ , in which he will be the Universal Ruler of the fallen world .
Q : There are Russophobes who say that there continuity between the Tsar ’ s Russia and Communist Soviet Union .
Is that so ?
A : There is certainly continuity of Western Russophobia !
Read copies of The Times newspaper from 1862 and 2012 for example .
You will see 150 years of xenophobia .
Yes , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were Russophobic long before the Soviet Union came into being .
There are the narrow-minded among all peoples who are simply racist .
Any nationality other than their own must be demonised , whatever their particular political system and however that system may change .
We saw that in the recent Iraq War .
We can see it now in the tabloid reports on Syria , Iran or North Korea , which try to demonise the peoples of those countries .
We do not take those narrow minds seriously .
Now , let @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Following the generation of obscenities after 1917 , continuity did re-emerge .
This was after Germany had again invaded Russia on the Feast of All the Saints who have shone forth in the Russian Lands in June 1941 .
Stalin realised that he could only win the war with the blessing of the Church , by recalling the victories of Orthodox Russians in the past , like those of St Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy , that any victory would have to be the victory of his ‘ brothers and sisters ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ‘ comrades ’ and his idiotic Communist ideology .
Geography does not change , so there is continuity in Russian history .
It is just that the Soviet period was an aberration from that history , a falling away from national destiny , especially in its violent first generation .
What is important is the way that the Soviet Union acted that was so perverse , not necessarily what it did , but how it did it .
I was struck by the words of the Tsar ’ s sister , the Grand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ biography stated : ‘ I have always followed Soviet foreign policy with great interest .
Hardly anything in it is different from the course adopted by my father and by Nicky ’ ( by Alexander III and Nicholas II ) .
The difference is that Soviet policy worked through violence and lies , the Tsar ’ s policies worked through peace and sincerity .
Q : Can you give an example of this ?
A : What would have happened if the Revolution had not taken place ?
We know ( and Churchill @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ‘ The World Crisis 1916-1918 ’ ) that Russia was on the verge of victory in 1917 .
This is why the revolutionaries took action then .
They had a very narrow window in which to operate before the great spring offensive of 1917 began .
Had there been no Revolution , Russia would have defeated the Austro-Hungarians , whose multinational and mainly Slav army was on the point of mutiny and collapse anyway .
Then Russia would have pushed back the Germans , or rather their Prussian warlords , to Berlin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would quite possibly have been similar to that in 1945 – with one vital exception .
That is that the Armies of the Tsar would have liberated Central and Eastern Europe in 1917-18 , not invading it , as in 1944-45 .
And so they would have liberated Berlin as they liberated Paris in 1814 , peacefully and respectfully , without the errors and drunkenness committed by the Red Army .
Q : What could have happened then ?
A : The liberation of Berlin , and so of Germany , from Prussian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ demilitarisation and regionalisation of Germany , restoring something of pre-1871 Germany , the Germany of culture , music , poetry and tradition .
This would have been the end of the Second Reich of Bismarck , which itself was a revival of the First Reich of the militaristic heretic Charlemagne and which led directly in its turn to the Third Reich of Hitler .
If Russia had been victorious , there would have been a humiliation of the German / Prussian government , the Kaiser being sent perhaps into exile to some remote @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would have been no humiliation of the German peoples , the result of the terrible Treaty of Versailles , which led directly to the horrors of Fascism and the Second World War .
And that , by the way , has led directly to the Fourth Reich of today ’ s European Union .
Q : Would France , Britain and the USA not have objected to victorious Russia ’ s dealings with Berlin ?
A : France and Britain , bogged down in their blood-soaked trenches or perhaps by then having reached @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , could not have objected to this , because the victory over the Kaiser ’ s Germany would above all have been a Russian victory .
As for the USA , it would never have entered the War , if Russia had not first been knocked out of it – partly by the US financing of revolutionaries , it must be said .
And that in itself is why the Allies did their best to eliminate Russia from the War , because they did not want a Russian victory .
All they wanted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Germany , in order to prepare it for defeat by the Allies , so that they could finish Germany off and take it over .
Q : Would the Russian Armies have retreated from Berlin and Eastern Europe soon after 1918 ?
A : Yes , of course .
Here is another difference with Stalin , for whom ‘ Sovereignty ’ , the second element in the motto of the Orthodox Empire , had been deformed into Totalitarianism and that meant occupation , oppression and exploitation by terror .
After the fall of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would have been freedom for Eastern Europe with population transfers in border areas and the establishment of new countries without minorities , like a newly-reunited Poland and Czechia , Slovakia , Slovenia , Croatia , Carpatho-Russia , Romania , Hungary and so on .
This would have created a demilitarised zone throughout Eastern and Central Europe .
This would have been an Eastern Europe with rational and protected frontiers , so avoiding the errors of conglomerate States like the future , and now past , Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia .
As regards Yugoslavia , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ up a Balkan Union in order to avoid further Balkan Wars .
True , this failed because of the intrigues of the German princeling Ferdinand in Bulgaria and nationalist intrigues in Serbia and Montenegro .
We can imagine that after a First World War in which Russia had been victorious , such a Customs Union , established with fair borders , could have become permanent .
Involving Greece and Romania , it could at last have established peace in the Balkans , its freedom guaranteed as a Russian protectorate .
Q : What @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ottoman Empire ?
A : The Allies had already agreed in 1916 that Russia would be allowed to free Constantinople and control the Black Sea .
This was only what Russia could have attained sixty years before , preventing Turkish massacres in Bulgaria and Asia Minor , had it not been for the Crimean invasion of Russia by France and Great Britain .
( We recall how Tsar Nicholas I was buried then with a silver cross depicting Aghia Sophia , the Church of the Wisdom of God , ‘ so that in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for his brothers in the East ’ ) .
Christian Europe would at last have been freed of Ottoman oppression .
The Armenians and the Greeks of Asia Minor would also have been protected and the Kurds would have had their own State .
But more than that , Orthodox Palestine and much of the future Syria and the Jordan would have come under Russian protection .
There would have been none of the permanent war that we see in the Middle East today .
Perhaps the situations of today ’ s Iraq @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The implications of this are huge .
Can we imagine a Russian-controlled Jerusalem ?
Even Napoleon recognised that , ‘ he who controls Palestine , controls the whole world ’ .
This is known today to Israel and the USA .
Q : What would the implications have been in Asia ?
A : Peter I opened a window on Europe .
It was the destiny of Nicholas II to open a window on Asia .
Despite his generous Church-building in Western Europe and the Americas , he had only a limited interest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the Americas and Australia , because it had and has only a limited interest in the Church .
In the West , there was and is relatively little potential growth for Orthodox Christianity .
Indeed , today , only a small proportion of the world population lives in the Western world , even though it covers a huge territory .
Tsar Nicholas ’ aim to serve Christ was therefore more concerned with Asia , especially with Buddhist Asia .
He had former Buddhist citizens in the Russian Empire who had converted to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , like Confucianism , is not a religion , but a philosophy .
The Buddhists called him ‘ The White Tara ’ ( King ’ ) .
So he worked with Tibet , where he was called ‘ Chakravartin ’ ( The King of Peace ’ ) , Mongolia , China , Manchuria , Korea and Japan , countries of potential .
He was also concerned with Afghanistan , India and Siam ( Thailand ) .
The King of Siam , Rama V , visited Russia in 1897 and the Tsar prevented Siam @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was an influence that would have spread to Laos , Vietnam and Indonesia .
In population terms these countries have nearly half of today ’ s world .
In Africa , with a seventh of today ’ s world population , the Tsar had diplomatic relations with Ethiopia and successfully protected it from Italian colonialism , also intervening on behalf of Morocco and also the Boers in South Africa .
His detestation of what the British did to the Boers , killing them in concentration camps , is well known .
We can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same about French and Belgian colonialism in Africa .
He was also respected by the Muslims , who called him ‘ Al-Padishah ’ , ‘ The Great King ’ .
In general , sacral , Eastern civilisations had far more respect for ‘ the White Tsar ’ than the bourgeois West .
It is significant that later the Soviet Union also opposed the cruelties of Western colonialism in Africa .
Here there is also continuity .
Today there are Russian Orthodox missions in Thailand , Laos , Indonesia , India and Pakistan , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I think that the contemporary BRICS group , Brazil , Russia , India , China and South Africa , is also very representative of what Russia could have achieved 90 years ago , as a member of a group of independent countries .
Indeed , the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire , Duleep ( Dalip ) Singh ( + 1893 ) , had asked Tsar Alexander III to free India from British exploitation and oppression .
Q : So Asia could have been colonised by Russia ?
A : No , definitely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , anti-imperialist .
We only have to compare Russian expansion into Siberia , which was basically peaceful , with European expansion into the Americas , which was basically genocidal .
The same people –native Americans are basically Siberians – were treated in totally different ways .
Of course , there were in Siberia and in Russian America ( Alaska ) exploitative Russian merchants and drunkard fur trappers who behaved like cowboys towards the local population .
This we know from the life of St Herman of Alaska and missionaries in eastern Russia and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and St Macarius of the Altai , but this was not the rule and there was no genocide .
Q : All of this is very well , but it is not very relevant to talk about what might have been .
It is all hypothetical .
A : Yes , it is hypothetical , but hypotheses can give us a vision for the future .
We could view the whole of the last 95 years of world history as a hiatus , a catastrophic aberration of tragic magnitude that has killed hundreds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ world became unbalanced after the fall of the bulwark of Christian Russia , whose fall was implemented by transnational capital in order to create a ‘ unipolar world ’ .
And that is simply code for the New World Order of a One World Government , that is , a Universal , anti-Christian Tyranny .
Only if we understand this , can we have a vision for the future .
This vision is to suppose that after July 2018 , we may still be able to resume where we left off in July @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oases of Orthodox civilisation worldwide together , before the end .
However terrible the present situation is , there is always the hope that is born of repentance .
Repentance means going back , and that is what we have been talking about , resuming from where the world left off on that terrible , world-changing night in Ekaterinburg in July 1918 .
Q : What would the fruit of such repentance be ?
A : A new Orthodox Empire , centred in Russia , with Ekaterinburg , the centre of repentance , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the chance to rebalance this whole tragic , unbalanced world .
Q : You could be accused of being far too optimistic ?
A : Yes , this is very optimistic .
But look at what has happened over the last generation , since the celebration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988 .
The situation of the world has been transformed , or rather transfigured , by repentance among enough of the people of the old Soviet Union for the whole world to change .
The last 25 years @ @ @ @ @ @ @ true revolution , a spiritual revolution , the return to the Church .
Suppose the next generation continues in that revolutionary repentance ?
Given the historic miracle that we have already seen , which seemed like a ridiculous dream for us who were born during the nuclear fears of the Cold War and can remember the spiritually grim 50s , 60s , 70s and 80s , why should we not envisage at least some of the possibilities outlined above ?
In 1914 the world entered a tunnel .
During the Cold War we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ see neither light behind us , nor in front of us .
Today we are still in the tunnel , but we can now actually see a glimmer of light on the road ahead .
Surely this is the light at the end of the tunnel ?
Let us recall the words of the Gospel : ‘ With God all things are possible ’ .
Yes , humanly , all the above is highly optimistic and there is no guarantee of anything .
However , the alternative to the above is not just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ time is short is our chief anxiety .
We hurry in a battle against time .
And that must be a warning and a call to us all .

"These members of the upper classes (and not all were traitors) were sponsored from the beginning by the West. The West considered that once its values of parliamentary democracy, republicanism or constitutional monarchy were introduced into Russia, it would become just another bourgeois Western country."
This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018
This article originally appeared on a new site about the Christian renaissance in Russia, called Russian Faith.
Father Andrew Phillips, is a long-serving priest in the ROCOR Orthodox church in Essex, UK. Biography. He is a prolific writer, particularly on Russian history and current events, from an Orthodox Christian perspective.
In this January 2013 article, he answers readers’ questions about the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas II, debunking decades of deliberate, slanderous lies coming from the media, academia, and governments of the UK, Germany, and America, but mostly from the UK.
For another excellent article debunking this anti-Russian propaganda which is so ingrained in the West, see his fascinating article about Rasputin, whom he sees as a hero, also maliciously slandered by Russia's enemies.
Q: Why are most academics so negative about Tsar Nicholas II?
A: Western academics, like Soviet academics, are negative about him because they are secularists. For example, I recently read the book ‘Crimea’ by the British historian of Russia, Orlando Figes. This is an interesting book on the Crimean War, with many well-researched details and facts, written as senior academics should write.
However, the author starts out from unspoken, purely Western secularist criteria, that since the Tsar of the age, Nicholas I, was not a Western secularist, he must have been a religious fanatic, and that his intention was to conquer the Ottoman Empire. Through his love of detail, Figes overlooks the main point – what the Crimean War was actually about from the Russian side. All he can see is Western-style imperialist aims, which he then attributes to Russia. This attribution is a projection of his Western self.
What Figes misunderstands is that the parts of the Ottoman Empire which Nicholas I was interested in were those where an Orthodox Christian population had for centuries suffered under the Muslim Yoke. The Crimean War was not a colonial, imperialist Russian war to expand into the Ottoman Empire and exploit it, like those conducted by Western Powers to expand into Africa and Asia and exploit them. It was a struggle to liberate from oppression – in fact an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist war. The aim was to free Orthodox lands and peoples from oppression, not to conquer someone else’s empire.
As for Nicholas I being a religious fanatic, in the eyes of secularists all sincere Christians must be ‘religious fanatics’. This is because secularists do not have a spiritual dimension. They are always one-dimensional, unable to see beyond their own secular cultural conditioning, to think ‘outside the box’.
Russian Imperial Family 1911
Q: Is this secular outlook why Western historians charge Tsar Nicholas II with being weak and unfitted?
A: Yes. This is Western political propaganda, invented at the time and still parroted today. Western historians are educated and paid by Western Establishments and cannot see outside that box.
Serious post-Soviet historians have disproved these charges, invented by the Western and the Westernised, gladly repeated by Soviet Communists, as their justification for the dismantlement of the Tsar’s Empire.
The only justification for the charge that the Tsarevich was ‘unfitted’ is the fact that he was at first unprepared to be Tsar because his father, Alexander III, died suddenly and at a young age. But he soon learned and became ‘fitted’.
Another favourite false accusation is that the Tsar started wars, namely the Japano-Russian War, called the Russo-Japanese War, and the Kaiser’s War, called the First World War. This is untrue. He was the only world leader who wanted to disarm, he was anti-militaristic. As regards the war against Japanese aggression, the Japanese, financed, armed and encouraged by the USA and Britain, started the Japano-Russian War. It attacked the Russian Fleet without warning in Port Arthur – a name that almost rhymes with Pearl Harbour. And, as we know, it was the Austro-Hungarians, urged on by the Kaiser who was desperate for any excuse to start a War, who triggered the First World War.
Let us recall that it was Tsar Nicholas who for the first time in world history had urged disarmament at The Hague in 1899, because he could see that Western Europe was a powder keg, waiting to explode. He was a moral and spiritual leader, the only world leader then who did not have narrow, national interests at heart and was not re-arming at huge cost.
Instead, as the Anointed of God, he had at heart the universal interests of all Orthodox Christendom, to bring to Christ all God-created mankind. Why else make sacrifices for Serbia? To have survived, he must have been incredibly strong-willed, as, among others, the French President Émile Loubet remarked.
All the powers of hell unleashed against the Tsar would never have been unleashed to remove him if he had been weak. Only the strong have to be destroyed, as is confirmed by those who knew him at the time.
Q: You say that he was profoundly Orthodox, but it is true that he had very little Russian blood, isn’t it?
A: Forgive me, but that statement contains a racist presumption, that you have to have ‘Russian blood’ to be Orthodox, a universal Christian. The Tsar was, I believe, one 128th Russian by blood. And so what? The Tsar’s sister answered this very challenge very adequately over fifty years ago. Interviewed by the Greek journalist, Ian Vorres, in 1960, his sister, the Grand Duchess Olga explained: ‘Did the British call George VI a German? He had not a drop of English blood in him…Blood is not everything. It is the soil you spring from, the faith you are brought up in, the language you speak and think in’.
Q: There are some Russians today who describe Tsar Nicholas as a ‘Redeemer’. Do you believe that?
A: Certainly not! There is only one Redeemer, the Saviour Jesus Christ. What can however be argued is that his sacrifice, and therefore that of his Family, of his servants and of the tens of millions of others who were murdered by the Soviet and Fascist regimes that followed, was redemptive. Rus was crucified for the sins of the world. Indeed, the sufferings of Russian Orthodox have been redemptive in their blood and in their tears. However, it is true that all Christians are called on to redeem themselves through living in Christ THE Redeemer. Interestingly, the pious but not well-educated Russians who call the Tsar a ‘Redeemer’ also call Rasputin a saint.
Rasputin
Q: Speaking of this, what should we think of Rasputin?
A: Hundreds of books have been written about Rasputin – nearly all of them by people who never knew him. I would only repeat the words of the Tsar himself, ‘He is a simple, good, religious Russian’, and the words of the Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga, ‘He was neither saint nor devil…he was a peasant with a profound faith in God and a gift of healing’. The fact that Rasputin was later atrociously slandered, and finally in December 1916 tortured by Russian aristocrats – a sign of just how sick the upper class was – and assassinated by British spies, only helps him in eternity.
Q: But what about all the charges that he was a drunkard, a thief and a debauchee?
A: Soviet and Hollywood fiction writers, like the Soviet novelist Radzinsky, love this image of Rasputin. Contemporary historians inside deSovietising Russia have proved that virtually all, perhaps all, of these charges were slanders, fiction. Moreover, they were made up not to discredit Rasputin – he was only a pawn in the hands of the slanderers – but to discredit the Imperial Family.
Their logic was that if the Friend of the ruling family could be presented as a thief, drunkard and debauchee, therefore the Family must also be like that, and that therefore they were unworthy, and that they the slanderers should have power. Such slander was very simple and very primitive. People, decadent and without any spiritual depth, believed in it because they wanted to believe in it, because such always prefer slander, scandal and gossip to the Truth of Christ.
Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarevich Alexis of Russia in 1914
Q: If we can come back to our main point, what is the relevance of Tsar Nicholas II today? Orthodox Christians are a small minority among all Christians. Even if he were important to all Orthodox, he would still be a minority interest among Christians.
A: Of course, we Christians are a minority. According to the statistics, of seven billion human beings on the planet, Christians number 2.2 billion – 32%. And Orthodox Christians are only 10% of all Christians, so only 3.2% of the world population, about one in thirty-three.
However, if we look at these statistics theologically, what do we see? For Orthodox Christians, all Non-Orthodox are lapsed Orthodox, who were brought involuntarily by their leaders, for all sorts of political reasons, worldly reasons of convenience, to become Non-Orthodox. For us, Catholics can be defined as Catholicised Orthodox and Protestants as Protestantised Catholics. We unworthy Orthodox are the leaven that leavens the lump.
Without the Church, there is no light and warmth of the Holy Spirit to radiate out into the rest of the world. Just as, even though you are outside the Sun, you can still feel the Sun’s light and warmth, so too the 90% of Christians who are outside the Church are still aware of the effects of the Church. For example, most of them confess the Holy Trinity and Christ as the Son of God. Why? Because of the Church which established such teachings long ago. Such is the grace of the Church that shines out of Her. Now, if we understand this, we will begin to understand the importance of the leader of Orthodox Christianity, the last successor of the Emperor Constantine, Tsar Nicholas II. His deposition changed the whole history of the Church, as also his Golgotha and his glorification today.
Q: If this is the case, why then was the Tsar deposed and then murdered?
A: Christians are always persecuted in the world, as our Lord told His disciples.
Pre-Revolutionary Russia ran on the Orthodox Faith. This was the oil that made the whole engine run. However, that Faith was rejected by the mass of the Westernised ruling elite, the aristocracy, and many others in the growing middle class. The Revolution was caused by a simple loss of faith, the engine ground to a halt and exploded for lack of oil.
Most of the Russian upper classes wanted power for themselves, in the same way that wealthy merchants and middle classes wanted power for themselves and so caused the French Revolution. Having obtained wealth, they wanted to mount the next rung in the hierarchy of values – the rung of power. In the Russian context this lust for power, which had come from the West, was therefore based by definition on a blind admiration of the West and a hatred of Russia. This we can see from the very beginning with figures like Kurbsky, Peter I, Catherine II and Westernisers like Chaadayev.
This lack of faith was also what poisoned the White Movement, which was disunited by its lack of a common and binding faith in Orthodox Tsardom. In general, Orthodox self-consciousness was absent in the Russian governing élite, which substituted various surrogates for it, whimsical mixtures of mysticism, occultism, freemasonry, socialism and a search for ‘truth’ in esoteric religions. Incidentally, these surrogates lived on in the Paris emigration, where various figures distinguished themselves in theosophy, anthroposophy, sophianism, name-worship and other very eccentric, but also spiritually dangerous fantasies.
These had so little love for Russia that they actually went into schism, breaking away from the Russian Church and justifying themselves for so doing! The poet Bekhteev wrote very sharply of this in his 1922 poem, ‘Come to your senses, upper classes!’, comparing the privileged situation in Paris to that of the people of crucified Rus in the homeland:
And once more their hearts are full of intrigue,
And once more treachery and lies are on their lips,
And life writes into the chapter of the last book
The vile treason of the grandees who knew it all.
These members of the upper classes (and not all were traitors) were sponsored from the beginning by the West. The West considered that once its values of parliamentary democracy, republicanism or constitutional monarchy were introduced into Russia, it would become just another bourgeois Western country. For the same reason, the Russian Church had to be Protestantised, that is spiritually neutralised, or rather neutered, as the West has tried to do with the Patriarchate of Constantinople and other Local Churches fallen under its power since 1917, as soon as Russian patronage was removed.
These attitudes were caused by the arrogant presumption that somehow the Western model could be universal. Incidentally, this is the arrogant presumption of the Western elites to this day, as they try to impose their model worldwide, presenting it as the ‘New World Order’.
The Tsar, the Lord’s Anointed representing the last bulwark of Church Christianity in the world, had to be removed, as he was blocking the power grab of the Western and Westernised world. However, in their incompetence, the aristocratic revolutionaries of February 1917 soon lost control of the situation and within a few months power had descended from them to the lowest of the low, to the criminal Bolsheviks. These set out on a course of massacre and genocide, of ‘red terror’ – just as in France five generations before, only now with far more murderous, twentieth-century, technology.
It was in this way that the motto of the Orthodox Empire was deformed. I remind you that it was ‘Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and People’. This was deformed by Westernised Russians and Western secularists, both then and now, into: ‘Obscurantism, Tyranny and Nationalism’.
Atheist Communists deformed it even further into ‘Centralised Communism, Totalitarian Dictatorship and National Bolshevism’. What did this motto in fact mean? It simply meant: ‘(Full-bodied, incarnate) Authentic Christianity, Spiritual Independence (from the powers of this world) and Love for God’s People. As I have said above, this motto is the spiritual, moral, political, economic and social programme of Orthodoxy.
Q: A social programme? But surely the Revolution came about because there were so many poor people and so much exploitation of the poor by the super-rich aristocrats, and the Tsar was at the head of that aristocracy?
A: No, it was precisely the aristocracy that was opposed to the Tsar and the people. The Tsar gave away much of his personal wealth and taxed the rich to the hilt under his brilliant Prime Minister Stolypin, who did so much for land reform. Sadly, the Tsar’s programme of social justice was one of the reasons why many aristocrats hated the Tsar. The Tsar and the people were one. They were both betrayed by the Westernised elite. This is clear from the assassination of Rasputin, which was the preparation for the Revolution. In it the peasants rightly saw the betrayal of the people by the upper classes.
Q: What was the role of the Jews in this?
A: There is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that only Jews were – and are – responsible for everything bad in Russia (and everywhere else). This contradicts the words of Christ. First of all, the Jews who were involved in the Russian Revolution – and it is true that most of the Bolsheviks were Jews – were apostates, atheists, like Marx, and not real, practising Jews. However, those Jews who were involved worked hand in hand with Non-Jewish atheists, like the American banker Morgan, or with Russians and many others and depended on them.
Thus, we know full well that Britain organised the Revolution of February 1917, applauded by France and financed by the USA, that Lenin was transported to Russia by the Kaiser and financed by him, and that the masses who fought in the Red Army were Russian. None of these were Jews. Some people, captives of racist myths, simply refuse to see the truth – that the Revolution was Satanic and that Satan can use any nationality, any of us, for his poisonous works, Jews, Russians and Non-Russians. Satan favours no nationality, but makes use of any who surrender their free will to him for his ‘New World Order’, in which he will be the Universal Ruler of the fallen world.
Q: There are Russophobes who say that there continuity between the Tsar’s Russia and Communist Soviet Union. Is that so?
A: There is certainly continuity of Western Russophobia! Read copies of The Times newspaper from 1862 and 2012 for example. You will see 150 years of xenophobia. Yes, it is true that many in the West were Russophobic long before the Soviet Union came into being. There are the narrow-minded among all peoples who are simply racist. Any nationality other than their own must be demonised, whatever their particular political system and however that system may change. We saw that in the recent Iraq War. We can see it now in the tabloid reports on Syria, Iran or North Korea, which try to demonise the peoples of those countries. We do not take those narrow minds seriously.
Now, let us turn to the question of continuity. Following the generation of obscenities after 1917, continuity did re-emerge. This was after Germany had again invaded Russia on the Feast of All the Saints who have shone forth in the Russian Lands in June 1941. Stalin realised that he could only win the war with the blessing of the Church, by recalling the victories of Orthodox Russians in the past, like those of St Alexander Nevsky and Dmitry Donskoy, that any victory would have to be the victory of his ‘brothers and sisters’, the people, not of his ‘comrades’ and his idiotic Communist ideology. Geography does not change, so there is continuity in Russian history.
It is just that the Soviet period was an aberration from that history, a falling away from national destiny, especially in its violent first generation. What is important is the way that the Soviet Union acted that was so perverse, not necessarily what it did, but how it did it. I was struck by the words of the Tsar’s sister, the Grand Duchess Olga, who in her 1960 biography stated: ‘I have always followed Soviet foreign policy with great interest. Hardly anything in it is different from the course adopted by my father and by Nicky’ (by Alexander III and Nicholas II). The difference is that Soviet policy worked through violence and lies, the Tsar’s policies worked through peace and sincerity.
Q: Can you give an example of this?
A: What would have happened if the Revolution had not taken place? We know (and Churchill expressed it very well in his book, ‘The World Crisis 1916-1918’) that Russia was on the verge of victory in 1917. This is why the revolutionaries took action then. They had a very narrow window in which to operate before the great spring offensive of 1917 began.
Had there been no Revolution, Russia would have defeated the Austro-Hungarians, whose multinational and mainly Slav army was on the point of mutiny and collapse anyway. Then Russia would have pushed back the Germans, or rather their Prussian warlords, to Berlin. In other words, the situation would quite possibly have been similar to that in 1945 – with one vital exception. That is that the Armies of the Tsar would have liberated Central and Eastern Europe in 1917-18, not invading it, as in 1944-45. And so they would have liberated Berlin as they liberated Paris in 1814, peacefully and respectfully, without the errors and drunkenness committed by the Red Army.
Q: What could have happened then?
A: The liberation of Berlin, and so of Germany, from Prussian militarism would surely have led to the demilitarisation and regionalisation of Germany, restoring something of pre-1871 Germany, the Germany of culture, music, poetry and tradition. This would have been the end of the Second Reich of Bismarck, which itself was a revival of the First Reich of the militaristic heretic Charlemagne and which led directly in its turn to the Third Reich of Hitler.
If Russia had been victorious, there would have been a humiliation of the German / Prussian government, the Kaiser being sent perhaps into exile to some remote island as was Napoleon. But there would have been no humiliation of the German peoples, the result of the terrible Treaty of Versailles, which led directly to the horrors of Fascism and the Second World War. And that, by the way, has led directly to the Fourth Reich of today’s European Union.
Q: Would France, Britain and the USA not have objected to victorious Russia’s dealings with Berlin?
A: France and Britain, bogged down in their blood-soaked trenches or perhaps by then having reached the French and Belgian borders with Germany, could not have objected to this, because the victory over the Kaiser’s Germany would above all have been a Russian victory. As for the USA, it would never have entered the War, if Russia had not first been knocked out of it – partly by the US financing of revolutionaries, it must be said. And that in itself is why the Allies did their best to eliminate Russia from the War, because they did not want a Russian victory. All they wanted from Russia was cannon fodder to exhaust Germany, in order to prepare it for defeat by the Allies, so that they could finish Germany off and take it over.
Q: Would the Russian Armies have retreated from Berlin and Eastern Europe soon after 1918?
A: Yes, of course. Here is another difference with Stalin, for whom ‘Sovereignty’, the second element in the motto of the Orthodox Empire, had been deformed into Totalitarianism and that meant occupation, oppression and exploitation by terror. After the fall of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, there would have been freedom for Eastern Europe with population transfers in border areas and the establishment of new countries without minorities, like a newly-reunited Poland and Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Carpatho-Russia, Romania, Hungary and so on. This would have created a demilitarised zone throughout Eastern and Central Europe.
This would have been an Eastern Europe with rational and protected frontiers, so avoiding the errors of conglomerate States like the future, and now past, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. As regards Yugoslavia, in 1912 Tsar Nicholas had already set up a Balkan Union in order to avoid further Balkan Wars. True, this failed because of the intrigues of the German princeling Ferdinand in Bulgaria and nationalist intrigues in Serbia and Montenegro. We can imagine that after a First World War in which Russia had been victorious, such a Customs Union, established with fair borders, could have become permanent. Involving Greece and Romania, it could at last have established peace in the Balkans, its freedom guaranteed as a Russian protectorate.
Q: What would have been the fate of the Ottoman Empire?
A: The Allies had already agreed in 1916 that Russia would be allowed to free Constantinople and control the Black Sea. This was only what Russia could have attained sixty years before, preventing Turkish massacres in Bulgaria and Asia Minor, had it not been for the Crimean invasion of Russia by France and Great Britain. (We recall how Tsar Nicholas I was buried then with a silver cross depicting Aghia Sophia, the Church of the Wisdom of God, ‘so that in heaven he would not forget to pray for his brothers in the East’). Christian Europe would at last have been freed of Ottoman oppression.
The Armenians and the Greeks of Asia Minor would also have been protected and the Kurds would have had their own State. But more than that, Orthodox Palestine and much of the future Syria and the Jordan would have come under Russian protection. There would have been none of the permanent war that we see in the Middle East today. Perhaps the situations of today’s Iraq and Iran could have been avoided. The implications of this are huge. Can we imagine a Russian-controlled Jerusalem? Even Napoleon recognised that, ‘he who controls Palestine, controls the whole world’. This is known today to Israel and the USA.
Q: What would the implications have been in Asia?
A: Peter I opened a window on Europe. It was the destiny of Nicholas II to open a window on Asia. Despite his generous Church-building in Western Europe and the Americas, he had only a limited interest in the Catholic/Protestant West and its extensions in the Americas and Australia, because it had and has only a limited interest in the Church. In the West, there was and is relatively little potential growth for Orthodox Christianity. Indeed, today, only a small proportion of the world population lives in the Western world, even though it covers a huge territory.
Tsar Nicholas’ aim to serve Christ was therefore more concerned with Asia, especially with Buddhist Asia. He had former Buddhist citizens in the Russian Empire who had converted to Christ, and he knew that Buddhism, like Confucianism, is not a religion, but a philosophy. The Buddhists called him ‘The White Tara’ (King’). So he worked with Tibet, where he was called ‘Chakravartin’ (The King of Peace’), Mongolia, China, Manchuria, Korea and Japan, countries of potential. He was also concerned with Afghanistan, India and Siam (Thailand). The King of Siam, Rama V, visited Russia in 1897 and the Tsar prevented Siam from becoming a French colony. This was an influence that would have spread to Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia. In population terms these countries have nearly half of today’s world.
In Africa, with a seventh of today’s world population, the Tsar had diplomatic relations with Ethiopia and successfully protected it from Italian colonialism, also intervening on behalf of Morocco and also the Boers in South Africa. His detestation of what the British did to the Boers, killing them in concentration camps, is well known. We can think that he must have thought the same about French and Belgian colonialism in Africa. He was also respected by the Muslims, who called him ‘Al-Padishah’, ‘The Great King’. In general, sacral, Eastern civilisations had far more respect for ‘the White Tsar’ than the bourgeois West.
It is significant that later the Soviet Union also opposed the cruelties of Western colonialism in Africa. Here there is also continuity. Today there are Russian Orthodox missions in Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, India and Pakistan, as well as churches in Africa. I think that the contemporary BRICS group, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is also very representative of what Russia could have achieved 90 years ago, as a member of a group of independent countries. Indeed, the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Duleep (Dalip) Singh (+ 1893), had asked Tsar Alexander III to free India from British exploitation and oppression.
Q: So Asia could have been colonised by Russia?
A: No, definitely not colonised. Imperial Russia was anti-colonial, anti-imperialist. We only have to compare Russian expansion into Siberia, which was basically peaceful, with European expansion into the Americas, which was basically genocidal. The same people –native Americans are basically Siberians – were treated in totally different ways. Of course, there were in Siberia and in Russian America (Alaska) exploitative Russian merchants and drunkard fur trappers who behaved like cowboys towards the local population. This we know from the life of St Herman of Alaska and missionaries in eastern Russia and Siberia, like St Stephen of Perm and St Macarius of the Altai, but this was not the rule and there was no genocide.
Q: All of this is very well, but it is not very relevant to talk about what might have been. It is all hypothetical.
A: Yes, it is hypothetical, but hypotheses can give us a vision for the future. We could view the whole of the last 95 years of world history as a hiatus, a catastrophic aberration of tragic magnitude that has killed hundreds of millions. This is because the world became unbalanced after the fall of the bulwark of Christian Russia, whose fall was implemented by transnational capital in order to create a ‘unipolar world’. And that is simply code for the New World Order of a One World Government, that is, a Universal, anti-Christian Tyranny.
Only if we understand this, can we have a vision for the future. This vision is to suppose that after July 2018, we may still be able to resume where we left off in July 1918, and gather the fragments and oases of Orthodox civilisation worldwide together, before the end. However terrible the present situation is, there is always the hope that is born of repentance. Repentance means going back, and that is what we have been talking about, resuming from where the world left off on that terrible, world-changing night in Ekaterinburg in July 1918.
Q: What would the fruit of such repentance be?
A: A new Orthodox Empire, centred in Russia, with Ekaterinburg, the centre of repentance, as its spiritual capital, and so the chance to rebalance this whole tragic, unbalanced world.
Q: You could be accused of being far too optimistic?
A: Yes, this is very optimistic. But look at what has happened over the last generation, since the celebration of the millennium of the Baptism of Rus in 1988. The situation of the world has been transformed, or rather transfigured, by repentance among enough of the people of the old Soviet Union for the whole world to change. The last 25 years have seen a revolution, the only true revolution, a spiritual revolution, the return to the Church.
Suppose the next generation continues in that revolutionary repentance? Given the historic miracle that we have already seen, which seemed like a ridiculous dream for us who were born during the nuclear fears of the Cold War and can remember the spiritually grim 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, why should we not envisage at least some of the possibilities outlined above?
In 1914 the world entered a tunnel. During the Cold War we lived in that tunnel and we could see neither light behind us, nor in front of us. Today we are still in the tunnel, but we can now actually see a glimmer of light on the road ahead. Surely this is the light at the end of the tunnel? Let us recall the words of the Gospel: ‘With God all things are possible’.
Yes, humanly, all the above is highly optimistic and there is no guarantee of anything. However, the alternative to the above is not just pessimistic, it is apocalyptic. That time is short is our chief anxiety.
We hurry in a battle against time. And that must be a warning and a call to us all.


russia-insider--2020-09-12--The West's Rejection of God Will End in Misery and Terror - Solzhenitsyn's Prophetic 1983 Warning

`` The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion ; religion here remains free .
But the West ’ s own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness ... .
the tide of secularism that , from the late Middle Ages onward , has progressively inundated the West .
This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without . ''
This article from our archives was first published on RI in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a new site about the Christian renaissance in Russia , called Russian Faith .
Their introductory video is at end of this article .
As a survivor of the Communist Holocaust I am horrified to witness how my beloved America , my adopted country , is gradually being transformed into a secularist and atheistic utopia , where communist ideals are glorified and promoted , while Judeo-Christian values and morality are ridiculed and increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our nation .
Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” elites , God has been progressively erased from our public and educational institutions , to be replaced with all manner of delusion , perversion , corruption , violence , decadence , and insanity .
It is no coincidence that as Marxist ideologies and secularist principles engulf the culture and pervert mainstream thinking , individual freedoms and liberties are rapidly disappearing .
As a consequence , Americans feel increasingly more powerless and subjugated by some of the most radical and hypocritical , least democratic , and characterless individuals our society has ever produced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and witnesses first-hand the atrocities and terror of communism understand fully why such evil takes root , how it grows and deceives , and the kind of hell it will ultimately unleash on the innocent and the faithful .
Godlessness is always the first step towards tyranny and oppression !
Nobel laureate , Orthodox Christian author , and Russian dissident , Alexander Solzhenitsyn , in his “ Godlessness : the First Step to the Gulag ” address , given when he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion on May of 1983 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the communist takeover were facilitated by an atheistic mentality an a long process of secularization which alienated the people from God and traditional Christian morality and beliefs .
He rightly concluded : “ Men have forgotten God ; that ’ s why all this has happened.
” The text of his Templeton Address is provided below .
The parallels with the current crisis and moral decay in American society are striking and frightening .
Those who have ears to hear , let them hear !
More than half a century ago , while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia : Men have forgotten God ; that ’ s why all this has happened .
Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution ; in the process I have read hundreds of books , collected hundreds of personal testimonies , and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval .
But if I were asked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people , I could not put it more accurately than to repeat : Men have forgotten God ; that ’ s why all this has happened .
What is more , the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now , at the end of the century , against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world .
What emerges here is a process of universal significance .
And if I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ principal trait of the entire twentieth century , here too , I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again : Men have forgotten God .
The failings of human consciousness , deprived of its divine dimension , have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century .
The failings of human consciousness , deprived of its divine dimension , have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century .
The first of these was World War I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can be traced back to it .
It was a war ( the memory of which seems to be fading ) when Europe , bursting with health and abundance , fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more , and perhaps forever .
The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them .
Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beyond the limits of humanity .
The same kind of defect , the flaw of a consciousness lacking all divine dimension , was manifested after World War II when the West yielded to the satanic temptation of the “ nuclear umbrella.
” It was equivalent to saying : Let ’ s cast off worries , let ’ s free the younger generation from their duties and obligations , let ’ s make no effort to defend ourselves , to say nothing of defending others-let ’ s stop our ears to the groans emanating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ live instead in the pursuit of happiness .
If danger should threaten us , we shall be protected by the nuclear bomb ; if not , then let the world burn in Hell for all we care .
The pitifully helpless state to which the contemporary West has sunk is in large measure due to this fatal error : the belief that the defense of peace depends not on stout hearts and steadfast men , but solely on the nuclear bomb… Today ’ s world has reached a stage which , if it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would have called forth the cry : “ This is the Apocalypse !
” Yet we have grown used to this kind of world ; we even feel at home in it .
Dostoevsky warned that “ great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.
” This is precisely what has happened .
And he predicted that “ the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.
” Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see : this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our spiritual lucidity , on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances .
But it has already come to pass that the demon of evil , like a whirlwind , triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth… By the time of the Revolution , faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles ; and amongst the uneducated , its health was threatened .
In its past , Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame , or riches , or material success , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church of the first centuries .
The Orthodoxy of that time knew how to safeguard its people under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two centuries , while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords of Western crusaders .
During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people , the forms of daily life , the work calendar , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ organization of the week and of the year .
Faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation .
But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism .
In the 18th , the country was shaken by Peter ’ s forcibly imposed transformations , which favored the economy , the state , and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life .
And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment , Russia felt the first whiff of secularism ; its subtle poisons permeated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism .
By the time of the Revolution , faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles ; and amongst the uneducated , its health was threatened .
It was Dostoevsky , once again , who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “ revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.
” That is absolutely true .
But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized , militarized , and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Marx and Lenin , and at the heart of their psychology , hatred of God is the principal driving force , more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions .
Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy ; it is not a side effect , but the central pivot .
The 1920 ’ s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy .
Two metropolitans were shot , one of whom , Veniamin of Petrograd , had been elected by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances .
Scores of archbishops and bishops perished .
Tens of thousands of priests , monks , and nuns , pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God , were tortured , shot in cellars , sent to camps , exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North , or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter .
All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith @ @ @ @ @ @ @ far between .
For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked , and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith : religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison , while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies… For a short period of time , when he needed to gather strength for the struggle against Hitler , Stalin cynically adopted a friendly posture toward the Church .
This deceptive game , continued in later years by Brezhnev with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ window dressing , has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West .
Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most liberal leader , Krushchev : for though he undertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom , Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied Leninist obsession with destroying religion .
But there is something they did not expect : that in a land where churches have been leveled , where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence , where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West , where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith , and where , within the camps themselves , those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells–they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia .
It is true that millions of our countrymen have been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imposed atheism , yet there remain many millions of believers : it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out , but , as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering , the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity .
It is here that we see the dawn of hope : for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets , no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet , it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Communist invasion ; religion here remains free .
But the West ’ s own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness .
It too has witnessed racking schisms , bloody religious wars , and rancor , to say nothing of the tide of secularism that , from the late Middle Ages onward , has progressively inundated the West .
This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decades of gradual erosion , the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the “ pursuit of happiness , “ a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions .
The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries ; banished from common use , they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value .
It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shameful to make dally concessions to an integral evil .
Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation , the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss .
Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism .
If a blasphemous film about Jesus is shown throughout the United States , reputedly one of the most religious countries in the world , or a major newspaper publishes a shameless caricature of the Virgin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ does one need ?
When external rights are completely unrestricted , why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts ?
Or why should one refrain from burning hatred , whatever its basis–race , class , or ideology ?
Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today .
Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society .
Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ human rights ; we forget that under Communism ( and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism , which are unstable ) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority ; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain “ equality ” –the equality of destitute slaves .
This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today ’ s free world .
Indeed , the broader the personal freedoms are , the higher the level of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , paradoxically , does this blind hatred become .
The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money .
This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive , to life itself , to the world with its colors , sounds , and shapes , to the human body .
The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate , for art is fruitless without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon , but in the West the fall has been voluntary , a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist , instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan , tries to put himself in the place of God .
Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process , with East and West yielding the same results , and once again for the same reason : Men have forgotten God .
With such global events looming over us @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mountain ranges , it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart , in the heart ’ s preference for specific good or evil .
Yet this remains true even today , and it is , in fact , the most reliable key we have .
The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy , leaving us at a dead end .
The free people of the West could reasonably have been expected to realize that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nurtured falsehoods , and not to allow lies to be foisted upon them so easily .
All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today ’ s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness , in repentance , to the Creator of all : without this , no exit will be illumined , and we shall seek it in vain .
The resources we have set aside for ourselves are too impoverished for the task .
We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not by some outside force , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but within each of us individually , and within every society .
This is especially true of a free and highly developed society , for here in particular we have surely brought everything upon ourselves , of our own free will .
We ourselves , in our daily unthinking selfishness , are pulling tight that noose… Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth .
Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher , and we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder .
Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction .
The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly , day in and day out , participates in the life of each of us , unfailingly granting us the energy of existence ; when this assistance leaves us , we die .
And in the life of our entire planet , the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and terrible hour .
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries , which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death , we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God , which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned .
Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our bands be directed to setting them right .
There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing .
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind .
But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested .
If we perish and lose this world , the fault will be ours alone .
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , “ Godlessness : the First Step to the Gulag ” .
Templeton Prize Lecture , 10 May 1983 ( London ) .
Source : The Voice Crying in the Wilderness

"The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West’s own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness.... the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without."
This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018
This article originally appeared on a new site about the Christian renaissance in Russia, called Russian Faith. Their introductory video is at end of this article.
Introduction by Chris Banescu
As a survivor of the Communist Holocaust I am horrified to witness how my beloved America, my adopted country, is gradually being transformed into a secularist and atheistic utopia, where communist ideals are glorified and promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are ridiculed and increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our nation.
Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many so-called “liberal” and “progressive” elites, God has been progressively erased from our public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity.
It is no coincidence that as Marxist ideologies and secularist principles engulf the culture and pervert mainstream thinking, individual freedoms and liberties are rapidly disappearing. As a consequence, Americans feel increasingly more powerless and subjugated by some of the most radical and hypocritical, least democratic, and characterless individuals our society has ever produced.
Those of us who have experienced and witnesses first-hand the atrocities and terror of communism understand fully why such evil takes root, how it grows and deceives, and the kind of hell it will ultimately unleash on the innocent and the faithful. Godlessness is always the first step towards tyranny and oppression!
Nobel laureate, Orthodox Christian author, and Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag” address, given when he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion on May of 1983, explained how the Russian revolution and the communist takeover were facilitated by an atheistic mentality an a long process of secularization which alienated the people from God and traditional Christian morality and beliefs. He rightly concluded: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
The text of his Templeton Address is provided below. The parallels with the current crisis and moral decay in American society are striking and frightening. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear!
“Men Have Forgotten God” – The Templeton Address
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
What is more, the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.
The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.
The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it. It was a war (the memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever. The only possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.
The same kind of defect, the flaw of a consciousness lacking all divine dimension, was manifested after World War II when the West yielded to the satanic temptation of the “nuclear umbrella.” It was equivalent to saying: Let’s cast off worries, let’s free the younger generation from their duties and obligations, let’s make no effort to defend ourselves, to say nothing of defending others-let’s stop our ears to the groans emanating from the East, and let us live instead in the pursuit of happiness. If danger should threaten us, we shall be protected by the nuclear bomb; if not, then let the world burn in Hell for all we care. The pitifully helpless state to which the contemporary West has sunk is in large measure due to this fatal error: the belief that the defense of peace depends not on stout hearts and steadfast men, but solely on the nuclear bomb…
Today’ s world has reached a stage which, if it had been described to preceding centuries, would have called forth the cry: “This is the Apocalypse!”
Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it.
Dostoevsky warned that “great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared.” This is precisely what has happened. And he predicted that “the world will be saved only after it has been possessed by the demon of evil.” Whether it really will be saved we shall have to wait and see: this will depend on our conscience, on our spiritual lucidity, on our individual and combined efforts in the face of catastrophic circumstances. But it has already come to pass that the demon of evil, like a whirlwind, triumphantly circles all five continents of the earth…
By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.
In its past, Russia did know a time when the social ideal was not fame, or riches, or material success, but a pious way of life. Russia was then steeped in an Orthodox Christianity which remained true to the Church of the first centuries. The Orthodoxy of that time knew how to safeguard its people under the yoke of a foreign occupation that lasted more than two centuries, while at the same time fending off iniquitous blows from the swords of Western crusaders. During those centuries the Orthodox faith in our country became part of the very pattern of thought and the personality of our people, the forms of daily life, the work calendar, the priorities in every undertaking, the organization of the week and of the year. Faith was the shaping and unifying force of the nation.
But in the 17th century Russian Orthodoxy was gravely weakened by an internal schism. In the 18th, the country was shaken by Peter’s forcibly imposed transformations, which favored the economy, the state, and the military at the expense of the religious spirit and national life. And along with this lopsided Petrine enlightenment, Russia felt the first whiff of secularism; its subtle poisons permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles; and amongst the uneducated, its health was threatened.
It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot.
The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies…
For a short period of time, when he needed to gather strength for the struggle against Hitler, Stalin cynically adopted a friendly posture toward the Church. This deceptive game, continued in later years by Brezhnev with the help of showcase publications and other window dressing, has unfortunately tended to be taken at its face value in the West. Yet the tenacity with which hatred of religion is rooted in Communism may be judged by the example of their most liberal leader, Krushchev: for though he undertook a number of significant steps to extend freedom, Krushchev simultaneously rekindled the frenzied Leninist obsession with destroying religion.
But there is something they did not expect: that in a land where churches have been leveled, where a triumphant atheism has rampaged uncontrolled for two-thirds of a century, where the clergy is utterly humiliated and deprived of all independence, where what remains of the Church as an institution is tolerated only for the sake of propaganda directed at the West, where even today people are sent to the labor camps for their faith, and where, within the camps themselves, those who gather to pray at Easter are clapped in punishment cells–they could not suppose that beneath this Communist steamroller the Christian tradition would survive in Russia. It is true that millions of our countrymen have been corrupted and spiritually devastated by an officially imposed atheism, yet there remain many millions of believers: it is only external pressures that keep them from speaking out, but, as is always the case in times of persecution and suffering, the awareness of God in my country has attained great acuteness and profundity.
It is here that we see the dawn of hope: for no matter how formidably Communism bristles with tanks and rockets, no matter what successes it attains in seizing the planet, it is doomed never to vanquish Christianity.
The West has yet to experience a Communist invasion; religion here remains free. But the West’s own historical evolution has been such that today it too is experiencing a drying up of religious consciousness. It too has witnessed racking schisms, bloody religious wars, and rancor, to say nothing of the tide of secularism that, from the late Middle Ages onward, has progressively inundated the West. This gradual sapping of strength from within is a threat to faith that is perhaps even more dangerous than any attempt to assault religion violently from without.
Imperceptibly, through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West has ceased to be seen as anything more lofty than the “pursuit of happiness, “a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short lived value. It has become embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system. Yet it is not considered shameful to make dally concessions to an integral evil. Judging by the continuing landslide of concessions made before the eyes of our very own generation, the West is ineluctably slipping toward the abyss. Western societies are losing more and more of their religious essence as they thoughtlessly yield up their younger generation to atheism. If a blasphemous film about Jesus is shown throughout the United States, reputedly one of the most religious countries in the world, or a major newspaper publishes a shameless caricature of the Virgin Mary, what further evidence of godlessness does one need? When external rights are completely unrestricted, why should one make an inner effort to restrain oneself from ignoble acts?
Or why should one refrain from burning hatred, whatever its basis–race, class, or ideology? Such hatred is in fact corroding many hearts today. Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hatred of their own society. Amid all the vituperation we forget that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, allowed unlimited freedom together with the various human rights; we forget that under Communism (and Communism is breathing down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) the identical flaws run riot in any person with the least degree of authority; while everyone else under that system does indeed attain “equality”–the equality of destitute slaves. This eager fanning of the flames of hatred is becoming the mark of today’s free world. Indeed, the broader the personal freedoms are, the higher the level of prosperity or even of abundance–the more vehement, paradoxically, does this blind hatred become. The contemporary developed West thus demonstrates by its own example that human salvation can be found neither in the profusion of material goods nor in merely making money.
This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.
Here again we witness the single outcome of a worldwide process, with East and West yielding the same results, and once again for the same reason: Men have forgotten God.
With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart’s preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end. The free people of the West could reasonably have been expected to realize that they are beset · by numerous freely nurtured falsehoods, and not to allow lies to be foisted upon them so easily. All attempts to find a way out of the plight of today’s world are fruitless unless we redirect our consciousness, in repentance, to the Creator of all: without this, no exit will be illumined, and we shall seek it in vain. The resources we have set aside for ourselves are too impoverished for the task. We must first recognize the horror perpetrated not by some outside force, not by class or national enemies, but within each of us individually, and within every society. This is especially true of a free and highly developed society, for here in particular we have surely brought everything upon ourselves, of our own free will. We ourselves, in our daily unthinking selfishness, are pulling tight that noose…
Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.
To the ill-considered hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can propose only a determined quest for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently spurned. Only in this way can our eyes be opened to the errors of this unfortunate twentieth century and our bands be directed to setting them right. There is nothing else to cling to in the landslide: the combined vision of all the thinkers of the Enlightenment amounts to nothing.
Our five continents are caught in a whirlwind. But it is during trials such as these that the highest gifts of the human spirit are manifested. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Godlessness: the First Step to the Gulag”. Templeton Prize Lecture, 10 May 1983 (London).
Source: The Voice Crying in the Wilderness
A video introducing Russian Faith