On the Coming Resurrection of Orthodox Russia
Fear not; for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west.
(Isaiah 43, 5)
May my voice sound forth like a bell, may all hearken unto it, even the dead.
From Glinka’s Opera ‘A Life for the Tsar’
The contemporary Golgotha of the Tsar is an undying wellspring of the monarchist idea, the victory of human morality and the greatest achievement of the human spirit. The death of the Tsar for the honour and the dignity of his people is the greatest triumph of monarchist teaching which we have to proclaim to the whole world, just as the fishermen of Galilee preached the Gospel of God among the pagan peoples of the exalted East and the sceptical West.
Sergey Bekhteyev, The Golgotha of the Tsar, The Russian Banner, No 19, 1927
For most of the century between 1917 and 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) was not free, but vilely persecuted, unfree to tell the truth. We do not judge those who compromised themselves during that time by telling untruths. Those who from the comfort of the West attacked the ROC then, today assert that She is still not free. In their aggressiveness, they in fact support those who attacked the Church before. In other words, the current media attacks on the Church are merely continuing the anti-spiritual, materialist ideology of the Russian Revolution, literally exported to Russia from the West.
Indeed, the atheist mindsets of anti-Christian Western and Westernised critics have always wanted to reduce the Church of God to a mere private opinion. They do not want the Church to play any public role, they want Her to be disincarnate. They want a weak ROC because they know that Russia, by far the largest country on earth and possessing great God-given resources, is nothing without the Church. That is why they planned and greeted the 1917 Revolution with unfeigned enthusiasm and rejoiced at the ensuing Russian catastrophe; that is why they also greet and deepen every difficulty of the Church with glee today.
Russia was crucified for the sins of the world from 1914 on, as is clear when the Tsar’s Gethsemane came three years later and his Golgotha four years later. This was the persecution of the Trinitarian White Idea of Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and People, food for the heart, the mind and the body. This Russian Orthodox motto, Orthodoxy (= spiritual liberty), Sovereignty (= spiritual equality) and People (= spiritual fraternity) was devised to oppose the Masonic ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’. This had inspired the bloodied French Revolution with its two million victims and everywhere led only to tyranny, inequality and hatred.
Today very real and terrible problems exist in the Russian Federation. As a result of recent Westernisation, following the lack of full repentance on the part of the people since the fall of atheism in 1991, the following deformations have arisen and become widespread: alcoholism, abortion, corruption, drugs, a huge gap between the new rich and the poor, injustice, accommodation that is no longer available to all, employment that is no longer available to all, medicine that is no longer free, and the undermining of what was once the best educational system in the world, itself part of the pre-Revolutionary Russian heritage.
In this way, it can be said of contemporary Russia that the best of what was, is rapidly being lost, and the worst of what was, has yet to be vanquished altogether. Moreover, no political parties, left or right, are able to do much about this. This is because political parties by definition only have part of the truth. The whole truth must be confessed if the situation is to be saved. For the coming Resurrection of Russia, this means that the Trinitarian motto, Orthodoxy, Sovereignty and People, not only has to be revived, but also has to be understood in its deepest sense, for the twenty-first century.
In this understanding of the contemporary world: Orthodoxy means Worldwide Russian Orthodoxy; Sovereignty means the Restoration of the Sovereign Orthodox Kingdom; the People means all who accept the Word of Christ in the Orthodox context, whatever our ethnicity and whatever our tongue. This is called gathering together all Rus and guarding it. This is the destiny of Russia, the future of the world and salvation in the last times. The future of the suicidal West depends on this, for its liquidation of Christianity means its own liquidation, but its affirmation of Christianity means its own affirmation.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
22 October / 4 November
Kazan Icon of the Mother of God
