Age of Catastrophe

THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE
(1914 to 1945)
VOLUME V OF AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY
Vladimir Moss
© Copyright: Vladimir Moss, 2018. All rights reserved.
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You deserve to die, because you have not guarded your master, the Lord’s Anointed.
I Samuel 26.16.
An evil will shortly take Russia, and wherever this evil goes, rivers of blood will flow. It is
not the Russian soul, but an imposition on the Russian soul. It is not an ideology, nor a
philosophy, but a spirit from hell.
St. Aristocles of Moscow and Mount Athos (1911).
The earthly fatherland with its Church is the threshold of the Heavenly Fatherland.
Therefore love it fervently and be ready to lay down your life for it, so as to inherit eternal
life there.
St. John of Kronstadt, (1905).
The destiny of the Tsar is the destiny of Russia. If the tsar rejoices, Russia will rejoice. If
the tsar weeps, Russia will weep, while if there is not tsar, there will be no Russia. Just as a
man with his head cut off is no longer a man, but a stinking corpse, so Russia without a
tsar will be a stinking corpse.
St. Anatoly of Optina (1916).
The Tsar was the embodiment of the Russian people’s… readiness to submit the life of the
state to the righteousness of God: therefore do the people submit themselves to the Tsar,
because he submits to God.
St. John Maximovich.
From the day of [the Tsar’s] abdication, everything began to collapse. It could not have
been otherwise. The one who united everything, who stood guard for the truth, was
overthrown…
St. John Maximovich (+1966).
In view of the prevailing, all-encompassing movement of universal apostasy, let your hand
not rise in the attempt to stop its elemental flow and progression. It is allowed by God
because of human sinfulness to overshadow Christendom and is far beyond our meagre
attempts to do something about it. Instead, ‘acquire the spirit of peace, and thousands
around you will be saved!’
St. Ignaty Brianchaninov.
An apparition different from everything that had been seen on earth until then, had taken
the place of Russia. . . . We had before us a state without nation, an army without country,
a religion without God. This government, which was born by revolution and nourished by
terror . . . had declared that between it and society no good faith could exist in public and
private relations, no understanding had to be respected. . . . That is how there was no more
Russia but only an emptiness that persists in human affairs.
Sir Winston Churchill, The Aftermath.
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The court must not banish terror, but justify and legalize it.
V.I. Lenin (1922).
We [the IRA] adopted political assassination as a principle. We turned the whole

thoughts and passions of a generation upon blood and revenge and death; we placed
gunmen, most half-educated and totally inexperienced, as dictators with powers of life
and death over large areas. We decided the moral law, and said there was no law but the
law of force, and the moral law answered us. Every devilish thing we did against the
British army went full circle, and then boomeranged and smote us tenfold; and the
cumulative effect of the whole of it was a general moral weakening and a general
degradation, a general cynicism and disbelief in either virtue or decency, in goodness or
uprightness or honesty.
P.S. O’Hegarty.
Communism is the greatest world evil that human history has ever seen. It destroys society
and age-old Christian culture and in its place creates the kingdom of the beast wherever it
succeeds it establishing its mastery. This is as obvious as its nature is without doubt one
and the same at all times and in all places: on whatever soil its seeds may grow: on Russia,
Spanish, Serbian soil, it everywhere produces one and the same poisonous fruits that kill
the soul and the body both of the individual person and of the whole people.
Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky).
If My people had heard Me, if Israel had walked in My ways, quickly would I have
humbled their enemies, and upon their oppressors would I have laid My hand…
Psalm 81.12-13.
It is well the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system,
for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Henry Ford.
For liberation, something more is necessary than an economic policy, something more
than industry. If a people is to become free, it needs pride and will-power, defiance, hate,
hate and once again hate.
Adolf Hitler.
Hitler’s democratic triumph [in 1933] exposed the true nature of democracy. Democracy
has few values of its own: it is as good, or as bad, as the principles of the people who
operate it. In the hands of liberal and tolerant people, it will produce a liberal and
tolerant government; in the hands of cannibals, a government of cannibals. In Germany
in 1933-34 it produced a Nazi government because the prevailing culture of Germany’s
voters did not give priority to the exclusion of gangsters…
Norman Davies (1997).
Patriotism does not call for the subjugation of the universe; to liberate your people does
not at all imply overtaking and wiping out your neighbours.
Ivan Ilyin.
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The nation, this collective organism, is just as inclined to deify itself as the individual
man. The madness of pride grows in this case in the same progression, as every passion
becomes inflamed in society, being refracted in thousands and millions of souls.
Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky) of New York (+1964).
The practice of Communist states and… Fascist states… leads to a novel conception of
the truth and of disinterested ideals in general, which would hardly have been
intelligible to previous centuries. To adopt it is to hold that outside the purely technical
sphere (where one asks only what are the most efficient means towards this or that
practical end) words like ‘true’, or ‘right’, or ‘free’, and the concepts which they denote,
are to be defined in terms of the only activity recognized as valuable, namely, the
organization of society as a smoothly-working machine providing for the needs of such of
its members as are permitted to survive…
Sir Isaiah Berlin.
Britain had still to confront the fact that her principal European ally of necessity, the
USSR, was a tyranny as gory and revolting as Hitler’s. To admit this would be to accept
that the suffering, the deaths and the destruction had been a desperate battle for survival
first, brought about by unreadiness and parsimony, and a crusade second…
Peter Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain (2008).
The Lord has revealed to me, wretched Seraphim, that there will be great woes in the
Russian land: the Orthodox Faith will trampled on, the hierarchs of the Church of God
and other spiritual persons will fall away from the purity of Orthodoxy, and for that the
Lord will punish them terribly. I, wretched Seraphim, besought the Lord for three days
and nights that He would rather deprive me of the Kingdom of Heaven but have mercy
on them. But the Lord replied: 'I will not have mercy on them, for they teach human
teachings and honour me with their lips but their hearts are far from Me.'
St. Seraphim of Sarov (+1833).
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INTRODUCTION 9
I. WAR AND REVOLUTION (1914-18) 12
1. THE FIRST YEARS OF WAR 13
2. THE ACTORS IN THE REVOLUTION: (1) THE BOLSHEVIKS 23
3. THE ACTORS IN THE REVOLUTION: (2) THE CHRISTIANS 33
4. THE ACTORS IN THE REVOLUTION: (3) RASPUTIN 40
5. STUPIDITY OR TREASON? 51
6. APOCALYPTIC VISIONS 63
7. THE ABDICATION OF THE TSAR 66
8. AMERICA INTERVENES 84
9. DUAL POWER 92
10. THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 99
11. THE BALFOUR DECLARATION 106
II. THE NEW WORLD DISORDER (1918-1925) 118
12. THE SPIRIT OF LENINISM 119
13. THE CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION 131
14. THE JEWS AND THE REVOLUTION 150
15. 1918: THE FALL OF GERMANY AND AUSTRIA 158
16. WHITE TSAR AND RED TERROR 168
17. VERSAILLES: (1) DEMOCRACY AND SELF-DETERMINATION 186
18. VERSAILLES: (2) REPARATIONS AND DEBT-RELIEF 197
19. FROM SERBIA TO YUGOSLAVIA 205
20. THE SECOND GREEK REVOLUTION 209
21. THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR 221
22. FROM WAR COMMUNISM TO NEP 231
23. SELF-DETERMINATION IN THE RUSSIAN BORDERLANDS 243
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24. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH IN EXILE 255
25. FROM THE VOLGA FAMINE TO THE “LIVING CHURCH” 263
26. GREEK ECCLESIASTICAL IMPERIALISM 279
27. THE INTRODUCTION OF THE NEW CALENDAR 287
28. THE FALL OF RENOVATIONISM 308
29. GERMAN HYPERINFLATION 315
30. THE RISE OF STALIN 324
31. THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS 335
32. THE RISE OF CHINA 342
33. THE RE-LAUNCH OF ECUMENISM 347
III. THE RISE OF THE DICTATORS (1925-1933) 351
34. LIBERALISM, COMMUNISM AND FASCISM 352
35. TOTALITARIANISM AND RELIGION 368
36. CHINESE NATIONALISTS AND COMMUNISTS 383
37. TURKS, ARABS, PERSIANS AND OIL 386
38. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH DECENTRALIZED 394
39. THE DECLARATION OF METROPOLITAN SERGIUS 398
40. THE BIRTH OF THE CATACOMB CHURCH 405
41. STALIN’S WAR ON RUSSIA 415
42. STALIN’S WAR ON UKRAINE 430
43. KING ALEXANDER I OF YUGOSLAVIA 437
44. THE OLD CALENDARIST MOVEMENT 453
45. THE FIRST PROJECT FOR A EUROPEAN UNION 465
46. THE RISE OF HITLER AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT 469
47. THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM 473
48. THE VATICAN AND RUSSIA 481
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49. THE WALL STREET CRASH AND AMERICA’S HUNDRED DAYS 485
50. THE REVOLUTION IN PHYSICS 494
IV. THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1933-1945) 500
51. HITLER’S IDEOLOGY 501
52. THE JAPANESE INVASION OF CHINA 506
53. APPEASEMENT: (1) ABYSSINIA AND THE RHINELAND 512
54. APPEASEMENT: (2) SPAIN 518
55. APPEASEMENT: (3) AUSTRIA AND CZECHOSLOVAKIA 523
56. THE GREAT TERROR OF 1937-38 532
57. A PARABLE OF SOVIET REALITY 540
58. THE FRUITS OF SERGIANISM 544
59. THE SECOND ALL-DIASPORA COUNCIL 549
60. PERSECUTION IN ROMANIA 559
61. THE MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT 567
62. DUNKIRK AND THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN 575
63. THE FASCISTS INVADE THE BALKANS 580
64. THE NAZIS INVADE RUSSIA 592
65. CHURCH LIFE DURING THE GERMAN OCCUPATION 601
66. THE BIG THREE: (1) TEHERAN AND BRETTON WOODS 622
67. THE BIG THREE: (2) YALTA 631
68. THE BALKANS AND THE COMMUNISTS 637
69. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH IN 1945 647
70. VICTORS’ JUSTICE 659
71. VICTORS’ INJUSTICE 664
72. JAPAN AND THE BOMB 676
73. THE NEW ECONOMIC ORDER: BRETTON WOODS 682
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74. THE NEW POLITICAL ORDER: THE UNITED NATIONS 688
75. THE NEW MORAL ORDER: HUMAN RIGHTS 693
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INTRODUCTION
This book is the fifth volume in my series entitled An Essay in Universal History.
The earlier volumes were: Part 1: The Age of Faith (to 1453), Part 2: The Age of
Reason (to 1789), Part 3: The Age of Revolution (to 1861) and Part 4: The Age of
Empire (to 1914).
The French revolution gave birth to three evil ideologies, or secular religions:
liberalism, communism and nationalism. This was in fulfilment of the prophetic
word: “And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the
dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false
prophet. For they are the spirits of demons, working miracles, which go forth
unto the kings of the earth, and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle
of that great day of God Almighty.” (Revelation 16.13-14)
During the “long” nineteenth century that lasted from 1815 to 1914, these
ideologies were checked and restrained from taking control of the whole of
Europe by the mighty Russian Empire and by the remnants of Christianity in the
West. But after Russia fell during the First World War and the Russian revolution,
these three evil spirits were unleashed to spread their pernicious influence
throughout almost the whole world.
The first spirit, liberalism, which was born during the first, liberal phase of the
French revolution, was seemingly the most innocent, the least violent and the
closest to Christian values – which is why it has deceived such vast numbers of
Christians who regard it as the natural political expression of Christian values.
The second, communism, which was born in the second, Jacobin (and Babeuvian)
phase of the revolution, is the most obviously antichristian – but still captured
the minds of very many intellectuals to a greater or lesser degree in the period up
to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and still has an uncanny ability to re-
appear in mature liberal societies and take them over, as we see in the European
Union today. The third, nationalism, was born in the last, Napoleonic phase of the
revolution (while being anticipated in the first), and is heartily despised by
internationalist liberals and communists, and yet has proved again and again to
be the scourge of liberal hopes and apparently ineradicable even by communist
methods of persuasion…
In what Philip Bobbitt in an important work has called “the Long War” (1914-
1990)1, the three spirits fought against each other for supremacy over each other
and for spiritual leadership over “the international community” of states. As a
result of the First World War, at Versailles in 1919, liberalism claimed the victory
– but prematurely, because two of the most important states, Germany and
Russia, rejected the liberal consensus. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945,
nationalism was universally discredited, and the two internationalist variants of
the nation-state, liberalism and communism, fought it out in the third and final

1The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (London: Penguin,
2002).
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phase of the Long War – the Cold War. Finally, in 1990, Russian communism
surrendered, and according to Bobbitt, the Long War came to an end with the
victory of liberalism and parliamentary democracy. I believe that this conclusion,
too, is premature, because Russia, China, and most of the Muslim world reject
this consensus, while democracy is in deep crisis in its West European and
American homelands.
The liberal consensus is also rejected by the Orthodox Christian nations whose
holocaust – much greater than the Jewish - constitutes the single most striking
and important fact of the period from both a spiritual and a purely statistical
point of view. That is why I have devoted so much space in this book to an
analysis of the internal ecclesiastical and political problems of Orthodox Eastern
Europe. For while, after 1917, the Orthodox Autocracy was not resurrected (the
Orthodox Balkan states were monarchies, not the Autocracy), there were still
many millions of Orthodox Christians for whom the Autocracy was still part of
the furniture of their minds. And while the Great Powers tried to impose on
them liberalism, fascism or communism, many of them remained unconvinced
by any of these alternatives. Thus, like the ghost in Hamlet or the Commendatore
in Don Giovanni, the Orthodox Autocracy remained in the subconscious of the
Orthodox peoples, and its return was fervently desired by many, especially in
Russia.
Such a return depended on two conditions: first, the revival of the truly
Orthodox Christian faith on a large enough scale to make its political expression,
Autocracy, a realistic possibility, and secondly, the manifest bankruptcy and/or
destruction of the despotic and democratic regimes which, as previous volumes
in this series have demonstrated, have always opposed the Autocracy. Neither of
these conditions was fulfilled in the period covered by this book (1914-45), nor do
they look close to being fulfilled at the time of writing. However, if Bobbitt is
right, and the nation-state, even in its democratic variant, is now in decay, then
we should not rule out the possibility of the revival of the Orthodox Autocracy in
a modernized form. Indeed, several holy elders and prophets of the Orthodox
Church prophesied that it would be resurrected.
If that fervently desired possibility is ever to become reality, we must

understand the mistakes of the past; we must analyse the history of the fall of the
Autocracy and the corruption of the Autocratic consciousness in the period
under discussion; and it is this that constitutes the main aim of this volume…
Its main subject, therefore, is the Russian revolution and its

consequences. For while there were, of course, other important events
and movements, it was the fall of the Russian Autocracy and the
Russian revolution that set everything else in motion, making the
outcome infinitely worse than it would otherwise have been. As Sir
Isaiah Berlin wrote in his valedictory speech: “’It was the best of
times, it was the worst of times.' With these words Dickens began his
famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about
our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each
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other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who
introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale
into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath:
the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of
Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of
information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—
these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but
preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in
historical determinism may think, they could have been averted.
"I speak with particular feeling, for I am a very old man, and I have
lived through almost the entire century. My life has been peaceful and
secure, and I feel almost ashamed of this in view of what has
happened to so many other human beings. I am not a historian, and so
I cannot speak with authority on the causes of these horrors. Yet
perhaps I can try.
"They were, in my view, not caused by the ordinary negative

human sentiments, as Spinoza called them—fear, greed, tribal hatreds,
jealousy, love of power—though of course these have played their
wicked part. They have been caused, in our time, by ideas; or rather,
by one particular idea. It is paradoxical that Karl Marx, who played
down the importance of ideas in comparison with impersonal social
and economic forces, should, by his writings, have caused the
transformation of the twentieth century, both in the direction of what
he wanted and, by reaction, against it. The German poet Heine, in one
of his famous writings, told us not to underestimate the quiet
philosopher sitting in his study; if Kant had not undone theology, he
declared, Robespierre might not have cut off the head of the King of
France…” 2
My debts are too numerous to list here. In addition to academic writers and
historians, I should particularly like to mention the Holy New Martyrs and
Confessors of Russia, the hidden glory of the twentieth century. It was pondering
on the significance of their exploit that first led me to the writing of this series.
Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have
mercy on us! Amen.

2 Berlin, “A Message to the Twenty-First Century”, New York Review of Books, October 23, 2014.
This is a little hard on Kant. Surely Hume was more to blame?
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I. WAR AND REVOLUTION (1914-18)
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1. THE FIRST YEARS OF WAR
The First World War began with both victories and defeats for the Allies. The
Serbs, against all expectation, defeated the Austrians and continued to hold out
well against them until the Germans took over and forced them to retreat
through Kosovo to the Adriatic coast. In the West, the Germans smashed through
French and British defences in August, 1914, and were threatening Paris, but
were held at the Battle of the Marne, which destroyed the Germans’ Schlieffen
Plan and condemned the two sides to a relatively immobile war of trenches and
barbed wire stretching from the Channel to Switzerland until 1918.
Turning now to the Eastern Front: On hearing of the successful German

advance into France, Grand-Duke Nicholas, the commander-in-chief of the
Russian armies, reversed the entire Russian strategic plan and, disregarding the
incomplete concentration of his armies, ordered a full-scale advance into Eastern
Prussia. At first he was successful, and the Germans were forced to transfer
troops from the Western front at a critical stage, with the result that Paris and
France were saved. As the French General Cherfils remarked in La Guerre de la
Déliverance, “The spirit in which this offensive was undertaken is something
which demands the greatest attention. It was conceived as an intervention, a
diversionary operation, to assist and relieve the French Front. A Russian
Commander-in-Chief, the Grand Duke behaved more like an ally than a Russian
and deliberately sacrificed the interests of his own country to those of France. In
these circumstances his strategy can be termed as ‘anti-national’.”3 Unfortunately,
this strategy led to a catastrophic defeat in East Prussia, at the Battle of
Tannenburg, where 100,000 Russian prisoners were taken and General Samsonov
shot himself. In general the first year of the war went badly for Russia.
“On January 25 1915,” writes Sebastian Sebag Montefiore, “Nikolasha [Grand

Duke Nicholas] and [War Minister] Yanushkevich ordered a ‘cleansing’ of the
entire theatre of operations through the expulsion of ‘all Jews and suspect
individuals’… The Jews, who spoke the Germanic Yiddish, were suspected of
treason. Nikolasha took Jewish hostages and executed suspects. Around 500,000
Jews were expelled in scenes of such desperate misery that even interior minister
Maklakov complained, ‘I’m not Judaeophile but I disapprove’.”4 The irony was
that this took place in the Pale of Settlement, where the Jews had been restricted
in order that they should not infect the interior provinces with their
revolutionary spirit. But now the Jews were forced to flee eastwards, to the major
cities of Central Russia, where they swelled the ranks of the revolutionaries…
In March 1915 British, French and Australasian (ANZAC) forces tried to break
through the Straits at Gallipoli, but were bloodily defeated by the Turks.
Meanwhile, the Russians continued to retreat westwards in Poland; they were

3 Arsène de Goulévitch, Czarism and Revolution, Hawthorne, Ca.: Omni
Publications, 1962, p. 184.
4 Montefiore, The Romanovs, London: Vintage, 2016, p. 581.
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burdened by a catastrophic deficit in shells and rifles. However, they did better
against the Turks in the Caucasus, which, writes Robert Tombs, became “the
context for the first twentieth-century genocide, that of the Christian Armenians.5
A British and Indian army marched from Basra towards Baghdad in 1915, but
part of it was forced to surrender after a siege at Kut the following year, and
many soldiers died in captivity. An Arab revolt in 1916 was given support,
involving a young Oxford archaeologist, T.E. Lawrence, the only romantic hero
of the war. British, Indian and ANZAC forces eventually took Jerusalem,
Damascus and Baghdad in 1917, where they were greeted as liberators from
Turkish rule. The British government signed a secret agreement with the French
dividing most of the Turkish empire into ‘spheres of influence’ between them.
Also, the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 committed Britain to a ‘National
Home for the Jewish People in Palestine’, though without prejudicing ‘the civil
and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’ – who, it was assumed,
would be grateful for economic development. This had seemed a clever idea,
pleasing Jewish opinion thought to be influential in Russia and America. Britain
thus blundered insouciantly into what would turn out to be an intractable and
damaging problem with long-term ramifications unimaginable at the time.”
In August, 1915, after a series of heavy defeats, the Tsar took control of the
Russian army as Supreme Commander. Even many of his supporters were
appalled at the decision, for it meant that if things went badly on the battlefield
the Tsar would be blamed as being directly responsible. However, the decision
was the right one.
“In the autumn,” writes Robert Massie, “the Tsar brought his son, the eleven-
year-old Tsarevich, to live with him at Army Headquarters. It was a startling
move, not simply because of the boy’s age but also because of his haemophilia.
Yet, Nicholas did not make his decision impetuously. His reasons, laboriously
weighed for months in advance, were both sentimental and shrewd.
“The Russian army, battered and retreating after a summer of terrible losses,
badly needed a lift in morale. Nicholas himself made constant appearances, and
his presence, embodying the cause of Holy Russia, raised tremendous
enthusiasm among the men who saw him. It was his hope that the appearance of
the Heir at his side, symbolizing the future, would further bolster their drooping
spirits. It was a reasonable hope, and, in fact, wherever Alexis appeared he
became a center of great excitement…”6
Under the Tsar’s command, the fortunes of the Russian armies revived. For
this it is only just to give the Tsar the credit. But very few historians do, so strong
is the continuing bias against him… Thanks to organizational changes
introduced by the Tsar, the crisis in supplies that had contributed so significantly
to the defeats of 1915 was gradually overcome.

5 The Turks massacred almost 2 million Armenians, and it was the Tsar who, by attacking the
Turks, stood out as the Armenians’ avenger… (V.M.)

6 Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, London: Indigo, 2000, p. 282.
14
As Hindenburg, the German commander, wrote: “For our GHQ the end of
1915 was no occasion for the triumphal fanfare we had anticipated. The final
outcome of the year’s fighting was disappointing. The Russian bear had escaped
from the net in which we had hope to entrap him, bleeding profusely, but far
from mortally wounded, and had slipped away after dealing us the most terrible
blows.”7
Tombs writes: “A ‘Western’ strategy for breaking the stalemate was agreed at
a conference of Allied commanders in December 1915. French, Russians, British,
Serbians and Italians (who had entered the war that May) would launch
simultaneous offensives in the summer of 1916 with the maximum of troops.
This would force the enemy to fight everywhere at once, ‘wear out’ – i.e. kill –
their reserves, and finally overwhelm them. The biggest effort would be a joint
Franco-British attack astride the River Somme. But the Germans struck first,
before ‘the balance of numbers’ deprived them, in the words of their commander,
General von Falkenhayn, ‘of all remaining hope’. He saw no chance of a military
breakthrough, even less of invading ‘the arch-enemy’, Britain. He decided
instead to ‘bleed the French army to death’, destroying French morale, and
forcing the inexperienced British to attack them to help their ally, thus suffering
huge casualties too. France and Britain might then see the war as hopeless and
sue for peace. The chosen killing ground was the exposed fortress town of
Verdun. Beginning on 21 February 1916, the German and French armies
embarked on a vast and hideous mutual slaughter, each eventually losing over
300,000 men…
“On 4 June 1916 the Russians launched a long and costly offensive to take the
weight off Verdun, and the Italians followed suit on the fifteenth…” 8 The
Russians’ Brusilov offensive, which was launched against the Austrians in
Galicia, was also designed to relieve the Italians and save Venice. It was highly
successful.
“The consequences of this victorious operation were at once manifest on the

other theatres of war. To relieve the Austrians in Galicia the German High
Command took over the direction of both armies and placed them under the sole
control of Hindenburg. The offensive in Lombardy was at once abandoned and
seven Austrian divisions withdrawn to face the Russians. In addition, eighteen
German divisions were brought from the West, where the French and British
were strongly attacking on the Somme. Further reinforcements of four divisions
were drafted from the interior as well as three divisions from Salonica and two
Turkish divisions, ill as the latter could be spared. Lastly, Rumania threw in her
lot with the Allies...”9

7 Hindenburg, in Goulévitch, op. cit., p. 189.
8 Tombs, The English and their History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, pp. 622, 623.
9 Goulévitch, op. cit., pp. 192-193.
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The Germans were well aware of Russian strength. In his Memoirs
Hindenburg writes that “the only solution to relieve a desperate state of affairs”
was “a policy of defence on all fronts, in the absence of some unforeseen and
untoward event”10 – like a revolution…
“Few episodes of the Great War,” writes Sir Winston Churchill, “are more
impressive than the resuscitation, re-equipment and renewed giant effort of
Russia in 1916. It was the last glorious exertion of the Czar and the Russian
people for victory before both were to sink into the abyss of ruin and horror. By
the summer of 1916 Russia, which eighteen months before had been almost
disarmed, which during 1915 had sustained an unbroken series of frightful
defeats, had actually managed, by her own efforts and the resources of her allies,
to place in the field – organized, armed and equipped – sixty Army Corps in
place of the thirty-five with which she had begun the war. The Trans-Siberian
railway had been doubled over a distance of 6,000 kilometres, as far east as Lake
Baikal. A new railway 1,400 kilometres long, built through the depth of winter at
the cost of unnumbered lives, linked Petrograd with the perennially ice-free
waters of the Murman coast. And by both these channels munitions from the
rising factories of Britain, France and Japan, or procured by British credit from
the United States, were pouring into Russia in broadening streams. The domestic
production of every form of war material had simultaneously been multiplied
many fold.
“The mighty limbs of the giant were armed, the conceptions of his brain were
clear, his heart was still true, but the nerves which could transform resolve and
design into action were but partially developed or non-existent [he is referring to
the enemy within, the Duma and the anti-monarchists]. This defect, irremediable
at the time, fatal in its results, in no way detracts from the merit or the marvel of
the Russian achievement, which will forever stand as the supreme monument
and memorial of the Empire founded by Peter the Great.”11
It is worth confirming the important fact of Russian strength by reference to

other sources. Thus the British military attaché in Russia said that Russia’s
prospects from a military point of view were better in the winter of 1916-17 than
a year before. This estimate was shared by Grand Duke Sergius Mikhailovich,
who was at Imperial Headquarters as Inspector-General of Artillery. As he said
to his brother, Grand Duke Alexander: “Go back to your work and pray that the
revolution will not break out this very year. The Army is in perfect condition;
artillery, supplies, engineering, troops – everything is ready for a decisive
offensive in the spring of 1917. This time we will defeat the Germans and
Austrians; on condition, of course, that the rear will not deprive us of our
freedom of action. The Germans can save themselves only if they manage to
provoke revolution from behind…”12

10 Hindenburg, in Goulévitch, op. cit., p. 194.
11 Churchill, The World Crisis, 1916-1918, vol. 1, pp. 102-103, London, 1929.
12 Grand Duke Sergius, in Lyubov Millar, Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia,
Redding, Ca.: Nikodemos Publication Society, 1993, p. 182.
16
“By 1916,” writes David Stevenson, “Russia, exceptionally among the
belligerents, was experiencing a regular boom, with rising growth and a bullish
stock exchange: coal output was up 30 per cent on 1914, chemicals output
doubled, and machinery output trebled. Armaments rode the crest of the wave:
new rifle production rose from 132,844 in 1914 to 733,017 in 1915, and 1,301,433
in 1916; 76mm field guns from 354 to 1,349 to 3721 in these years; 122mm heavy
guns from 78 to 361 to 637; and shell production (of all types) from 104,900 to
9,567,888 to 30,974,678. During the war Russia produced 20,000 field guns,
against 5,625 imported; and by 1917 it was manufacturing all its howitzers and
three-quarters of its heavy artillery. Not only was the shell shortage a thing of the
past, but by spring 1917 Russia was acquiring an unprecedented superiority in
men and materiel.”13
As. F. Vinberg, a colonel of a regiment in Riga, wrote: “Already at the end of

1916 and the beginning of 1917 many knew that, insofar as it is possible to
calculate the future, our victories in the spring and summer of 1917 were
guaranteed. All the deficiencies in the material and technical sphere, which had
told so strongly in 1914 and 1915, had been corrected. All our armies had every
kind of provisions in abundance. While in the German armies the insufficiency in
everything was felt more strongly every day…”14
“The price of this Herculean effort, however, was dislocation of the civilian
economy and a crisis in urban food supply. The very achievement that moved
the balance in the Allies’ favour by summer 1916 contained the seeds of later
catastrophe.”15 Fr. Lev Lebedev cites figures showing that the production for the
front equalled production for the non-military economy in 1916, and exceeded it
in 1917.16 This presaged complete economic collapse in 1918. So if Russia did not
defeat Germany in 1917 she was bound to lose the war…
Meanwhile, on the Western Front, things were going badly. At the Somme on
July 1, 1916, writes Tombs, “the British army began the biggest and bloodiest
battle in its history… By the end of the day, there were 19,240 dead and 37, 646
wounded or missing, including 75 percent of all the officers engaged, among
them two generals…
“But the battle was not over in one day: it continued as a four-and-a-half
month campaign with successive British and French offensives, including the
first use of tanks, major use of aircraft and vastly increased artillery. Wrote one
German soldier: ‘The strain was too immense… the English… surprised us in a

13 Stevenson, 1914-1918: The History of the First World War, London: Penguin,
2005, p. 237.
14 Vinberg, Krestnij Put’ (The Way of the Cross), Munich, 1920, St. Petersburg, 1997,
p. 149.
15 Stevenson, op. cit., p. 237.
16 Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), St. Petersburg, 1997, p. 465.
17
manner never seen before. They came on unstoppably.’ German aircraft and
artillery were ‘as good as eliminated’, units were bled ‘like lemons in a press,’
and lost large numbers of officers and NCOs... The Germans lost heavily doe to
their policy of defending every foot of ground and immediately counter-
attacking every British advance – proof that German professionalism could be as
prodigal of men as British amateurism… Total casualties defy the imagination:
some 420,000 British, 200,000 French, 465,000 Germans. From a strategic
viewpoint, the campaign helped to save Verdun and preserve the French army,
and it forced the Germans onto the defensive. The Somme, wrote one young
German officer, had been ‘the muddy grave’ of the German army…
“The Somme, especially its first day, has taken on emblematic meanings. First,
of the inhuman logic of the First World War: huge battles fought not to capture
or liberate countries, or even seize resources or vital strategic objectives, but to
kill enemy soldiers. After the disaster of Gallipoli, no one in any country would
come up with any other way of fighting. The Somme – like its ghostly twin
Verdun – epitomizes the implacable war of attrition…
“The fundamental cause of the carnage… was not military or social, but
political and ideological: few in England, or any other country, were willing to
surrender or even accept semi-defeat. The loss of life increased the determination
to win, to justify the sacrifice. Only when the whole fabric of society began to
unravel in some countries did resolve evaporate.”17
The reason why no country was ready to accept defeat was that war, since the
time of Napoleon, was total, involving the whole of society at every level. It was
no longer the war of a dynasty or of a small professional army – that is, of one
section of society; it was truly the people’s war, symbolized by the fact that (from
1914 in Germany and France, 1916 in Britain) there was conscription and the
enrolment of the whole of the nation-state into either waging the war at the front
or supporting and provisioning it from the back. As such, defeat implied the
defeat of the whole people, not just of a government – and this was unacceptable
to the new kind of national ego that had emerged in the nineteenth century.
In August, 1916, the Russians’ successful offensive in Galicia

threatened to take Austria out of the war. Among other consequences,
it encouraged the Romanians, who had taken a neutral stance until
then, to join the Allies. This decision brought the Kaiser close to
despair. “The news of Romania’s entry into the war, writes Adam
Tooze, “‘fell like a bomb. William II completely lost his head,
pronounced the war finally lost and believed we must now ask for
peace.’ The Habsburg ambassador in Bucharest, Count Ottokar
Czernin, predicted ‘with mathematical certainty the complete defeat of

17 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 624, 625, 627.
18
the Central Powers and their allies if the war were continued any
longer.’” 18
According to Tombs, it was the war at sea that “was crucial, perhaps
decisive”. For most of the war the British fleet kept the German fleet shut up in
its own ports for fear of the superior firepower of the British dreadnoughts. The
only major confrontation of the two great battle fleets, at Jutland in 1916, was a
tactical victory for the Germans, who inflicted more ships sunk and more
casualties on the British (6,000 to 2,500). “But strategically it was a British victory;
the battered German fleet fled back to port, and never risked action again. An
American newspaper put it well: the German fleet had assaulted its gaoler, but
was still in gaol.
“Thanks to control of the seas, Britain and France (whose economies became
closely integrated) were able to draw on global resources – at a cost. Between
August 1914 and October 1916, their trade with the United States quadrupled,
and 40 percent of British government war purchases were made there. Britain
was the biggest spender of all the belligerents. It subsidized its allies and paid 90
percent of the empire’s costs. It was also the biggest lender, advancing £1.6bn to
its allies, principally Russia and France, much of which was never repaid. It
raised domestic funds by a mixture of taxation and selling war bonds to the
public. To raise foreign exchange, about a quarter of its huge foreign
investments were liquidated and over £800m was borrowed from the U.S.
government. In all it spent over £9bn – more than the total for the previous forty
years of public spending. It increased its national debt by £6.6bn, ten times the
prewar total.
“Britain’s blockade of Germany at first proved indecisive. Neutral countries,

particularly the United States, demanded freedom of navigation and trade, and
the Foreign Office was extremely sensitive to their demands. Moreover, British
firms were themselves trading on an increasing scale with Holland, Switzerland
and Scandinavia, which in effect were German proxies: one Zeppelin shot down
over England proved to have a fabric covering made in Lancashire. It was not
clear that Britain could destroy German commerce without wrecking its own
financial institutions and devastating its economy, which was paying the costs
of the war. In 1915 German exports, via the neutrals, recovered to 60 percent of
their peacetime figure. Only as the war lengthened and intensified was the
blockade of Germany tightened. An Order in Council of 7 July 1916 allowed
European neutrals only to import and export on their own behalf, to prevent
them acting as German intermediaries. Britain used its financial strength to buy
up neutral goods to deprive Germany. More and more were declared
‘contraband’, liable to seizure by the navy, including cotton, wool, fertilizers
(devastating for agriculture), and animal feed vital both for meat production

18 Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, London:
Penguin, 2015, p. 47.
19
and for transport horses, whose requisition by the army and subsequent
destruction in battle caused huge economic disruption. Wool princes in
Germany rose by 1,700 percent. Meat consumption fell on average from 1,050
grams per week to 135 grams. The milk supply was halved. In 1916 even
potatoes ran short. Oil, petrol and domestic fuel became chronically scarce.
Germany’s capture of Romanian oilfields in 1916 was sabotaged by a
buccaneering Tory MP, Colonel J. Norton-Griffiths, who wrecked the
installation. Germany began to suffer universal shortages – aggravated by the
devastation of eastern Europe – and introduced thousands of ersatz (substitute)
products, including acorns, nettles, powdered hay, flavoured salt and even
insects. A vast black market appeared. The death rate rose: that of women by 51
percent, while in England it was falling. The German economy shrank by 10
percent, whereas the British grew throughout the war. The blockade required a
huge effort by the Royal Navy, which lost over 43,000 men. It was a step
towards ‘total war’, resulting in perhaps 500,000 German deaths. But the
blockade depended not only on the Royal Navy’s warships: it also reflected
Britain’s control of the world’s telegraph communications, commercial networks,
merchant shipping, and insurance.
“The Germans retaliated with the submarine: ‘England wants to starve us

into submission,’ said Tirpitz, ‘we can play the same game.’ Its naval staff had
high hopes of submarine warfare and made glowing promises. But, to work, it
had to be ‘unrestricted’ – torpedoing without warning any ship in a declared
‘prohibited region’ round the British Isles. This was regarded by the British, and
most others, as a war crime. In 1914, an admiral had declared that ‘no nation
would permit it, and the officer who did it would be shot’. But when the
Lusitania was sunk in May 1915 the officer who did it became a hero. American
anger caused the Germans to suspend such an attack, but in January 1917,
accepting the likelihood of war with America, they again declared unrestricted
submarine warfare, believing that if they could sink 600,000 tons of shipping per
month it would starve Britain into surrender and so win the war by November
1917. The Admiralty and the British government were very alarmed early in
1917 by large-scale sinkings (885,000 tons in May), and the decision of neutrals,
except the Norwegians, to stay in port. The submarine threat passed into
national folklore. Churchill described it as ‘among the most heart-shaking
episodes of history… a turning point in the history of nations’. Seizing German
submarine bases in Belgium was one motive for the 1917 Passchendaele
bloodbath. In all, 6.7 million tons of British shipping were sunk – roughly
equivalent to 1,000 medium-sized ships. But Germany’s submarine strategy was
a pipe dream, based on absurdly optimistic assumptions about British shipping,
finance, politics and the economy. All coped. Home cereal production shot up.
The poorest people in Britain actually ate better during the war. Even racehorses
continued to eat, rather than be eaten. After convoys were introduced in 1917,
finally involving 4,000 Royal Navy vessels and 140,000 sailors, sinkings
amounted to only 393 of the 95,000 ship-crossings of the Atlantic. The American
army was convoyed across without loss – largely in confiscated German liners.
At any one time, there were only about twenty German submarines in the
Western Approaches. German shipyards were unable to increase the numbers
20
significantly. Half the U-boat fleet was sunk – 178 out of 345. So control of the
sea proved literally vital: Germany tired to starve Britain, and failed; Britain
tried to starve Germany, and succeeded…”19
The unprecedented destructiveness of the war had been predicted by Engels

as early as 1887: “Prussia-Germany can no longer fight any war but a world war;
and a war of hitherto unknown dimensions and ferocity. Eight to ten million
soldiers will swallow each other up and in doing so eat all Europe more bare
than any swarm of locusts. The devastation of the Thirty Years War compressed
into the space of three or four years and extending over the whole continent;
famine, sickness, want, brutalizing the army and the mass of the population;
irrevocable confusion of our artificial structure of trade, industry and credit,
ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional
statecraft, so that crowns will roll by dozens in the gutter and no one can be
found to pick them up. It is absolutely impossible to predict where it will end
and who will emerge from the struggle as victor. Only one result is absolutely
certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of conditions for the final
victory of the working class.”20
And truly: after the war, everything was different. The Russian empire was
gone, and with its disappearance all the islands of Orthodoxy throughout the
world began to tremble and contract within themselves. Also gone were the
German and Austrian empires. The very principle of monarchy was fatally
undermined, surviving in a feebler, truncated form for a short time only in
Orthodox Eastern Europe. Christianity as a whole was on the defensive; in most
places it became a minority religion again, and in some it was fiercely
persecuted, as if the Edict of Milan had been reversed and a new age of the
catacombs had returned. The powerful, if superficial pax Europaica had been
succeeded by a new age of barbarism, in which nations were divided within and
between themselves, and neo-pagan ideologies held sway. The nature of the war
itself contributed to this seismic change. It was not like most earlier European
wars – short, involving only professional armies, with limited effects on the
civilian population. It was (with the possible exception of the Napoleonic wars)
the first of the total wars, involving the whole of the people and taking up all its
resources, thereby presaging the appearance of the totalitarian age. The war’s
length, the vast numbers of its killed and wounded, the unprecedented
sufferings of the civilian populations, and the sheer horror of its front-line
combat deprived it, after the patriotic élan of the first few months, of any
chivalric, redemptive aspects – at any rate, for all but the minority who
consciously fought for God, Tsar and Fatherland. Indeed, the main legacy of the
war was simply hatred – hatred of the enemy, hatred of one’s own leaders – a

19 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 637, 38-640.
20 Engels, in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 707.
21
hatred that did not die after the war’s end, but was translated into a kind of
universal hatred that presaged still more horrific and total wars to come.
Thus the Germans so hated the English that Shakespeare could not be
mentioned in Germany. And the English so hated the “Huns” that Beethoven
could not be mentioned in England and the Royal Family changed its German-
sounding surname to “Windsor”. And the Russians so hated the Germans that
the Germanic-sounding “St. Petersburg” had to be changed to the more Slavic
“Petrograd”…21
As a journalist for the American magazine Time reported, on

Thanksgiving Day, 1918 Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow wrote to
President Wilson. “In it the Patriarch had expressed his Church's
participation in offering thanks for victory over the powers of evil,
and congratulated President Wilson on his fine type of leadership. The
letter then went on to speak of the seemingly severe terms imposed
upon the enemy, and urged Christian forbearance and the alleviation
of the conditions laid down, rather than the creation of a lasting
hatred which could but breed more war. No reply was ever received,
and the Patriarch was curious to know if it had ever reached the
President.” 22
Unfortunately, “lasting hatred” was precisely the legacy of the war

– although, as we shall see, it was probably not the result of “severe
terms imposed upon the enemy”… Tony Judt points out some of the
other longer-term consequences: “World War I led to an
unprecedented militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a
cult of death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the
ground for the political disasters that followed. States and societies
seized during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in
sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but
degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The
very structures of civilized life – regulations, laws, teachers,
policemen, judges – disappeared or took on sinister significance: far
from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading source
of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors, colleagues,
community, or leaders, collapsed. Behaviour that would be aberrant in
conventional circumstances – theft, dishonesty, dissemblance,
indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic
exploitation of their suffering – became not just normal but sometimes
the only way to save family and yourself. Dissent or opposition was
stifled by universal fear.

21Edvard Radzinsky, interview with Vladimir Posner,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0waA2YwhLnw.
22 Donald A. Lowrie, The Light of Russia, Prague: YMCA, 1923.
22
“War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well
as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or
religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War – total war – has been the crucial
antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. The first primitive
concentration camps were set up by the British during the Boer War of 1899-1902.
Without World War I there would have been no Armenian genocide and it is
highly unlikely that either Communism or Fascism would have seized hold of
modern states. Without World War II there would have been no Holocaust.
Absent the forcible involvement of Cambodia in the Vietnam War, we would
never have heard of Pol Pot. As for the brutalizing effect of war on ordinary
soldiers themselves, this of course has been copiously documented…”23
2. THE ACTORS IN THE REVOLUTION: (1) THE BOLSHEVIKS
If the root of the Russian revolution was a nihilistic-messianic-chiliastic kind

of faith built out of many strands of European and Jewish thought, the actual
composition of forces that brought about the revolution was no less varied. We
need to distinguish between at least three levels at which the revolution took
place. First, there was the level of the out-and-out revolutionaries, intelligenty
who were supported by many from the industrial proletariat and the
revolutionary-minded peasantry, who were aiming to destroy Russian tsarism
and Russian Orthodox civilization completely before embarking on a world
revolution that would dethrone God and traditional authority from the hearts
and minds of all men everywhere. This level was led by Lenin, Trotsky and
Stalin; it was composed mainly of Jews, but also contained numbers of Russians,
Latvians, Georgians, Poles and other nationalities. They were possessed by the
revolutionary faith to the greatest extent, and owed no allegiance to any nation
or traditional creed or morality.
Secondly, there was the level of the Freemasons, the mainly aristocratic and
middle-class Duma parliamentarians and their supporters in the country at large,
who were not aiming to destroy Russia completely, but only to remove the tsar
and introduce a constitutional government on the English model. This level was
led by Guchkov, Rodzyanko and Kerensky; it was composed mainly of Russians,
but also contained most of the intelligentsia of the other nations of the empire.
They believed in the revolutionary faith, but still had moral scruples derived
from their Christian background.
Thirdly, there were the lukewarm Orthodox Christians, the great mass of
ordinary Russians, who lacked the courage and the faith to act openly in support
of Faith, Tsar and Fatherland. It is certain that if very many Russians had not
become lukewarm in their faith, God would not have allowed the revolution to
take place. After the revolution, many from this level, as well as individuals from

23Judt, “What have we learned, if anything?”, When the Facts Change, London: Vintage, 2015, pp.
273-274.
23
the first two levels, seeing the terrible devastation that their lukewarmness had
allowed to take place, bitterly repented and returned to the ranks of the
confessing Orthodox Christians.
The extraordinary prominence of Jews in the revolution is a fact that must be

related, at least in part, to the traditionally anti-Russian and anti-Christian
attitude of Jewish culture, which is reflected in both of its major political
offspring – Bolshevism and Zionism. The theist Jews who triumphed in Israel in
1917, and especially in 1948 after the foundation of the State of Israel, came from
the same region and social background – the Pale of Settlement in Western
Russia – as the atheist Jews who triumphed in Moscow in 1917, and sometimes
even from the same families. One such family was that of Chaim Weitzmann, the
first president of Israel, who in his Autobiography wrote that his own mother was
able to witness her sons’ triumph both in Bolshevik Moscow and Zionist
Jerusalem…24
The simultaneous triumph of the Jews in Russia and Palestine was indeed an
extraordinary “coincidence”: Divine Providence drew the attention of all those
with eyes to see this sign of the times when, in one column of newsprint in the
London Times for November 9, 1917, there appeared two articles, the one
announcing the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd, and the other – the promise
of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine (the Balfour declaration). M. Heifetz also
points to the coincidence in time between the October revolution and the Balfour
declaration. “A part of the Jewish generation goes along the path of Herzl and
Zhabotinsky. The other part, unable to withstand the temptation, fills up the
band of Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin.” “The path of Herzl and Bagritsky allowed
the Jews to stand tall and immediately become not simply an equal nation with
Russia, but a privileged one.”25
Indeed, the Russian revolution may be regarded as one branch of that general
triumph of Jewish power which we observe in the twentieth century in both East
and West, in both Russia and America and Israel. The mainly Jewish nature of
the world revolution cannot be doubted. Thus Winston Churchill wrote: “It
would almost seem as if the Gospel of Christ and the gospel of anti-Christ were
designed to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and
mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the
Divine and the diabolical… From the days of ‘Spartacus’ Weishaupt to those of
Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa
Luxembourg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide
conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society
on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible
equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Nesta
Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the
French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement

24 Weitzmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weitzmann, New
York: Harper, 1949.

25 Heifetz, “Nashi Obschie Uroki”, 22, 1980, N 14, p. 162; in Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti Let
Vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), Moscow, 2001, p. 112.
24
during the nineteenth century; and now at last this band of extraordinary
personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have
gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become
practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to
exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing
about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part
atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all
others.”26
Liberals ascribed the revolutionary character of the Jews to antisemitism, and,

in the Russian case, to pogroms and the multitude of restrictions placed on the
Jews by the Russian tsars. However, as we have seen, far fewer Jews died in the
pogroms than Russian officials in terrorist attacks (1845 by the year 1909), while
the restrictions were placed on the Jews in order to protect the Russian peasant,
who was ruthlessly exploited by them. As the future Hieromartyr John
Vostorgov said in 1906: “The Jews are restricted in their rights of residence not as
a confessional unit, but as a predatory tribe that is dangerous in the midst of the
peaceful population because of its exploitative inclinations, which… have found
a religious sanction and support in the Talmud… Can such a confession be
tolerated in the State, when it allows its followers to practise hatred and all kinds
of deceit and harm towards other confessions, and especially Christians? … The
establishment of the Pale of Settlement is the softest of all possible measures in
relation to such a confession. Moreover, is it possible in this case not to take
account of the mood of the masses? But this mood cannot be changed only by
issuing a law on the complete equality of rights of the Jews. On the contrary, this
can only strengthen the embitterment of the people…”27
“Let us remember,” writes Solzhenitsyn: “the legal restrictions on the Jews in

Russia were never racial [as they were in Western Europe]. They were applied
neither to the Karaites [who rejected the Talmud], nor to the mountain Jews, nor
to the Central Asian Jews.”28 In other words, restrictions were placed only on
those Jews who practised the religion of the Talmud, because of its vicious anti-
Christianity and double morality. Moreover, the restrictions were very
generously applied. The boundaries of the Pale (a huge area twice the size of
France) were extremely porous, allowing large numbers of Jews to acquire higher
education and make their fortunes in Great Russia – to such an extent that by the
time of the revolution the Jews dominated Russian trade and, most ominously,
the Russian press. Stolypin wanted to remove the restrictions on the Jews. But in

26 Churchill, Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920; in Douglas Reed, The
Controversy of Zion, Durban, S.A.: Dolphin Press, 1978, pp. 272-273. Detailed data
on the domination of the Jews over Russia can be found in Winberg, Krestnij Put’,
Munich, 1920, pp. 359-372.
27 Vostorgov, in Fomin, S. and Fomina, T., Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia
before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. II, p. 624.

28 Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., p. 292.
25
this case the Tsar resisted him, as his father had resisted Count Witte before
him.29
This was not because the Tsar felt no responsibility to protect the Jews; he
spoke about “my Jews”, as he talked about “my Poles”, “my Armenians” and
“my Finns”. And his freedom from anti-semitism is demonstrated by his reaction
to the murder of Stolypin by a Jewish revolutionary, Bogrov, in Kiev on
September 1, 1911. As Robert Massie writes: “Because Bogrov was a Jew, the
Orthodox population was noisily preparing a retaliatory pogrom. Frantic with
fear, the city’s Jewish population spent the night packing their belongings. The
first light of the following day found the square before the railway station
jammed with carts and people trying to squeeze themselves on to departing
trains. Even as they waited, the terrified people heard the clatter of hoofs. An
endless stream of Cossacks, their long lances dark against the dawn sky, rode
past. On his own, Kokovtsev had ordered three full regiments of Cossacks into
the city to prevent violence. Asked on what authority he had issued the
command, Kokovtsev replied: ‘As head of the government.’ Later, a local official
came up to the Finance Minister to complain, ‘Well, Your Excellency, by calling
in the troops you have missed a fine chance to answer Bogrov’s shot with a nice
Jewish pogrom.’ Kokovtsev was indignant, but, he added, ‘his sally suggested to
me that the measures which I had taken at Kiev were not sufficient… therefore I
sent an open telegram to all governors of the region demanding that they use
every possible means – force if necessary – to prevent possible pogroms. When I
submitted this telegram to the Tsar, he expressed his approval of it and of the
measure I had taken in Kiev.’”30
In the end, the Pale of Settlement was destroyed, not by liberal politicians, but
by right-wing generals. For in 1915, as the Russian armies retreated, some Jews
were accused of spying for the enemy and shot, while the Jewish population in
general was considered unreliable. And so a mass evacuation of the Jews from
the Pale was ordered by the authorities. But the results were disastrous. Hordes
of frightened Jews fleeing eastwards blocked up vital roads along which supplies
for the front were destined. Landing up in large cities such as Moscow and
Petrograd where there had been no large Jewish population before, these
disgruntled new arrivals only fuelled the revolutionary fires. And so was created
precisely the situation that the Pale of Settlement had been designed to avert. As
the Jews poured from the western regions into the major cities of European

29 As Witte recorded in his Memoirs: “’Are you right to stand up for the Jews?’
asked Alexander III. In reply Witte asked permission to answer the question with a
question: ‘Can we drown all the Russian Jews in the Black Sea? If we can, then I
accept that resolution of the Jewish question. If not, the resolution of the Jewish
question consists in giving them a chance to live. That is in offering them equal
rights and equal laws.’” (Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, London: Arrow, 1993, p.
69). But Witte’s reply misses the point, as if the choice lay between killing all the
Jews or giving them complete equality. No State can give complete freedom to a
section of the population that does not respect the law and endangers the lives or
livelihoods of the majority.
30 Massie, op. cit., p. 229.
26
Russia, they soon acquired prominent executive positions in all major sectors of
government and the economy…
As we have seen, at the beginning of the war national loyalties proved

stronger than both class loyalties and, it would seem, the loyalty created by
brotherhood in Masonry. Indeed, “all the main Masonic orders of the warring
countries were in favour of war: the Great national lodge of England, the Grand
Orient of France, the Grand Orient of the nations of Russia, the Old Prussian
lodges and the Great lodge of Hamburg. The latter was the foundation of the
Great Serbian lodge, members of which were involved in the assassination of
Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.”31
However, the Masons of different countries were united in their desire to

destroy the monarchy – or, at any rate, the monarchy in its traditionally
Orthodox, autocratic form. And their anti-monarchical activity had been
increasing inside Russia since the Tsar’s October Manifesto removed many of the
restrictions on free speech. “At this time,” writes Eduard Radzinsky, “as once
before in the nineteenth century, the opposition was allying itself increasingly in
secret masonic lodges, which flourished in Russia after the 1905 revolution. By
1917 they had united society’s liberal elite, which was fed up with the Rasputin
business. The paradox of the situation was that on the eve of 1905, when the
police had frightened Nicholas with masons, masonry scarcely existed in Russia.
Now, on the eve of 1917, when masonry had become a real force, the police knew
little about it. Meanwhile the Masonic lodges included among their members
tsarist ministers, generals, members of the State Council, Duma figures,
prominent diplomats, industrialists.”32
If the October revolution was engineered by Bolshevik Jews, the February

revolution that preceded it was engineered by Russian Masons. I.L. Solonevich
writes: “The whole of the nineteenth century was filled with the struggle of the
autocracy against the aristocratic elite. In this struggle both warring sides
perished. However, the monarchy perished with some chance of resurrection,
but the aristocracy – with absolutely no chance (I am speaking of the destruction
of the aristocracy as a ruling class).
“The roots of this struggle go deep into the past – perhaps as far as Kalita and
the Terrible one. But we shall not descend to the depths of the ages. We shall
only recall that while the mystical beginning of the Russian revolution is usually
ascribed to the Decembrists, there were no Jews among them. Then there came
Belinsky and Chernyshevsky and Bakunin and Herzen and Plekhanov and
Lavrov and Milyukov and Lenin and many other sowers of ‘the rational, the
good and the eternal’. In the course of a whole century they shook and
undermined the building of Russian statehood. All this work was covered by the
moral authority of Prince Peter Alexeyevich Krapotkin, who had not been
bought by the Jews, and Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, who, although taking

31 Platonov, op. cit., p. 344.
32 Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, p. 154.
27
no bribes from the Jews, undermined both the State and the Church and even the
family very thoroughly.
“And any Berdichev chemist from the [Jewish] Bund or from the Bolsheviks,
in his struggle again the order created by history, could have taken me by the
lapel and said: ‘Listen, are you an intelligent person? Can’t you see that I am
walking in the steps of the best lights of Russian thought?’
“And what could I as ‘an intelligent person’ reply to this chemist? Truly he
was walking in their steps! And Chernyshevsky really was a ‘light’…
“If we, out of this extraordinarily complicated combination of factors that was
making and supporting the revolution, concentrate our fire only on one – Jewry,
- then we have lost the plot. It’s not so simple. They say: the Jew Jacob Schiff gave
money for the Russian revolution. Yes, he did. But [the Old Ritualist] Savva
Morozov also gave money for the same revolution. And Germany gave more
than any – not the Germany of Weimar and Ebert, and still less Hitler, but the
Germany of the Hohenzollerns… It’s not a secret to anybody that all these
‘entrenched truths’ were published on German money, while in the
Kshesinskaya palace German marks were valued above all… But if you simplify
the matter to such a degree that one can make a revolution in the world with
money, then the October revolution was made on German money. Á la guerre
comme á la guerre. However, it was with the closest and most powerful
participation of almost the whole of Russian Jewry…
“And so: the elite of the aristocracy laid the main weight of the struggle
against the monarchy on their own shoulders. Then they were joined by the
‘raznochintsy’, and by the very last decades of the past century this anti-
monarchist front received powerful support from the whole of Russian Jewry.”33
Fr. Lev Lebedev writes: “Soon after the manifesto of October 17, 1905 which
gave certain freedoms, legal Masonic lodges, which before had been banned,
began to appear. And although, practically speaking, secret Masonry never
ceased to exist in Russia, the absence of legal lodges was for the Masons a great
obstacle… A ‘reserve’ was being prepared in France by the ‘Grand Orient’.
Already in the 60s some Russians had entered French Masonry in Paris. Among
them was the writer I.S. Turgenev, later – Great Prince Nicholas Mikhailovich
(the ‘Bixiot’ lodge), and then the philosopher V. Vyrubov, the psychiatrist N.
Bazhenov, the electrophysicist P. Yablochkov, the historian M. Kovalevsky. In
1887 the ‘Cosmos’ (no. 288) lodge was founded for Russians – the writer A.
Amphiteatrov, the zemstvo activist V. Maklakov and the activist of culture V.N.
Nemirovich-Danchenko. From 1900 the Masonic Russian School of social
sciences began its work in Paris, and there arose yet another Russian lodge,
‘Mount Sinai’.34 At the beginning of 1906, with the agreement of the ‘Grand

33 Solonevich, “Rossia, Revoliutsia i Yevrejstvo” (Russia, the Revolution and
Jewry), Rossia i Revoliutsia (Russia and the Revolution), Moscow, 2007, pp. 26-27.
34 Both ‘Cosmos’ and ‘Mount Sinai’ were under the Supreme Council of the Ancient
and Accepted Scottish Rite, according to the Mason Boris Telepneff, Russian
28
Orient of France’, M. Kovalevsky opened a lodge of French obedience in Russia.
The first such lodge was joined by the already mentioned Kovalevsky, Bazhenov,
Maklakov, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and also new people such as S.
Kotlyarovsky, E. Kedrin (the jurist), the historian V.O. Klyuchevsky, Prince S.
Urusov, the Jewish doctor and lawyer M. Margulies, the diplomat I. Loris-
Melikov and others. This lodge had two main affiliates: in Moscow –
‘Regeneration’, and in St. Petersburg – ‘Polar Star’. They were ‘opened’ by two
high-ranking Masons, Senchole and Boulet, who came specially from France.
Later, in 1908, they gave ‘Polar Star’ the right to open new lodges in Russia
without the prior agreement of the French. Many lodges with various names
appeared [such as ‘the Iron Ring’ in Nizhni], but the leading role continued to be
played by ‘Polar Star’, which was led by Count A. Orlov-Davydov, and only
Masons of no lower rank than the 18th degree were admitted into it. The Masons
were also joined by the Cadet A. Kolyubakin, Prince Bebutov, Baron G. Maidel,
the public library worker A. Braudo, the historians N. Pavlov-Silvansky and P.
Schegolev, the lawyers S. Balavinsky and O. Goldovsky, the Octobrist A.I.
Guchkov, his comrade in the party M.V. Rodzyanko, the Cadet N.V. Nekrasov,
the workers’ party A.F. Kerensky (in 1912, through the ‘Ursa Minor’ lodge35), the
Mensheviks A. Galpern, Chkheidze, the Bolsheviks Trotsky, Lunacharsky,
Skvortsov-Stepanov, Krasin, Boky, Sereda, Chicherin, the millionaires N.I.
Tereschenko, A. Konovalov, P.P. Ryabushinsky (with his two brothers), Prince V.
Obolensky, Countess S.V. Panina, Baron V. Meller-Zakomelsky (not to be
confused with the general), M. Gorky, his wife E. Peshkova, his godson the Jew
Zenobius Peshkov (the brother of Ya. Sverdlov), their friend E.D. Kuskova (a
female Mason of the higher degrees), her husband S. Prokopovich, Prince G.
Lvov (president of the Zemstvo and City Unions), Prince A. Khatistov (the city
commandant of Tiflis), Prince P. Dolgorukov, Major-General P. Popovtsev (of the
33rd degree), Mark Aldanov, Fyodorov, Chelnokov, the Menshevik G. Aronson,
the artist Mark Chagall, the cadet V. Velikhov and very many other prominent
activists of that time. The lists of Russian Masons do not contain the name of the
Cadet historian P. Milyukov (he even concealed his Masonry), but only because
he had for a long time been in purely French Masonry… Masonic lodges
appeared and functioned also, besides Moscow and Petersburg, in Kiev, Odessa,
Nizhni-Novgorod, Minsk, Vitebsk, Tver, Samara, Saratov, Tiflis, Kutaisi and
other cities. In the words of Kuskova, before 1917 the whole of Russia was
covered by a net of Masonic lodges of which many thousands of people were
members.”36

Assistant Consul in Paris in 1922 (An Outline of the History of Russian Freemasonry).
(V.M.)
35 According to George Sprukts, Kerensky also belonged to the “Grand Orient of
the Peoples of Russia” and the Scottish Rite (32 n d degree) (“Re: [paradosis] Re:
White army”, orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com, June 9, 2004). (V.M.)
36 Lebedev, op. cit. “Telepneff reported that two Russian Lodges had been formed
in Paris under the auspices of the Grand Lodge of France while a Russian Lodge
existed in Berlin, the Northern Star Lodge, under a warrant of the Grand Lodge of
the Three Globes.” (Richard Rhoda, “Russian Freemasonry: A New Dawn”, a paper
read at the Orient Lodge no. 15 on June 29, 1996,
http://members.aol.com/houltonme/rus/htm).
29
The Mason Boris Telepneff wrote: “This was done accordingly until 1911,
when some of their members decided to renew their activities with due
prudence. One would not call these activities Masonic in any sense, as their chief
aim was purely political – the abolition of the autocracy, and a democratic regime
in Russia; they acknowledged allegiance to the Grand Orient of France. This
political organization comprised about forty Lodges in 1913. In 1915-1916
disagreements arose between their members who belonged to two political
parties (the constitutional democrats and the progressives) and could not agree
on a common policy. Ten Lodges became dormant. The remaining thirty Lodges
continued to work, and took part in the organization of the 1917 March
revolution and in the establishment of the Provisional Government. Their
political aim being attained, the organisation began to decay; twenty-eight
Lodges existed on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, and since then most of
their members have left Russia.”37
“Besides lodges of the ‘Polar Star’ structure there also existed lodges of a
mystical tendency. Among them were the Martinistes (old-style) headed by a
‘Great Master’, Count Musin-Pushkin, which was joined by many from the
aristocracy and even from the Imperial Family – Great Princes Nicholas
Nikolayevich [supreme commander of the Russian armed forces in 1914-15],
Peter Nikolayevich and George Mikhailovich.38 Among them at one time was the
noted Mason and occultist Papius, who was very active. Papius even hoped to
draw his Majesty Nicholas II, but was not successful! Among the mystics were
the Masons Philaletes, who were joined by Great Prince Alexander Mikhailovich
(the brother of George) and a string of aristocrats, about one thousand people in
all. Their main occupation was spiritist séances (supposed ‘communion’ with the
spirits and souls of the dead), which quite a lot of the intelligentsia were
interested in at that time. 39 Finally, there was the directly Satanist lodge
‘Lucifer’, which included many from the ‘creative’ sort, basically decadents such
as Vyacheslav Ivanov, V. Bryusov and A. Bely...

37 Telepneff, op. cit.
38 Telepneff also reported that “an independent lodge of the so-called Martiniste
Rite was formed among the entourage of Czar Nicholas II under the name of 'The
Cross and the Star',… which suspended its work in 1916.” Perhaps Great Prince
Nicholas Mikhailovich Romanov, the Chairman of the Russian History Society, was
a member of this lodge. Edvard Radzinsky (The Last Tsar, London: Arrow Books,
1993, p. 111) writes that he “was a mystic, a mason, and a freethinker… In the
family he was called Monsieur Egalité, as the eighteenth-century liberal, the Duc
d’Orléans, was called.” (V.M.)
39 “Other Martiniste lodges opened ... 'Apollonius' in St Petersburg (1910), 'St John'
in Moscow (1911), 'St Andrew' in Kiev (1912). A very curious lodge existed among
the Russian Navy League, calling themselves 'Philaletes'; beside philanthropic and
intellectual work, it pursued a political aim in opposition to that of the Grand
Orient lodges, namely the support of the monarchy of Nicholas II. Probably this
movement arose in connection with the Paris branch of the Swiss Order of the
Chevaliers 'Philaletes' which established two lodges in St Petersburg: 'The Pyramid
of the North' and 'The Star of the North'. Both pursued studies of mysticism and
symbolism.” (Telepneff, quoted in “Russian Freemasonry” by Worshipful Brother
Dennis Stocks, Barron Barnett Lodge.
http://www.casebook.org/dissertations/freemasonry/russianfm.html). (V.M.)
30
“On the direct orders of the ‘Grand Orient of France’, Masonry extended its
tentacles into the State apparatus, into the diplomatic corps. Thus according to
the data of N. Verberova in her book, People and Lodges40, the Masons in the
diplomatic service were: K.D. Nabokov (England), A.D. Kandaurov (France),
G.P. Zabello (Italy), A.V. Nekludov (Sweden), I.G. Loris-Melikov (Norway), K.M.
Onu (Switzerland), B.A. Bakhmetev (USA), N.A. Kudashev (China), A.I.
Scherbatsky (Brazil), etc.
“All the Masonic lodges in Russia were linked and communicated with each
other and with foreign centres, first of all with the ‘Grand Orient of France’. And
all of them together were ruled by the purely Jewish community (called
sometimes a ‘lodge’ and sometimes an ‘order’) Bnai Brith, which was at the head
of united world Zionism, with its centre in the USA.
“For the western centres, the most important thing from a political point of
view was Russian political Masonry of the ‘Polar Star’ structure. In 1909 it
declared that it was liquidating itself.41 This was a manoeuvre, well-known from
the times of [the Decembrist] P. Pestel, whose aim, on the one hand, was to get
rid of ‘ballast’ and spies that had penetrated into its midst, and on the other
hand, to create a new secret union for the political struggle that would not be
subject to the suspicion and danger its legal ‘brothers’ were in. Thus in the same
year of 1909 a deeply conspiratorial ‘Military lodge’ was formed headed by A.I.
Guchkov, and in 1910 – the ‘Ursa Minor’ lodge for work with ‘state’ society, in
which the main roles gradually came to be played by Prince G. Lvov, M.V.
Rodzyanko, A.F. Kerensky, N.V. Nekrasov, P.P. Ryabushinsky, M.I. Tereschenko
and A. Konovalov… Over them, that is, over the whole of Russian Masonry of
this tendency, there weighed the Masonic oath of fidelity to the ‘Grand Orient of
France’, which was given already in 1908 in the form of a special document
called ‘Obligation’. This oath-obligation was kept faithfully both before and after
the ‘self-liquidation’ and the emergence of a new leadership and a new structure.
In 1910 this leadership declared its formal independence from Russian Masonry –
but with the agreement of the French of the ‘Grand Orient’. The new leadership
significantly simplified the reception of new members, it rejected (for
conspiratorial reasons) many elements of Masonic symbolism and ritual, and
thereby became, in the language of the Masons, ‘unlawful’. But all this was part
of the conspiracy (so that in the event of something World Masonry could
declare its complete ‘non-involvement’ in the conspirators and the conspiracy).
In actual fact the whole course of the conspiracy was led and controlled precisely
through foreign Masons (through the embassies of Germany, England and
France in Russia). In 1910 Guchkov, a long-time member of the State Council and
the Third State Duma, became the president of the Duma. However, in 1911 he
voluntarily resigned from this post, which was immediately taken by his
‘brother’ Rodzyanko. In 1913 Guchkov and other ‘brothers’ created a secret

40Nina Berberova, Liudi i Lozhi: russkie masony XX stoletia, New York, 1986. (V.M.)
41“The existence of Masonic Lodges was discovered by the Russian Government in
1909; it also became known to the authorities that they were of French origin. It
was then decided by the Russian Lodges to suspend work.” (Telepneff). (V.M.)
31
‘Supreme Council of Peoples of Russia’, which was joined by up to 400 members.
But the presidents of the lodges knew only its secretaries – Nekrasov, Kerensky,
Tereschenko. Each new lodge consisted of no more than 12 members. The
Council and its ‘Convent’ coordinated the actions of the ‘Military Lodge’ and the
structures of ‘Ursa Minor’. At this time Guchkov headed the military committee
of the State Duma, and was in charge of defence questions. ‘In accordance with
service obligations’, he was linked with the General Staff, and the most
prominent military men, diplomats and industrialists. Gradually, one by one,
Guchkov attracted into his ‘Military Lodge’ Generals N.N. Yanushkevich, A.S.
Lukomsky, A.A. Polivanov, A.Z. Myshlayevsky, V.I. Gurko, Colonel Baron Korf,
and then Generals A.V. Alexeyev, N.V. Ruzsky, A.M. Krymov, L.G. Kornilov,
A.A. Brusilov, A.A. Manikovsky, V.F. Dzhunkovsky and many other eminent
officers.
“In essence, in the years 1909-1913 Guchkov had already prepared a general
plan of action, which he borrowed from the ‘Young Turk’ Masons in 1908 in
Turkey, where he went specially to study the experience of the Turkish
revolution. The essence of the plan consisted in the higher military officers,
including those in the Tsar’s closest entourage, being able, at the necessary
moment, to isolate their Monarch from all the levers of administration and force
him to whatever deed or word the conspirators needed at that moment.
“As we can see, Masonry contained prominent activists and members of the
leadership of almost all the parties and major organizations. Kerensky later
recalled that in Masonry they almost never allowed themselves to violate the
unity of the ‘brotherhood’ by party disagreements. But ‘in public’ a sharp
polemic between the parties went on, a struggle that sometimes seemed
irreconcilable to the public (the ‘profanes’)! So that whatever party came to
power in the event of the revolution, there would in any case be ‘brother-
masons’ at the helm of this power!”42
Yana Sedova writes: “This group of Masons – about 300 people – had
absolutely no interest in the [official] aims of Masonry and rituals. They had their
own clearly defined aim – to gain political power in the Russian Empire.
However, in spite of the fact that amongst them there were very many prominent
public figures, they did not have the real strength for a coup. For that reason, in
order to organize the coup, the Masons attracted outsiders who did not guess
who was using them and for what.”43

42Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 448-451.
43Sedova, “Byl li masonskij zagovor protiv russkoj monarkhii?” (Was there a
masonic plot against the Russian Monarchy?), Nasha Strana, November 24, 2006,
no. 2808, p. 4.
32
3. THE ACTORS IN THE REVOLUTION: (2) THE CHRISTIANS
Long before the Jews began to join terrorist organizations, or the intelligentsia
to weave plots against the tsar, the Russian people began to fall away from the
faith. This was mentioned by Saints Seraphim of Sarov and Tikhon of Zadonsk;
and St. Ignaty Brianchaninov spoke about “hypocrisy”, “scribes and Pharisees”
and “the salt losing its savour”. By the eve of the revolution this decline was still
more noticeable. “Are many Orthodox Christians firm in the faith which they
confess?” asked St. Joseph of Optina. “Do not the greater portion of them have
something of a weak faith, like a tiny spark which might be extinguished at any
moment?”44
The Church hierarchy was corrupted by renovationists such as Archbishop

Sergius (Stragorodsky) and Bishop Antoninus (Granovsky). There were few
bishops who spoke out openly against the revolutionary madness…
In the monasteries it was the same story. Thus the future Elder Gabriel of
Seven Lakes was warned by St. Ambrose of Optina “to go wherever he please, so
as only not to live in Moscow”, where monasticism was at such a low level.45 A
generation later, in 1909, Archbishop Nicon (Rozhdenstvensky) pointed to many
serious failings of contemporary monasticism at an All-Russian Monastic
Conference.46 In the same year, St. Barsanuphius of Optina said: “Contemporary
monasticism strives in all things to fulfil its own will. Abba Dorotheus says: ‘I
know of no other fall for a monk than as a consequence of his own will.’”47 The
ignorance and superstition of the name-worshipping monks did not grow on an
empty place; and pseudo-elders such as Rasputin and Iliodor could not have
flourished in a more truly pious society.
In the years 1908-13 there was a series of rebellions against the abbots and
elders of some of the best monasteries in Russia: Optina, Solovki, Glinsk. These
were usually linked with monks who had entered the monasteries during the
revolutionary years 1905-07.
This was true even outside Russia, in the Russian monastery and
sketes of Mount Athos. In 1907, a Russian Athonite, Schema-monk
Hilarion, published a book on the Jesus prayer entitled On the
Mountains of the Caucasus. This book was at first well-received and
passed the spiritual censor; but later its claim that the name of God is
God - more precisely, that the Name of God as uttered in the Jesus
prayer is not only holy and filled with the grace of God, but is holy in
and of itself, being God Himself - elicited criticism. Although both the

44 Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, The Elder Joseph of Optina, Boston,
Mass.: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1984, p. 284.

45 Fr. Simeon Kholmogorov, One of the Ancients, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska
Brotherhood, 1988, p. 67.

46 http://www.pravoslavie.ru/sm/30988.htm.
47 St. Barsanuphius, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., p. 409.
33
Greek and Russian Churches condemned the heresy 48 , the name-
worshippers rose up and expelled their Orthodox abbots and spiritual
leaders. Finally, in 1913, after every attempt at peaceful persuasion
had failed, the Tsar authorized a warship to be sent to Athos. The
rebellious monks were transported to Odessa and then sent to
different places of exile (for example, Novy Afon in Abkhazia).
Soon monastic opinion in Russia was polarised between those who,

like the monks of the Kiev Caves Lavra, approved of the book and its
name-worshipping thesis (imiabozhie in Russian), and those, like the
monks of the Pochaev Lavra and the Optina Desert, who rejected it.
However, as Gubanov writes, “the illiterate G.E. Rasputin interceded
for the heretical name-worshippers and even tried to incite the
empress to attack the fighters against the heresy of name-
worshipping.” 49 In 1914 the leading name-worshippers, including
Hieroschemamonk Anthony (Bulatovich), author of An Apology of Faith
in the Name of God and the Name of Jesus (1913), were justified by the
Moscow Diocesan Court, which declared: “… The Synodal Office has
found that in the confessions of faith in God and in the Name of God
coming from the named monks, in the words, ‘I repeat that in naming
the Name of God and the Name of Jesus as God and God Himself, I
reject both the veneration of the Name of God as His Essence, and the
veneration of the Name of God separately from God Himself as some
kind of special Divinity, as well as any deification of the very letters
and sounds and any chance thoughts about God’ – there is contained
information allowing us to conclude that in them there is no basis for
leaving the Orthodox Church for the sake of the teaching on the
Names of God.’ (decree № 1443 of May 8, 1914)”.
Of course, this decree was in no way a justification of the name-worshippers’

teaching, especially in view of the fact that on the same day the Office, led by
Metropolitan Macarius, affirmed that name-worshipping – “the new false-teachings
on the names of God proclaimed by Schema-Monk Hilarion and Anthony Bulatovich” –
was a heresy (decree № 1442 of May 8, 1914). Moreover, in rejecting “any
deification of the very letters and sounds and any chance thoughts about God”,
Bulatovich was obliged also to renounce his words in the Apology: “Every mental
representation of a named property of God is the Name of God [and therefore,
according to the name-worshippers, God Himself]”, “the contemplation of the
His name is God Himself”, “the conscious naming of God is God Himself”,
“Every idea about God is God Himself”, “we call the very idea of God – God”.

48 The heresy was condemned by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1912 (Charter No.
8522 of Patriarch Joachim III to Mount Athos, dated September 12) and 1913
(Charter No. 758 of Patriarch German V to Mount Athos, dated February 15), and
by the Russian Holy Synod in 1913 (Epistle of May 18, and Decree of August 27,
No. 7644). See Ekklesiastiki Alitheeia, N 16, April 20, 1913, pp. 123-125, N 19, May
11, 1913, pp. 145-146, N 11, N 24, June 15, 1913, pp. 187-191, March 15, 1914, p. 119
(in Greek); “O lzhe-uchenii imiabozhnikov”, Tserkovnie Vedomosti, N 20, 1913.
49 Gubanov, op. cit., p. 770.
34
Unfortunately, the repentance of the name-worshippers turned out to be
fictional. Bulatovich concealed his heresy behind ambiguous words and phrases.
Thus on May 18, 1914, in a letter to Metropolitan Macarius, Bulatovich thanked
him for his “justification”, and nobly deigned to declare that he was now ready
to return into communion with the Orthodox Church (!). And he added:
“Concerning the Name of God and the Name of Jesus Christ, we, in accordance
with the teaching of the Holy Fathers, confessed and confess the Divinity and the
Divine Power of the Name of the Lord, but we do not raise this teaching to the
level of a dogma, for it has not yet been formulated and dogmatised in council,
but we expect that at the forthcoming Council it will be formulated and
dogmatised. Therefore we, in accordance with the teaching of the Holy Fathers,
in the words of the ever-memorable Father John of Kronstadt said and say that
the Name of God is God Himself, and the Name of the Lord Jesus is the Lord
Jesus Christ Himself, understanding this not in the sense of a deification of the
created name, but understanding it spiritually, in the sense of the inseparability
of the God-revealed Truth, Which is the Action of the Divinity.” These words of
Bulatovich show that he was not sincere in his signature below his Confession, but
deceived Metropolitan Macarius (who was probably under pressure from the
Over-Procurator Sabler, who was in turn under pressure from the fervent name-
worshipper Gregory Rasputin). “Mixing truth with unrighteousness” (Rom.
1.18), Bulatovich mixed Orthodoxy with heresy. Thus Orthodoxy recognises that
there is a “Divine Power” in the name of Jesus, but does not recognise that it is
“Divinity”. Again, Orthodoxy recognises that in prayer the name of God is
indeed inseparable from God, but it does not confuse the two, as does Bulatovich.
For while a shadow is inseparable from the body that casts it, this is not to say
that the shadow is the body. Finally, Bulatovich’s “dogma” is still not
“formulated and dogmatised in council” – because it is not a dogma, but heresy!
The Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church accepted that Bulatovich
and his fellows had not really repented, so they set aside the decree of the
Moscow Synodal Office, and confirmed the sentences against the name-
worshippers (decree № 4136 of May 10-24, 1914), which confirmation was again
confirmed by decree № 2670 of March 10, 1916. “In this decree of the Most Holy
Synod,” wrote the future Hieromartyr Bishop Basil (Zelentsov), “we find a
confirmation of the basic rule that the name-worshippers must be received into
ecclesiastical communion and admitted to the sacraments of the Church only on
the unfailing condition that they reject the false teaching of name-worshipping
and witness to their faithfulness to the dogmas and teaching of the Church and
to their obedience to Church authority.”
Although name-worshipping was on the agenda of the 1917-18 Council and a

subcommission to study it under the leadership of Archbishop Theophan of
Poltava and Fr. Sergius Bulgakov was formed, the subcommission did not have
time to complete its work before the Council was terminated by the Bolsheviks.
However, on October 8/21, 1918, Patriarch Tikhon and the Most Holy Synod
declared: “The Most Holy Synod does not change its former judgement on the
error itself [of name-worshipping]… and has in no way changed its general rule,
35
according to which the name-worshippers, as having been condemned by the
Church authorities, can be received into Church communion… only after they
have renounced name-worshipping and have declared their submission to the
Holy Church… The petition of Hieroschemamonk Anthony to allow him to serve
is to be recognised as not worthy of being satisfied so long as he continues to
disobey Church authority and spread his musings which have been condemned
by the Church hierarchy to the harm of the Church”.
After this decision, the leading name-worshipper, Anthony Bulatovich, broke

communion for the second time with the Russian Church and was shortly
afterwards killed by robbers.
The name-worshipping movement survived in the Caucasus and South

Russian region (where the Tsar had transported the rebellious monks); and the
sophianist heretics Florensky and Bulgakov also confessed name-worshipping in
the inter-war period. In modern times the heresy has enjoyed a revival in
intellectualist circles in Russia, especially in the works of Bishop Gregory
(Lourié), who supports the heretical views of Bulatovich, considers him to be a
saint, and those who oppose his ideas, including several hieromartyrs of the
Russian Church to be “enemies of the Name”!
Reasons for the failure to stamp out the heresy included the comparatively
weak defence of the truth produced by the Greek and Russian theologians50, the
aura of martyrdom which was attached to the name-worshippers as a result of
their forcible expulsion from Mount Athos to Russia on a Russian cruiser, and
the fact that the heresy coincided with the end of the Balkan wars and the
transfer of Mount Athos from Turkish to Greek dominion after the Treaty of
Bucharest, which meant that mutual suspicions between the Greeks and the
Russians concerning the status of Athos hindered a united and thorough
approach to the problem. Many took up the cause of the name-worshippers as
part of their general attack on the “paralytical” Russian Holy Synod. Soon the
debate acquired political overtones: democrats and socialists generally took the
side of the name-worshippers, and the monarchists – that of the Orthodox.51
Bulatovich himself was a left social revolutionary.52
Elder Gerasimus of Alaska relates how Elder Joasaph of St. Tikhon’s

monastery, Kaluga province, would often say in those pre-revolutionary years:
"Misha, you see how monks are complaining - either the food is bad or
something else is not good enough! Misha, grumbling is a frightful sin. For
grumbling, God punished the chosen Israelite people not just once. Palestine is

50 The best effort was by S. Troitsky in one of the three reports attached by the
Russian Holy Synod to their decision of 1913: “Afonskaia Smuta”, Tserkovnie

Vedomosti, N 20, 1913, pp. 882-909.
51 Constantine Papoulides, Oi Rossoi onomolatroi tou Agiou Orous, (The Russian
Name-Worshippers of Mount Athos), Thessaloniki, 1977 (in Greek).

52 "Kratkoe opisanie biografii menie nyedostojnago skhiepiskopa Piotra Ladygina"
(MS written in Bishop Peter's own hand, 1948); Tserkovnaia Zhizn', NN 5-6, 7-8, 9-
10, 11-12, 1984; NN 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 1985.
36
not far from Egypt, but the Lord led the Jews a whole forty years, and not many
of them reached the Promised Land. See what a terrible sin it is - grumbling
against God. And why should monks grumble? They usually have a warm cell,
decent food, and enough bread to eat any time they want it. They have both
shoes and clothing. While our peasant, having a family, often lacks those things,
and then there are crop failures, and they have to pay taxes. And yet many of
them are bearing this horrendous burden. Oh Misha, you'll see, the Lord will
send terrible trials. He will take everything away from us, and then we will say,
“Bad times have come; we have nothing to eat.” Misha, this will inevitably take
place if we do not repent; for such a sin God will not spare either our luxurious
temples or the beautiful belfries, or the bells, or even the whole of our
brotherhood - everything, everything will be taken away for our sinful
grumbling.”53
Churchmen were particularly guilty of failing to support the monarchical

principle. Thus in May, 1913, the Holy Synod took the important decision to
forbid clergy from taking part in political movements. However, since most
clergy affected by this decree were working in the monarchist “Black Hundreds”
movement, this was, in effect, an anti-monarchist move; it was hardly consistent
with the Epistle that the Synod issued in February, 1913 on the occasion of the
200th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, in which they declared that “only in
an unbroken union of the Church with the state is the strength and might of our
native Rus’”. As a result of the May decree, such prominent monarchist clergy as
Archimandrite Vitaly (Maximenko) and Protopriest John Vostorgov were forced
to abandon the “Black Hundreds” movement. As a result, the movement went
into a sharp decline…
Again, in 1916 all 45 priests who were deputies in the Duma and
were considered “rightists” presented the Tsar with a petition to re-
establish “conciliarity” in the Church and stop using the clergy “as an
instrument of the government’s internal politics”. At such a critical
moment in the country’s life such a petition was more than a little
misplaced… When the liberal “Progressive Bloc” had been formed in
1915, more than half of these priests joined it.
All this demonstrated how the revolutionary spirit penetrated even into the
holiest institutions of Russia.54
A particular characteristic of the pre-revolutionary period – and a propaganda

gift for the revolutionaries - was the extravagance of the rich and their flagrant
immorality. The Romanovs – with the shining exception of the Tsar and Tsarina,

53 Fr. Leonid Kavelin, Elder Macarius of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska
Brotherhood Press, 1995, pp. 276-277.

54 Hieromonk Simeon (Kalugin), “Optinskaia Smuta 1910-1912 gg. V kontekste istoricheskikh
sobytij” (The Optina disturbances of 1910-1912 in the context of historical events),

http://cliuchinskaya.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/1910-1912.html
37
Great Princess Elizabeth and some others – were among the worst sinners. The
increasing hard-heartedness of wealthy Russian Christians to the poor was
bewailed by many leading churchmen, such as St. John of Kronstadt. Almost the
only thing shared by St. John and his ideological opposite, Lev Tolstoy, was their
condemnation of the rich. Thus Tolstoy wrote already in 1886 in What Then Must
We Do?: “The hatred and contempt of the oppressed masses are increasing, and
the physical and moral forces of the wealthy classes are weakening; the
deception on which everything depends is wearing out, and the wealthy classes
have nothing to console themselves with in this mortal danger.
“To return to the old ways is not possible; only one thing is left for those who
do not wish to change their way of life, and that is to hope that ‘things will last
my time’ – after that let happen what may. That is what the blind crowd of the
rich are doing, but the danger is ever growing and the terrible catastrophe draws
near…”55
Both rich and poor tended to forget the Christian teaching on social inequality,
namely, that it is an opportunity for the rich to show compassion and for the
poor to display patience. For, as Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich wrote, “it is God’s
desire that men be unequal in externals: riches, power, status, learning, position
and so forth. But he does not recommend any sort of competitiveness in this. God
desires that men compete in the multiplying of the inner virtues.” 56
But the rich in every age have been corrupt. What of the poor?... In the villages
and factories, as we have seen, revolutionary propaganda made deep inroads.
Although only a minority of peasants took part in the burning of landowners’
estates in the 1905 revolution, by 1917 the experience of the war and the lying
propaganda directed against the Tsar and his family had increased the numbers
of deserters, thieves and arsonists. In the elections to the Constituent Assembly in
1918 no less than 80% of the population voted for socialist deputies.57 Moreover,
support for the Bolsheviks in the elections, as Richard Pipes writes, “came not
from the region of Jewish concentration, the old Pale of Settlement, but from the
armed forces and the cities of Great Russia, which had hardly any Jews”.58 So
blame for the Russian revolution must fall on Russians as well as Jews, and not
only on the aristocratic or Masonic Russians, but on large swathes of the
Christian working population.
F. Vinberg writes: “Everyone was guilty! Both the higher circles of the
nobility, and the major and minor merchants, and the representatives of science,
and the servant classes, and in particular the adulterers of the word, the
corrupters of thought, many Russian writers of the last decades, lawyers and

55 Tolstoy, in A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy, London: Atlantic Books, 2012, pp. 362-363.
56 Velimirovich, Homilies, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, volume 2.
57 Edward Roslof, Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution,
1905-1946, Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 15.

58 Pipes, op.cit., p. 113.
38
professors: for all these categories of Russian citizens there can be no forgiveness
for the great crime they committed.”59
And so Ivan Solonevich’s words applied to all sections of the population:

“With the substitution of faith in absolute Good with faith in relative sausages,
everything else also begins to take on a relative character, including man. With
the loss of faith in God, loss of faith in man is also lost. The Christian principle,
‘love your neighbour as yourself’, for your neighbour is also a part of absolute
Good, is exchanged for another principle: ‘man is a means for the production of
sausages’. The feeling of absolute morality is lost… Consequently faith ceases to
exist not only in man generally, but also in one’s ‘neighbour’ and even in the
neighbour himself. And then begins mutual extermination…”60
A particular vice of the simple people was drunkenness. The future

hieromartyr Bishop Herman (Ryashentsev) of Vyazniki wrote: “The most evil
infirmity of our countryside and the strongest brake on all real enlightenment
and spiritual growth is alcohol. If in antiquity ‘Rus’ used to drink with gladness’,
now it has turned into a passion and a chronic illness, and our people not only
drinks away its last substance, an excess of which destiny never spoiled them
with, but, what is worst of all, it drinks away its mind, its conscience, its soul, the
man himself. On the soil richly watered with alcohol there develop card games,
interspersed with pearls of foul language, and there grow quarrels and fights,
those eternal companions of drunkenness.
“And new infirmities are added to these: the sowing of our political
innovators brings forth abundant shoots: they develop lack of respect to the
person and to parents, an easy attitude to other people’s property. Instances of
thievery and violence become more frequent. Add to that a distorted
manifestation of an incorrectly understood notion of the freedom of the
personality, which is reflected in the fall of morality among the young, and you
receive quite a full picture of the spiritual life in the countryside…”61
The general condition of the Russian people on the eve of the revolution was
described by Dmitri Merezhovsky as follows: “If you asked me what is the main
characteristic of Russian people in our days, I would reply: loneliness. Never and
nowhere have there been so many lonely people as now in Russia. Even those
who not long ago were sociable, have suddenly become solitary. People are
dispersing like iron filings bound together by a magnet when the magnet has lost
its strength: they are falling out of society like a fish out of a holy sweepnet…”62

59 Vinberg, op. cit., p. 7.
60 I.L. Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia (The People’s Monarchy), Minsk, 1998, pp.
384, 385.
61 Pis’ma Vladyki Germana (The Letters of Bishop Herman), Moscow: St. Tikhon
Theological Institute, Moscow, 2004, p. 13.

62 Merezhkovsiy, Bylo i Budet (It was and shall be).
39
4. THE ACTORS IN THE REVOLUTION: (3) RASPUTIN
Kerensky said that “without Rasputin, there could have been no Lenin”…
But no, Rasputin was not the cause of the Russian revolution: God would not
have allowed the greatest Christian empire in history to fall because of the
sinfulness of one man! Nevertheless, slanderous stories about the “elder’s”
supposed sexual relationship with the Empress, and of his control of the Russian
government through her, undoubtedly had a particularly corrosive influence on
the reputation of the monarchy during the war and hastened its demise.
Since the early 1990s there have been attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of
Rasputin, notably by the historians Oleg Platonov and Alexander Bakhanov.63
We can sympathize with these attempts insofar as they are motivated by a desire
to protect the reputation of the Tsar and Tsarina, which suffered so much
because of their (especially her) credulity in relation to Rasputin. Moreover, it is
right to point out that many of those who attacked Rasputin in the dying days of
the empire were motivated not so much by a desire to “save” the empire as by
mercenary, egoistic and unpatriotic considerations that make their testimony
highly dubious.
However, even after discounting these evilly-motivated testimonies, and

taking into account the anti-monarchical bias of such “champions of the truth”
about Rasputin as Guchkov and Rodzyanko, the evidence against Rasputin is too
great and too varied to dismiss wholesale. In 1995 the historian and dramatist
Edvard Radzinsky came into possession of the long-lost file of testimonies to the
Extraordinary Commission set up by the Provisional Government in March, 1917
to investigate the truth or otherwise of accusations against the Royal Couple and
those close to them.64 These testimonies, which include some by close friends of
Rasputin, such as his publisher Filippov, as well as by others whose integrity and
devotion to the Royal Couple cannot be doubted, and by several of his female
victims, force us to the conclusion that, barring some of the wildest accusations,
Rasputin was “guilty as charged”. Also impossible to reject wholesale are the
very extensive police reports on Rasputin’s immoral behaviour. While Bakhanov
among others has tried to dismiss even this evidence, Alexander Khitrov is right
in pointing out that the police were, after the Tsar himself, the very first victims
of the February revolution, and so cannot be accused of simply making up the
whole story.65

63 Bakhmatov, Pravda o Grigorii Rasputine (The Truth about Gregory Rasputin),
Moscow, 2010.
64 Radzinsky, Rasputin: The Last Word, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.
65 Khitrov, “Rasputin-Novykh Grigory Efimovich i kratkaia istoria spornogo
voprosa o priznanii v RPTsZ ego oschetserkovnogo pochitania, kak pravoslavnogo

startsa” (Gregory Efimovich Rasputin-Novykh and a short history of the
controversial question of his recognition in ROCOR of his veneration throughout
the Church as an Orthodox elder).
40
The Siberian peasant Gregory Rasputin emerged on the scene at the same time
as a new, more subtle and sinister threat replaced the revolutionary threat in
1906: theosophy, occultism, spiritism and pornography flooded into Russia.66
Neo-paganism was penetrating music and the arts, as we see, or example, in
Stravinsky’s famous ballet, The Rite of Spring (1913).67 Also sharply on the rise,
especially among the peasantry, were Protestant sects, as well as sectarian
movements that hid among the Orthodox peasantry like the khlysty. Rasputin
was symbolic of this trend, which undermined the foundations of Holy Rus’ just
as surely as the anti-monarchism of the revolutionaries.
After a debauched youth, Rasputin repented and spent some years on

pilgrimage, going from monastery to monastery, and also to Athos and
Jerusalem, becoming highly religious in a rather supercharged way. In 1899 he
married and had children, but in 1902 was recommended by Bishop Chrysanthus
of Kazan to the rector of the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, Bishop Sergius
(Stragorodsky, the future patriarch}. “The latter, in his turn, presented Rasputin
to the professor, celibate priest Veniamin, and to the inspector of the Academy,
Archimandrite Theophan.” 68
In November, 1905, Rasputin met the Tsar for the first time (probably through
the Montenegrin Grand Duchesses Militsa and Anastasia). The Royal Couple,
and especially the Tsarina, had already shown their vulnerability to religious
quacks in the affair of the French charlatan, “Monsieur Philippe” of Lyons. At
that time Grand Duchess Elizabeth, the Tsarina’s sister had tried to open her eyes
to the deception, but without success – she attributed her failure to her sister’s
inability to distinguish between the true faith and the condition of religious
exaltation.69
St. Elizabeth would also become a strong opponent of her sister’s “second
Friend”, Rasputin. But the second Friend had a powerful weapon that the first
Friend did not – his ability to heal the symptoms of the Tsarevich Alexei’s
haemophilia, a closely guarded secret and a cause of great anguish to his parents.
As Pierre Gilliard, the Tsarevich’s tutor, said: “The illness of the Tsarevich cast a
shadow over the whole of the concluding period of Tsar Nicholas II’s reign,
and… was one of the main causes of his fall, for it made possible the
phenomenon of Rasputin and resulted in the fatal seduction of the sovereigns
who lived in a world apart, wholly absorbed in a tragic anxiety which had to be
concealed from the eyes of all.”

66 Maria Carlson, “No Religion Higher than Truth”: A History of the Theosophical
Movement in Russia, 1875-1922, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

67 In 2013 the Mariinsky ballet under Valery Gergiev recreated Nijinsky’s original
1913 production in its original location, Paris. See

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BryIQ9QpXwI
68 Alexander Bokhanov, Manfred Knodt, Vladimir Oustimenko, Zinaida
Peregudova, Lyubov Tyutyunnik, The Romanovs, London: Leppi, 1993, p. 233.
69 Velikaia Kniaginia Elizaveta Fyodorovna i Imperator Nikolai II (Great Princess
Elizabeth Fyodorovna and Emperor Nicholas II), St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 2009, p.
34.
41
General V.N. Voeikov, commendant of the palace at Tsarskoye Selo and a
close friend of the Royal Couple until the end, was sceptical about Rasputin from
the beginning. But he witnessed to his healing power: “From the first time
Rasputin appeared at the bed of the sick heir, alleviation followed immediately.
All those close to the Royal Family were well acquainted with the case in Spala,
when the doctors found no means of helping Alexis Nikolayevich, who was
suffering terribly and groaning from pain. As soon as a telegram was sent to
Rasputin on the advice of Vyrubova, and the reply was received, the pains began
to decrease, his temperature began to fall, and soon the heir got better.
“If we take the point of view of the Empress-mother, who saw in Rasputin a
God-fearing elder who had helped her sick son by his prayers – much should be
understood and forgiven by every Russian devoted to the throne and the
Homeland.
“The help he gave to the heir strengthened the position of Rasputin to such a
degree at court that he no longer had need of the support of the [Montenegrin]
Great Princesses and clergy. As a completely uneducated man, he was not able or
did not want to hide this, and simply turned his back on his benefactors. Then
there began denunciations against him; in the Synod they began a case to
investigate the life and activity of Rasputin with the aim of demonstrating that he
was a sectarian preaching principles harmful to Orthodoxy; while in society they
began to speak about him as about a debauchee who cast a shadow on the
empress by his appearances at court. The excuse for these conversations was
disillusionment in Rasputin, who did not justify the hopes laid upon him.
“The stronger the campaign of denunciation against the Rasputin coming

from the Duma, the more there developed in her Majesty the feeling that it was
necessary to protect the man who was irreplaceable for the health of the heir: the
influence of the empress on certain appointments can be explained by her desire
to distance people who were dangerous to Rasputin from power.
“Taking full account of all this, Rasputin put on the mask of a righteous man
at court, but outside it did not disdain to use the privileges of his position and to
satisfy his sometimes wild instincts...”70
D.P. Anashkin writes: “Let us not judge the doting parents for
grasping at any opportunity to aid their son, who himself loved
Grigory Efimovich. But again arises the question of this character’s
two-faced nature. Did he truly love the Royal Family? If it were so, he
would not have discredited them in the eyes of the public by his
behavior. Or, if he saw that the situation had gotten out of hand, then
he would have quietly withdrawn. Instead, he placed self-assuredness
before this. Besides which, sanctity does not signify omniscience.

70 Voeikov, op. cit., pp. 58-59.
42
Though sincere [in their affection], the Royal Family misjudged their
‘friend.’
“It must be noted that the ‘special intimacy of the elder’ with the
Royal Family advertised by Rasputin’s admirers is greatly
exaggerated. To be exact, there was no ‘special bond’ at all. The Tsar,
contrary to commentary of both the pro-Rasputin and the Soviet press,
did not place blind trust in Rasputin. In a letter to the Empress, he
writes, ‘As far as Rasputin’s counsels, you know how carefully one
must regard his counsels.’ As evidence, S. Oldenburg shows in
his book, The Life and Rule of Emperor Nicholas II, that in 1915–16 the
Sovereign heeded not one of Rasputin’s
71
seventeen recommendations.”
This judgement was confirmed by the Tsar’s sister Grand Duchess Olga
Alexandrovna, who witnesses that the real influence of Rasputin on the Tsar was
negligible: "Knowing Nicky as I did, I must insist that Rasputin had not a particle
of influence over him. It was Nicky who eventually put a stop to Rasputin's visits
to the palace. It was again Nicky who sent the man back to Siberia and that more
than once. And some of Nicky's letters to Alicky are proof enough of what he
really thought of Rasputin's advice..."
Of particular significance was the relationship between Rasputin and

Archimandrite, later Bishop Theophan (Bystrov). 72 Vladyka was at first
impressed by the peasant, but became disillusioned with him after becoming
convinced, from his own observations and from the confessions of his spiritual
daughters, that the man was untrustworthy and sexually rapacious.
“After a while,” he testified to the Extraordinary Commission, “rumours

reached me that Rasputin had resumed his former way of life and was
undertaking something against us… I decided to resort to a final measure – to
denounce him openly and to communicate everything to the former emperor. It
was not, however, the emperor who received me but his wife in the presence of
the maid of honour Vyrubova.
“I spoke for about an hour and demonstrated that Rasputin was in a state of
spiritual deception… The former empress grew agitated and objected, citing
theological works… I destroyed all her arguments, but she… reiterated them: ‘It

71 Anashkin, “The Real Rasputin?: A Look at His Admirers’ Revisionist History”,
Orthodox Life, May 4, 2017.

72 On this important, but unsung hero of the faith, see Monk Anthony (Chernov),
Vie de Monseigneur Théophane, Archevêque de Poltava et de Pereiaslavl (The Life of his

Eminence Theophan, Archbishop of Poltava and Pereyaslavl), Lavardac: Monastère
Orthodoxe St. Michel, 1988; Richard Bettes, Vyacheslav Marchenko, Dukhovnik
Tsarskoj Sem’i (Spiritual Father of the Royal Family), Moscow: Valaam Society of
America, 1994, pp. 60-61; Archbishop Averky (Taushev), Vysokopreosviaschennij
Feofan, Arkhiepiskop Poltavskij i Pereiaslavskij (His Eminence Theophan, Archbishop
of Poltava and Pereyaslavl), Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1974 ; Radzinsky,
Rasputin, op. cit.
43
is all falsehood and slander’… I concluded the conversation by saying that I
could no longer have anything to do with Rasputin… I think Rasputin, as a
cunning person, explained to the royal family that my speaking against him was
because I envied his closeness to the Family… that I wanted to push him out of
the way.
“After my conversation with the empress, Rasputin came to see me as if

nothing had happened, having apparently decided that the empress’s
displeasure had intimidated me… However, I told him in no uncertain terms,
‘Go away, you are a fraud.’ Rasputin fell on his knees before me and asked my
forgiveness… But again I told him, ‘Go away, you have violated a promise given
before God.’ Rasputin left, and I did not see him again.”
At this point Vladyka received a “Confession” from a former devotee of

Rasputin’s. On reading this, he understood that Rasputin was “a wolf in sheep’s
clothing” and “a sectarian of the khlyst type” who “taught his followers not to
reveal his secrets even to their confessors. For if there is allegedly no sin in what
these sectarians do, then their confessors need not be made aware of it.”
“Availing myself of that written confession, I wrote the former emperor a

second letter… in which I declared that Rasputin not only was in a state of
spiritual deception but was also a criminal in the religious and moral sense… In
the moral sense because, as it followed from the ‘confession’, Father Gregory had
seduced his victims.”
There was no reply to this letter. “I sensed that they did not want to hear me
out and understand… It all depressed me so much that I became quite ill.” And
indeed, the Tsaritsa’s faith in the “elder” was unshakeable; she felt in her heart –
“which has never deceived me” – that Rasputin was a man of God and that her
family and Russia lived through his prayers.
But in fact, Vladyka’s letter had reached the Tsar, and the scandal surrounding
the rape of the children’s nurse, Vishnyakova, whose confessor was Vladyka,
could no longer be concealed. Vishnyakova herself testified to the Extraordinary
Commission that she had been raped by Rasputin during a visit to Verkhoturye
Monastery in Tobolsk province, a journey undertaken at the empress’s
suggestion. “Upon our return to Petrograd, I reported everything to the empress,
and I also told Bishop Theophan in a private meeting with him. The empress did
not give any heed to my words and said that everything Rasputin does is holy.
From that time forth I did not see Rasputin, and in 1913 I was dismissed from my
duties as nurse. I was also reprimanded for frequenting the Right Reverend
Theophan.”
Another person in on the secret was the maid of honour Sophia Tyutcheva,
grand-daughter of the famous poet. As she witnessed to the Commission, she
was summoned to the Tsar, who said to her:
“You have guessed why I summoned you. What is going on in the nursery?”
44
She told him.
“So you too do not believe in Rasputin’s holiness?”
She replied that she did not.
“But what will you say if I tell you that I have lived all these years only thanks
to his prayers?”
Then he “began saying that he did not believe any of the stories, that the
impure always sticks to the pure, and that he did not understand what had
suddenly happened to Theophan, who had always been so fond of Rasputin.
During this time he pointed to a letter from Theophan on his desk.”
“’You, your majesty, are too pure of heart and do not see what filth surrounds
you.’ I said that it filled me with fear that such a person could be near the grand
duchesses.
“’Am I then the enemy of my own children?’ the sovereign objected.
“He asked me never to mention Rasputin’s name in conversation. In order for

that to take place, I asked the sovereign to arrange things so that Rasputin would
never appear in the children’s wing.”
But her wish was not granted, and both Vishnyakova and Tyutcheva would
not long remain in the tsar’s service…
It was at about this time that the newspapers began to write against Rasputin.
And a member of the circle of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, Michael
Alexandrovich Novoselov, the future bishop-martyr of the Catacomb Church,
published a series of articles condemning Rasputin. "Why do the bishops,” he
wrote, “who are well acquainted with the activities of this blatant deceiver and
corrupter, keep silent?… Where is their grace, if through laziness or lack of
courage they do not keep watch over the purity of the faith of the Church of God
and allow the lascivious khlyst to do the works of darkness under the mask of
light?" The brochure was forbidden and confiscated while it was still at the
printer's, and the newspaper The Voice of Moscow was heavily fined for
publishing excerpts from it.
Also disturbed by the rumours about Rasputin was the Prime Minister Peter
Arkadievich Stolypin. But he had to confess, as his daughter Maria relates:
“Nothing can be done. Every time the opportunity presents itself I warn his
Majesty. But this is what he replied to me recently: ‘I agree with you, Peter
Arkadievich, but better ten Rasputins than one hysterical empress.’ Of course,
the whole matter is in that. The empress is ill, seriously ill; she believes that
Rasputin is the only person in the whole world who can help the heir, and it is
beyond human strength to persuade her otherwise. You know how difficult in
45
general it is to talk to her. If she is taken with some idea, then she no longer takes
account of whether it is realisable or not… Her intentions are the very best, but
she is really ill…”
In the spring of 1911, after listening to a report on Rasputin by Stolypin, the

tsar thanked him and said: “I know and believe, Peter Arkadyevich, that you are
sincerely devoted to me. Perhaps all that you say is true. But I beseech you never
again to talk to me about Rasputin. In any case I can do nothing…”73
In November, 1910, Bishop Theophan went to the Crimea to recover from his
illness. But he did not give up, and inundated his friend Bishop Hermogen of
Saratov, the future hieromartyr, with letters. It was his aim to enlist this
courageous fighter against freethinking in his fight against Rasputin. But this
was difficult because it had been none other than Vladyka Theophan who had
introduced Rasputin to Bishop Hermogen, speaking of him, as Bishop Hermogen
himself said, “in the most laudatory terms.” Indeed, for a time Bishop Hermogen
and Rasputin had become allies in the struggle against freethinking and
modernism.
Unfortunately, a far less reliable person then joined himself to Rasputin’s

circle – Sergius Trophanov, in monasticism Iliodor, one of Bishop Theophan’s
students at the academy. He later became a co-worker of Dzerzhinsky, a Baptist,
married and had seven children. In an interview with the newspaper Rech’
(January 9, 1913) Fr. Iliodor said: “I used to be a magician and fooled the people.
I was a Deist.” He built a large church in Tsaritsyn on the Volga, and began to
draw thousands to it with his fiery sermons against the Jews and the intellectuals
and the capitalists. He invited Rasputin to join him in Tsaritsyn and become the
elder of a convent there. Rasputin agreed.
However, Iliodor’s inflammatory sermons were not pleasing to the authorities,

and in January, 1911 he was transferred to a monastery in Tula diocese. But he
refused to go, locked himself in his church in Tsaritsyn and declared a hunger-
strike. Bishop Hermogen supported him, but the tsar did not, and ordered him to
be removed from Tsaritsyn.
When Rasputin’s bad actions began to come to light, Hermogen vacillated for
a long time. However, having made up his mind that Vladyka Theophan was
right, and having Iliodor on his side now too, he decided to bring the matter up
before the Holy Synod, of which he was a member, at its next session. Before that,
however, he determined to denounce Rasputin to his face. This took place on
December 16, 1911. According to Iliodor’s account, Hermogen, clothed in
hierarchical vestments and holding a cross in his hand, “took hold of the head of
the ‘elder’ with his left hand, and with his right started beating him on the head
with the cross and shouting in a terrifying voice, ‘Devil! I forbid you in God’s
name to touch the female sex. Brigand! I forbid you to enter the royal household
and to have anything to do with the tsarina! As a mother brings forth the child in

73 Bakhanov, Imperator Nikolai II, Moscow, 1998, p. 294.
46
the cradle, so the holy Church through its prayers, blessings, and heroic feats has
nursed that great and sacred thing of the people, the autocratic rule of the tsars.
And now you, scum, are destroying it, you are smashing our holy vessels, the
bearers of autocratic power… Fear God, fear His life-giving cross!”
Then they forced Rasputin to swear that he would leave the palace. According
to one version of events, Rasputin swore, but immediately told the empress what
had happened. According to another, he refused, after which Vladyka Hermogen
cursed him. In any case, on the same day, December 16, five years later, he was
killed…
Then Bishop Hermogen went to the Holy Synod. First he gave a speech
against the khlysty. Then he charged Rasputin with khlyst tendencies.
Unfortunately, only a minority of the bishops supported the courageous bishop.
The majority followed the over-procurator in expressing dissatisfaction with his
interference “in things that were not of his concern”.
Vladyka Hermogen was then ordered to return to his diocese. As the director
of the chancery of the over-procurator witnessed, “he did not obey the order and,
as I heard, asked by telegram for an audience with the tsar, indicating that he
had an important matter to discuss, but was turned down.” On receiving this
rejection, Bishop Hermogen began to weep. Then he said: “They will kill the tsar,
they will kill the tsar, they will surely kill him.”
The opponents of Rasputin now felt the fury of the Tsar. Bishop Hermogen
and Iliodor were exiled to remote monasteries. (Iliodor took his revenge by
leaking forged letters of the Empress to Rasputin.) And Vladyka Theophan was
transferred to the see of Astrakhan. The Tsar ordered the secular press to stop
printing stories about Rasputin. Before leaving the Crimea, Vladyka called on
Rasputin’s friend, the deputy over-procurator Damansky. He told him:
“Rasputin is a vessel of the devil, and the time will come when the Lord will
chastise him and those who protect him.” Later, in October, 1913, Rasputin tried
to take his revenge on Bishop Theophan by bribing the widow of a Yalta priest
who knew him to say that Vladyka had said that he had had relations with the
empress. The righteous widow rejected his money and even spat in his face…
During the war, the influence of Rasputin became more dangerous. For, with
the Tsar at the front, control of home appointments de facto came under the
control of the Tsarina, who always turned to Rasputin and to those who were
approved by him... Voeikov points out that from 1914 Vyrubova and Rasputin
“began to take a greater and greater interest in questions of internal politics”, but
at the same time argues that the number of appointments actually made by the
Tsarina were few.74 Bakhanov calculates that there were eleven. But these few
included Prime Ministers, Interior Ministers and church metropolitans!
Moreover, even the Tsarina admitted that one of them, the appointment of A.N.

74 Voeikov, op. cit., pp. 50, 143.
47
Khvostov as Interior Minister, was disastrous!75 It is hardly surprising, in those
circumstances, that the reputation of the Royal Couple suffered...
Who, in the end, was Rasputin? Bishop Theophan’s opinion was that Rasputin
had originally been a sincerely religious man with real gifts, but that he had been
corrupted by his contacts with aristocratic society. Archbishop Anthony
(Khraptovitsky) of Voronezh had a similar opinion. After having tea with him
twice, Rasputin “revealed himself as a deceiver and intriguer”.
But the Royal Couple, “surrounded as they were from all sides by flattery and
slanders, decided that love for truth and honourableness remained only in the
simple people, and therefore turned to ‘the people’s reason’…
“However, they forgot about the most important point in such a choice.
“I myself was raised in the countryside amidst middle-ranking landowners

and close to the people, and I share all the positive declarations about the
people’s reason and honourableness. But I insist on my conviction that a peasant
is worthy of every respect only as long as he remains a peasant. But if he enters
the milieu of the masters, he will unfailingly be corrupted...”76
Rasputin was killed on December 16, 1916 at the hands of Great Prince Dmitri
Pavlovich Romanov, Prince Felix Yusupov and a right-wing member of the
Duma, Purishkevich. Yusupov lured him to his flat on the pretext of introducing
him to his wife, the beautiful Irina, the Tsar’s niece. He was given madeira mixed
with poison (although this is disputed), but this did not kill him. He was shot
twice, but neither did this kill him. Finally he was shot a third time – according to
recent joint investigation by British and Russian police, by a British secret agent,
Oswald Rayner77 - before being pushed under the ice of the River Neva.

75 Bakhanov, Imperator Nikolai II-ij, Moscow, 1998, p. 371.
76 Khrapovitsky, “Moi Vospominania” (My Reminiscences), Tserkovnie Vedomosti,
N 450, in Bishop Nikon (Rklitsky), Zhizneopisanie Blazhennejshago Antonia
(Biography of his Beatitude Anthony), vol. 3, New York, 1957, pp. 8-11.
77 See Michael Smith, A History of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, London: Dialogue; Annabel
Venning, “How Britain’s First Spy Chief Ordered Rasputin’s Murder”, Daily Mail, July 22, 2010,
pp. 32-33; Montefiore, The Romanovs, pp. 606-612. It is also probable, according to Christopher
Danziger, that Yusupov had contacts with the SIS through his Oxford friends (“The Prince, the
Spy and the Mad Monk”, Oxford Today, Michaelmas Term, 2016, p. 33). However, John Penycate
writes: “Danzinger quotes an autopsy report saying Rasputin drowned. [However,] Professor
Dmitri Kosorotov of the Russian Imperial Military Medical Academy, who carried out Rasputin’s
autopsy, wrote that he was killed by a bullet to the forehead. You can see the bullet hole in the
photograph of Rasputin’s post-mortem. Kosorotov adds that the three bullets that struck
Rasputin came from three different guns. Felix Yusupov and Vladimir Purishkevich, the
conspirator who was a member of the Duma, described in their memoirs firing the first two shots.
But not the coup de grace. This led to the rumour that Yusupov’s old Oxford friend, the SIS
officer Oswald Rayner, shot Rasputin. The former ‘C’ of MI6, Sir John Scarlett (Magdalen, 1966),
assured me that he didn’t – the official line now for a century, but probably true” (“Rasputin
Disputed”, Oxford Today, Trinity term, 2017, p. 6). Considering how Scarlett lied about the
48
The Tsar did not condone the murder. But Yusupov was justified by his close
friend, Great Princess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, who said that he had only done his
patriotic duty – “you killed a demon,” she said. (To Yusupov’s parents she wrote:
“May the Lord bless the patriotic exploit of your son”.78) Then, as Yusopov
himself writes in his Memoirs, “she informed me that several days after the death
of Rasputin the abbesses of monasteries came to her to tell her about what had
happened with them on the night of the 30th. During the all-night vigil priests
had been seized by an attack of madness, had blasphemed and shouted out in a
voice that was not their own. Nuns had run down the corridors crying like
hysterics and tearing their dresses with indecent movements of the body…”79
And to the Tsar she wrote on December 29: “Crime remains crime, but this
one being of a special kind, can be counted as a duel and it is considered a
patriotic act… Maybe nobody has had the courage to tell you now, that in the
street of the towns people kissed like at Easter week, sang the hymn in the
theatres and all moved by one feeling – at last the black wall between us and our
Emperor is removed.”80
Montefiore speaks of “the great myth of Alexandra’s and Rasputin’s

influence” on the Tsar during the great crisis of July, 1914.81 However, there is no
doubt that during the war, Rasputin became more influential and dangerous.
For, with the Tsar at the front, control of home appointments de facto came
under the control of the Tsarina, who always turned to Rasputin and to those
who were approved by him... Voeikov points out that from 1914 Rasputin and
the Tsarita’s and Rasputin’s friend Vyrubova “began to take a greater and greater
interest in questions of internal politics”, but at the same time argues that the
number of appointments actually made by the Tsarina were few.82 Bakhanov
calculates that there were no more than eleven… But these few included Prime
Ministers, Interior Ministers and church metropolitans! Moreover, even the
Tsarina admitted that one of them, the appointment of A.N. Khvostov as Interior
Minister, was disastrous!83 It is hardly surprising, in those circumstances, that the
reputation of the Royal Couple suffered...
Rasputin was a symbol of the majority, peasant stratum of the Russian

population in the last days of the empire. Though basically Orthodox and
monarchist, it was infected with spiritual diseases that manifested themselves in
the wild behaviour of so many peasants and workers after the revolution. The
support of the peasants kept the monarchy alive just as Rasputin kept the

supposed weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003, we are entitled to be skeptical of his
testimony…
78 Yusupov, Memuary (Memoirs), Moscow, 1998, p. 235.
79 Yusupov, op. cit., p. 230.

80 Alexander Bokhanov, Manfred Knodt, Vladimir Oustimenko, Zinaida Peregudova, Lyubov
Tyutyunnik, The Romanovs, London: Leppi, 1993, p. 237.

81 Montefiore, The Romanovs, p. 571.
82 Voeikov, op. cit., pp. 50, 143.
83 Bakhanov, Imperator Nikolaj II, Moscow, 1998, p. 371.
49
tsarevich alive, stopping the flow of blood that represented the ebbing spiritual
strength of the dynasty.
“Rasputin,” writes Radzinsky, “is a key to understanding both the soul and
the brutality of the Russia that came after him. He was a precursor of the millions
of peasants who, with religious consciousness in their souls, would nevertheless
tear down churches, and who, with a dream of the reign of Love and Justice,
would murder, rape, and flood the country with blood, in the end destroying
themselves...”84
But while Rasputin lost grace and the majority of Russians descended into
madness, it was a different story for the royal family. They had put their trust in
a charlatan, but inwardly had remained pure and faithful to God, and so were
finally counted worthy of martyrdom... Thus both the Tsar, the Tsaritsa and the
tsarevnas were shot in July, 1918. And “the child,” the Tsarevich Alexei, the
future of the dynasty, “who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron” and over
whom Rasputin appeared to have had such power, “was caught up to God and
His throne” (Revelation 12.5)...

84 Radzinsky, Rasputin, p. 501.
50
5. STUPIDITY OR TREASON?
Russia was not defeated militarily from without, but by revolution from
within. And yet the losses sustained by Russia during the war had a significant
bearing on the outcome of the revolution. For in the first year almost all the old
cadres, from privates to colonels, had been killed – that is, the best and the most
loyal to the Tsar. 85 The pre-revolutionary aristocracy of Russia was almost
completely wiped out in the first two years of the war.86 From 1916, to fill up the
losses in the ranks of the junior and middle commanders, the officer schools were
forced to take 9/10ths of their entrance from non-noble estates. These new
commanders were of much lower quality than their predecessors, who had been
taught to die for the Faith and the Fatherland. Especially heavy losses were
suffered in the same period by the military chaplains. The older generation of
clergy had enjoyed considerable spiritual authority among the soldiers. But they
were replaced by less experienced men enjoying less authority.87
The critical factor was the loss of morale among the rank and file. In general,
the appeals of the socialists and Bolsheviks before the war that the workers of
different countries should not fight each other had not been successful. Patriotic
feelings turned out to be stronger than class loyalties. However, the terrible
losses suffered in the war, the evidence of massive corruption and incompetence
in arms deliveries, the unending lying propaganda against the Tsar and the
return of Bolshevik agitators began to take their toll.
“… Evidence suggests that many soldiers were convinced by 1915 that they
could not beat the Germans, and that by the end of 1916 they were full of
despondency and recrimination against the authorities who had sent them into
war without the wherewithal to win. The evidence that victory was as remote as
ever, despite Brusilov’s initial successes and another million casualties, produced
a still uglier mood. Soldiers’ letters revealed a deep anxiety about the
deteriorating quality and quantity of their provisions (the daily bread ration was
reduced from three pounds to two, and then to one, during the winter), as well
as anger about rocketing inflation and scarcities that endangered their loved ones’
welfare. Many wanted to end the war whatever the cost, and over twenty
mutinies seem to have occurred in October-December 1916 (the first on this scale
in any army during the war), some involving whole regiments, and in each case
taking the form of a collective refusal of orders to attack or to prepare to
attack.”88

85 According to Goulévitch, whose father was chief of staff of the group of Russian
armies facing the Germans, “the Russian army lost over two-thirds of its cadres”
(op. cit., p. 191).
86 Sergius Vladimirovich Volkov, “Pervaia mirovaia vojna i russkij ofitserskij
korpus”, Nasha Strana, N 2874, August 29, 2009, p. 3.

87 Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 463- 464.
88 Stevenson, op. cit., p. 218.
51
But the most serious threat to the stability of Russia from within came from
the Duma. Late in 1915, taking advantage of the Tsar’s absence at the front, the
liberals in the Duma had formed a “progressive bloc” designed to force the tsar
to give them “a government responsible to the people” – that is, to give power to
themselves in a constitutional monarchy. The Germans were well aware of this,
which is why they smuggled Lenin and a lot of money into Russia in a sealed
train “in order to create… the greatest possible chaos. We should do all we can…
to exacerbate the differences between the moderate and extremist parties,
because we have the greatest possible interest in the latter gaining the upper
hand”.89 This plan went back to 1915, when Alexander Helphand, code-named
Parvus, a German agent, persuaded the German Foreign Ministry that they
might engineer a mass strike in Russia. In March, 1917, Arthur Zimmermann
convinced the Kaiser and the army that the Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, who was
living in exile in Switzerland, should be smuggled back into Russia.”90
The Germans must have known that if Lenin, a sworn enemy of all
governments, and especially of monarchist ones such as Germany’s, were to
succeed in Russia, they would have created a scourge for their own backs. But
they at least had the excuse that they were fighting against Russia and saw
victory over Russia as their first priority. Much less comprehensible was the
attitude of the English and French Masons, who, while relying on the Russians as
allies, were prepared to plot against the Tsar. The madness of attempting to
overthrow a powerful ally in time of war was obscured by the fact that the
Americans entered the war in place of the Russians in 1917.
Given that the tsar had the God-given right to rule, and had been anointed to
the kingdom in a special church rite, the sacrament of anointing to the kingdom,
how was he to exercise his rule in relation to rebels? This was truly a most
difficult problem, which required both the meekness of David and the wisdom of
Solomon. Tsar Nicholas II, as we have seen, was the most merciful of men, and
the least inclined to manifest his power in violent action. Once the head of the
police promised him that there would be no revolution in Russia for a hundred
years if the Tsar would permit 50,000 executions. The Tsar quickly refused this
proposal… And yet he could manifest firmness, and was by no means as weak-
willed as has been claimed. Thus once, in 1906, Admiral F.V. Dubasov asked him
to have mercy on a terrorist who had tried to kill him. The Tsar replied: “Field
tribunals act independently and independently of me: let them act with all the
strictness of the law. With men who have become bestial there is not, and cannot
be, any other means of struggle. You know me, I am not malicious: I write to you
completely convinced of the rightness of my opinion. It is painful and hard, but
right to say this, that ‘to our shame and gall’ [Stolypin’s words] only the
execution of a few can prevent a sea of blood and has already prevented it.”91

89 Count Brockdorff-Rantzau to the German Foreign Office, April 2, 1917; in Cohen
and Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, p. 726.

90 Huw Strachan, The First World War, London: Pocket Books, 2006, p. 256.
91 Lebedev, op. cit., p. 430.
52
In the Duma on November 1, 1916, the leader of the Cadet party, Paul
Milyukov, holding a German newspaper in his hand and reading the words: “the
victory of the court party grouped around the Tsarina”, uttered his famously
seditious evaluation of the regime’s performance: “Is it stupidity – or treason?”
To which the auditorium replied: “Treason”. Major-General V.N. Voeikov, who
was with the Tsar at the time, writes: “The most shocking thing in this most
disgusting slander, unheard of in the annals of history, was that it was based on
German newspapers…
“For Germany that was at war with us it was, of course, necessary, on the eve
of the possible victory of Russia and the Allies, to exert every effort and employ
all means to undermine the might of Russia.
“Count P.A. Ignatiev, who was working in our counter-espionage abroad,

cites the words of a German diplomat that one of his agents overheard: ‘We are
not at all interested to know whether the Russian emperor wants to conclude a
separate peace. What is important to us is that they should believe this rumour,
which weakens the position of Russia and the Allies.’ And we must give them
their due: in the given case both our external and our internal enemies showed
no hesitation: one example is the fact that our public figures spread the rumour
coming from Duma circles that supposedly on September 15, 1915 Grand Duke
Ludwig of Hesse, the brother of the Empress, secretly visited Tsarskoye Selo. To
those who objected to this fable they replied: if it was not the Grand Duke, in any
case it was a member of his suite; the mysterious visit was attributed to the desire
of Germany, with the cooperation of the Empress, to conclude a separate peace
with Russia.
“At that time nobody could explain to men whether the leader of the Cadet
party, Milyukov himself, was led by stupidity or treason when he ascended the
tribune of the State Duma, holding in his hands a German newspaper, and what
relations he had with the Germans…”92
Treason was certainly afoot among the Masons. And so, it could be argued,
the Tsar should have acted against the conspirators at least as firmly as he had
against the revolutionaries of 1905-06. Moreover, this was precisely what the
Tsaritsa argued in private letters to her husband: “Show to all, that you are the
Master & your will shall be obeyed – the time of great indulgence & gentleness is
over – now comes your reign of will & power, & obedience…” (December 4,
1916). And again: “Be Peter the Great, John [Ivan] the Terrible, Emperor Paul –
crush them all under you.” (December 14, 1916). She urged him to prorogue the
Duma, remove Trepov and send Lvov, Milyukov, Guchkov and Polivanov to
Siberia.
But he did not crush them. And in attempting to understand why we come
close to understanding the enigma of the greatest of the tsars…

92 Voeikov, So Tsarem i Bez Tsaria (With and Without the Tsar), Moscow, 1995, p.
137.
53
One false explanation is that he was deterred by the death of Rasputin, in that
Rasputin had “prophesied”: “Know that if your relatives commit murder, then
not one of your family, i.e. your relatives and children, will live more than two
years…” Now Rasputin had been murdered by relatives of the tsar. Did this
mean that resistance to the revolution was useless? However, the tsar was not as
superstitious as his enemies have made out. One pseudo-prophecy could not
have deterred him from acting firmly against the conspirators, if that is what his
conscience told him to do. Rasputin was certainly the evil genius of the Royal
Family, and they – or the Tsaritsa, at any rate – were deceived in believing him to
be a holy man. But his real influence on the course of events was only indirect –
in giving the enemies of the Tsar an excuse for viciously slandering him.
Archpriest Lev Lebedev has another hypothesis: “We shall not err by one iota
if we suppose that such question arose at that time in the consciousness of the
Tsar himself, that he too experienced movements of the soul in the direction of
deciding everything by simply and speedily dealing with the conspirators. We
remember his words, that ‘with men who have become bestial there is not, and
cannot be, any other means of struggle’ (besides shooting them) and that ‘only the
execution of a few can prevent a sea of blood’. But there appeared before the Tsar
at that time in the persons of Lvov, Rodzyanko, Guchkov, etc. not ‘bestialized’
criminal murderers like the Bolsheviks, but respectable people with good
intentions! Yes, they were in error in thinking that by removing the Tsar from
power they rule Russia better [than he]. But this was a sincere error, they thought
that they were truly patriots. It would have been wrong to kill such people! Such
people should not even have been sent to Siberia (that is, into prison). It was
necessary to show them that they were mistaken. And how better to show them
than by victory over the external enemy, a victory which was already in their
hands, and would be inevitable in four or five months! The tsar did not know that
his closest generals had already prepared to arrest him and deprive him of power
on February 22, 1917. And the generals did not know that they were doing this
precisely in order that in four or five months’ time there should be no victory! That
had been decided in Bnai-Brit, in other international Jewish organizations (Russia
must not be ‘among the victor-countries’!). Therefore through the German
General Staff (which also did not know all the plots, but thought only about its
own salvation and the salvation of Germany), and also directly from the banks of
Jacob Schiff and others (we shall name them later) huge sums of money had
already gone to the real murderers of the Tsar and the Fatherland - the Bolsheviks.
This was the second echelon [of plotters], it hid behind the first [the Russian
Masons]. It was on them (and not on the ‘noble patriots’) that the world powers
of evil placed their hopes, for they had no need at all of a transfigured Russia,
even if on the western (‘their’) model. What they needed was that Russia and the
Great Russian people should not exist as such! For they, the powers of evil, knew
Great Russia better (incomparably better!) than the whole of Russian ‘society’
(especially the despised intelligentsia). Did Guchkov know about the planned
murder of the whole of Great Russia? He knew! The Empress accurately called
him ‘cattle’. Kerensky also knew, and also several specially initiated Masons, who
hid this from the overwhelming majority of all the ‘brothers’ – the other Russian
54
Masons. The specially initiated had already for a long time had secret links
(through Trotsky, M. Gorky and several others) with Lenin and the Bolsheviks,
which the overwhelming majority of the Bolsheviks, too, did not know!
“And what did his Majesty know? He knew that society was eaten up by
Judaeo-Masonry, he knew that in it was error and cowardice and deception. But
he did not know that at the base of the error, in its secret places, was treason. And
he also did not know that treason and cowardice and deception were all around
him, that is, everywhere throughout the higher command of the army. And what
is the Tsar without an army, without troops?! Then there is the question: could
the Tsar have learned in time about the treachery among the generals? Why not!
Let’s take, for example, Yanushkevich, or Gurko, or Korfa (or all of them
together), whom Sukhomlinov had pointed to as plotters already in 1909 (!). In
prison, under torture – such torture as they had with Tsars Ivan and Peter – they
would have said everything, given up all the rest…! But in this case, he, Nicholas II,
would have needed to be truly like Ivan IV or Peter I from the beginning – that is,
a satanist and a born murderer (psychologically), not trusting anyone, suspecting
everyone, sparing nobody. It is significant that her Majesty joined to the names of
these Tsars the name of Paul I. That means that she had in mind, not Satanism
and bestiality, but only firmness (that is, she did not know who in actual fact were
Ivan the Terrible and his conscious disciple, Peter I). But she felt with striking
perspicacity that her husband was ‘suffering for the mistakes of his royal
predecessors’. Which ones?! Just as we said, first of all and mainly for the ‘mistakes’
precisely of Ivan IV and Peter I. Not to become like them, these predecessors, to
overcome the temptation of replying to evil with evil means – that was the task of
Nicholas II. For not everything is allowed, not all means are good for the attainment
of what would seem to be the most important ends. The righteousness of God is not
attained by diabolic methods. Evil is not conquered by evil! There was a time
when they, including also his Majesty Nicholas II, suppressed evil by evil! But in
accordance with the Providence of God another time had come, a time to show
where the Russian Tsar could himself become a victim of evil – voluntarily! – and
endure evil to the end. Did he believe in Christ and love Him truly in such a way as
to suffer voluntarily like Christ? The same Divine providential question as was
posed for the whole of Great Russia! This was the final test of faith – through life and
through death. If one can live only by killing and making oneself one with evil and
the devil (as those whom one has to kill), then it would be better not to live! That
is the reply of the Tsar and of Great Russia that he headed! The more so in that it
was then a matter of earthly, historical life. Here, in this life and in this history to
die in order to live again in the eternal and new ‘history’ of the Kingdom of
Heaven! For there is no other way into this Kingdom of Heaven – the Lord left no
other. He decreed that it should be experienced only by this entry… That is what
turned out to be His, God’s will!
“We recall that his Majesty Nicholas II took all his most important decisions
after ardent prayer, having felt the goodwill of God. Therefore now, on considering
earnestly why he then, at the end of 1916 and the very beginning of 1917 did not
take those measures which his wife so warmly wrote to him about, we must
inescapably admit one thing: he did not have God’s goodwill in relation to them!
55
Her Majesty’s thought is remarkable in itself, that the Tsar, if he had to be ruled
by anyone, should be ruled only by one who was himself ruled by God! But there
was no such person near the Tsar. Rasputin was not that person. His Majesty
already understood this, but the Tsaritsa did not yet understand it. In this
question he was condescending to her and delicate. But, as we see, he did not
carry out the advice of their ‘Friend’, and did not even mention him in his replies
to his wife. The Tsar entrusted all his heart and his thoughts to God and was
forced to be ruled by Him alone.”93
There is much of value in this hypothesis, but it is too kind to the Masonic
plotters. Yes, they were “sincere” – but so were the Bolsheviks! It seems unlikely
that the Tsar should have considered the Bolsheviks worthy of punishment, but
the Masons not. More likely, in our opinion, is that he thought that acting against
the Masons would bring forward the revolution at precisely the moment when
he wanted peace in the rear of the army. Moreover, the Masons controlled the
public organizations, like the Military-Industrial Committees, whose leader was
Guchkov, and the zemstvos, whose leader was Prince Lvov. These, in spite of
their disloyalty, were nevertheless making their contribution to providing
ammunition for the army and helping the wounded. “The Emperor held the
opinion that ‘in wartime one must not touch the public organizations’.”94
Almost all the plotters later repented of their actions. Thus “in the summer of
1917,” writes F. Vinberg, “in Petrograd and Moscow there circulated from hand
to hand copies of a letter of the Cadet leader Milyukov. In this letter he openly
admitted that he had taken part, as had almost all the members of the State
Duma, in the February coup, in spite of the fact that he understood the danger of
the ‘experiment’ he had undertaken. ‘But,’ this gentleman cynically admitted in
the letter, ‘we knew that in the spring we were were about to see the victory of
the Russian Army. In such a case the prestige and attraction of the Tsar among
the people would again become so strong and tenacious that all our efforts to
shake and overthrow the Throne of the Autocrat would be in vain. That is why
we had to resort to a very quick revolutionary explosion, so as to avert this
danger. However, we hoped that we ourselves would be able to finish the war
triumphantly. It turned out that we were mistaken: all power was quickly torn
out of our hands by the plebs… Our mistake turned out to be fatal for
Russia’…”95
So we must conclude that it was both stupidity and treason that manifested
themselves in the actions of the February plotters. They were undoubtedly
traitors in violating their oath of allegiance to the Tsar. But they were also stupid
because they did not understand what the overthrow of the Tsar would lead to…
*

93 Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 473-475.
94 Sedova, “Ne Tsar’, a Ego Poddanie Otvetsvenny za Febral’skij Perevorot 1917
Goda” (Not the Tsar, but his Subjects were Responsible for the February Coup of
1917”), Nasha Strana, N 2864, March 14, 2009, p. 3.
95 Vinberg, op. cit., p. 151.
56
Many people think that the Russian revolution began as the result of an
elemental movement of the masses. It is true that after the abdication of the Tsar
the masses joined the revolution. But the February revolution itself was a
carefully hatched plot. Shtormakh considers that the main plotters were A.I.
Guchkov, Prince G.E. Lvov, N.V. Nekrasov and M.I. Tereschenko, all of whom
became ministers in the Provisional Government.96
Their leader was the industrialist and conservative (supposedly monarchist)

parliamentarian, Alexander I. Guchkov.
“The views of Guchkov,” writes Voeikov, “were a secret for nobody: already
in 1908 he was enthusiastic about the work of the Young Turks, and he found it
necessary to correct the mistake of the fighters for freedom in 1905, who before
their planned movement had not paid enough attention to the army, whose
faithfulness at that time they had not succeeded in shaking.”97
Yana Sedova writes: “Already in 1906, after a meeting with the Emperor, A.I.
Guchkov came to the unexpected conclusion: ‘We are in for still more violent
upheavals’. Then he wanted ‘simply to step aside’. But already in those years he
began to talk about a ‘coup d’état’.
“In the next few years Guchkov’s attention was temporarily occupied by work
in the State Duma. But in 1911 after the murder of Stolypin, as he later recalled,
there arose in him ‘an unfriendly feeling’ towards the Emperor Nicholas II.
“At the beginning of 1913, at a meeting in his Petersburg flat, Guchkov talked
about a military coup in Serbia. The discussion moved to a coup in Russia. At
this point one of the participants in the meeting said that ‘the party of the coup is
coming into being’.
“Several months later, at a congress of his [Octobrist] party in Petersburg,

Guchkov proclaimed the principle by which he was governed in the next four
years: ‘the defence of the monarchy against the monarch’.
“The next year, during the ‘great retreat’, Guchkov created the Military-
Industrial Committees, an organization whose official task was to help provide
the army with ammunition. In fact, however, the committees turned out to be an
instrument for the preparation of a coup.
“However, Guchkov would probably have continued to the end of his life
only to ‘platonically sympathize’ with the coup, and do nothing himself, if once
there had not appeared in his flat the leader of Russian masonry, N.V. Nekrasov.

96 http://rushistory.3dn.ru/forum/4-86-1
97 Voeikov, op. cit., p. 131.
57
“The two of them became the ‘initiators’ of a plan: ‘a palace coup, as a result of
which his Majesty would be forced to sign his abdication passing the throne to
his lawful Heir’.
“Soon another Mason, M.I. Tereschenko, joined the plot, and, as Guchkov
recalled, ‘the three of us set about a detailed working out of this plan’.”98
On September 8, 1915 a “Committee of National Salvation” issued

“Disposition Number 1”. “It affirmed,” writes N. Yakovlev, “that there were two
wars going on in Russia – against a stubborn and skilful enemy from outside and
a no less stubborn and skilful enemy from inside. The attainment of victory over
the external enemy was unthinkable without a prior victory over the internal
enemy. By the latter they had in mind the ruling dynasty. For victory on the
internal front it was necessary… immediately to appoint a supreme command
staff, whose basic core consisted of Prince G.E. Lvov, A.I. Guchkov and A.F.
Kerensky.”99
Some of the plotters may have considered regicide. Thus Shtormakh writes:
“’In 1915,’ recounts the Mason A.F. Kerensky in his memoirs, ‘speaking at a
secret meeting of representatives of the liberal and moderate conservative
majority in the Duma and the State Council, which was discussing the Tsar’s
politics, V.A. Maklakov, who was to the highest degree a conservative liberal,
said that it was possible to avert catastrophe and save Russia only by repeating
the events of March 11, 1801 (the assassination of Paul I).’ Kerensky reasons that
the difference in views between him and Maklakov came down only to time, for
Kerensky himself had come to conclude that killing the Tsar was ‘a necessity’ ten
years earlier. ‘And besides,’ continues Kerensky, ‘Maklakov and those who
thought like him would have wanted that others do it. But I suggested that, in
accepting the idea, one should assume the whole responsibility for it, and go on
to execute it personally’. Kerensky continued to call for the murder of the Tsar. In
his speech at the session of the State Duma in February, 1917 he called for the
‘physical removal of the Tsar, explaining that they should do to the Tsar ‘what
Brutus did in the time of Ancient Rome’.”100
According to Guchkov, they worked out several variants of the seizure of

power. One involved seizing the Tsar in Tsarskoye Selo or Peterhof. Another
involved doing the same at Headquarters. This latter plan would have had to
involve some generals who were members of the military lodge, especially
Alexeyev (a friend of Guchkov’s) and Ruzsky. However, this might lead to a
schism in the army, which would undermine its capability for war. So it was
decided not to initiate the generals into the plot – although, as we shall see, they
played a very important role quite independently of Guchkov’s band, prevented

98 Sedova, op. cit., p. 3.
99 Yakovlev, 1 Avgusta, 1914, Moscow, 1974, p. 13.
100 http://rushistory.3dn.ru/forum/4-86-1.
58
loyal military units from coming to the aid of the Tsar, and themselves
demanded his abdication.101
A third plan, worked out by another Mason, Prince D.L. Vyazemsky,

envisaged a military unit taking control of the Tsar’s train between Military
Headquarters and Tsarskoye Selo and forcing him to abdicate in favour of the
Tsarevich.
Yet another plan was to seize the Tsar (on March 1) and exile him abroad.
Guchkov claims that the agreement of some foreign governments to this was
obtained.
The Germans got wind of these plans, and not long before February, 1917 the
Bulgarian Ambassador tried to warn the Tsar about them. The Germans were
looking to save the Tsar in order to establish a separate peace with him. But the
Tsar, in accordance with his promise to the Allies, rejected this out of hand.
Yet another plan was worked out by Prince G.E. Lvov. He suggested forcing
the Tsar to abdicate and putting Great Prince Nicholas Nikolayevich on the
throne in his place, with Guchkov and Lvov as the powers behind the throne.
The Mason A.I. Khatisov, a friend of the Great Prince, spoke with him and his
wife about this, and they were sympathetic to the idea. Sedova claims that Lvov
actually offered the throne to Nikolasha…102
At a meeting between members of the Duma and some generals in the study
of Rodzyanko in February, 1917 another plot to force the Tsar to abdicate was
formed. The leading roles in this were to be played by Generals Krymov and
Ruzsky and Colonel Rodzyanko, the Duma leader’s son.
Finally, the so-called naval plot was formed, as Shulgin recounts, according to
which the Tsaritsa (and perhaps also the Tsar) was to be invited onto a warship
and taken to England.103
Besides the formal conspirators, there were many others who helped them by
trying to undermine the resolve of the Tsar. Thus “before the February coup,”
writes Yana Sedova, “in the Russian empire there were more and more attempts
on the part of individual people to ‘open the eyes of his Majesty’ to the internal
political situation.

101 Sedova, after arguing that the generals were never initiated into Guchkov’s plot,
goes on: “Finally, nevertheless, Guchkov revealed his plan to Ruzsky. But this took
place already after the coup. On learning of the plot, Ruzsky cried out: ‘Ach,
Alexander Ivanovich, if you had told me about this earlier, I would have joined
you.’ But Guchkov said: ‘My dear, if I had revealed the plan, you would have
pressed a button, and an adjutant would have come and you would have said:
“Arrest him”.’” (“Ne Tsar…”, p. 4)
102 Sedova, ““Byl li masonskij zagovor…?” Nasha Strana.
103 http://rushistory.3dn.ru/forum/4-86-1.
59
“This ‘search for truth’ assumed a particularly massive character in November,
1916, beginning on November 1, when Great Prince Nicholas Mikhailovich
arrived at Stavka to have a heart-to-heart conversation with his Majesty…
“Very many considered it their duty to ‘open the eyes of his Majesty’: Great
Princes Nicholas and Alexander Mikhailovich, Nicholas Nikolayevich and Paul
Alexandrovich, the ministers Ignatiev and Pokrovsky, Generals Alexeyev and
N.I. Ivanov, the ambassadors of allied governments Buchanan and Paléologue,
the president of the Duma M. Rodzyanko, Protopresbyter of the army and navy
G. Shavelsky, the court commandant V.N. Voejkov, the chief representative of
the Red Cross P.M. Kaufmann-Turkestansky, the official A.A. Klopov, the dentist
S.S. Kostritsky…
“This is far from a complete list. It includes only conversations, but many
addressed his Majesty in letters or tried to influence the Empress (Great Prince
Alexander Mikhailovich both spoke with his Majesty and sent him a very long
letter and spoke with the Empress). ‘It seemed,’ wrote Rodzyanko later, ‘that the
whole of Russia was beseeching his Majesty about one and the same thing, and it
was impossible not to understand and pay heed to the pleas of a land worn out
by suffering’.
“But what did ‘the whole of Russia’ ask about? As a rule, about two things:
the removal of ‘dark powers’ and the bestowing of ‘a ministry of confidence’. The
degree to which the boundaries between these two groups was blurred is evident
from the fact that the Duma deputy Protopopov at first considered himself a
candidate for the ‘ministry of confidence’, but when his Majesty truly appointed
him a minister, the name of Protopopov immediately appeared in the ranks of
the ‘dark powers’. By the ‘dark powers’ was usually understood Rasputin and
his supposed protégés. Few began to think at that time that ‘the Rasputin legend’
was invented, and not invented in vain.
“It was less evident what the ‘ministry of confidence’ was. For many this term
had a purely practical meaning and signified the removal from the government
of certain ministers who were not pleasing to the Duma and the appointment in
their place of Milyukov, Rodzyanko and other members of the Duma.
“But the closer it came to the February coup, the more demands there were in
favour of a really responsible ministry, that is, a government which would be
formed by the Duma and would only formally be confirmed by his Majesty. That
a responsible ministry was no longer a real monarchy, but the end of the
Autocracy was not understood by everyone. Nobody at that time listened to the
words of Scheglovitov: ‘A monarchist who goes with a demand for a ministry of
public confidence is not a monarchist’.
“As for the idea of appointed people with no administrative experience, but of
the Duma, to the government in conditions of war, this was evidently thought
precisely by those people. All these arguments about ‘dark forces’ and ‘a
ministry of confidence’ first arose in the Duma and were proclaimed from its
60
tribune. Evidently the beginning of the mass movements towards his Majesty in
November, 1916 were linked with the opening of a Duma session at precisely
that time. These conversations were hardly time to coincide with the opening of
the Duma: rather, they were elicited by the Duma speeches, which were
distributed at the time not only on the pages of newspapers, but also in the form
of leaflets. ‘We,’ wrote Shulgin later, ‘ourselves went mad and made the whole
country mad with the myth about certain geniuses, ‘endowed with public
confidence’, when in fact there were none such…’
“In general, all these conversations were quite similar and usually irrelevant.
Nevertheless, his Majesty always listened attentively to what was expressed in
them, although by no means all his interlocutors were easy to listen to.
“Some of them, like many of the Great Princes and Rodzyanko, strove to
impose their point of view and change his political course, demanding a ministry
endowed with confidence or even a responsible ministry. His Majesty listened to
them in silence and thanked them for their ‘advice’.
“Others, like General Alexeyev or S.S. Kostritsky, were under the powerful
impression (not to say influence) of the Duma speeches and political agitation,
which the truly dark forces who had already thought up the February coup were
conducting at the time. Those who gave regular reports to his Majesty and whom
he trusted were subjected to particularly strong pressure. If they began a heart-
to-heart conversation, his Majesty patiently explained to them in what he did not
agree with them and why.
“There existed a third category which, like P.M. Kaufmann, got through to
his Majesty, even though they did not have a report to give, so as to tell him ‘the
whole bitter truth’. They did not clearly know what they wanted, and simply
said ‘everything that had built up in their souls’. Usually they began their
speeches with the question: could they speak to him openly (as if his Majesty
would say no to such a question!), and then spoke on the same two subjects,
about the ‘dark powers’ and the government, insofar as, by the end of 1916, the
same things, generally speaking, had built up in all their souls. The speech of
such a ‘truth-seeker’ usually ended in such a sad way (Kaufmann just said:
‘Allow me: I’ll go and kill Grishka!’) that his Majesty had to calm them down
and assure them that ‘everything will work out’.
“One cannot say that his Majesty did not listen to his interlocutors. Some
ministers had to leave their posts precisely because of the conversations. For
example, on November 9, 1916 his Majesty wrote to the Empress that he was
sacking Shturmer since nobody trusted that minister: ‘Every day I hear more
and more about him. We have to take account of that.’ And on the same day he
wrote in his diary: ‘My head is tired from all these conversations’.
“From the beginning everyone noticed his tiredness, and his interlocutors
began more often to foretell revolution to him. Earlier he could say to the visitor:
‘But you’ve gone out of your mind, this is all in your dreams. And when did
61
you dream it? Almost on the very eve of our victory?! And what are you
frightened of? The rumours of corrupt Petersburg and the babblers in the Duma,
who value, not Russia, but their own interests?’ (from the memoirs of
Mamantov). And then the conversation came to an end. But now he had to
reply to the most senseless attacks. And he replied. To the rumours of betrayal
in the entourage of the Empress: ‘What, in your opinion I’m a traitor?’ To the
diagnosis made by the Duma about Protopopov: ‘When did he begin to go mad?
When I appointed him a minister?’ To the demand ‘to deserve the confidence of
the people’: ‘But is it not that my people has to deserve my confidence?’
However, they did not listen to him…”104
The plot was successful. But it succeeded in eventually bringing to power,

not the Masonic liberals, but the Bolsheviks, who destroyed all the plotters and
all their Masonic lodges, forcing the Masons themselves to flee back to their
mother lodges abroad… Thus in October Kerensky and his Masonic colleagues
fled to France, where they set up lodges under the aegis of the Grand
Orient…105

104 Sedova, “’Razgovory po dusham’ Fevral’skikh Impotentov” (‘Heart-to-heart
Conversation of the February Impotents’), Nasha Strana (Our Country), N 2834,

December 29, 2007, p. 7.
105 G. Katkov, Fevral’skaia Revoliutsia (The February Revolution), Paris, 1984, pp.
175-82.
62
6. APOCALYPTIC VISIONS
On February 21, 1917, just before the February revolution, a 14-year-old

Kievan novice, Olga Zosimovna Boiko, fell into a deep trance lasting for forty
days during which many mysteries were revealed to her. She saw the
following: “In blinding light on an indescribably wonderful throne sat the
Saviour, and next to Him on His right hand – our sovereign, surrounded by
angels. His Majesty was in full royal regalia: a radiant white robe, a crown, with
a sceptre in his hand. And I heard the martyrs talking amongst themselves,
rejoicing that the last times had come and that their number would be
increased. They said that they would be tormented for the name of Christ and
for refusing to accept the seal [of the Antichrist], and that the churches and
monasteries would soon be destroyed, and those living in the monasteries
would be driven out, and that not only the clergy and monastics would be
tortured, but also all those who did not want to receive ‘the seal’ and would
stand for the name of Christ, for the Faith and the Church.”106
So the coming age was to be an apocalyptic struggle against the Antichrist, an

age of martyrdom for Christ’s sake – and the Tsar would be among the martyrs.
More was revealed a few weeks later, on March 2, the very day of the Tsar’s
abdication, when the Mother of God appeared to the peasant woman Eudocia
Adrianovna and said to her: “Go to the village of Kolomenskoye; there you will
find a big, black icon. Take it and make it beautiful, and let people pray in front
of it.” Eudocia found the icon at 3 o’clock, the precise hour of the abdication.
Miraculously it renewed itself, and showed itself to be the “Reigning” icon of
the Mother of God, the same that had led the Russian armies into war with
Napoleon. On it she was depicted sitting on a royal throne dressed in a dark red
robe and bearing the orb and sceptre of the Orthodox Tsars, as if to show that
the sceptre of rule of the Russian land had passed from earthly rulers to the
Queen of Heaven…107
So the Orthodox Autocracy, as symbolized by the orb and sceptre, had not
been destroyed, but was being held “in safe keeping”, as it were, by the Queen
of Heaven, until the earth should again be counted worthy of it…108

106 Letter of Sergius Nilus, 6 August, 1917; in V. Gubanov, Tsar’ Nikolai II-ij i Novie
Mucheniki (Tsar Nicholas II and the New Martyrs), St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 121.
107 It is also said that during the siege of the Moscow Kremlin in October, 1917, the
Mother of God ordered the “Reigning” icon to be taken in procession seven times
round the Kremlin, and then it would be saved. However, it was taken round only
once… (Monk Epiphany (Chernov), Tserkov’ Katakombnaia na Zemle Rossijskoj (The
Catacomb Church in the Russian Land), Old Woking, 1980 (MS), http://www.vs-
radoste.narod.ru/photoalbum09.html)
108 However, both the facts about the appearance of the icon and its theological interpretation are
disputed. See M. Babkin, “2 (15) marta 1917 g.: iavlenie ikony ‘Derzhavnoj’ i otrechenie ot
prestola imperatora Nikolaia II” (March 2/15, 1917: the appearance of the “Reigning’ icon and
Emperor Nicholas II’s abdication from the throne), Posev, March, 2009, pp. 21-24.
63
A third vision was given in this year to Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow,
who alone in the Church's hierarchy had refused to accept the Provisional
Government because of his oath of allegiance to the Tsar: "I saw a field. The
Saviour was walking along a path. I went after Him, crying,
"'Lord, I am following you!'
"Finally we approached an immense arch adorned with stars. At the

threshold of the arch the Saviour turned to me and said again:
"'Follow me!'
And He went into a wondrous garden, and I remained at the threshold and
awoke. Soon I fell asleep again and saw myself standing in the same arch, and
with the Saviour stood Tsar Nicholas. The Saviour said to the Tsar:
"'You see in My hands two cups: one which is bitter for your people and the
other sweet for you.'
"The Tsar fell to his knees and for a long time begged the Lord to allow him
to drink the bitter cup together with his people. The Lord did not agree for a
long time, but the Tsar begged importunately. Then the Saviour drew out of the
bitter cup a large glowing coal and laid it in the palm of the Tsar's hand. The
Tsar began to move the coal from hand to hand and at the same time his body
began to grow light, until it had become completely bright, like some radiant
spirit. At this I again woke up.
“Falling asleep yet again, I saw an immense field covered with flowers. In the
middle of the field stood the Tsar, surrounded by a multitude of people, and
with his hands he was distributing manna to them. An invisible voice said at
this moment:
"'The Tsar has taken the guilt of the Russian people upon himself, and the
Russian people is forgiven.'"
But how could the Russian people could be forgiven through the Tsar? A.Ya.
Yakovitsky has expressed the following interpretation. The aim of the
Provisional Government was to have elections to the Constituent Assembly,
which would finally have rejected the monarchical principle. But this would
also have brought the anathema of the Zemsky Sobor of 1613 upon the whole of
Russia, because the anathema invoked a curse on the Russian land if it ever
rejected Tsar Michael Romanov and his descendants. Now according to
Yakovitsky, the vision of Metropolitan Macarius demonstrates that through his
martyric patience the Tsar obtained from the Lord that the Constituent
Assembly should not come to pass – through its dissolution by the Bolsheviks in
January, 1918. Moreover, his distributing manna to the people is a symbol of the
distribution of the Holy Gifts of the Eucharist. So the Church hierarchy, while it
wavered in its loyalty in 1917, did not finally reject monarchism, and so did not
64
come under anathema and was able to continue feeding the people spiritually.
In this way the Tsar saved and redeemed his people.
Returning to the Reigning icon, Yakovitsky writes: “Through innumerable

sufferings, blood and tears, and after repentance, the Russian people will be
forgiven and Royal power, preserved by the Queen of Heaven herself, will
undoubtedly be returned to Russia. Otherwise, why should the Most Holy
Mother of God have preserved this Power?”109 “With this it is impossible to
disagree. The sin committed can be purified only by blood. But so that the very
possibility of redemption should arise, some other people had to receive power
over the people that had sinned, as Nebuchadnezzar received this power over
the Jewish people (as witnessed by the Prophet Jeremiah), or Baty over the
Russian people (the first to speak of this after the destruction was the council of
bishops of the Kiev metropolia)… Otherwise, the sufferings caused by fraternal
blood-letting would only deepen the wrath of God…”110
So redemption could be given to the Russian people only if they expiated

their sin through the sufferings of martyrdom and repentance, and provided
that they did not reject the Orthodox Autocracy in principle. The Tsar laid the
foundation to this redemption by his petition before the throne of the Almighty.
The New Martyrs built on this foundation through their martyric sufferings.
And yet redemption, as revealed in the restoration of the Orthodox

Autocracy, has not yet come. And that because the third element – the
repentance of the whole people – has not yet taken place…
In the same fateful year of 1917 Elder Nectary of Optina prophesied: "Now
his Majesty is not his own man, he is suffering such humiliation for his mistakes.
1918 will be still worse. His Majesty and all his family will be killed, tortured.
One pious girl had a vision: Jesus Christ was sitting on a throne, while around
Him were the twelve apostles, and terrible torments and groans resounded from
the earth. And the Apostle Peter asked Christ:
"'O Lord, when will these torments cease?'
"And Jesus Christ replied: 'I give them until 1922. If the people do not repent,
do not come to their senses, then they will all perish in this way.'
"Then before the throne of God there stood our Tsar wearing the crown of a
great-martyr. Yes, this tsar will be a great-martyr. Recently, he has redeemed his
life, and if people do not turn to God, then not only Russia, but the whole of
Europe will collapse..."111

109 Yakovitsky, in S. Fomin (ed.), Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russian before
the Second Coming), Moscow, 2003, p. 235.

110 Yakovitsky, “Sergianstvo: mif ili real’nost’”, Vernost’ (Fidelity), N 100, January,
2008.
111 I. Kontsevich, Optina Pustyn’ i ee Vremia (Optina Desert and its Time),
Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1977.
65
7. THE ABDICATION OF THE TSAR
We have noted that at the beginning of the war, the family of European
monarchies was already drastically weakened: “the monarchs, who still
dreamed that international relations were a family affair, were suddenly as
powerless as if revolutions had already broken out”.112 By the end of the war,
the weakened structure had already begun to collapse completely. In 1917-18
the dynasties of the defeated nations: Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary were
destroyed; Bulgaria’s king abdicated in favour of his son. Within a decade
monarchy was destroyed or severely weakened in several other nations, such as
Turkey, Italy and Greece. Where it survived, monarchism existed in a distorted
form, shackled to parliaments and constitutions, unstable and prey to extremist
movements from the right and the left.
Together with the closely related phenomenon of the fall from official favour
of the Orthodox and Catholic churches (which was followed by the fiercest and
widest persecution of the Orthodox Church in the whole of her history), the fall
of monarchism represented the final collapse of the hierarchical principle in
European public life. This is the principle that all legitimate power, both
ecclesiastical and secular, comes from above, from God, and is filtered down
from God to the kings and bishops and from them to the lower orders. Against
it, especially from 1789, was raised the revolutionary principle, which asserts, by
contrast, that all power comes from below, from the people, whether “the
people” is understood as the ethnic nation or the general will as expressed in the
ballot box. Since the revolutionary principle is against all hierarchy, its final aim
is to dethrone God Himself, as several of the revolutionaries themselves
admitted. The whole of “the long nineteenth century” (1789-1914) may be seen
as one long war between these two opposing principles. By 1914 it looked as if
the hierarchical principle had triumphed. But then the States of Europe turned
against each other in the greatest and most destructive war in history to that
date, enabling the revolutionary principle to claim the victory. Of course, the
First World War did not begin as an ideological struggle between democracy
and monarchy. On the social and psychological planes, it was primarily a war
between Slavism and Germanism, on the spiritual plane – between Orthodoxy
and the western heresies. Even when the Germans invaded France, they did so
primarily not out of ideological antipathy or nationalist envy, but so as to be
able to turn the full strength of their armed forces against Orthodox Russia
without having to worry about her western allies attacking from the rear. As for
the masses in all the warring countries, they joined the war for very similar
motives, in patriotic defence of king (whether autocratic or constitutional) and
country…
However, as time passed, the incongruity of the alliance between Republican

France and Liberal Britain, on the one hand, and Autocratic Russia, on the other,
began to trouble political consciences. Embarrassment increased as opposition
to the Tsar increased in Russia, and democratic America with her anti-Russian

112 Ferguson, op. cit., p. 107.
66
Jewish bankers joined the war on the Allied side. Moreover, by 1917 Britain had
a new and radical Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who had built his reputation
on his opposition to the aristocrats and promotion of the welfare state. People
were thinking about the post-war settlement, and the advancement of the
liberal-socialist revolution was again becoming an important factor. Thus in the
all-important propaganda war, the Germans were no longer denounced just for
their cruelty, greed and Prussian militarism, but also for the fact that they had a
monarch – albeit a grandson of Queen Victoria who spoke excellent English and
was fascinated by England. As for Russia, she had been long condemned as “the
prison of the peoples” ruled by a tyrannical tsar. Such an image had been
repressed when the Tsar was the ally of Britain and France; but now, at the
beginning of 1917, his people were deserting him, and a new ally had come to
the fore – America’s President Woodrow Wilson, who was determined to make
the world safe for democracy and apply his anti-monarchical and anti-
imperialist vision of national self-determination…
As we have seen, there were good reasons, for thinking that Russia could
defeat her enemies in 1917. Thus Dominic Lieven denies that there was “any
military reason for Russia to seek a separate peace between August 1914 and
March 1917. Too much attention is usually paid to the defeats of Tannenburg in
1914 and Gorlice-Tarnow in 1915. Russia’s military effort in the First World War
amounted to much more than this. If on the whole the Russian army proved
inferior to the German forces, that was usually true of the French and British as
well. Moreover, during the Brusilov offensive in 1916 Russian forces had shown
themselves quite capable of routing large German units. Russian armies usually
showed themselves superior to Austrian forces of comparable size, and their
performance against the Ottomans in 1914-16 was very much superior to that of
British forces operating in Gallipoli, Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Russian
defence industry performed miracles in 1916 and if there were legitimate
doubts as to whether this level of production could be fully sustained in 1917,
the same was true of the war economies of a number of other belligerents. It is
true that Rumania’s defeat necessitated a major redeployment of troops and
supplies to the southern front in the weeks before the revolution and that this,
together with a particularly severe winter, played havoc with railway
movements on the home front. Nevertheless, in military terms there was
absolutely no reason to believe that Russia had lost the war in February 1917.
“Indeed, when one raised one’s eyes from the eastern front and looked at the
Allies’ overall position, the probability of Russian victory was very great, so
long as the home front could hold. Although the British empire was potentially
the most powerful of the Allied states, in 1914-16 France and Russia had carried
the overwhelming burden of the war on land. Not until July 1916 on the Somme
were British forces committed en masse against the Germans, and even then the
British armies, though courageous to a fault, lacked proper training and were
commanded by amateur officers and generals who lacked any experience of
controlling masses of men. Even so, in the summer of 1916 the combined impact
of the Somme, Verdun and the Brusilov offensive had brought the Central
Powers within sight of collapse. A similar but better coordinated effort, with
67
British power now peaking, held out excellent prospects for 1917. Still more to
the point, by February 1917 the German campaign of unrestricted submarine
warfare made American involvement in the war in the immediate future a near
certainty: the Allied superiority in resources would thereby become
overwhelming.
“Once stalemate set in on the battlefield in 1914, the First World War became
as much as anything a contest over which belligerent’s home front would
collapse first. This fate befell Russia in large part because even its upper and
middle classes, let alone organized labour, were more hostile to the existing
regime and less integrated into the legal political order than was the case even
in Italy, let alone in France, Germany or Britain in 1914. In addition, opposition
to the regime was less divided along ethnic lines than was the case in Austria-
Hungary, and Russia was more geographically isolated from military and
economic assistance from its allies than was the case with any of the other major
belligerents. Nevertheless, unrest on the domestic front was by no means
confined to Russia. The Italian home front seemed on the verge of collapse after
the defeat of Caporetto in 1917 and the French army suffered major mutinies
that year. In the United Kingdom the attempt to impose conscription in Ireland
made that country ungovernable and led quickly to civil war. In both Germany
and Austria revolution at home played a vital role in 1918, though in contrast to
Russia it is true that revolution followed decisive military defeats and was set
off in part by the correct sense that the war was unwinnable.
“The winter of 1916-17 was decisive not just for the outcome of the First
World War but also for the history of twentieth-century Europe. Events on the
domestic and military fronts were closely connected. In the winter of 1915-16 in
both Germany and Austria pressure on civilian food consumption had been
very severe. The winter of 1916-17 proved worse. The conviction of the German
military leadership that the Central Powers’ home fronts could not sustain too
much further pressure on this scale was an important factor in their decision to
launch unrestricted submarine warfare in the winter of 1916-17, thereby (so
they hoped) driving Britain out of the war and breaking the Allied blockade. By
this supreme piece of miscalculation and folly the German leadership brought
the United States into the war at precisely the moment when the overthrow of
the imperial regime was preparing Russia to leave it…”113
.
*
The Tsar’s abdication was the product of a Masonic plot comprising about
300 members of Russia’s highest elites, and supported by Masonic lodges in
France and England. They began putting their plans into action in January, 1917.
Towards the end of that month, there arrived in Petrograd an Allied
Commission composed of representatives of England, France and Italy. After

113 Lieven, “Russia, Europe and World War I”, in in Edward Acton, Vladimir
Cherniaev, William Rosenberg (eds.), A Critical Companion to the Russian

Revolution, 1914-1921, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
68
meeting with A.I. Guchkov, who was at that time president of the military-
industrial committee, Prince G.E. Lvov, president of the State Duma Rodzyanko,
General Polivanov, Sazonov, the English ambassador Buchanan, Milyukov and
others, the mission presented the following demands to the Tsar, which
amounted to demanding that he resign altogether from public life:
1. The introduction into the Staff of the Supreme Commander of allied

representatives with the right of a deciding vote.
2. The renewal of the command staff of all the armies on the indications of
the heads of the Entente.
3. The introduction of a constitution with a responsible ministry.
He replied firmly and courageously:
1. “The introduction of allied representatives is unnecessary, for I am not

suggesting the introduction of my representatives into the allied armies
with the right of a deciding vote.”
2. “Also unnecessary. My armies are fighting with greater success than the
armies of my allies.”
3. “The act of internal administration belongs to the discretion of the
Monarch and does not require the indications of the allies.”
When the reply of the Tsar was made known there was a meeting in the
English Embassy attended by the same people, at which it was decided: “To
abandon the lawful path and step out on the path of revolution”.114 Thus “the
English Embassy,” wrote Princess Paley, “on the orders of Lloyd George,
became a nest of propaganda. The liberals, and Prince Lvov, Milyukov,
Rodzyanko, Maklakov, etc., used to meet there constantly. It was in the English
embassy that the decision was taken to abandon legal paths and step out on the
path of revolution.”115
On February 14, Kerensky proclaimed this decision more or less openly at a

session of the Duma: “The historical task of the Russian people at the present
time is the task of annihilating the medieval regime immediately, at whatever
cost… How is it possible to fight by lawful means against those whom the law
itself has turned into a weapon of mockery against the people?... There is only
one way with the violators of the law – their physical removal.”116
Although the February revolution had been hatched in the English embassy,
the English leaders themselves were far from uniformly hostile to the Tsar. The
ambassador himself, Sir George Buchanan, was devoted to him. King George V
loved his cousin – but still refused to give him asylum in England, fearing a
revolution there.

114 Armis (a Duma delegate), “Skrytaia Byl’” (A Hidden Story), Prizyv’ (Summons),
N 50, Spring, 1920; in Vinberg, op. cit., pp. 165-166.

115 Paley, Souvenir de Russie, 1916-1919, p. 33, in Yakobi, op. cit., p. 96.
116 Kerensky, in Voprosy Istorii (Questions of History), 1990, N 10, p. 144
69
Even the new British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, though the most
radical and left-wing politician ever to lead the country, was ambiguous about
the Tsar and the plot to overthrow him. Thus “initially,” writes Roy Hattersley,
“Lloyd George had regarded the overthrow of the Tsar as ‘worth the whole war
and its terrible sacrifices’, but within a month he had changed his mind. On 17
March,… he told Lord Riddell that Russia was ‘not sufficiently advanced for a
republic’. [As regards the Tsar seeking asylum in Britain], Lloyd George was
surprisingly sympathetic towards a man he called a ‘virtuous and well-meaning
Sovereign [who] became directly responsible for a regime drenched in
corruption, debauchery, favouritism, jealousy, sycophantic idolatry,
incompetence and treachery’.”117
However, in view of the failure of rescue attempts from within Russia, “the
future of the Tsar and his family grew ever more precarious. It was the [British]
Prime Minister who initiated the meeting with George V’s private secretary at
which, for a second time, ‘it was generally agreed that the proposal we should
receive the Emperor in this country… could not be refused’. When Lloyd
George proposed that the King should place a house at the Romanovs’ disposal
he was told that only Balmoral was available and that it was ‘not a suitable
residence at this time of year’. But it transpired that the King had more
substantial objections to the offer of asylum. He ‘begged’ (a remarkably unregal
verb) the Foreign Secretary ‘to represent to the Prime Minister that, from all he
hears and reads in the press, the residence in this country of the ex-Emperor and
Empress would be strongly resented by the public and would undoubtedly
compromise the position of the King and Queen’. It was the hereditary
monarch, not the radical politician, who left the Russian royal family to the
mercy of the Bolsheviks and execution in Ekaterinburg.”118
The result was that, as Frances Welch writes, “eleven months later, the Tsar,
the Tsarina and their five children were all murdered. But when the Tsar’s sister
finally reached London in 1919, King George V brazenly blamed his Prime
Minister for refusing a refuge to the Romanovs. Over dinner, he would
regularly castigate Lloyd George as ‘that murderer’…”119
Nor was this the first or only betrayal: in a deeper sense English
constitutionalism betrayed Russian autocracy in February, 1917. For it was a
band of constitutionalist Masons supported by the Grand Orient of France and
the Great Lodge of England, that plotted the overthrow of the Tsar in the safe
haven of the English embassy in St. Petersburg. (Surprising as it may seem in
view of the Masons’ overt republicanism, they were patronized by the British
monarchy; there is a photograph of King Edward VII, Georgie’s father, in the
full regalia of a Grand Master…120)

117 Hattersley, The Great Outsider: David Lloyd George, London: Abacus, 2010, p. 436.
118 Hattersley, op. cit., p. 472.
119 Welch, “A Last Fraught Encounter”, The Oldie, N 325, August, 2015, p. 26.
120 See the photo on the back cover of Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons, London:
Constable, 1999.
70
And so it was constitutional monarchists who overthrew the Russian
autocratic monarchy. The false kingship that was all show and no substance
betrayed the true kingship that died in defence of the truth in poverty and
humiliation. For Tsar Nicholas died in true imitation of the Christ the King. And
with Him he could have said: “You say rightly that I am a king: for this cause I
was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear
witness to the truth!” (John 18.37).
Lloyd George’s colleague and friend, Winston Churchill, made a worthy and
more accurate tribute to the Tsar: “Surely to no nation has Fate been more
malignant than to Russia. Her ship went down in sight of port… Every sacrifice
had been made; the toil was achieved… In March the Tsar was on the throne:
the Russian Empire and the Russian army held up, the front was secured and
victory was undoubted. The long retreats were ended, the munitions famine
was broken; arms were pouring in; stronger, larger, better equipped armies
guarded the immense front… Moreover, no difficult action was no required: to
remain in presence: to lean with heavy weight upon the far stretched Teutonic
line: to hold without exceptional activity the weakened hostile forces on her
front: in a word to endure – that was all that stood between Russia and the fruits
of general victory… According to the superficial fashion of our time, the tsarist
order is customarily seen as blind, rotten, a tyranny capable of nothing. But an
examination of the thirty months of war with Germany and Austria should
correct these light-minded ideas. We can measure the strength of the Russian
Empire by the blows which it suffered, by the woes it experienced, by the
inexhaustible forces that it developed, and by the restoration of forces of which
it showed itself capable… In the government of states, when great events take
place, the leader of the nation, whoever he may be, is condemned for failures
and glorified for successes. The point is not who did the work or sketched the
plan of battle: reproach or praise for the outcome is accorded to him who bears
the authority of supreme responsibility. Why refuse this strict examination to
Nicholas II? The brunt of supreme decisions centred upon him. At the summit
where all problems are reduced to Yea and Nay, where events transcend the
faculties of men and where all is inscrutable, he had to give the answers. His
was the function of the compass needle. War or no war? Advance or retreat?
Right or left? Democratise or hold firm? Quit or persevere? These were the
battlefields of Nicholas II. Why should he reap no honour for them?... The
regime which he personified, over which he presided, to which his personal
character gave the final spark, had at this moment won the war for Russia. Now
they crush him. A dark hand intervenes, clothed from the beginning in madness.
The Tsar departs from the scene. He and all those whom he loved are given over
to suffering and death. His efforts are minimized; his actions are condemned;
his memory is defiled…”121

121 Churchill, World Crisis, 1916-1918, London, 1927, volume 1, p. 476. It may seem
surprising that Churchill, who had been a Freemason since 1902 (Master,
“Rosemary” lodge no. 2851) should have been so attached to the Tsar, the main
target of the Masons. But Churchill’s Masonry was never important to him. Much
closer to him was his hatred of Communism and determination to save the British
Empire.
71
*
“In the middle of 1916,” writes Fr. Lev Lebedev, “the Masons had designated
February 22, 1917 for the revolution in Russia. But on this day his Majesty was
still at Tsarksoye Selo, having arrived there more than a month before from
Headquarters, and only at 2 o’clock on the 22nd did he leave again for Mogilev.
Therefore everything had to be put back for one day and begin on February 23.122
By that time special trains loaded with provisions had been deliberately stopped
on the approaches to Petrograd on the excuse of heavy snow drifts, which
immediately elicited a severe shortage of bread, an increase in prices and the
famous ‘tails’ – long queues for bread. The population began to worry,
provocateurs strengthened the anxiety by rumours about the approach of
inevitable famine, catastrophe, etc. But it turned out that the military authorities
had reserves of food (from ‘N.Z.’) that would allow Petrograd to hold out until
the end of the snow falls. Therefore into the affair at this moment there stepped
a second very important factor in the plot – the soldiers of the reserve
formations, who were in the capital waiting to be sent off to the front. There
were about 200,000 of them, and they since the end of 1916 had been receiving
25 roubles a day (a substantial boost to the revolutionary agitation that had been
constantly carried out among them) from a secret ‘revolutionary fund’. Most
important of all, they did not want to be sent to the front. They were reservists,
family men, who had earlier received a postponement of their call-up, as well as
new recruits from the workers, who had been under the influence of
propaganda for a long time. His Majesty had long ago been informed of the
unreliability of the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison and had ordered General
Alexeyev to introduce guards units, including cavalry, into the capital. However,
Alexeyev had not carried out the order, referring to the fact that, according to the
information supplied by the commandant of the Petrograd garrison General
Khabalov, all the barracks in the capital were filled to overflowing, and there
was nowhere to put the guardsmen!... In sum, against 200,000 unreliable
reservists who were ready to rebel the capital of the Empire could hardly
number 10,000 soldiers – mainly junkers and cadets from other military schools
– who were faithful to his Majesty. The only Cossack regiment from the reserves
was by that time also on the side of the revolution. The plotters were also
successful in gaining the appointment of General Khabalov to the post of
commandant of the capital and district. He was an inexperienced and extremely
indecisive man. Had Generals Khan-Hussein of Nakhichevan or Count Keller
been in his place, everything might have turned out differently…”123

122 There is conflicting evidence on this point. Sedova writes: “Later Guchkov said
that the coup was planned for March-April, 1917. However his comrades in the
plot were more sincere. In Yekaterinoslav, where Rodzyanko’s estate was situated,
there came rumours from his, Rodzyanko’s house that the abdication of the Tsar
was appointed for December 6, 1917. At the beginning of 1917 Tereschenko
declared in Kiev that the coup, during which the abdication was supposed to take
place, was appointed for February 8” (“Ne Tsar’…”, op. cit., p. 3). (V.M.)
123 Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), St. Petersburg, 1997, pp. 477 et seq.
Adjutant-General Nilov also remained faithful to the Tsar.
72
At the beginning of March (according to the old, Julian calendar), the noose
around the Tsar was tightened. He was effectively “ambushed” in a little
railway station called Dno (“Dno” in Russian means “Bottom”, signifying the
lowest point in Russia’s history), isolated from all those loyal to him, and then,
on March 2, forced to abdicate by the leading generals and the leading Duma
delegates Rodzyanko, Guchkov and Shulgin…
Why did the Tsar agree to abdicate? Yana Sedova goes back to the similar
crisis of October, 1905. “His Majesty himself explained the reason for his
agreement. He wrote that he had to choose between two paths: a dictatorship
and a constitution. A dictatorship, in his words, would give a short ‘breathing
space’, after which he would ‘again have to act by force within a few months;
but this would cost rivers of blood and in the end would lead inexorably to the
present situation, that is, the power’s authority would have been demonstrated,
but the result would remain the same and reforms could not be achieved in the
future’. So as to escape this closed circle, his Majesty preferred to grant a
constitution with which he was not in sympathy.
“These words about a ‘breathing-space’ after which he would again have to

act by force could perhaps have been applied now [in 1917]. In view of the
solitude in which his Majesty found himself in 1917, the suppression of the
revolution would have been the cure, not of the illness, but of its symptoms, a
temporary anaesthesia – and, moreover, for a very short time.”124
“By contrast with Peter I, Tsar Nicholas II of course was not inclined to walk
over other people’s bodies. But he, too, was able, in case of necessity, to act
firmly and send troops to put down the rebellious city. He could have acted in
this way to defend the throne, order and the monarchical principle as a whole.
But now he saw how much hatred there was against himself, and that the
February revolution was as it were directed only personally against him. He did
not want to shed the blood of his subjects to defend, not so much his throne, as
himself on the throne…”125
The critical conversation took place between the tsar and General Nikolai
Ruzsky, commander of the northern front, in the late evening of March 1/14 in a
railway carriage near Pskov. Sebag Sebastian Montefiore writes: “Nicholas was
alone except for his devoted courtiers, at whom Ruzsky growled: ‘Look what
you’ve done… all your Rasputin clique. What have you got Russian into now?’
“Emperor and general sat together awkwardly in the salon of the imperial
train.

124 Sedova, “Pochemu Gosudar’ ne mog ne otrech’sa?” (Why his Majesty could not
avoid abdication), Nasha Strana, March 6, 2010, N 2887, p. 2.

125 Sedova, “Ataka na Gosudaria Sprava” (An Attack on his Majesty from the
Right), Nasha Strana, September 5, 2009.
73
“’I’m responsible before God and Russia for everything that’s happening,’
declared Nicholas, still bound by his coronation oath, ‘regardless of whether
ministers are responsible to the Duma or State Council.’
“’One must accept the formula ‘the monarch reigns but the government
rules’, explained Ruzsky.
“This, explained the emperor, was incomprehensible to him, and he would

need to be differently educated, born again. He could not take decisions against
his conscience. Ruzsky brusquely argued with the emperor into the night
without, Nicholas complained, ‘leaving him one moment for reflection’. Then a
telegram arrived from General Alexeev revealing the widening revolution and
proposing a government under Rodzianko. Nicholas, under unbearable
pressure, telegraphed General Ivanov [whom he had sent to repress the
revolution] ‘to undertake no measures before my arrival’ in Petrograd. At 2
a.m., now on March 2, Nicholas agreed to appoint Rodzianko prime minister,
retaining autocratic power. Then he went to bed. Ruzsky informed Rodzianko,
who replied at 3.30 a.m., ‘It’s obvious neither his Majesty nor you realize what’s
going on here… There is no return to the past… The threatening demands for an
abdication in favour of the son with Michael Alexandrovich as regent are
becoming quite definite.’ In the course of that evening, the bewhiskered gents of
the Duma, who wished to preserve the monarchy, and the leather-capped
Marxists of the Petrograd Soviet, who wanted a republic, had compromised to
form a Provisional Government – and seek Nicholas’s abdication in favour of
Alexei. The new premier was Prince Lvov, with Kerensky as justice minister.
Now that they knew Nicholas was in Pskov, the Duma sent two members,
Guchkov and Vasily Shulgin, to procure his abdication. They set off
immediately…”126
Archpriest Lev Lebedev argues that the Tsar agreed to abdicate because he
believed that the general dissatisfaction with his personal rule could be assuaged
by his personal departure from the scene. But he never saw in this the
renunciation of the Monarchy and its replacement by a republic; he never
thought this would mean the destruction of the Monarchy, but only its transfer
to another member of the Dynasty – his son, under the regency of his brother.
This transfer, he thought, would placate the army and therefore ensure victory
against the external enemy, Germany.
It was neither Ruzsky’s arguments for a constitutional monarchy (which the

Tsar rejected to the very end127) nor the representations of the Duma politicians
that finally compelled his abdication. It was the news he received that none of
the leading generals supported his remaining in power… As he wrote in his
diary-entry for March 2/15: “My abdication is necessary. Ruzsky transmitted
this conversation [with Rodzianko] to the Staff HQ, and Alexeyev to all the com-

Montefiore, The Romanovs, London: Vintage, 2016, pp. 619-620.
126
“God gives me the strength to forgive all my enemies,” he wrote, “but I can’t forgive General
127
Ruzsky” (Montefiore, The Romanovs, p. 621).
74
manders-in-chief of the fronts. The replies from all arrived at 2:05. The essence is
that that for the sake of the salvation of Russia and keeping the army at the front
quiet, I must resolve on this step. I agreed. From the Staff HQ they sent the draft
of a manifesto. In the evening there arrived from Petrograd Guchkov and
Shulgin, with whom I discussed and transmitted to them the signed and edited
manifesto. At one in the morning I left Pskov greatly affected by all that had
come to pass. All around me I see treason, cowardice, and deceit.”128
Thus, as Fr. Lev writes: “The Tsar was convinced that this treason was
personally to him, and not to the Monarchy, not to Russia! The generals were
sincerely convinced of the same: they supposed that in betraying the Tsar they
were not betraying the Monarchy and the Fatherland, but were even serving
them, acting for their true good!... But betrayal and treason to God’s Anointed is
treason to everything that is headed by him. The Masonic consciousness of the
generals, drunk on their supposed ‘real power’ over the army, could not rise
even to the level of this simple spiritual truth! And meanwhile the traitors had
already been betrayed, the deceivers deceived! Already on the following day,
March 3, General Alexeyev, having received more detailed information on what
was happening in Petrograd, exclaimed: ‘I shall never forgive myself that I
believed in the sincerity of certain people, obeyed them and sent the telegram to
the commanders-in-chief on the question of the abdication of his Majesty from
the Throne!’… In a similar way General Ruzsky quickly ‘lost faith in the new
government’ and, as was written about him, ‘suffered great moral torments’
concerning his conversation with the Tsar, and the days March 1 and 2 ‘until the
end of his life’ (his end came in October, 1918, when the Bolsheviks finished off
Ruzsky in the Northern Caucasus). But we should not be moved by these
belated ‘sufferings’ and ‘recovery of sight’ of the generals (and also of some of
the Great Princes). They did not have to possess information, nor be particularly
clairvoyant or wise, they simply had to be faithful to their oath – and nothing
more! One of the investigators of the generals’ treason, V. Kobylin, is right is
saying that no later ‘regrets’ or even exploits on the fields of the Civil war could
wash away the stain of eternal shame from the traitor-military commanders. ‘The
world has never heard of such an offence,’ he writes. ‘After that, nothing other
than Bolshevism could or should have happened… The Russian Tsar had been
betrayed… The whole of Russia had been betrayed… The Army had been
betrayed, and after this it would also betray. As a consequence of the acts of
Alexeyev and the commanders-in-chief there would be ‘Order N 1’ (of the
Soviet), which was carried out to the letter by the same Alexeyev…’ The whole
of this ‘chain reaction’ of betrayals and deceits was determined, according to the
just word of N. Pavlov, ‘by the connection of the Tsars with Orthodoxy and the
people and the act of anointing by God. Before… the past and the future (of Russia)

128 Shulgin wrote: “How pitiful seemed to me the sketch that we had brought him… It is too late
to guess whether his Majesty could have not abdicated. Taking into account the position that
General Ruzsky and General Alexeyev held, the possibility of resistance was excluded: his
Majesty’s orders were no longer passed on, the telegrams of those faithful to him were not
communicated to him… In abdicating, his Majesty at least retained the possibility of appealing
to the people with his own last word” (in S.S. Oldenburg, Tsarstvovanie Imperatora Nikolaia II
(The Reign of Emperor Nicholas II), Belgrade, 1939, vol. 2, p. 253).
75
his Majesty stood alone,’ says Pavlov. ‘On no other Monarch had the burden of
such a decision ever been laid, since there is no greater or more important country
than Russia…’ Archimandrite Constantine (Zaitsev) adds: ‘in general she ceased
to exist as a certain conciliar [sobornaia] personality’ – an exceptionally
important observation! Although, in spite of Fr. Constantine’s thought, this did
not happen immediately, at the moment of abdication.
“The whole point is that to the mysticism of Tsarist power as the ‘Head’ of
Russia there corresponded the mysticism of its people’s ‘Body’. If you cut off the
head of an ordinary person, then the body, like the head, is doomed to a rapid
dying. But it was not like that with the mystical ‘Body’ of the people, Great
Russia as a Conciliar Personality! This ‘Body’, this Personality was able in similar
cases to generate a new Head in the form of a new Tsar, as had already happened
more than once, for example in 1613! His Majesty Nicholas II knew this well.
Therefore, in abdicating from his power personally, he firmly believed and knew
that this power would be inherited by another Monarch, and in no other way, and
he was completely right! A thousand times right! And wrong are those who
rebuked (and to this day continue to rebuke) Nicholas II for ‘not thinking’ about
the people, the Fatherland and Russia, and that by his abdication he ‘doomed’
them to something terrible. Nothing of the sort! After the inevitable period of a
new Time of Troubles, the Great Russian people, that is, more than 80% of the
population, which was deeply monarchist in the whole of its nature and
psychology, could not fail to engender a new Orthodox Autocrat and nothing other
than a restored Orthodox Kingdom!...
“… At that time, March 1-2, 1917, the question was placed before the Tsar, his
consciousness and his conscience in the following way: the revolution in
Petrograd is being carried out under monarchical banners: society, the people
(Russia!) are standing for the preservation of tsarist power, for the planned
carrying on of the war to victory, but this is being hindered only by one thing –
general dissatisfaction personally with Nicholas II, general distrust of his personal
leadership, so that if he, for the sake of the good and victory of Russia, were to
depart, then he would save both the Homeland and the Dynasty!
“Convinced, as were his generals, that everything was like that, his Majesty,
who never suffered from love of power (he could be powerful, but not power-
loving!), after 3 o’clock in the afternoon of March 2, 1917, immediately sent two
telegrams – to Rodzyanko in Petrograd and to Alexeyev in Mogilev. In the first
he said: ‘There is no sacrifice that I would not undertake in the name of the real good of
our native Mother Russia. For that reason I am ready to renounce the Throne in
favour of My Son, in order that he should remain with Me until his coming of
age, under the regency of My brother, Michael Alexandrovich’. The telegram to
Headquarters proclaimed: ‘In the name of the good of our ardently beloved
Russia, her calm and salvation, I am ready to renounce the Throne in favour of
My Son. I ask everyone to serve Him faithfully and unhypocritically.’ His
Majesty said, as it were between the lines: ‘Not as you have served Me…’
Ruzsky, Danilov and Savich went away with the texts of the telegrams.
76
“On learning about this, Voeikov ran into the Tsar’s carriage: ‘Can it be
true… that You have signed the abdication?’ The Tsar gave him the telegrams
lying on the table with the replies of the commanders-in-chief, and said: ‘What
was left for me to do, when they have all betrayed Me? And first of all –
Nikolasha (Great Prince Nicholas Nikolayevich)… Read!’”129
And so in 1905, so in 1917, probably the single most important factor

influencing the Tsar’s decision was the attitude of his uncle, Grand Duke
Nicholas Nikolayevich Romanov, “Nikolasha” as he was known in the family. It
was indeed the case that there was very little he could do in view of the treason
of the generals and Nikolasha. He could probably continue to defy the will of
the social and political élite, as he had done more than once in the past – but not
the generals…
E.E. Alferev writes: “Factually speaking, in view of the position taken by

Ruzsky and Alexeev, the possibility of resistance was excluded. Being cut off
from the external world, the Sovereign was as it were in captivity. His orders
were not carried out, the telegrams of those who remained faithful to their oath
of allegiance were not communicated to him. The Empress, who had never
trusted Ruzsky, on learning that the Tsar’s train had been help up at Pskov,
immediately understood the danger. On March 2 she wrote to his Majesty: ‘But
you are alone, you don’t have the army with you, you are caught like a mouse
in a trap. What can you do?’”130
But let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the Tsar had had a choice,
and was able, as Nicholas I had been able in 1825, to suppress the rebellion by
force. The problem was that the country had changed drastically since 1825: the
rebels were now not one small and unrepresentative segment of the population,
but the majority of the educated classes. The Russian Autocracy, with the
exception of some of the eighteenth-century tsars, had never acted against the
people or in conflict with the people’s ideal – this is what distinguished it from
western-style absolutism. So now that the majority of the people were no longer
in solidarity with the tsar, having exchanged his and Holy Russia’s ideal of
Orthodox Christianity for the western idols of democracy and mammon, there
was nothing that the Tsar could honourably do but abdicate. The people had
renounced Orthodoxy and the Autocrat who stood on guard for Orthodoxy; so
now God, honouring its free will, granted it to taste the bitter fruits of
“freedom”…

129 Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 486-488. Cf. Voeikov, op. cit., p. 212; Mark Steinberg and
Vladimir Khrustalev, The Fall of the Romanovs, Yale University Press, 1995, pp. 89-
90, citing State Archive of the Russian Federation, document f.601, op. 1, d. 2102,
1.1-2. Nikolasha was blessed to ask the Tsar to abdicate by Metropolitan Platon,
Exarch of Georgia (N.K. Talberg, “K sorokaletiu pagubnogo evlogianskogo
raskola” (On the Fortieth Anniversary of the Destructive Eulogian Schism”),
Pravoslavnij Put’ (The Orthodox Way), Jordanville, 1966, p. 36; Groyan, op. cit., p.
CLXI, note).
130 Alferov, Imperator Nikolaj II kak chelovek sil’noj voli (Emperor Nicholas II as a
Man of Strong Will), Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983, 2004, p. 121.
77
What Lebedev calls “the first echelon” of the revolution, the Cadets and
Octobrists, favoured the English model - a constitutional monarchy which
preserved religion and the monarchy while allowing the people participation in
government. They did not want the Tsar to abdicate (at first) but demanded
from him a “responsible” government (i.e. one controlled by them).
The Russian Autocracy showed a spiritual consistency and purpose that was
lacking in English constitutionalism. For all the Russian tsars consciously –
albeit with differing levels of success – pursued the aim of the defence of
Orthodoxy and the eternal salvation of all the people through Orthodoxy;
whereas the English constitutional monarchy had no such spiritual purpose,
and was in any case subject to parliament – which as a result of its “multi-
mutinous” essence (Tsar Ivan IV’s word) could have no single purpose either.
For in the last resort, in spite of many human failings, the Russian Autocracy
tried to serve God, and precisely for that reason submitted to no other authority
than God’s, seeing its authority as derived from God; whereas the English
monarchy, after its fall from grace in 1066, served many masters, but first of all
Mammon, and saw its authority as derived, not from God, but from man…
Democracy, of course, claims to guarantee the freedom and equality of its

citizens. But even if we accept that “freedom” and “equality” are too often
equated by liberals with licence and an unnatural levelling of human diversity,
and that they had little to do with spiritual freedom or moral equality, England in
1914 was probably a less free and less equal society than Russia. As the call-up
for the Boer war in 1899-1902 revealed, a good half of British conscripts were too
weak and unhealthy to be admitted to active service. And things were no better
in 1918, when the tall, well-fed American troops compared well with the
scrawny, emaciated Tommies - the monstrously rich factory-owners and
aristocratic landlords had seen to it that their lot remained as harsh as ever. But
in Russia in 1914 greatly increased prosperity, rapidly spreading education
among all classes, liberal labour laws and a vast increase in a free, independent
yeomanry (especially in Siberia) were transforming the country.
The idea that autocracy is necessarily inimical to freedom and equality was
refuted by the monarchist Andozerskaya in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel,
“October, 1916”: “Under a monarchy it is perfectly possible for both the freedom
and the equality of citizens to flourish. First, a firm hereditary system delivers
the country from destructive disturbances. Secondly, under a hereditary
monarchy there is no periodic upheaval of elections, and political disputes in
the country are weakened. Thirdly, republican elections lower the authority of
the power, we are not obliged to respect it, but the power is forced to please us
before the elections and serve us after them. But the monarch promised nothing
in order to be elected. Fourthly, the monarch has the opportunity to weigh up
things in an unbiased way. The monarchy is the spirit of national unity, but
under a republic divisive competition is inevitable. Fifthly, the good and the
strength of the monarch coincide with the good and the strength of the whole
country, he is simply forced to defend the interests of the whole country if only
78
in order to survive. Sixthly, for multi-national, variegated countries the monarch
is the only tie and the personification of unity…”131
No autocrat conducted himself with more genuine humility and love for his
subjects, and a more profound feeling of responsibility before God than Tsar
Nicholas II. He was truly an autocrat, and not a tyrant. He did not sacrifice the
people for himself, but himself for the people. The tragedy of Russia was that
she was about to exchange the most truly Christian of monarchs for the most
horrific of all tyrannies – all in the name of freedom!
The tsar’s commitment to the autocratic principle was reinforced by the

tsarina, who, as Hew Strachan writes, “despite being the granddaughter of a
British queen, believed, [the British ambassador] Buchanan said, that ‘autocracy
was the only regime that could hold the Empire together’.
“Writing after the war, Buchanan confessed that she might have been right. It
was one thing for well-established liberal states to move in the direction of
authoritarianism for the duration of the war; it was quite another for an
authoritarian government to move towards liberalism which many hoped
would last beyond the return to peace. Moreover, the strains the war had
imposed on Russian society, and the expectations that those strains had
generated, looked increasingly unlikely to be controlled by constitutional
reform…”132
The constitutionalists criticize the Orthodox autocracy mainly on the grounds

that it presents a system of absolute, uncontrolled power, and therefore of
tyranny. They quote the saying of the historian Lord Acton: “Power corrupts,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. But this is and was a serious
misunderstanding. The Russian autocracy was based on the anointing of the
Church and on the faith of the people; and if it betrayed either – by disobeying
the Church, or by trampling on the people’s faith, - it lost its legitimacy, as we
see in the Time of Troubles, when the people rejected the false Dmitri. It was
therefore limited, not absolute, being limited, not by parliament or any secular
power, but by the teachings of the Orthodox Faith and Church, and must not be
confused with the system of absolutist monarchy that we see in, for example,
the French King Louis XIV, or the English King Henry VIII, who felt limited by
nothing and nobody on earth.
The Tsar-Martyr resisted the temptation to act like a Western absolutist ruler,
thereby refuting those in both East and West who looked on his rule as just that
– a form of absolutism. Like Christ in Gethsemane, he told his friends to put
their swords, and surrendered himself into the hands of his enemies; “for this is
your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22.53). He showed that the
Orthodox Autocracy was not a form of absolutism, but something completely

131 Solzhenitsyn, The Red Wheel, “October, 1916”, uzel 2, Paris: YMCA Press, pp.
401-408.
132 Strachan, The First World War, London: Pocket Books, 2006, pp. 234-235.
79
sui generis – the external, secular aspect of the government of the Orthodox
Church on earth. He refused to treat his power as if it were independent of the
Church and people, but showed that it was a form of service to the Church and
the people from within the Church and the people, in accordance with the word:
“I have raised up one chosen out of My people… with My holy oil have I
anointed him” (Psalm 88.18, 19). So not “government by the people and for the
people” in a democratic sense, but “government by one chosen out of the people
of God for the people of God and responsible to God alone”…Tsar Nicholas
perfectly understood the nature of his autocratic power, which is why he never
went against the Church or violated Orthodoxy, but rather upheld and
championed both the one and the other. Moreover, he demonstrated in his
personal life a model of Christian humility and love.
If we compare the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917 with that of the

British King Edward VIII in 1936, then we immediately see the superiority, not
only of the Tsar over the King personally, but also of Orthodox autocracy over
constitutional monarchy. Edward VIII lived a debauched life, flirted with the
Nazis, and then abdicated, not voluntarily, for the sake of the nation, but
because he could not have both the throne and a continued life of debauchery at
the same time. He showed no respect for Church or faith, and perished saying:
“What a wasted life!” While the abdication of Edward VIII only demonstrated
his unfitness to rule, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas, by contrast, saved the
monarchy for the future. For while continuing to fight for his rule would have
been completely justified from a purely juridical point of view, it was not
justified from a deeper, eschatological point of view.
That is why Blessed Pasha of Sarov (+1915), who called him “the greatest of
the tsars”, nevertheless called on him to step down. If he had been personally
ambitious, or cared first for his own safety, he would have fought to retain his
throne, but he abdicated, as we have seen, in order to avoid civil war and
guarantee his country’s victory in an external war against a powerful and
heretical enemy. In this he followed the example of the first canonized saints of
Russia, the Princes Boris and Gleb, and the advice of the Prophet Shemaiah to
King Rehoboam and the house of Judah as they prepared to face the house of
Israel: “Thus saith the Lord, Ye shall not go up, nor fight against your brethren,
the children of Israel. Return every man to his house…” (I Kings 12.24).
The Tsar at first abdicated in favour of his son Alexis, but then changed his
mind and appointed his brother Prince Michael (whom Montefiore calls “Tsar
Michael II”). But Michael, under pressure from the Masons under Kerensky,
refused to accept the throne. When Tsar Nicholas heard, he was devastated…
However, writes Lebedev, “Michael Alexandrovich… did not decide

[completely] as Kerensky and the others wanted. He did not abdicate from the
Throne directly in favour of the Provisional Government. In the manifesto that he
immediately wrote he suggested that the question of his power and in general
of the form of power in Russia should be decided by the people itself, and in that
case he would become ruling Monarch if ‘that will be the will of our Great
80
People, to whom it belongs, by universal suffrage, through their representatives
in a Constituent Assembly, to establish the form of government and the new
basic laws of the Russian State’. For that reason, the manifesto goes on to say,
‘invoking the blessing of God, I beseech all the citizens of the Russian State to
submit to the Provisional Government, which has arisen and been endowed
with all the fullness of power at the initiative of the State Duma (that is, in a self-
willed manner, not according to the will of the Tsar – Prot. Lebedev), until the
Constituent Assembly, convened in the shortest possible time on the basis of a
universal, direct, equal and secret ballot, should by its decision on the form of
government express the will of the people. Michael.’ The manifesto has been justly
criticised in many respects. But still it is not a direct transfer of power to the
‘democrats’!”133
Not a direct transfer of power, but an indirect transfer, nevertheless. For Tsar
Michael had effectively given the people the final say in how they were to be
ruled, thereby giving them the opportunity to destroy the monarchy. “The talk
was not,” writes M.A. Babkin, “about the Great Prince’s abdication from the
throne, but about the impossibility of his occupying the royal throne without the
clearly expressed acceptance of this by the whole people of Russia.”134 However,
the people of Russia was not allowed to express its opinion…
In Deuteronomy 17.14 the Lord had laid it down as one of the conditions of
the creation of a God-pleasing monarchy that the people should want a God-
pleasing king. For, as Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov writes: "Without
establishing a kingdom, Moses foresaw it and pointed it out in advance to
Israel... It was precisely Moses who pointed out in advance the two conditions
for the emergence of monarchical power: it was necessary, first, that the people
itself should recognize its necessity, and secondly, that the people itself should
not elect the king over itself, but should present this to the Lord. Moreover,
Moses indicated a leadership for the king himself: 'when he shall sit upon the
throne of his kingdom, he must… fulfil all the words of this law'."135
So the Tsar could not rule if the people did not want him. Just as it takes two
willing partners to make a marriage, so it takes a head and a body who are
willing to work with each other to make a Christian state. The bridegroom in
this case was willing and worthy, but the bride was not… As P.S. Lopukhin
wrote: “At the moment of his abdication his Majesty felt himself to be
profoundly alone, and around him was ‘cowardice, baseness and treason’. And
to the question how he could have abdicated from his tsarist service, it is

134 Babkin, “Sviatejshij Sinod Pravoslavnoj Rossijskoj Tserkvi i Revoliutsionnie
Sobytia Fevralia-Marta 1917 g.”(“The Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox
Church and the Revolutionary Events of February-March, 1917”,
http://www.monarhist-spb.narod.ru/D-ST/Babkin-1, p. 3.
135 Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St.
Petersburg, 1992, pp. 127-129.
81
necessary to reply: he did this because we abdicated from his tsarist service, from
his sacred and sanctified authority…”136
In agreement with this, the philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin wrote:

“Faithfulness to the monarchy is a condition of soul and form of action in which
a man unites his will with the will of his Sovereign, his dignity with his dignity,
his destiny with his destiny… The fall of the monarchy was the fall of Russia
herself. A thousand-year state form fell, but no ‘Russian republic’ was put in its
place, as the revolutionary semi-intelligentsia of the leftist parties dreamed, but
the pan-Russian disgrace foretold by Dostoyevsky was unfurled, and a failure of
spirit. And on this failure of spirit, on this dishonour and disintegration there
grew the state Anchar of Bolshevism, prophetically foreseen by Pushkin – a sick
and unnatural tree of evil that spread its poison on the wind to the destruction
of the whole world. In 1917 the Russian people fell into the condition of the mob,
while the history of mankind shows that the mob is always muzzled by despots
and tyrants…
“The Russian people unwound, dissolved and ceased to serve the great
national work – and woke up under the dominion of internationalists. History
has as it were proclaimed a certain law: Either one-man rule or chaos is possible in
Russia; Russia cannot have a republican order. Or more exactly: Russia’s
existence demands one-man rule – either a religiously and nationally
strengthened one-man rule of honour, fidelity and service, that is, a monarchy, or
one-man rule that is atheist, conscienceless and dishonourable, and moreover
anti-national and international, that is, a tyranny.”137
Archimandrite Constantine (Zaitsev) wrote that the tragedy of the last days
of the Empire consisted in the people’s ever greater attraction to the path of
liberation from all hindrances to the attainment of ever greater prosperity and
freedom. “In this striving for civil freedom, the Russian man lost the capacity
and the readiness freely to submit to the power given by God, and rational
freedom was transformed in the consciousness of Russian people into freedom
from spiritual discipline, into a cooling towards the Church, into lack of respect
for the Tsar. The Tsar became, with the civil flourishing of Russia, spiritually
and psychologically speaking unnecessary. He was not needed by free Russia.
The closer to the throne, and the higher up the ladder of culture, prosperity and
intellectual development, the more striking became the spiritual abyss opening
up between the Tsar and his subjects. Only in this way, generally speaking, can
we explain the fact of the terrifying emptiness that was formed around the Tsar
from the moment of the revolution.”
The demand for his abdication was “a sharp manifestation of that

psychological feeling of the unnecessariness of the Tsar which took hold of

136 Lopukhin, “Tsar’ i Patriarkh” (Tsar and Patriarch), Pravoslavnij Put’ (The
Orthodox Way), Jordanville, 1951, pp. 103-104.

137 Ilyin, Sobranie Sochinenij (Collected Works), Moscow, 1994, volume 4, p. 7; in
Valentina D. Sologub, Kto Gospoden’ – Ko Mne! (He who is the Lord’s – to me!),
Moscow, 2007, p. 53.
82
Russia. Every person acted according to his own logic and had his own
understanding of what was necessary for the salvation and prosperity of Russia.
Here there might have been much cleverness, and even much state wisdom. But
that mystical trembling before the Tsar’s power and that religious certainty that
the Tsar and Anointed of God bore in himself the grace of God which it was
impossible to distance oneself from by substituting one’s own ideas for it, no
longer existed, it had disappeared…”138
And so the Scripture was fulfilled: “We have no king, because we feared not the
Lord…”(Hosea 10.3)
The fall of the Romanov dynasty so soon after Tsar Nicholas’ abdication, and
the seizing of power by the Bolsheviks only a few months after that, proves the
essential rightness of the Tsar’s struggle to preserve the autocracy and his
refusal to succumb to pressures for a constitutional government. As in 1789, so
in 1917, constitutional monarchy, being itself the product of a disobedient, anti-
monarchical spirit, proved itself to be a feeble reed in the face of the revolution.
The Tsar clung onto power for as long as he could, not out of personal ambition,
but because he knew that he was irreplaceable. Or rather, he believed that the
dynasty was irreplaceable, which is why he passed on is power, not to the
Duma, but to his brother Michael. But the dynastic family, being itself corrupted
by its disobedience and disloyalty to the Tsar (Michael had disobeyed the Tsar
in marrying Natalia Brassova), was unable to take up the burden that Tsar
Nicholas had borne so bravely for so long.
And so not only the Tsar, and not only his family, perished, but the whole of
Russia.

138 Zaitsev, in Zhitia i Tvorenia Russkikh Svyatykh (The Lives and Works of the
Russian Saints), Moscow, 2001, p. 1055.
83
8. AMERICA INTERVENES
At the beginning of 1917, as we have seen, the Allies were planning another
joint offensive. “In March the French army launched a huge, scientifically
planned and, it hoped, decisive offensive in Champagne. It began more
successfully than the first day of the Somme, but over the next few days the
French suffered 130,000 casualties. A large part of the army mutinied.
Consequently, the French postponed major offensive operations: as its new
commander, General Pétain put it, they would wait for the Americans and the
tanks. At the same time, a revolution in Russia overthrew the tsar, though the
new provisional republic tried to continue the fight. The British were under
pressure to attack the Germans somewhere, to take pressure off the French and
the faltering Russians and Italians, and produce some dramatic effect. In July
1917 they began another campaign, which was to become as notorious as the
Somme: the third battle of Ypres – ‘Passchendaele’. This began successfully by
the standards of the Western Front by seizing some ground, and the British
showed that they had vastly improved their military skills. German intelligence
reported the British troops confident of victory… But unseasonable rain in
August slowed progress, and a deluge in October turned the battlefield into an
ocean of mud… [The British commander] Haig insisted on continuing attacks in
October and November in impossible conditions, incurring thousands of British,
Canadian and Australian casualties in vain. During the whole Third Ypres
campaign, the British lost about 275,000 men and the Germans about 200,000.
Meanwhile the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia and rapidly dropped out of
the war…”139
The killer blow planned by the Allies powers had not been
delivered. There were three main reasons for this. First, the Kaiser
transferred Hindenburg and Ludendorff from the Eastern to the
Western front; and they decided on a defensive programme that
involved doubling ammunition output – a goal that was achieved,
albeit at the cost of great suffering on the home front. Secondly, the
promised Russian offensive collapsed ignominiously after the
abdication of the Tsar, which had destroyed morale in the Russian
army. And thirdly, the Entente was hindered in increasing its
ammunition output by an unexpected obstacle: the American
President Wilson was campaigning for a second term on the slogan
that he was the man to keep America out of the war – and that meant
refusing to back the Entente’s American banker, J.P. Morgan, in
raising the huge loans that France and Britain so desperately needed
in order to restock their reserves.
And so “on 27 November 1916, four days before J.P. Morgan

planned to launch the Anglo-French bond issue, the Federal Reserve

139 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 627-628.
84
Board 140 issued instructions to all member banks. In the interest of the
stability of the American financial system, the Fed announced that it
not longer considered it desirable for American investors to increase
their holdings of British and French securities. As Wall Street plunged
and sterling was offloaded by speculators, J.P. Morgan and the UK
Treasury were forced into emergency purchasing of sterling to prop
up the British currency. At the same time the British government was
forced to suspend support of French purchasing. The Entente’s entire
financing effort was in jeopardy. In Russia in the autumn of 1916 there
was mounting resentment at the demand by Britain and France that it
should ship its gold reserves to London to secure Allied borrowing.
Without American assistance it was not just the patience of the
financial markets but the Entente itself that would be at risk. As the
year ended, the war committee of the British cabinet concluded grimly
that the only possible interpretation was that Wilson meant to force
their hand and put an end to the war in a matter of weeks. And this
ominous interpretation was reinforced when London received
confirmation from its ambassador in Washington that it was indeed
the President himself who had insisted on the strong wording of the
Fed’s note.
“Given the huge demands made by the Entente on Wall Street in

1916, it is clear that opinion was already shifting against further
massive loans to London and Paris ahead of the Fed’s announcement.
But what the cabinet could not ignore was the open hostility of the
American President. And Wilson was determined to raise the stakes.
On 12 December the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, without
stating Germany’s own aims, issued a pre-emptive demand for peace
negotiations. Undaunted, on 18 December Wilson followed this with a
‘Peace Note’, calling on both sides to state what war aims could justify
the continuation of the terrible slaughter. It was an open bid to
delegitimize the war, all the more alarming for its coincidence with
the initiative from Berlin. On Wall Street the reaction was immediate.
Armaments shares plunged and the German ambassador, Johann
Heinrich von Bernstorff, and Wilson’s son-in-law, Treasury Secretary
William Gibbs McAdoo, found themselves accused of making millions
by betting against Entente-connected armaments stocks. In London
and Paris the impact was more serious. King George V is said to have
wept. The mood in the British cabinet was furious. The London Times
called for restraint but could not hide its dismay at Wilson’s refusal to
distinguish between the two sides. It was the worst blow that France
had received in 29 months of war, roared the patriotic press from
Paris. German troops were deep in Entente territory in both East and
West. They had to be driven out, before talks could be contemplated.

140 In the Federal Reserve Act of December, 1913 President Wilson and Congress
had created an American central bank with a national currency, the US dollar,
which brought American banking partly under state control. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act (V.M.).
85
Nor, since the sudden swing in the fortunes of the war in the late
summer of 1916, did this seem impossible. Austria was clearly close to
the brink. When the Entente met for their war conference in Petrograd
at the end of January 1917, the talk was of a new sequence of
concentric offensives.
“Wilson’s intervention was deeply embarrassing, but to the

Entente’s relief the Central Powers took the initiative in rejecting the
President’s offer of mediation. This freed the Entente to issue their
own, carefully worded statement of war aims on 10 January. These
demanded the evacuation of Belgium and Serbia, and the return of
Alsace-Lorraine, but more ambitiously they insisted on self-
determination for the oppressed peoples of both the Ottoman and
Habsburg empires. It was a manifesto for continued war, not
immediate negotiation, and it thus raised the inescapable question:
how were these campaigns to be paid for? To cover purchases in the
US running at $75 million per week, in January 1917 Britain could
muster no more than $215 million in assets in New York. Beyond that,
it would be forced to draw down on the Bank of England’s last
remaining gold reserves, which would cover no more than six weeks
of procurement. In January, London had no option but to ask J.P.
Morgan to start preparing to relaunch the bond issue that had been
aborted in November. Once more, however, they had reckoned
without the President.
“At 1 p.m. on 22 January 1917 Woodrow Wilson strode towards the

rostrum of the US Senate. It was a dramatic occasion. News of the
President’s intention to speak was only leaked to the senators over
lunch. It was the first time that a President had directly addressed that
august body since George Washington’s day. Nor was it an occasion
only on the American political stage. It was clear that Wilson would
have to speak about the war and in so doing he would not merely be
delivering a commentary. Commonly, Wilson’s emergence as a leader
of global stature is dated a year later to January 1918 and his
enunciation of the so-called ’14 points’. But it was in fact in January
1917 that the American President first staked an explicit claim to
world leadership. The text of his speech was distributed to the major
capitals of Europe at the same time that it was delivered in the Senate.
As in the 14 Points speech, on 22 January Wilson would call for a new
international order based on a League of Nations, disarmament and
the freedom of the seas. But whereas the 14 Points were a wartime
manifesto that fit snugly into a mid-century narrative of American
global leadership, the speech that Wilson delivered on 22 January is a
great deal harder to assimilate.
“As the door to the American century swung wide in January 1917,
Wilson stood poised in the frame. He came not to take sides but to
make peace. The first dramatic assertion of American leadership in the
86
twentieth century was not directed towards ensuring that the ‘right’
side won, but that no side did. The only kind of peace with any
prospect of securing the cooperation of all the major world powers
was one that was accepted by all sides. All parties to the Great War
must acknowledge the conflict’s deep futility. That meant that the war
could have only one outcome: ‘peace without victory’. It was this
phrase that encapsulated the standpoint of moral equivalence with
which Wilson had consistently staked his distance from the Europeans
since the outbreak of the war. It was a stance that he knew would stick
in the gullet of many in his audience in January 1917. ‘It is not
pleasant to say this… I am seeking only to face realities and to face
them without soft concealment.’ In the current slaughter the US must
take no side. For America to ride to the assistance of Britain, France
and the Entente would certainly ensure their victory. But in so doing
America would be perpetuating the old world’s horrible cycle of
violence. It would, Wilson insisted in private conversation, be nothing
less that a ‘crime against civilization’…
“All this ought to have presented a truly historic opportunity for

Germany. The American President had weighed the war in the balance
and had refused to take the Entente’s side. When the blockade
revealed what Britain’s command of the seaways meant for global
trade, Wilson had responded with an unprecedented naval programme
of his own. He seemed bent on blocking any further mobilization of
the American economy. He had called for peace talks whilst Germany
still had the upper hand. He was not deterred by the fact that
Bethmann Hollweg had gone first. Now he was speaking quite openly
to the population of Britain, France and Italy over the heads of their
governments, demanding an end to the war. The German Embassy in
Washington fully understood the significance of the President’s words
and desperately urged Berlin to respond positively. Already in
September 1916, after extended conversations with Colonel House
[Wilson’s adviser], Ambassador Bernstorff had cabled Berlin that the
American President would seek to mediate as soon as the election was
over and that ‘Wilson regards it as in the interest of America that
neither of the combatants should gain a decisive victory’. In December
the ambassador sought to bring home to Berlin the importance of
Wilson’s intervention in the financial markets, which would be a far
less dangerous way of throttling the Entente than an all-out U-boat
campaign. Above all, Bernstorff understood Wilson’s ambition. If he
could bring the war to an end he would claim for the American
presidency the ‘glory of being the premier political personage on the
world’s stage’. If the Americans were to thwart him, they should
beware of his wrath. But such appeals were not enough to halt the
logic of escalation that had been set in motion by the Entente’s near
break-through in the late summer of 1916…” 141

141 Tooze, op. cit., pp. 51-54, 56-57.
87
For on 9 January Hindenburg and Ludendorff had overridden the
objections of the Chancellor Bethmann and rammed through the
decision to conduct unrestricted U-boat warfare against the Entente’s
supply-lines across the Atlantic. This confirmed the suspicions of
many that Germany was indeed a militaristic state. Thus for the
sociologist Max Weber, “Bethmann Hollweg’s willingness to allow the
military’s technical arguments to override his own better judgement
was damning evidence of the lasting damage done to Germany’s
political culture by Bismarck…” 142 On 31 January this decision was
conveyed to the Americans, and on 3 February Congress approved the
breaking of diplomatic relations with Germany.
However, even then Wilson did not give up his hope of becoming
the saviour of the world. And he had on his side not only many
Americans of Germanic descent, but also Jews who hated the Entente’s
alliance with Russia. Moreover, while the Grand Lodges of the
warring nations generally split along national lines, according to
David P. Hullinger, “representatives of German Grand Lodges were
received at the annual communications of the Grand Lodges of New
Jersey and New York less than a month after the United States entered
the War.” 143
At the same time, the American economy and especially its arms
export business were so heavily invested in the Entente already that it
was probably only a matter of time before Wilson succumbed to
pressure and declared himself on the side of the Entente. But for the
time being he held out. “As March began in 1917, America was still
not at war. To the frustration of much of his entourage, the President
still insisted that it would be a ‘crime’ for America to allow itself to be
sucked into the conflict, since it would ‘make it impossible to save
Europe afterwards’.” 144
Europe did indeed turn out to be “impossible to save” after the

Entente victory, in spite of Wilson’s best efforts at the Versailles
Conference. The defeat, but not the crushing of Germany in 1918 made
that nation sullen and resentful, making possible the rise of Hitler, as
we shall see. Post-revolutionary Russia became a loose cannon that
Wilson did not even try to control. Moreover, if Wilson’s appeal for
peace had been accepted in January or February, 1917, then Russia
would not have been defeated and Tsarism would have been saved –

142 Tooze, op. cit., p. 58.
143 Hullinger, “Freemasonry and World War I”,
http://www.skirret.com/papers/freemasonry_and_WWI.html.
88
which is probably why the Russian liberals chose precisely this time to
execute their plot against Tsar Nicholas. 145
But Divine Providence judged against both Germany and Russia. For at the
critical moment of late February, 1917, the German Foreign Office sent a
telegram to its embassy in Mexico City authorizing it to propose an alliance with
Mexico, as Protopresbyter James Thornton writes, “if, and only if, the United
States entered the war against Germany. In that case, Mexico would be expected
to attack the United States and, were Germany and its allies victorious, was
promised the return of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, territories she had lost
in the 1830s and ’40s. The whole idea was a major blunder by the German
foreign office and, truth be told, ludicrous given the abysmal condition of
Mexico’s military, which could never have been a serious threat to the United
States. Nevertheless, the telegram was intercepted and decoded by the British
and then given to the American ambassador to Britain, Walter Hines Page, who
forwarded it to President Wilson. Wilson, in turn, released it to the press.
Americans were stunned and infuriated.”146
“The launching of the U-boat campaign,” writes Tooze, “compounded by the

leaking of the Zimmermann telegram [whose authenticity was admitted by the
Germans], forced Wilson’s hand. He had no politically defensible option but to
go to war. On 20th March 1917, the day that the cabinet arrived at that solemn
conclusion, the decision was reinforced by other urgent news. Washington
instructed its embassy in Petrograd to recognize the Provisional Government in
Russia…
“The revolution promised freedom and democracy. What that would mean
in a gigantic, desperately poor country, fighting for its life in an immensely
costly war, would remain to be seen. But for the advocates for war in
Washington, the overthrow of the tsar came as a huge relief. As Robert Lansing,
Wilson’s Secretary of State, remarked: the Russian revolution had ‘removed the
one obstacle to affirming that the European war was a war between democracy
and absolutism’.”147
On April 6, the Americans declared war on Germany - but not on

their allies Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey… Although the
American build-up of troops was slow, and made no major impact
until almost the end of the war, its psychological impact was probably
decisive in finally cracking the Germans’ morale in the autumn of
1918. This, a direct consequence of their mad declaration of

145 G.M. Katkov penetratingly observes that the Russian liberals’ and radicals’ “fear
of the military failure and humiliation of Russia was, if we are not mistaken, only
the decent cover for another feeling – the profound inner anxiety that the war
would end in victory before the political plans of the opposition could be fulfilled,
and that the possibilities presented to it by the exceptional circumstances of
wartime, would be missed” (op. cit., p. 236).
146 Thornton, “Partnering with Putin”, New American, November 20, 2015,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/21998-partnering-with-putin.
147 Tooze, “365 Days that Shook the World”, Prospect, January, 2017, pp. 24, 26.
89
unrestricted U-boat warfare, followed by their equally mad
Zimmermann telegram, probably cost them the First World War.
Similarly, in 1941 Hitler’s declaration of war on America probably cost
him the Second World War…
Fr. James Thornton has developed an interesting argument that it was in

America’s interests to keep out of the war in accordance with her policy of
isolationism first proclaimed by George Washington himself. “After the end of
hostilities, a backlash developed in America against the idea of American
involvement in the affairs of Europe. The peace created by the Treaty of
Versailles solved none of Europe’s problems and created a host of new ones.
The throwing together of peoples who had ancient grievances against one
another into new, artificially created countries; the shifting of borders that left
ethnic minorities under hostile governments; and the denial by the victors of the
rights of the vanquished to be able to defend themselves established a Europe
rife with bitter resentments. The U.S. Senate wisely rejected Wilson’s League of
Nations, which would have compromised American sovereignty, and the Treaty
of Versailles, which, in its vindictiveness, violated many of the ideals that
Wilson had himself trumpeted so loudly. President Wilson had promised ‘a war
to make the world safe for democracy,’ but created a world in which
dictatorships sprang up everywhere. He promised ‘a war to end all wars,’ but
set in motion forces that guaranteed a new and even more terrible war within a
generation.
“How catastrophic was American intervention in the First World War?
Winston Churchill answered that question in an interview given to William
Griffin, publisher of the New York Enquirer, in August 1936. (Churchill later
denied making these comments, but in October 1939 Griffin insisted in sworn
testimony before Congress that he had.) Churchill said, ‘America should have
minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t
entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring
of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia
followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and
Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned
Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’
wouldn’t today be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down
parliamentary government — and if England had made peace early in 1917, it
would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other
lives.’”148
This is a persuasive argument if we consider only America’s national

interests considered in isolation and in the relatively short term. But it rests on
some false assumptions.

148 Thornton, op. cit.
90
First and most importantly, America’s decision to intervene was made only
after the Tsar abdicated, so it had no influence on the supremely critical event
that made inevitable the triumph of Bolshevism. Secondly, whatever Churchill
may have said in 1936, there is no evidence that the Allies were going to make
peace with Germany in the spring of 1917. Far from making peace, Britain,
France, Italy and Russia were preparing an offensive for that spring which they
fully expected would be successful - especially in view of Russia’s greatly
improved and now well-equipped army. But the Tsar’s abdication put paid to
those hopes as the morale of the Russian soldiers plummeted almost
overnight… Thirdly, while the Versailles peace was indeed a failure in many
ways, it is hardly just to lay the blame for that solely on Wilson, or blame it for
the rise of fascism and all the other catastrophes of the inter-war years.
If America had stayed out of the war, it is by no means certain that the Allies
would have lost. But if they had, what would have been the result? The
domination of the continent by a proto-fascistic, imperialist Germany – hardly a
recipe for stability. The Bolsheviks, as we shall see later, would probably have
made a deal with the Germans, foreshadowing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of
some twenty years later. With Bolshevism established in the East with the
blessing of Germany, millions of Orthodox would still have fled westwards,
only this time, without having any anti-Bolshevik state there to give them
refuge – unless they were able to make it across the ocean to America…
The fact is, because of the sins of the Orthodox peoples, God had decreed the
triumph of Bolshevism, and there was nothing the Americans or anybody else
could have done about that, even if they had wanted to. If He had counted the
peoples worthy, God would have raised another Tsar to crush the Bolsheviks
and restore Orthodoxy – but they were not worthy. And yet in His mercy He
brought America into Europe, tentatively in 1917, more decisively in 1944, so
that there should be at least some defence and refuge from the most evil regime
in the history of the world…
91
9. DUAL POWER
The abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on March 2, 1917 marked the end of the
Christian era of political history initiated by the coming to power of St.
Constantine the Great in 306. The enormous change – and the enormous loss –
was felt immediately by those who lived through it. As the novelist I.A. Bunin
wrote: “Our children and grandchildren will not be able even to imagine that
Russia in which we once (that is, yesterday) lived, which we did not value and
did not understand – all that might, complexity, wealth and happiness…”
The power that replaced that of the tsar was from the beginning dual, being
composed of the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet of soldiers’
and workers’ deputies. And they were unequal partners: already on the night
before the abdication the Duma had begged Himmer, Nakhamkes and
Alexandrovich of the Petrograd Soviet to allow them to create a government.
This showed that the Soviet, and not the Provisional Government, was the real
ruler of Russia now.
And already on March 2, in its very first act, “Soviet Order Number One”,
the Soviet rubbed the government’s nose in the dust: “The orders of the military
commission of the State Duma are to be obeyed only in such instances when
they do not contradict the orders and decrees of the Soviet”. In other words,
while the official power was in the hands of the Duma, the real power lay in the
hands of the Soviets; the Provisional Government that officially came into being
on March 3 was to rule only by permission of the real ruler, the Soviet, which
had come into being on March 1 and supposedly represented the soldiers and
workers. The immediate effect of Order Number One was to destroy discipline
in the army, as soldiers refused to salute or obey their officers – or simply went
home to join in the looting of landowners’ and church estates. And so the Tsar’s
main purpose in abdicating – to preserve the army as a fighting force capable of
defeating the Germans – was frustrated before the ink was dry on his manifesto.
On the same day, March 2, at the Tauris palace in Petrograd, Pavel Milyukov
announced the formation of a “Provisional” government to oversee the
administration of the country until the convening of an elected Constituent
Assembly. The “poisonous question” was put to him: “Who elected you?” Many
years later Milyukov wrote: “I could have read out a whole dissertation in reply.
We were not ‘elected’ by the Duma. Nor were we elected by Lvov in accordance
with the tsar’s order prepared at Headquarters, of which we could not have
been informed. All these sources for the succession of power we ourselves had
consciously cast out. There remained only one reply, the clearest and most
convincing. I replied: ‘The Russian revolution has elected us!’ This simple
reference to the historical process that brought us to power shut the mouths of
the most radical opponents.”149

149 Katkov, op. cit., p. 370.
92
But if it was the revolution that “elected” the leaders of the Provisional
Government, they could not really object to the further “election” of Lenin,
could they? That is why they offered no real opposition to the Bolshevik
revolution in October, and were so easily swept into “the dustbin of history”, in
Trotsky’s phrase.
The formal head of the Provisional Government was Prince Lvov. But the
real leader was the Justice Minister, Alexander Kerensky, a Trudovik lawyer
who had wanted to be an actor. As Graham Darby writes, contemporaries saw
Kerensky “as the real prime minister from the outset but despite being in both
the government and the soviet – thereby embodying the dual power structure –
he was in between the two camps, distanced from party politics, a politician of
compromise who would fail to reconcile the irreconcilable… For a brief moment
Kerensky was the essential man, the peoples’ tribune, a fine orator and a man of
charisma. A good actor, he could catch the mood of an audience. He wore semi-
military costume and attempted to strike a Napoleonic pose. He enjoyed
immense popularity, even adulation, in the early months and a personality cult
grew up around him fuelled by his own self-promotion, a range of propaganda
(articles, medals, badges, poems) and a receptive audience. Many saw him as a
saviour, the true successor to the tsar. There was, however, an inherent
contradiction between Russia’s political culture, with its dependency on
powerful leaders, and the democratic ideology of the early stages of the
revolution, a contradiction embodied in Kerensky, the undemocratic democrat.
The adulation went to his head and he came to overestimate his popularity long
after it had evaporated. He moved into the Winter Palace, lived in the tsar’s
apartments and used the imperial train. He was seemingly powerful but only by
virtue of the offices he held and the fickle nature of mass popularity. To sustain
the latter he had to fulfil everyone’s expectations, but as Lenin pointed out, he
‘wanted to harmonise the interests of landowners and peasants, workers and
bosses, labour and capital’. It was an impossible task…”150
P. Novgorodtsev writes: "Prince Lvov, Kerensky and Lenin were bound

together by an unbroken bond. Prince Lvov was as guilty of Kerensky as
Kerensky was of Lenin. If we compare these three actors of the revolution, who
each in turn led the revolutionary power, in their relationship to the evil
principle of civil enmity and inner dissolution, we can represent this
relationship as follows. The system of guileless non-resistance to evil, which was
applied by Prince Lvov as a system of ruling the state, with Kerensky was
transformed into a system of pandering to evil camouflaged by phrases about
'the revolutionary leap' and the good of the state, while with Lenin it was
transformed into a system of openly serving evil clothed in the form of merciless
class warfare and the destruction of all those displeasing to the authorities. Each
of the three mentioned persons had his utopian dreams, and history dealt with
all of them in the same way: it turned their dreams into nothing and made of
them playthings of the blind elements. The one who most appealed to mass

150 Darby, “Kerensky in Hindsight”, History Today, July, 2017, p. 51.
93
instincts and passions acquired the firmest power over the masses. In conditions
of general anarchy the path to power and despotism was most open to the worst
demagogy. Hence it turned out that the legalized anarchy of Prince Lvov and
Kerensky naturally and inevitably gave way to the demagogic despotism of
Lenin."151
The only possible source for the legitimate, ordered succession of power after
the abdication of the Tsar was the Tsar’s own orders, given on the same day,
transferring royal power to his brother, Great Prince Michael, and appointing –
at the request of the Duma representatives Guchkov and Shulgin - Prince V.E.
Lvov as President of the Council of Ministers and General L.G. Kornilov as
Commander of the Petrograd military district. But the Duma politicians had no
intention of accepting Great Prince Michael as tsar (Milyukov and Guchkov
were in favour of a constitutional monarchy, but not a true autocracy), and soon
compelled him, too, to abdicate. As for Lvov, he was made head of the
Provisional Government, but not by virtue of any order of the Tsar, whose
authority the Duma politicians rejected.
Since the legitimizing power of the Tsar’s orders had been rejected, there
remained only the authority of a popular election, according to liberal theory.
But the Provisional Government had not, of course, been elected. Rather, its
purpose was to supervise the election of a Constituent Assembly which alone,
according to liberal theory, could bring a legitimate government into power. So
Miliukov resorted to a deliberate paradox: they had been “elected” by the
revolution. The paradox consists in the fact that revolutions do not “elect” in
accordance with established legal procedures; for the revolution is the violent
overthrow of all existing procedures and legalities…
But if the Provisional Government came to power through the revolution –

that is, through the violent overthrow of all existing legalities – it had no legal
authority to suppress the continuation of the revolution through the violent
overthrow of its own power. In this fact lies the clue to the extraordinarily weak
and passive attitude of the Provisional Government towards all political forces
to the left of itself. It could not rule because, according to its own liberal
philosophy, it had no right to rule… No such inhibitions were felt by the radical
socialists, for whom might was right and the niceties of liberal political
philosophy and procedure were irrelevant.
The lesson was clear: if the Russians did not want to be ruled by the God-
anointed Tsar, then, by God’s permission and as punishment for their sins, they
would be ruled by the Satan-appointed Soviets…
The inequality of the “dual-power” system was evident from the beginning.
Thus M.V. Rodzianko, who more than anyone had forced the Tsar to sign his
abdication, was excluded from the list of ministers as being unacceptable to the

151 Novgorodtsev, Vostanovlenie sviatyn" (“The Restoration of the Holy Things”),
Put' (The Way), N 4, June-July, 1926, p. 4.
94
masses; and Guchkov and Miliukov, the Ministers of War and Foreign Affairs,
who had also played major roles in the abdication of the Tsar, did not last
beyond the April Crisis after their continued support for the war became
apparent. This left the government in the hands of a group of leftist Masons:
Kerensky (the link with the Petrograd Soviet), Nekrasov, Konovalov,
Tereschenko and Efremov. In order to gain the support of the Soviet, as Douglas
Smith writes, they “had to agree to eight conditions, including amnesty for all
political prisoners; freedom of speech, press, and assembly; and the abolition of
all restrictions based on class, religion, and nationality… The new government
also agreed to immediately abolish the police, the Okhrana, and the Corps of
Gendarmes. This step, together with the dissolution of the tsarist provincial
bureaucracy, was to have fatal consequences, for without new institutions to
take their place, the Provisional Government was left with no means to
effectively govern the country at the very moment it was descending into ever
greater disorder…”152
This orgy of liberal freedoms – accompanied by an orgy of violence

throughout the country - earned the government the plaudits, not only of
deadly enemies of Tsarism such as the Jewish banker Jacob Schiff in New York,
but also of the western governments, whose democratic prejudices blinded
them to the fact that the revolution was turning Russia from their most faithful
ally into their deadliest enemy... But as time passed and the chaos spread
throughout the country, it became clear that neither the Provisional
Government, nor even the Soviets, nor even a coalition between the two on a
pro-war platform, would be able to control the revolutionary masses, who
wanted peace at any price with the Germans abroad and the most radical social
revolution at home. Of all the parties represented in the Soviets, it was only the
Bolsheviks (for the soldiers and workers) and the Left Social Revolutionaries
(for the peasants) who understood this, who had their fingers on the nation’s
revolutionary pulse…
Anarchy was the order of the day, and the only “justice” was imposed by
lynchings. Thus Gorky claimed to have seen 10,000 cases of summary justice in
1917 alone.153 The Church suffered particularly in this period, with the killing of
many priests…
Indeed, “’it was in the summer of 1917,’ Ivan Bunin later wrote, ‘that the
Satan of Cain’s anger, of bloodlust, and of the most savage cruelty wafted over
Russia while its people were extolling brotherhood, equality and freedom.’
Freedom for the peasants meant volia, license. Anton Kazakov, a peasant from
Chernigov, said freedom was ‘Doing whatever you want’. And what the
peasants, together with the returning army deserters, wanted was to destroy the

152 Smith, Former Persons: The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy, London:
Macmillan, 2012, p. 73.

153 Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 400.
95
landlords and take their property. It was not enough to plunder them; they had
to be physically annihilated and driven off the land for good…”154
In an article written in 1923 G. Mglinsky explained why the government

proved so weak: “Understanding the absence of firm ground under their feet
because of the absence of those layers of the population on which it was possible
to rely, the new government fell immediately into dependence on the ‘Soviet of
Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies’ which had been formed even before the
abdication of his Majesty the Emperor, and behind which there stood the
capital’s working masses who had been propagandized by the same Russian
intelligentsia. Although it did not really sympathize with the content of Order
Number 1, which destroyed the army, and understood all its danger, the
Provisional Government nevertheless allowed the carrying out of this order – so
criminal in relation to the fatherland - by the hands of its Minister of War
Guchkov.
“Fearing a reaction in the Russian people, which, as it well understood,

would hardly be likely to be reconciled with the seizure of power by a bunch of
intriguers, the Provisional Government from the very beginning of its activity
tried hard to destroy the state-administrative apparatus. With a stroke of the
pen all administrative power in Russia was destroyed. The governors were
replaced by zemstvo activists, the city commanders – by city-dwellers, the
police – by militia.
“But, as is well known, it is always easy to destroy, but very difficult to

create. And so it was here: having destroyed the old state apparatus, the
Provisional Government did not think of, or, more likely, was simply not able to
create anything in its place. Russia was immediately handed over to itself and
nepotism was introduced as a slogan for the whole of the state administration,
and this at precisely the moment when a strong power was required as never
before.
“When representatives of the old and new administrations came to the head
of the Provisional Government, Prince [G.E.] Lvov, and demanded directions,
they unfailingly received the same refusal which Prince Lvov gave to the
representatives of the press in his interview of 7 March, that is, five days after
the coup. ‘This is a question of the old psychology. The Provisional Government
has removed the old governors and is not going to appoint anybody. They will
be elected on the spot. Such questions must be resolved not from the centre, but
by the population itself… We are all boundlessly happy that we have succeeded
in living to this great moment when we can create a new life of the people – not
for the people, but together with the people… The future belongs to the people
which has manifested its genius in this historical days. What great happiness it
is to live in these great days!...’

154 Smith, op. cit., pp. 94-95.
96
“These words, which sound now like pure irony, were not invented, they are
found in the text of the 67th page of the first volume of A History of the Second
Russian Revolution written, not by any die-hard or black-hundredist, but by Paul
Milyukov ‘himself’, who later on the pages of his history gives the following
evaluation of the activity of the head of the government which he himself joined
as Minister of Foreign Affairs:
“’This world-view of the leader of our inner politics,’ says Milyukov, ‘led in
fact to the systematic cessation of activity of his department and to the self-
limitation of the central authority to a single task – the sanctioning of the fruits
of what in the language of revolutionary democracy is called the revolutionary
creation of rights. The population, left to itself and completely deprived of
protection from the representatives of the central power, necessarily had to
submit to the rule of party organizations, which acquired, in new local
committees, a powerful means of influence and propagandizing certain ideas
that flattered the interests and instincts of the masses, and for that reason were
more acceptable for them.’ ”155
There was no real opposition to this wanton destruction of old Russia

because the forces on the right were in a state of shock and ideological
uncertainty that left them incapable of undertaking any effective counter-
measures. We search in vain for a leader, in Church or State, who called for the
restoration of the Romanov dynasty at this time. Perhaps the deputy over-
procurator, Raev, who called on the Synod to support the monarchy, was an
exception to this rule, or the only Orthodox general who remained faithful to his
oath, Theodore Keller. Or perhaps Archimandrite Vitaly (Maximenko) of
Pochaev monastery, the future Archbishop of Eastern America, who, “having
found out about the emperor’s abdication… travelled to the Tsar’s military
headquarters in Mogilev in order to plead with the sovereign to rescind his
abdication. He was not allowed a meeting…”156
Orthodox monarchism, it seemed, was dead… The abdication of the Tsar was
greeted with joy by people of all classes – even the peasantry. As Oliver Figes
writes, “the news from the capital was joyously greeted by huge assemblies in
the village fields. ‘Our village,’ recalls one peasant, ‘burst into life with

155 Mglinsky, “Grekhi russkoj intelligentsii” (The Sins of the Russian Intelligentsia),
Staroe Vremia (Old Times), 1923; in Prince N.D. Zhevakov, Vospominania

(Reminiscences), Moscow, 1993. Zhevakhov, who was assistant over-procurator
during the February Revolution, comments on these words: “If Milyukov, who
took the closest participation in the overthrow of Tsarist Power in Russia, could
talk like this, then what was it like in reality! ‘Things were no better in other
departments. Everywhere complete chaos reigned, for none of the departmental
bosses, nor the government as a whole, had any definite, systematically realizable
plan. They broke down everything that was old, they broke it down out of a
spectral fear of a return to the old. Without thinking of tomorrow, with a kind of
mad haste, they broke down everything that the whole Russian people is now
beginning to sorrow over…’ (Staroe Vremia, December 18/31, 1923, N 13).” (op.
cit.).
156 “Archbishop Vitaly Maximenko”, Orthodox Life, March-April, 2010, p. 15.
97
celebrations. Everyone felt enormous relief, as if a heavy rock had suddenly
been lifted from our shoulders.’ Another peasant recalled the celebrations in his
village on the day it learned of the Tsar’s abdication: ‘People kissed each other
from joy and said that life from now on would be good. Everyone dressed in
their best costumes, as they do on a big holiday. The festivities went on for three
days.’ Many villages held religious processions to thank the Lord for their
newly won freedoms, and offered up prayers for the new government. For
many peasants, the revolution appeared as a sacred thing, while those who had
laid down their lives for the people’s freedom were seen by the peasants as
modern-day saints. Thus the villagers of Bol’she-Dvorskaya volost in the
Tikhvinsk district of Petrograd province held a ‘service of thanksgiving for the
divine gift of the people’s victory and the eternal memory of those holy men
who fell in the struggle for freedom’. The villagers of Osvyshi village in Tver
province offered, as they put it, ‘fervent prayers to thank the Lord for the divine
gift of the people’s victory… and since this great victory was achieved by
sacrifice, we held a requiem for all our fallen brothers’. It was often with the
express purpose of reciprocating this sacrifice that many villages sent donations,
often amounting to several hundred roubles, to the authorities in Petrograd for
the benefit of those who had suffered losses in the February Days.”157
This confusion of the values of Christianity with those of the anti-Christian

revolution was also evident in contemporary literature – in, for example, Blok’s
poem The Twelve, in which Christ is portrayed at the head of the Red Guards.
The prevalence of this confusion among all classes of society showed how
deeply the democratic-revolutionary ideology had penetrated the masses in the
pre-revolutionary period. For those with eyes to see it showed that there could
be no quick return to normality, but only a very long, tortuous and tormented
path of repentance through suffering…

157 Figes, op. cit., pp. 347-348.
98
10. THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION
The Soviet Order Number One, and the success of the Bolshevik propaganda
against the war from April onwards, destroyed discipline in the army. As more
and more soldiers returned to their villages, the June offensive ended in dismal
failure. General Alexeyev had calculated that the losses would be about 6000,
but they turned out to be 400,000.158 An offensive that had been designed by
Kerensky and the liberals to bolster the state and the forces of law and order by
bringing all classes together on a patriotic wave ended by opening the path to
the final destruction of the state.
The coup began with the setting up of a separate government by the

Bolshevized sailors of Kronstadt, which precipitated a confused “semi-
insurrection”, in Trotsky’s words, in early July. But the insurrection failed,
Kerensky became prime minister and a crackdown on the Bolsheviks began.
Lenin fled, disguised as a woman, to Finland, and many party members were
arrested. It was left to Stalin and Sverdlov, working underground, to keep the
party afloat… The Mensheviks and other socialists to the right of the Bolsheviks
also helped at this critical point. Believing that there were “no enemies to the
Left”, and fearing a counter-revolution, they protected the Bolsheviks from
treason charges. A year later, the Bolsheviks proved their ingratitude by
imprisoning the Mensheviks…159
In spite of this setback, support for the Bolsheviks continued to grow,

especially after they adopted the SR slogan, “Land to the Peasants!” legalizing
the peasants’ seizure of the landowners’ estates. As their wars against the
peasantry in 1918-22 and 1928-1934 were to show, the Bolsheviks were never a
pro-peasant party, and really wanted to nationalize the land rather than give it
to the peasants. This was in accordance with Marxist teaching, which saw the
industrial proletariat as the vanguard of the revolution, but looked down on the
peasants, with their religiosity, old-fashioned ways and rejection of state
interference, as being relics of the old order. However, towards the end of his
life, in 1881, Marx had entered into correspondence with the narodnik Vera
Zasulich, and had recognized the possibility that the revolution in Russia could
begin with the agrarian socialists.160 So Lenin had some precedent in making
tactical concessions to the SRs at this point – concessions he was soon to take
back once he was in power. It paid off: many Left SRs joined the party, and
others voted for the Bolsheviks in the Soviets.
In late August, alarmed by the increasing power of the Bolsheviks, and by the
German advance on Petrograd, which was creating chaos in the rear, General
Kornilov, the new commander-in-chief of the Russian armies, ordered his troops
to march on Petrograd in order to restore order. As he said on August 11: “It is
time to put an end to all this. It is time to hang the German agents and spies,

158 Figes, op. cit., p. 408.
159 Figes, op. cit., p. 436.
160 Robert Service, Comrades, London: Pan Books, 2007, p. 30.
99
with Lenin at their head, to dispel the Council of Soviet of Workers’ and
Soldiers’ Deputies and scatter them far and wide, so that they should never be
able to come together again!” 161 Right-wing forces in politics (Rodzyanko,
Guchkov, Milyukov), in business and in the army (the Officers’ Union and the
Union of Cossacks) soon rallied around him, hoping to prevent the Russian
revolution from following the pattern of the French revolution and passing from
a bourgeois, liberal phase to a Jacobin, terrorist one. It may be that Kerensky
originally invited Kornilov to save the Provisional Government from the
Bolsheviks. Be that as it may, Kerensky soon renounced Kornilov, and Kornilov
renounced the Provisional Government. But on the approaches to Petrograd,
Bolshevik agitators and railwaymen managed to infiltrate Kornilov’s troops and
persuade them to give up the coup attempt.
Figes writes: “The social polarization of the summer gave the Bolsheviks their
first real mass following as a party which based its main appeal on the plebeian
rejection of all superordinate authority. The Kornilov crisis was the critical
turning point, for it seemed to confirm their message that neither peace nor
radical social change could be obtained through the politics of compromise with
the bourgeoisie. The larger factories in the major cities, where the workers’ sense
of class solidarity was most developed, were the first to go over in large
numbers to the Bolsheviks. By the end of May, the party had already gained
control of the Central Bureau of the Factory Committees and, although the
Menshevik trade unionists remained in the ascendancy until 1918, it also began
to get its resolutions passed at important trade union assemblies. Bolshevik
activists in the factories tended to be younger, more working class and much
more militant than their Menshevik or SR rivals. This made them more
attractive to those groups of workers – both among the skilled and the unskilled
– who were becoming increasingly prepared to engage in violent strikes, not just
for better pay and working conditions but also for the control of the factory
environment itself. As their network of party cells at the factory level grew, the
Bolsheviks began to build up their membership among the working class, and
as a result their finances grew through the new members’ contributions. By the
Sixth Party Conference at the end of July there were probably 200,000 Bolshevik
members, rising to perhaps 350,000 on the eve of October, and the vast majority
of these were blue-collar workers.”162
Similar swings to the Bolsheviks took place in the city Duma elections of
August and September, and in the Soviets. “As early as August, the Bolsheviks
had won control of the Soviets in Ivanovo-Voznesensk (the ‘Russian
Manchester’), Kronstadt, Yekaterinburg, Samara and Tsaritsyn. But after the
Kornilov crisis many other Soviets followed suit: Riga, Saratov and Moscow
itself. Even the Petrograd Soviet fell to the Bolsheviks… [On September 9]
Trotsky, appearing for the first time after his release from prison, dealt the
decisive rhetorical blow by forcing the Soviet leaders to admit that Kerensky, by

161 Kornilov, in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell,
2004, p. 727.
162 Figes, op. cit., p. 457.
100
this stage widely regarded as a ‘counter-revolutionary’, was still a member of
their executive. On 25 September the leadership of the Petrograd Soviet was
completely revamped, with the Bolsheviks occupying four of the seven seats on
its executive and Trotsky replacing Chkheidze as its Chairman. This was the
beginning of the end. In the words of Sukhanov, the Petrograd Soviet was ‘now
Trotsky’s guard, ready at a sign from him to storm the coalition’.”163
On October 10 Lenin returned secretly to Petrograd from Finland determined

that an armed insurrection should be launched now, even before the convening
of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets on October 20; for he did not
want to share power with the other parties represented at the Congress. On
October 10, by a margin of ten to two (Zinoviev and Kamenev voted against) his
views prevailed in the Central Committee, and on October 16 Trotsky set up the
Petrograd Revolutionary Military Committee, which was theoretically under the
control of the Petrograd Soviet but was in fact designed to be the spearhead of
the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power.
Trotsky’s support for the Leninist line was crucial to the success of the
revolution. For a long time he had not seen eye-to-eye with Lenin. Originally a
Menshevik, in 1904 he accurately summed up Lenin’s dictatorial aims: “The
party organization is substituted for the party, the Central Committee is
substituted for the party organization, and finally a ‘dictator’ is substituted for
the Central Committee”.164 And as late as March, 1917, Lenin had expressed his
wariness of Trotsky: “The main thing is not to let ourselves get caught in stupid
attempts at ‘unity’ with social patriots, or still more dangerous… with
vacillators like Trotsky & Co.”165 Nevertheless, by 1917 there were no major
differences between the two revolutionaries, so it was logical that Trotsky
should join - it was probably his vanity and ambition that had prevented him
from surrendering to the party he had criticized for so long. And now his
oratorical power to sway the mob, and the key position he occupied in the
Petrograd Soviet and its Revolutionary Military Committee, supplied the vital
element that propelled the Bolsheviks to power.
Figes continues: “The rising fortunes of the Bolsheviks during the summer
and autumn were essentially due to the fact that they were the only major
political party which stood uncompromisingly for Soviet power. This point
bears emphasizing, for one of the most basic misconceptions of the Russian
Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were swept to power on a tide of mass support
for the party itself. The October insurrection was a coup d’étât, actively
supported by a small minority of the population (and indeed opposed by
several of the Bolshevik leaders themselves). But it took place amidst a social
revolution, which was centred on the popular realization of Soviet power as the
negation of the state and the direct self-rule of the people, much as in the ancient

163 Figes, op. cit., p. 459.
164 Trotsky, Our Political Tasks (1904); in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 679.
165 Lenin, Letter to Alexandra Kollontai, March 15, 1917; in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 726.
101
peasant ideal of volia. The political vacuum brought about by this social
revolution enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power in the cities and consolidate
their dictatorship during the autumn and winter. The slogan ‘All Power to the
Soviets!’ was a useful tool, a banner of popular legitimation covering the
nakedness of Lenin’s ambition (which was better expressed as All Power to the
Party). Later, as the nature of the Bolshevik dictatorship became apparent, the
party faced the growing opposition of precisely those groups in society which in
1917 had rallied behind the Soviet slogan…”166
The lack of opposition to the Bolshevik coup was almost farcical. First, the
Petrograd garrison mutinied, leaving the government no substantial forces in
the capital. Then, on the night of the 24th, Kerensky fled in a stolen car and fled
to the West, never to return. A week before his death he said to an acquaintance:
“My own children are ashamed of me. They say that I have entered into history
as the father of ‘Kerenshchina’. Forgive me and forget me. I destroyed Russia…”
The rest of the ministers huddled in the Winter Palace guarded by some
Cossacks, cadets and 200 women from the Shock Battalion of Death – about 3000
people in all. But such was their lack of morale that by the evening only 300 of
these were left. Very little fighting actually took place.
The Bolsheviks’ most potent weapon was the blank round fired by the cruiser
Aurora at 9.40 p.m. “The huge sound of the blast, much louder than a live shot,
caused the frightened ministers to drop at once to the floor. The women from
the Battalion of Death became hysterical and had to be taken away to a room at
the back of the palace, where most of the remaining cadets abandoned their
posts.”167 When the Bolsheviks finally stormed into the Palace, their first act was
to break open the wine cellars and get drunk…
The only real drama took place at the Soviet Congress, which finally
convened at 10.40 p.m. The delegates at first supported the formation of a Soviet
government, which, if the Bolsheviks had really believed their slogan: “All
Power to the Soviets!” should have stopped their coup in its tracks. “Martov
proposed the formation of a united democratic government based upon all the
parties in the Soviet: this, he said, was the only way to avert a civil war. The
proposal was met with torrents of applause. Even Lunacharsky was forced to
admit that the Bolsheviks had nothing against it – they could not abandon the
slogan of Soviet Power – and the proposal was immediately passed by a
unanimous vote. But just as it looked as if a socialist coalition was at last about
to be formed, a series of Mensheviks and SRs bitterly denounced the violent
assault on the Provisional Government. They declared that their parties, or at
least the right-wing sections of them, would have nothing to do with this
‘criminal venture’, which was bound to throw the country into civil war, and
walked out of the Congress hall in protest, while the Bolshevik delegates
stamped their feet, whistled and hurled abuse at them.

166 Figes, op. cit., pp. 460-461.
167 Figes, op. cit., p. 488.
102
“Lenin’s planned provocation – the pre-emptive seizure of power – had
worked. By walking out of the Congress, the Mensheviks and SRs undermined
all hopes of reaching a compromise with the Bolshevik moderates and of
forming a coalition government of all the Soviet parties. The path was now clear
for the Bolshevik dictatorship, based on the Soviet, which Lenin had no doubt
intended all along. In the charged political atmosphere of the time, it is easy to
see why the Mensheviks and SRs acted as they did. But it is equally difficult not
to draw the conclusion that, by their actions, they merely played into Lenin’s
hands and thus committed political suicide…”168
Trotsky shouted after the departing delegates: “You are miserable bankrupts,
your role is played out; go where you ought to go – into the dustbin of history.”
Then he proposed a resolution condemning the “treacherous” attempts of the
Mensheviks and SRs to undermine Soviet power. The mass of the remaining
delegates (Bolsheviks and Left SRs) fell into the trap and voted for the motion,
thereby legitimizing the Bolshevik coup in the name of the Soviet Congress.
At 2 a.m. the ministers in the Winter Palace were arrested and cast into the
Peter and Paul fortress. Kamenev announced the arrest of the ministers to the
Congress.
“And then Lunacharsky read out Lenin’s Manifesto ‘To All Workers, Soldiers
and Peasants’, in which ‘Soviet Power’ was proclaimed, and its promises on
land, bread and peace were announced. The reading of this historic
proclamation, which was constantly interrupted by the thunderous cheers of the
delegates, played an enormous symbolic role. It provided the illusion that the
insurrection was the culmination of a revolution by ‘the masses’. When it had
been passed, shortly after 5 a.m. on the 26th, the weary but elated delegates
emerged from the Tauride Palace. ‘The night was yet heavy and chill,’ wrote
John Reed. ‘There was only a faint unearthly pallor stealing over the silent
streets, dimming the watch-fires, the shadow of a terrible dawn rising over
Russia…’”169
“We have it on the authority of Trotsky himself,” writes Richard Pipes, “that
the October ‘revolution’ in Petrograd was accomplished by ‘at most’ 25,000-
30,000 persons – this in a country of 150 million and a city with 400,000 workers
and a garrison of over 200,000 soldiers.
“From the instant he seized dictatorial power Lenin proceeded to uproot all
existing institutions so as to clear the ground for a regime subsequently labelled
‘totalitarian’. This term has fallen out of favour with Western sociologists and
political scientists determined to avoid what they consider the language of the
Cold War. It deserves note, however, how quickly it found favour in the Soviet
Union the instant the censor’s prohibitions against its use had been lifted. This

168 Figes, op. cit., pp. 489-490.
169 Figes, op. cit., p. 492.
103
kind of regime, unknown to previous history, imposed the authority of a private
but omnipotent ‘party’ on the state, claiming the right to subject to itself all
organized life without exception, and enforcing its will by means of unbounded
terror…”170
As just one example of how the Bolsheviks were prepared to destroy even the
most important and essential leaders of the nation, we may consider the beating
to death by revolutionary soldiers of the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian
Army, Nikolai Nikolaievich Dukhonin, on December 3, 1917, in Mogilev. The
lynching was watched with indifference by Krylenko, who the previous had
announced that he was taking Dukhonin’s place and that Dukhonin was to be
sent to Petrograd at the disposal of the Council of People’s Commissars. The
body was mocked and mutilated, and it was not until two years later that
Dukhonin’s wife was able to obtain it for burial…
“On the day after the coup,” writes Adam Tooze, “Lenin proposed that the
Constituent Assembly elections be cancelled altogether. There was no need for
such an exercise in ‘bourgeois democracy’. But he was overruled by the
Bolshevik Executive Committee, which decided that to flout the democratic
hopes of the February revolution so openly would do more harm than good.”171
In the elections to the Constituent Assembly, the turnout was large (60%),
and Russians voted in large numbers for the main socialist party of the SRs
(58%). The Bolsheviks polled only 25%, the Ukrainian Mensheviks - 12%, and
other national parties - 4%. In all, socialist or revolutionary parties received 80%
of the vote, while the liberal Cadets received 5%.172 There is no question about
it: the revolution was not imposed upon the Russian people, in their great
majority they called it upon themselves…
According to Solzhenitsyn, “‘More than 80% of the Jewish population of

Russia voted’ for Zionist parties. Lenin wrote that 550,000 were for Jewish
nationalists. ‘The majority of the Jewish parties formed a single national list, in
accordance with which seven deputies were elected – six Zionists and
Gruzenberg. ‘The success of the Zionists’ was also aided by the [published not
long before the elections] Declaration of the English Foreign Minister Balfour
[on the creation of a ‘national centre’ of the Jews in Palestine], ‘which was met
by the majority of the Russian Jewish population with enthusiasm’.”173 Thus in
many cities there were festive manifestations, meetings and religious services.
The Constituent Assembly was convened in January, 1918. On the first day,
“between 3 and 4 a.m. on the 6th, the Chairman of the Assembly and leader of
the SRs, Victor Chernov (1873-1952), was trying to pass a law for the abolition of

170 Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, London: Fontana, 1995, p.
499.
172 Tooze, op. cit., p. 85; Pipes, op. cit., pp. 5, 149.
173 Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), Moscow, 2001, p.
73.
104
landed property when he was tapped on the shoulder by a sailor, the
commander of the Bolshevik Guard. ‘I have been instructed to inform you that
all those present should leave the Assembly Hall,’ the sailor announced,
‘because the guard is tired’.”174 The Assembly never reconvened.
So the supreme authority in the Russian republic disappeared because the

guard was tired… Thus was Russian democracy brought to an abrupt and
inglorious end… And with it disappeared the last chance that the Russian
people would have to reinstate the monarchy in a peaceful and orderly fashion
and avoid the great catastrophe that now overtook them…

174 Norman Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1996, p. 921.
105
11. THE BALFOUR DECLARATION
One of the most unexpected, but most far-reaching consequences of the First
World War was the establishment, by the British, of a National Homeland for
the Jews in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration, so called after the British Foreign
Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour, who published it on November 2, 1917, was one
of the most portentous documents in world history, whose consequences are
still being played out today – and not only in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It ranged
one of the great powers of the time – the power, moreover, that was about to
conquer Jerusalem in the following month – in alliance with Zionism, thereby
laying the foundation for the creation of the modern State of Israel in 1948 and
tying in the interests of what is now called “the international community” with
the interests of Israel.
But, as we shall see, its significance was still greater than that.
“Many different individuals,” writes Peter Mansfield, “contributed to the

genesis of the Balfour Declaration. The British Gentiles among them were
guided by a remarkable mixture of imperial Realpolitik and romantic/historical
feelings. It was a Jewish member of the British government, Herbert Samuel,
who in January 1915 first proposed to the cabinet the idea of a Jewish Palestine
which would be annexed by the British Empire. But it was not until after David
Lloyd George took over the conduct of the war at the end of 1916, as the leader
of a National Coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, that the Zionist cause
made real headway. The prime minister, a close friend of the Gentile Zionist
editor of the Manchester Guardian – C.P. Scott – was an easy convert, as were
other members of his cabinet – Balfour, the foreign secretary; Lord Milner, the
former imperial consul in Africa; and a large group of Foreign Office officials
and government advisers which included Sir Mark Sykes. These were non-Jews
who saw huge advantages in a Jewish Palestine as part of the empire. But
underpinning their imperial convictions was the romantic appeal of the return
of the Jews to Zion, which, founded on Old Testament Christianity, was part of
their Victorian upbringing. (Zionism also had this twin attraction for Churchill,
who was not in the cabinet in 1917 but would return to it.) The British cabinet
had already veered away from the commitment in the Sykes-Picot agreement to
international control for Palestine. ‘Britain could take care of the Holy Places
better than anyone else,’ the prime minister told C.P. Scott, and a French
Palestine was ‘not to be thought of’.
“It was ironical, but in the circumstances not surprising, that the only Jew in
the cabinet, Mr. Edwin Montagu, secretary of state for India, should also be the
most outspoken opponent of the Balfour Declaration. Montague was a member
of the highly assimilated Anglo-Jewish aristocracy, many of whom feared the
effect of Jewish nationalism on their own position. Montagu had his counterpart
in other countries – Henry Morgenthau Sr., a former US ambassador to Turkey,
was a pronounced anti-Zionist, for example. Nevertheless the British cabinet
was convinced that world Jewry was overwhelmingly in favour of Zionism and
106
gave credit to Britain for supporting the cause. It believed that this had helped
to bring the United States into the war in April 1917 and to maintain its
enthusiasm thereafter. The British may have had an exaggerated view of the
wealth and influence on Washington of American Jews at this period, but it was
their belief in these that mattered. Moreover, the Germans were aware of the
possibilities to be gained by winning Jewish sympathy, especially among the
many American Jews of east-European origin who hated the Russian
government. Germany was trying to persuade the Turks in lift their objections
to Zionist settlement in Palestine, although so far without success. Finally, it was
hoped that Britain’s adoption of Zionism would win over the Russian Jewish
socialists who were trying to influence the Kerensky government to take Russia
out of the war…”175
Let us look at this story in a little more detail… The most importance Jewish
Zionist was the Manchester chemist (and refugee from Tsarist Russia), Chaim
Weizmann. Jonathan Schneer describes his path to power as follows:
“Conditions created by the war enabled Chaim Weizmann and his colleagues to
work wonders. During 1914-17 they gained access to the elite among British
Jews and converted some of them to Zionism. They defeated advocates of
Jewish assimilation, such as Lucien Wolf of the Conjoint Committee, whose
raison d’être, lobbying the Foreign Office on behalf of foreign Jews, especially
Russian and Romanian, had been swept away by the war. They gained entrance
to British governing circles and converted some of their most important
members too.
“During this period Weizmann and those who worked with him acted as
inspired opportunists. Finally they could argue convincingly that a community
of interest linked Zionist aspirations with those of the Entente. Zionists wanted
the Ottomans out of Palestine; Britain and France wanted them out of the
Middle East altogether. Zionists wanted a British protectorate in Palestine;
Britain did too (although initially Sir Mark Sykes had bargained it away in
negotiations with Georges-Picot of France).
“More generally, Weizmann and his colleagues persuaded powerful men in

Britain, France and Italy that support of Zionism would benefit their wartime
cause and the peace to follow. ‘International Jewry’ was a powerful if
subterranean force, they claimed…, whose goodwill would reap dividends for
the Allies. Specifically, they suggested that Jewish finance in America and
Jewish influence upon anti-war forces in Russia, could help determine the
conflict’s outcome. Weizmann warned the Foreign Office that Germany
recognized the potential of Jewish power and had begun to court it already. He
advised the Allies to trump their enemy by declaring outright support for
Zionism. His arguments worked upon the minds of anti- and philo-Semites
alike among the British governing elite, who were desperate for any advantage

175 Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, London: Penguin, 2003, pp. 162-163.
107
in the wartime struggle. Eventually, to gain Jewish backing in the war, they
promised to support establishment of a homeland for Jews in Palestine…”176
“The Balfour Declaration,” wrote the Zionist Jew Samuel Landman in 1936,
“originated in the War Office, was consummated in the Foreign Office and is
being implemented in the Colonial Office”177. This sounds as if it were entirely a
British governmental idea; and it is true that without the enthusiastic support of
certain Gentile Englishmen in the British government, especially Sir Mark Sykes,
Under-Secretary at the War Cabinet and co-author of the famous Sykes-Picot
Agreement, the Declaration would probably never have come into being.
Nevertheless, the real motors behind the coup were two Russian Zionist Jews
living in Britain – Chaim Weizmann and Nathan Sokolow.
They had an uphill task ahead of them. For until well into the war the British
government was not interested in Zionism – and had in any case semi-officially
promised Palestine to the Arabs (or so the Arabs were led to believe) in exchange
for their support against the Ottomans. Also, the leaders of British Jewry, the
“Conjoint Committee” led by Lucien Wolf, who initially had the ear of the
government, were fiercely opposed to Zionism since it endangered their goal –
secure assimilation within western society. Moreover, the Zionists themselves
were divided into the politicals under Weizmann and the practicals or culturals
under the Romanian Moses Gaster. The political Zionists were looking to create
a Zionist state, while the culturals wanted only to strengthen Jewish culture and
the Hebrew language in Palestine and throughout the Diaspora.
In April 1915 an important debate took place between the Zionists and the
Assimilationists. “[The Russian Zionist] Tschlenow, in a long introductory
speech, pointed out that at the peace conference following the war, even small
nationalities such as Finns, Lithuanians and Armenians would ‘put forward
their demands, their wishes, their aspirations.’ He then asked his anti-Zionist
friends: ‘Shall the Jewish “people”, the Jewish “nation”, be silent?’
“Note here that Wolf, in his written account of the meeting, placed the words
‘people’ and ‘nation’ in quotation marks. Those tiny vertical scratches signalled
the profound chasm separating the two camps. Wolf believed that asserting that
the Jews constituted a distinct nation would fatally undercut his argument that
British Jews really were Jewish Britons. It would deny the possibility of a
genuine Jewish assimilation in Britain or anywhere else. It contradicted his
liberal assumptions. He refused to make the required assertion…
“... On the crucial issue of Jewish nationality, neither side budged.

Consultation and discussions would continue, and memoranda would be
written from both sides, but the gulf remained unbridgeable. Henceforth their
competition for the ear of the government would grow increasingly fierce. And

Schneer, The Balfour Declaration, London: Bloomsbury, 2011, pp. 365-366.
176
Landman, Great Britain, The Jews and Palestine, London: The Zionist Association,
177
1936; quoted in Vicomte Léon De Poncins, State Secrets, Chulmleigh: Britons

Publishing Company, 1975, pp. 9, 11-14.
108
although Wolf began from the better-established and therefore more
advantageous position, Weizmann was an absolute master of the political
game…”178
The triumph of Weizmann and the Zionists was the result of many factors.
One, undoubtedly, was the personal charm of Weizmann himself. According to
A.N. Wilson, “the importance of personal charm in history is sometimes
forgotten. Chaim Weizmann had it in abundance, and this largely explains
Arthur Balfour’s 1917 Declaration.” 179 However, no less important was the
particular character of Russian, as opposed to Western Jewry – and the peculiar
conjunction of political circumstances in 1914-1917.
Russian Jewry, unlike its West European counterparts, lived as a state within
a state, a self-created ghetto, enslaved, not so much by the Russian authorities as
by its own rabbinic kahal and the multiplicity of rules imposed on them by the
Talmud, seeking no contact with Gentiles and despising them. This Jewish
isolationism is recognized by Jews and Gentiles alike180. As such, the Russian
Jews were naturally drawn to Zionism, to emigration to Palestine and the
formation of a state within a state there.
However, Zionism would never have succeeded at this time without the
endorsement of the British; and the British, as we have seen, endorsed it
primarily because they thought that in this way they could buy the financial
support of the American Jews, and especially of the leading American Jewish
banker, Jacob Schiff, the head of the New York bank of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Schiff
was a Zionist who financed several Zionist projects in Palestine. He also, like
most Zionists, had a visceral hatred of Russian tsarism: in 1904 he had given a
huge loan of $200 million to the Japanese in their war with Russia, for which the
Japanese gave him several awards, and as a result of which they became among
the most fervent believers in the idea that the world was ruled by the Jews... In
1916, in response to Russian requests for a war loan, he made it clear that he
would satisfy this request only if the Tsar’s government gave the Jews of Russia
full equality immediately.181

178 Schneer, op. cit., pp. 147-151.
179 Wilson, After the Victorians, London: Hutchinson, 2005, p. 510. See Sir Isaiah
Berlin’s hero-worshipping essay, “Chaim Weizmann’s Leadership”, in The Power of
Ideas, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, pp. 186-194.
180 Thus, on the one hand, Sir Isaiah Berlin writes: “They had, unlike their Western
brothers, grown to be a kind of State with a State, with their own political, social,
religious and human ideals… They were surrounded by Russian peasants, against
whom they felt no hatred, but whom they regarded as a species of lower being
with whom their contacts were restricted” (“The Origin of Israel”, in The Power of
Ideas, p. 14). On the other hand, M.O. Menshikov, wrote: “The real Ghetto of the
Jews is Judaism itself, an old creed that congeals its followers in a serfdom heavier
than that of ancient Egypt” (Monthly Review (London), February, 1904; in David
Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, Oxford University Press, 1999,
p. 535).
181 S.S. Oldenburg, Tsartstvovanie Imperatora Nikolaia II (The Reign of Emperor
Nicholas II), Belgrade, 1939, vol. II, pp. 196-197.
109
Later, after the fall of the Tsar, Schiff was to finance Lenin and Trotsky… At
the beginning of the war, however, it was by no means certain which side he
would back. After all, America did not join the side of the Allies (France, Britain
and Russia) until April, 1917: before then she had adopted a posture of strict
neutrality. Moreover, there was a powerful minority, the German Americans,
whose sympathies were naturally with Germany, and another powerful
minority, the Irish Americans, whose feelings (especially after the Dublin
Uprising of 1916) were decidedly anti-English. Now Schiff was a German Jew.
Therefore it was reasonable to expect that not only his Russophobia but also his
German roots would incline him towards favouring the Germans.
Another important factor here was the policy adopted by the Russian
generals during their retreat through Poland in 1915 of evacuating the Jewish
population from the front line areas towards the East on the grounds of their
unreliability. There were some grounds for the Russian decision. Apart from the
well-known hostility of the Jews to all things Russian, which had led to the
murder of thousands of Russians in pogroms since 1881, the largest Jewish
organization in Russia, the Bund, had signed Trotsky’s Zimmerwald Manifesto
in September, 1915 against the war – an action that contrasted with the strongly
patriotic support of almost all Jews in other warring countries for the country in
which they lived. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the policy was disastrous. First,
it inflicted unjust suffering on many innocent Jews (several hundreds of them
were shot as spies). Secondly, it clogged up the transport system in Western
Russia, thereby hindering the war effort at a critical time. And thirdly, it for the
first time involved the transportation of large numbers of discontented Jews
beyond the Pale and into Central and Eastern Russia, thereby raising the
revolutionary temperature there.
No less seriously, reports of their ally’s actions in evacuating the Jews

eastwards hindered the efforts of the French and the English to raise loans in
America. As the French Professor Basch reported from there: “The great point of
departure is now religious persecution [in Russia] and it is the two million Jews
of America, a million and a half of whom are to be found in New York, and a
million and a half of whom are Russian and Polish Jews who have escaped
pogroms, who lead the campaign against Russia. The organs of anti-Russian
propaganda are the Yiddish-language newspapers..; the popular speakers; the
rabbis; and finally the great bankers of Wall Street headed by the greatest
financial force of all in America, Jacob H. Schiff….”182
Even anti-Zionist Jews like Lucien Wolf recognized that the Allies had to do
something to elicit the sympathy of the Jews if they were to offset the Russian
factor. “’In any bid for Jewish sympathies today,’ he told Lord Robert Cecil [on
December 16, 1915], ‘very serious account must be taken of the Zionist
movement. In America the Zionist organizations have lately captured Jewish
opinion, and very shortly a great American Jewish Congress will be held
virtually under Zionist auspices.’ He wished to make it clear that he himself

182 Basch, in Vital, op. cit., p. 664.
110
‘deplored the Jewish National Movement. ‘To my mind the Jews are not a
nationality. I doubt whether they have ever been one in the true sense of the
term.’ But he did not doubt that this was ‘the moment for the Allies to declare
their policy in regard to Palestine’ and to do so in a spirit that was acceptable to
Zionist ears. The Zionists probably recognized that the Allies could not ‘make a
Jewish State of a land in which only a comparatively small minority of the
inhabitants are Jews’. But Britain and France could say to them ‘that they
thoroughly understand and sympathise with Jewish aspirations in regard to
Palestine, and that when the destiny of the country came to be considered, those
aspirations will be taken into account’. He thought too that assurances of
‘reasonable facilities for immigration and colonisation’, for the establishment of
a Jewish University, and for the recognition of Hebrew ‘as one of the
vernaculars of the land’ could be given. Were all that done, the Allies, Wolf did
not doubt, ‘would sweep the whole of American Jewry into enthusiastic alliance
to their cause’. It was true that this still left the question of the political
disposition of the country itself open. The Zionists, he had reason to believe,
would look forward to Great Britain becoming ‘the mistress of Palestine’. No
doubt, as he himself recognized, it might be difficult for the British themselves
to touch on the subject in view of the well-established French claims to Syria
and the equally well-established French view that Palestine itself was part of
‘Syria’. But again, if the assurances about Britain’s sympathy for Zionism and its
willingness to guarantee rights of immigration and settlement in Palestine to
Jews that he proposed were proclaimed, the purpose immediately in view,
namely the attachment of American Jewry to the Allied cause, would be
achieved.”183
By March, 1916 the Foreign Office was converted to Wolf’s “Palestine idea”.
“The Russians and the French were invited to join Britain in considering ‘an
arrangement in regard to Palestine completely satisfactory to Jewish aspirations’.
The definition of ‘Jewish aspirations’ Wolf had offered to the Foreign Office,
was forwarded to the Allied governments for examination as it stood along with
the terms on which the Foreign Office itself proposed that an offer to the Jews be
made. Wolf’s terms were modest: ‘In the event of Palestine coming within the
sphere of Great Britain or France at the close of the war, the Governments of
those Powers will not fail to take account of the historic interest that country
possesses for the Jewish community. The Jewish population will be secured in
the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, equal political rights with the rest of
the population, reasonable towns and colonies inhabited by them as may be
shown to be necessary.’
“The Foreign Office, however, wished the French and the Russians to know
that they themselves favoured a substantially stronger formulation: ‘We
consider… that the scheme might be made far more attractive to the majority of
Jews if it held out to them the prospect that when in the course of time Jewish
colonies in Palestine grow strong enough to cope with the Arab population they

183 Vital, op. cit., pp. 665-666.
111
may be allowed to take the management of the internal affairs of Palestine (with
the exception of Jerusalem and the Holy Places) into their own hands.’
“The Russian response turned out to be friendly. Sazonov, the foreign

minister, told the British ambassador (Buchanan) that Russia welcomed the
migration of Jews out of Russia to Palestine or anywhere else. Their only
proviso was that the (Christian) Holy Places be placed under an international
regime. In contrast, the French response was ferociously negative, first and
foremost because it seemed to them that the ‘Palestine Idea’ touched
impermissibly, even if only obliquely (but perhaps not unintentionally), on their
own strategic and colonial ambitions in the area…”184
This Anglo-French rivalry over Palestine recalls the similar struggle at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon set out to conquer
Palestine from Egypt and was foiled by Admiral Nelson’s destruction of his fleet
at the battle of the Nile. Now it was a British army under General Allenby that
would set out from Egypt to conquer Palestine, thereby threatening French
colonial designs in the region. For a while, the British put aside the Palestine
Idea so as not to endanger relations with France.
At the same time, however, the British were entertaining a quite different idea
that was completely incompatible with the Palestine Idea. Since the outbreak of
the war, Arab nationalism had been stirring. It was led by King Hussein, Sharif
of Mecca, descendant of the prophet and custodian of the Muslim holy places,
who, together with his sons Abdullah and Faisal, was proposing a jihad against
the Turkish Sultan.
The British High Commissioner for Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, entered into
correspondence with Hussein, hoping to use this Arab nationalist movement in
the interests of the Allies. He offered the Arabs independence on the lands they
liberated – but not in a very clear manner, because he wanted Palestine in
particular to be kept out of the independence agreement. Nevertheless, the
publication of two British documents in 1964 makes it clear that Palestine was
indeed promised to the Arabs.
Alfred Lilienthal writes: “The third note from Sir Henry expressed pleasure
in Hussein’s efforts ‘to gain all Arab tribes to our joint cause and prevent them
from giving assistance to our enemies. We leave it to your discretion to choose
the most suitable opportunity for the initiation of more decisive measures.’ The
last word from the British High Commissioner came on February 12, and the
Arab revolt broke out in the Hejaz on June 5, 1916.
“Aided by the entrance of Arab forces [assisted by the British officer

Lawrence of Arabia] on their side, the British were able to withstand the
German effort to take Aden and blockade the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
‘Had the result done nothing else than frustrate that combined march of Turks

184 Vital, op. cit., p. 671.
112
and Germans to Southern Arabia in 1916, we should owe it more than we have
paid to this day,’ wrote British archaeologist D.G. Hogarth, of the staff of the
Arab Bureau.
“The Arabs drew off considerable Turkish forces that had been aimed against
British General Murray in his advance on Palestine. The General noted that
‘there were more Turkish troops fighting against the Arabs’ than there were
fighting against him. The Arab contribution to the British victory in the area was
termed by General Allenby an ‘invaluable aid’. By repudiating their allegiance
with Turkey and throwing in their lot with the Allies in exchange for pledges of
independence, the Arabs had redressed the balance in the Middle East.
“In the light of the terror inflicted upon the Arabs by their Turkish overlords
in a frenzied effort to suppress the revolution, the contribution must have been
considerable. As the countryside rose to aid the Arab forces under Faisal, Arab
nationalist leaders were taken from their homes in Damascus, brought to public
squares, and hanged. Food was withheld from the people in Palestine and
Lebanon, and tens of thousands died of starvation. Everywhere Arab patriots
paid with their lives. When Hussein called upon all Muslims to join in the revolt,
and Ibn Saud took the lead in the Arabian Peninsula, Jamal Pasha, leader of the
Turkish forces, was compelled, to use his own words, ‘to send forces against
Hussein which should have been defeating the British on the Canal and
capturing Cairo.’
“Had the Arabs been aware of secret diplomatic agreements then being
negotiated, it is highly unlikely any revolt would have taken place. Secret
exchanges between Russia, Britain, and France resulted, on May 16, 1916, in the
Sykes-Picot Agreement, named for the negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain
and Charles François Picot of France. The spoils of the Ottoman Empire were
divided among the three countries (Russia’s share being of no concern here as it
fell outside the scope of the Arab world). Under the agreement, France was to
receive western Syria with the city of Mosul, while the rest of Mesopotamia
(Iraq) from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf went to England. In the desert between
there was to be a future Arab state, the northern part under French control and
the southern under British domination. Although the French had insisted on all
of Greater Syria including Palestine, the British, concerned over Suez and the
need for a base near this strategic artery, forced agreement on
internationalization of most of the Palestine area while reserving Haifa and Acre
in the north for themselves. The ultimate future of areas in which spheres of
influence had been demarcated was left undecided…”185
In December, 1916, the British acquired a new Prime Minister in Lloyd

George and a new Foreign Secretary in Lord Balfour, and the Palestine Idea –

185 Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection, New York: Dodd, Mead & co., 1987, pp. 16-18.
113
which, as noted above, was incompatible with Arab interests, and constituted a
betrayal of them - was resurrected…
The decisive factor here was the close friendship between Lloyd George and
Weizmann. The two men had in common that neither was English, but both had
a passionate belief in the civilizing mission of the British Empire. Together,
therefore, they were able to overcome the fear of antagonizing the French that
had prevailed heretofore in British government circles. Moreover, Lloyd George
was already a Zionist sympathizer. As Simon Sebag Montefiore writes, he
“cared greatly about the Jews, and had represented the Zionists as a lawyer ten
years earlier. ‘I was taught more in school about the history of the Jews, than
about my own land,’ he said.”186 For there was much sympathy for Zionism in
British Protestantism. “’Britain was a Biblical nation,’ wrote Weizmann. ‘Those
British statesmen of the old school were genuinely religious. They understood
as a reality the concept of the Return. It appealed to their tradition and their
faith.’ Along with America, ‘Bible-reading and Bible-thinking England,’ noted
one of Lloyd George’s aides, ‘was the only country where the desire of the Jews
to return to their ancient homeland’ was regarded ‘as a natural aspiration not to
be denied’.”187
Other Zionists helped to persuade the sceptics: Sokolow in Paris, Supreme

Court Justice Brandeis in Washington. They in turn were helped by a changing
political situation in 1917. First, with the fall of the Tsar in February, it was now
necessary to secure the support of the newly-emancipated Jews inside Russia,
many of whom wanted the Provisional Government to conclude a separate
peace with Germany. Secondly, the emancipation of the Jews in Russia removed
one of the main obstacles to Schiff wholeheartedly supporting the Allies with
his money – and also eased the way for the entry, not only of American money,
but also, still more importantly, of American troops, into the war on the Allied
side.
“During the critical days of 1916 and of the impending defection of Russia,”
wrote Landman, “Jewry, as a whole was against the Czarist regime and had
hopes that Germany, if victorious, would in certain circumstances given them
Palestine. Several attempts to bring America into the War on the side of the
Allies by influencing influential Jewish opinion were made and had failed. Mr.
James A. Malcolm, who was already aware of German pre-war efforts to secure
a foothold in Palestine through the Zionist Jews and of the abortive Anglo-
French démarches at Washington and New York; and knew that Mr. Woodrow
Wilson, for good and sufficient reasons, always attached the greatest possible
importance to the advice of a very prominent Zionist (Mr. Justice Brandeis, of
the US Supreme Court); and was in close touch with Mr. Greenberg, Editor of
the Jewish Chronicle (London); and knew that several important Zionist Jewish
leaders had already gravitated to London from the Continent on the qui vive
awaiting events; and appreciated and realized the depth and strength of Jewish

186 Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography, London: Phoenix, 2011, p. 494.
187 Montefiore, op. cit., p. 495.
114
national aspirations; spontaneously took the initiative, to convince first of all Sir
Mark Sykes, Under-Secretary to the War Cabinet, and afterwards M. Georges
Picot, of the French Embassy in London, and M. Goût of the Quai d’Orsay
(Eastern Section), that the best and perhaps the only way (which proved so to
be) to induce the American President to come into the War was to secure the co-
operation of Zionist Jews by promising them Palestine, and thus enlist and
mobilize the hitherto unsuspectedly powerful forces of Zionist Jews in America
and elsewhere in favour of the Allies on a quid pro quo contract basis.” 188
Another important factor, as Vital notes, was that “approval of Zionism

accorded neatly… with what was now the accepted western view of the matter
of nationalities. By this stage of the war there was no question at all in either of
the major Allied capitals that when the time came for a general political
settlement it would be necessary, as Balfour put it to the cabinet on one occasion,
to set about ‘the rearranging of the map of Europe in closer agreement with
what we rather vaguely call “the principle of nationality’.”189
The British bargain with the Zionists was indeed instrumental in bringing the
Americans into the war on the Allied side. The Germans fully appreciated the
value of this bargain to the Allies. As Ludendorff is alleged to have said to Lord
Melchett, the Balfour Declaration was the cleverest thing done by the Allies in
the way of propaganda, and he wished Germany had thought of it first...190
There was still frantic opposition from anti-Zionist British Jews such as
Edwin Montagu (who was a minister), Montefiore, Wolf and others. And
among the leading English Gentile sceptics was Lord Curzon. Thus “the matter
of the true seriousness and popularity of Zionism, the known poverty of
Palestine itself (as Curzon stated: ‘A less propitious seat for the future Jewish
race could not be imagined’), and the question of the country’s other inhabitants
(Curzon asking: What was to happen to them? Were they to be got rid of?) were
all brought up as the cabinet moved towards a decision. Balfour, Sykes
providing the arguments, assured his colleagues that the Jews would be able to
work out their own salvation there and were anxious to do so. And such anxiety
as there was about the fate of the existing Arab population was met by the
insertion of a clause affirming that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice
the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities’. No one
suggested that the political rights of the ‘existing non-Jewish communities’
deserved discussion, let alone assurance…”191
The final draft of the Balfour Declaration was secretly approved by the
American president on October 19, 1917, and then approved by the British
cabinet on November 2. It read: “His Majesty’s Government views with favour
the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will

188 Landman, op. cit. But Sykes and Picot has already apportioned Palestine to the
British!
189 Vital, op. cit., p. 689.
190 Landman, op. cit.
191 Vital, op. cit., pp. 696-67.
115
use its best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights
and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”192 Nobody would
have guessed from this statement that the Jews constituted no more than 7% of
the population of Palestine (60,000 people), while the “non-Jewish communities”
comprised 93% (670,000).
The precise meaning of “a national home for the Jewish people” was not clear.
Balfour and others later denied that it meant a Jewish state – a homeland is not a
state - but that is precisely what the Zionists themselves understood by it. Nor
was the Homeland defined territorially. In 1919 the American president
Woodrow Wilson sent Dr. Henry C. King and industrialist Charles R. Crane to
investigate the situation on the ground. The King and Crane Commission –
which Wilson allowed to be published in December, 1922 – declared: “A
‘national home’ is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish state nor can
the erection of such a Jewish state be accomplished without the gravest trespass
upon the civil and religious rights of existing ‘non-Jewish communities’.”193
“The Declaration,” writes A.N. Wilson, “was designed to detach Russian

Jews from Bolshevism but the very night before it was published, Lenin seized
power in St. Petersburg. Had Lenin moved a few days earlier, the Balfour
Declaration may never have been issued. Ironically, Zionism, propelled by the
energy of Russian Jews – from Weizmann in Whitehall to Ben-Gurion in
Jerusalem – and Christian sympathy for their plight, was now cut off from
Russian Jewry until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991…”194
However, the real significance of the Balfour Declaration was not only
political, but also eschatological – and its eschatological, truly apocalyptic
significance was revealed in its timing. Divine Providence drew the attention of
all those with eyes to see to this sign of the times when, in one column of
newsprint in the London Times for November 9, 1917, there appeared two
articles, the one announcing the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd, and the
other – the promise of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine (the Balfour
declaration). This showed that the two events taking placing thousands of miles
apart were different aspects - the internationalist-atheist and nationalist-theist
aspects respectively, - of a single event, the Jewish revolution.
In fact, both the Bolshevik and the Zionist revolutionaries came from the
same region of Western Russia, often from the same families. Thus Weizmann’s
own mother was able to witness Chaim’s triumph in Zionist Jerusalem, and that

192 The last sentence was inserted by Leo Amery, who became British minister in charge of
Palestine before World War Two. However, he later changed his mind about the wisdom of the
Declaration…
193 Lilienthal, op. cit., p. 31.
116
of another son – in Bolshevik Moscow…195 As M. Heifetz pointed out, “a part of
the Jewish generation goes along the path of Herzl and Zhabotinsky. The other
part, unable to withstand the temptation, fills up the band of Lenin and Trotsky
and Stalin...”196
The events of 1917-18 were only the beginning. With the removal of the
Orthodox Christian emperor, “him who restrains” the coming of the Antichrist
(II Thessalonians 2.7), and with anti-Christian Jewish power established in both
East and West, in both Russia and America and Israel, there was now no earthly
power in existence that could stop the triumph of Jewish power throughout the
world – unless the Orthodox empire could be restored.
The last times – as perhaps only the Orthodox Christian Russians and the
Orthodox Jews understood, albeit from completely opposing viewpoints - had
begun…

195 Weitzmann, Trial and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weitzmann, New
York: Harper, 1949.

196 Heifetz, “Nashi Obshchie Uroki”, 22, 1980, N 14, p. 162; in Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti
let vmeste (Two Hundred Years Together), Moscow, 2001, p. 112.
117

II. THE NEW WORLD DISORDER (1918-1925)
118
12. THE SPIRIT OF LENINISM
In 1796, in his Manifesto of Equals, Gracchus Babeuf had proclaimed: “The

French Revolution is only the forerunner of another, even greater revolution
that will finally put an end to the era of revolutions. The people have swept
away the Kings and priests who have been in league with them… We intend the
COMMON GOOD or the COMMUNITY OF GOODS.”197 Babeuf was right at
any rate in his first statement – the French Revolution was only the forerunner
of the still greater Russian, or Leninist revolution. But he was utterly naïve in
thinking that the French revolution or any of its successors or imitators had
anything essentially to do with communism in the sense of the community of
goods. The spirit of Leninism – and it was indeed a spirit, not just an ideology –
was far deeper and darker than that.
Lenin, a hereditary nobleman of mixed Russian, German and Jewish origin,

was a professional revolutionary who lived on party funds and income from his
mother’s estate. Choosing to live in the underground198, he had very little direct
knowledge of the way ordinary people lived, and cared even less. “According to
Gorky, it was this ignorance of everyday work, and the human suffering which
it entailed, which had bred in Lenin a ‘pitiless contempt, worthy of a nobleman,
for the lives of the ordinary people… Life in all its complexity is unknown to
Lenin. He does not know the ordinary people. He has never lived among
them.’”199
Lenin hated his own country. “I spit on Russia”, he said once; and his actions
showed his contempt for Russians of all classes. Nothing is further from the
truth than the idea that Lenin’s revolution was carried out for the sake of Russia
or the Russians: it was carried out, not out of love for anybody or anything, but
simply out of irrational, demonic, universal hatred…
Still less was it carried out for the sake of truth. As Victor Sebasyen
says, “In his ideas and polemics Lenin constantly created images of an
alternative reality, appealing not so much to facts, as to emotions. This
is the politics of post-truth, in which real facts and truth are
substituted by their emotional fictions and utopian surrogates.” 200

197 Babeuf, in Martin Crook, Napoleon Comes to Power, 1998, pp. 106, 107.
198 In What is to be Done? (1902), Lenin argued that in the conditions of Tsarist
Russia it was impossible for the party to live openly among the people, but had to
be an underground organization with strictly limited membership. “In an
autocratic state the more we confine the membership of such a party to people who
are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity and who have been
professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the more
difficult it will be to wipe out such an organization” (in Cohen and Major, op. cit.,
p. 678).
199 Figes, op. cit., p. 386.
200 Sebastyen, in Natalia Golitsyna, “Biurokrat, dictator, liubovnik” (Bureaucrat, dictator, lover),
Radio Svoboda, April 1, 2017.
119
For a revolutionary, Lenin lived a relatively simple, even ascetic life, and had
only one known affair - with Inessa Armand. But, as Oliver Figes writes,
“asceticism was a common trait of the revolutionaries of Lenin’s generation.
They were all inspired by the self-denying revolutionary Rakhmetev in
Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be Done? By suppressing his own sentiments,
by denying himself the pleasures of life, Lenin tried to strengthen his resolve
and to make himself, like Rakhmetev, insensitive to the sufferings of others.
This, he believed, was the ‘hardness’ required by every successful revolutionary:
the ability to spill blood for political ends. ‘The terrible thing in Lenin,’ Struve
once remarked, ‘was that combination in one person of self-castigation, which is
the essence of all real asceticism, with the castigation of other people as
expressed in abstract social hatred and cold political cruelty…
“The root of this philistine approach to life was a burning ambition for power.
The Mensheviks joked that it was impossible to compete with a man, such as
Lenin, who thought about revolution twenty-four hours every day. Lenin was
driven by an absolute faith in his own historical destiny. He did not doubt for a
moment, as he had once put it, that he was the man who was to wield the
‘conductor’s baton’ in the party. This was the message he brought back to
Russia in April 1917. Those who had known him before the war noticed a
dramatic change in his personality. ‘How he had aged,’ recalled Roman Gul’,
who had met him briefly in 1905. ‘Lenin’s whole appearance had altered. And
not only that. There was none of the old geniality, his friendliness or comradely
humour, in his relations with other people. The new Lenin that arrived was
cynical, secretive and rude, a conspirator “against everyone and everything”,
trusting no one, suspecting everyone, and determined to launch his drive for
power.’…
“Lenin had never been tolerant of dissent within his party’s ranks. Bukharin
complained that he ‘didn’t give a damn for the opinions of others’. Lunacharsky
claimed that Lenin deliberately ‘surrounded himself with fools’ who would not
dare question him. During Lenin’s struggle for the April Theses this
domineering attitude was magnified to almost megalomaniac proportions.
Krupskaya called it his ‘rage’ – the frenzied state of her husband when engaged
in clashes with his political rivals – and it was an enraged Lenin whom she had
to live with for the next five years. During these fits Lenin acted like a man
possessed by hatred and anger. His entire body was seized with extreme
nervous tension, and he could neither sleep nor eat. His outward manner
became vulgar and coarse. It was hard to believe that this was a cultivated man.
He mocked his opponents, both inside and outside the party, in crude and
violent language. They were ‘blockheads’, ‘bastards’, ‘dirty scum’, ‘prostitutes’,
‘cunts’, ‘shits’, ‘cretins’, ‘Russian fools’, ‘windbags’, ‘stupid hens’ and ‘silly old
maids’. When the rage subsided Lenin would collapse in a state of exhaustion,
listlessness and depression, until the rage erupted again. This manic alteration
of mood was characteristic of Lenin’s psychological make-up. It continued
almost unrelentingly between 1917 and 1922, and must have contributed to the
brain haemorrhage from which he eventually died.
120
“Much of Lenin’s success in 1917 was no doubt explained by his towering
domination over the party. No other political party had ever been so closely tied
to the personality of a single man. Lenin was the first modern party leader to
achieve the status of a god: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao Zedong were all
his successors in this sense. Being a Bolshevik had come to imply an oath of
allegiance to Lenin as both the ‘leader’ and the ‘teacher’ of the party. It was this,
above all, which distinguished the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks (who had
no close leader of their own)…”201
In February, 1917 Lenin was living in Switzerland. He had been on the

German payroll as an agent of the Reich for some time. Thus on December 29,
1915 the Jewish revolutionary Parvus (Gelfond) recorded receiving a million
rubles to support the revolution in Russia from the German envoy in
Copenhagen. Still larger sums were given by Jewish bankers in the West. The
leading American Jewish banker who bankrolled the Bolsheviks was Jacob
Schiff, a member of Bnai Brith, a cabbalistic sect founded in 1843 in America.202
Schiff was related to the German Jewish banker Warburg, who financed the
Bolsheviks from Germany. Lilia Shevstova writes: “Germany provided the
Bolsheviks with substantial funds for “revolutionary purposes”: prior to
October 1917, the Germans had paid them 11 million German gold marks; in
October 1917, the Bolsheviks received another 15 million marks.”203
However, until 1917 the German and Jewish investment in Lenin did not
seem to have paid off. His message that the proletariat should turn the war
between nations into a civil war between classes had not been listened to even
by other socialist parties. But the February revolution – which took Lenin, living
in Switzerland, completely by surprise – changed everything.
Arthur Zimmermann – the same man whose famous telegram the month
before had caused Germany such damage – now made up for his mistake by
persuading the Germans that Lenin should be smuggled back into Russia.204
“The German special services guaranteed his passage through Germany in the
sealed carriage. Among the passengers were: Zinoviev, Radek, Rozenblum,
Abramovich, Usievich, and also the majors of the German General Staff, the
professional spies Anders and Erich, who had been cast in prison for subversive
and diversionary work in Russia in favour of Germany and the organization of
a coup d’état. The next day there arrived in Berlin an urgent secret report from
an agent of the German General Staff: ‘Lenin’s entrance into Russia achieved.
He is working completely according to our desires.’…”205

201 Figes, op. cit., pp. 389, 390, 391.
202 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwanvYnzCKE&feature=related.
203 Shevtsova, “Russia’s Love Affair with Germany”, http://www.the-american-
interest.com/2015/08/27/russias-love-affair-with-germany/affair with Germany”,

The American Interest, August 27, 2015.
204 Strachan, op. cit., p. 256.
205 Istoki Zla (The Sources of Evil), pp. 35-36.
121
Although History had not revealed to her acolyte what had been obvious to
many, that the Russian empire at the beginning of 1917 was on the verge of
collapse, Lenin made up for lost time by trying to jump ahead of History on
returning to Russia. Ignoring Marxist teaching that the proletarian revolution
must be preceded by a period of bourgeois rule, he called for non-recognition of
the Provisional Government, all power to the Soviets and the immediate
cessation of the war.
Even his own party found his position extreme, if not simply mad – but it
was what the maddened revolutionary masses wanted. For, as Douglas Smith
writes, the foot soldiers of the revolution “had no understanding or even
interest in Marxist theory, nor were they concerned with what the new Russian
society would look like. Rather, they were motivated by one thing: the desire to
destroy the old order…”206
It was precisely the madness of Lenin that made him the man of the moment,
the politician best suited for those mad times. The word “madness” here is not
used in a wholly metaphorical sense. Of course, in 1917 he was not mad in the
sense that he had lost contact with ordinary, everyday reality – his clever tactical
manoeuvring and his final success in October proves that he was more realistic
about Russian politics than many. But the photographs of him in his last illness
reveal a man who was truly mad – post-mortems showed that his brain had
been terribly damaged by syphilis. Moreover, in a spiritual sense he was mad
with the madness of the devil himself: he was demonized, with an irrational
rage against God and man, an urge to destroy and kill and maim that can have
no rational basis.
As the SR leader Victor Chernov wrote in 1924: “Nothing to him was worse
than sentimentality, a name he was ready to apply to all moral and ethical
considerations in politics. Such things were to him trifles, hypocrisy, ‘parson’s
talk’. Politics to him meant strategy, pure and simple. Victory was the only
commandment to observe; the will to rule and to carry through a political
program without compromise that was the only virtue; hesitation, that was the
only crime.
“It has been said that war is a continuation of politics, though employing
different means. Lenin would undoubtedly have reversed this dictum and said
that politics is the continuation of war under another guise. The essential effect
of war on a citizen’s conscience is nothing but a legalization and glorification of
things that in times of peace constitute crime. In war the turning of a flourishing
country into a desert is a mere tactical move; robbery is a ‘requisition’, deceit a
stratagem, readiness to shed the blood of one’s brother military zeal;
heartlessness towards one’s victims is laudable self-command; pitilessness and

206 Smith, Former People: The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy, London:
Macmillan, 2012, p. 10.
122
inhumanity are one’s duty. In war all means are good, and the best ones are
precisely the things most condemned in normal human intercourse. And as
politics is disguised war, the rules of war constitute its principles…”207
Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes that Lenin “understood the main thing in Marx
and Marxism and created not simply a political revolutionary party on the basis
of the economic and social ‘scientific’ theory of Marxism: he founded a religion,
and one, moreover, in which ‘god’ turned out to be himself! In this lies the
essence of all the disagreements between Lenin and the legal Marxists like
Struve and Plekhanov, and the Mensheviks – that is, all those who through
naivety and evident misunderstanding took Marxism to be precisely a ‘scientific’
theory able to serve the ‘radiant future’ of humanity, beginning with Russia…
For Lenin, as for Marx, the only thing that was necessary and important was his
personal power with the obligatory deification of his own person, regardless not
only of objections or criticisms, but even simply of insufficient servility. Lenin
(like Marx) considered himself to be nothing less than the ‘Messiah’ – the
‘teacher’ and ‘leader’ not only of Russian, but also of world significance. This
was the psychology of the Antichrist, which was reflected both in Lenin’s teaching
on ‘the new type of party’, and in the ‘world revolution’, and in the construction
of socialism in Russia, and in his ‘philosophy’, and in his methods of
‘leadership’, when he and his ‘comrades’ came to power. In the sphere of
politics Lenin was always, from the very beginning, an inveterate criminal. For
him there existed no juridical, ethical or moral limitations of any kind. All
means, any means, depending on the circumstances, were permissible for the
attainment of his goal. Lies, deceit, slander, treachery, bribery, blackmail,
murder – this was the almost daily choice of means that he and his party used,
while at the same time preserving for rank-and-file party members and the
masses the mask of ‘crystal honesty’, decency and humanity – which, of course,
required exceptional art and skilfulness in lying. Lenin always took a special
pleasure in news of murders, both individual and, still more mass murders –
carried out with impunity. At such moments he was sincerely happy. This
bloodthirstiness is the key to that special power that ‘the leader of the world
proletariat’ received from the devil and the angels of the abyss. In the sphere of
philosophy Lenin was amazingly talentless. How to lie a little more successfully
– that was essentially his only concern in the sphere of ideas. But when he really
had to think, he admitted blunders that were unforgivable in a ‘genius’…
“But the question is: how could a teaching that conquered millions of minds
in Russia and throughout the world be created on the basis of such an
intellectually impoverished, primitive basis?! An adequate answer can never be
given if one does not take into account the main thing about Marxism-Leninism
– that it is not simply a teaching, but a religion, a cult of the personality of its
founders and each of the successive ‘leaders’, that was nourished, not by human,
but by demonic forces from ‘the satanic depths’. Therefore its action on the minds
took place simultaneously with a demonic delusion that blinded and darkened
the reasoning powers. In order to receive such support from hell, it was

207 Chernov, “Lenin”, in Foreign Affairs, January-February, 2012, pp. 10-12.
123
necessary to deserve it in a special way, by immersing oneself (being ‘initiated’)
into Satanism. And Lenin, beginning in 1905, together with his more ‘conscious
comrades’ immersed himself in it (in particular, through the shedding of
innocent blood), although there is not information to the effect that he personally
killed anybody. The ‘leader’ had to remain ‘unsullied’… By contrast with certain
other satanic religions, the religion of Bolshevism had the express character of
the worship of the man-god (and of his works as sacred scripture). This was
profoundly non-coincidental, since what was being formed here was nothing
other than the religion of the coming Antichrist. Lenin was one of the most
striking prefigurations of the Antichrist, one of his forerunners, right up to a
resemblance to the beast whose name is 666 in certain concrete details of his life
(his receiving of a deadly wound and healing from it). Lenin was not able to
create for himself a general cult during his lifetime, since he was forced to share
the worship of the party and the masses with such co-workers as, for example,
Trotsky. But the ‘faithful Leninist’ Stalin was able truly to take ‘Lenin’s work’ to
its conclusion, that is, to the point of absurdity… He fully attained his own cult
during the life and posthumous cult of personality of his ‘teacher’. Lenin, who
called religion ‘necrophilia’, was the founder of the religion of his own corpse,
the main ‘holy thing’ of Bolshevism to this day! All this conditioned, to an
exceptional degree, the extraordinary power of Lenin and his party-sect…”208
The Bolshevik party was indeed more like a religious sect than a normal
political party. While members of other parties, even socialist ones, had a
private life separate from their political life, this was not so for the Bolsheviks
and the parties modelled on them. Thus Igor Shafarevich writes: “The German
publicist V. Schlamm tells the story of how in 1919, at the age of 15, he was a
fellow-traveller of the communists, but did not penetrate into the narrow circle
of their functionaries. The reason was explained to him twenty years later by
one of them, who by that time had broken with communism. It turns out that
Schlamm, when invited to join the party, had said: ‘I am ready to give to the
party everything except two evenings a week, when I listen to Mozart.’ That
reply turned out to be fatal: a man having interests that he did not want to
submit to the party was not suitable for it.
“Another aspect of these relations was expressed by Trotsky. Having been

defeated by his opponents, in a speech that turned out to be his last at a party
congress, he said: ‘I know that it is impossible to be right against the party. One
can be right only with the party, for History has not created any other ways to
realize rightness.’
“Finally, here is how Piatakov, already in disgrace and expelled from the
party, explained his relationship to the party to his party comrade N.V.
Valentinov. Remembering Lenin’s thesis: ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat is a
power realized by the party and relying on violence and not bound by any laws’
(from the article, ‘The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky’),
Piatakov added that the central idea here was not ‘violence’ but precisely ‘not

208 Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), St. Petersburg, 1997, pp. 445-447.
124
being bound by any laws’. He said: ‘Everything that bears the seal of human
will must not, cannot be considered inviolable, as being bound by certain
insuperable laws. Law is a restriction, a ban, a decree that one phenomenon is
impermissible, another act is possible, and yet another impossible. When the
mind holds to violence as a matter of principle, is psychologically free, and is
not bound by any laws, limitations or obstacles, then the sphere of possible
action is enlarged to a gigantic degree, while the sphere of the impossible is
squeezed to an extreme degree, to the point of nothingness… Bolshevism is the
party that bears the idea of turning into life that which is considered to be
impossible, unrealizable and impermissible… For the honour and glory of being
in her ranks we must truly sacrifice both pride and self-love and everything else.
On returning to the party, we cast out of our heads all convictions that are
condemned by it, even if we defended them when we were in opposition… I
agree that those who are not Bolsheviks and in general the category of ordinary
people cannot in a moment make changes, reversals or amputations of their
convictions… We are the party consisting of people who make the impossible
possible; penetrated by the idea of violence, we direct it against ourselves, while
if the party demands it, if it is necessary and important for the party, we can by
an act of will in 24 hours cast out of our heads ideas that we have lived with for
years… In suppressing our convictions and casting them out, it is necessary to
reconstruct ourselves in the shortest time in such a way as to be inwardly, with
all our minds, with all our essence, in agreement with this or that decision
decreed by the party. Is it easy violently to cast out of one’s head that which
yesterday I considered to be right, but which today, in order to be in complete
agreement with the party, I consider to be false? It goes without saying – no.
Nevertheless, by violence on ourselves the necessary result is attained. The
rejection of life, a shot in the temple from a revolver – these are sheer trivialities
by comparison with that other manifestation of will that I am talking about. This
violence on oneself is felt sharply, acutely, but in the resort to this violence with
the aim of breaking oneself and being in complete agreement with the party is
expressed the essence of the real, convinced Bolshevik-Communist… I have
heard the following form of reasoning… It (the party) can be cruelly mistaken,
for example, in considering black that which is in reality clearly and
unquestionably white… To all those who put this example to me, I say: yes, I
will consider black that which I considered and which might appear to me to be
white, since for me there is no life outside the party and outside agreement with
it.’”209
Having completely surrendered their minds and wills to the party, much as
the Jesuits surrendered their minds and wills to the Pope (Chernov compared
Lenin to Torquemada), the Bolsheviks proceeded to shed blood on a scale never
previously seen in history, unrestrained by any kind of morality.
Thus Lenin called for “mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White
Guards”. And Trotsky said: “We must put an end, once and for all, to the

209 Shafarevich, Sotsializm kak iavlenie mirovoj istorii (Socialism as a phenomenon of
world history), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 284-286.
125
papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life”. 210 Again, Gregory
Zinoviev said: “To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist
militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of
Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They
must be annihilated…”211 Again, the first issue of the Kiev Cheka, Krasnij Mech
(The Red Sword) for 1918 proclaimed: “We reject the old systems of morality
and ‘humanity’ invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the ‘lower
classes’. Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute because it
rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence.
To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to
oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its
shackles… Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever the black
pirate’s flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be blood-red forever! For
only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves from the
return of those jackals!”212
In view of the fact that communism is by a wide margin the most

bloodthirsty movement in human history, having already killed hundreds of
millions of people worldwide (and we are still counting), it is necessary to say a
few words about this aspect of its activity, which cannot be understood by
reference to its ideology – which in any case was closer to Bakunin’s anarchism
than Marx’s materialism.213
According to Lebedev, the essence of the movement was “devil-worshipping.

For the blood it sheds is always ritualistic, it is a sacrifice to demons. As St. John
Chrysostom wrote: ‘It is a habit among the demons that when men give Divine
worship to them with the stench and smoke of blood, they, like bloodthirsty and
insatiable dogs, remain in those places for eating and enjoyment.’ It is from such
bloody sacrifices that the Satanists receive those demonic energies which are so
necessary to them in their struggle for power or for the sake of its preservation.
It is precisely here that we decipher the enigma: the strange bloodthirstiness of
all, without exception all, revolutions, and of the whole of the regime of the
Bolsheviks from 1917 to 1953.”214
That communism, a strictly “scientific” and atheist doctrine, should be

compared to devil-worshipping may at first seem strange. And yet closer study
of communist history confirms this verdict. The communists’ extraordinary
hatred of God and Christians, and indeed of mankind in general, can only be
explained by demon-possession – more precisely, by an unconscious

210 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World, London: Penguin, 2007, pp. 150, 148.
211 Zinoviev, in Smith, op. cit., p. 5.
212 Nicholas Werth, “A State against its People”, in Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas
Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Packowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin,

The Black Book of Communism, London: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 102.
213 I.P. Goldenberg saw Lenin as the successor of Bakunin, not Marx, and his tactics
those of “the universal apostle of destruction” (in Robert Service, Lenin, 2000, p.
267).
126
compulsion to bring blood-sacrifices to the devil, who was, in Christ’s words, “a
murderer from the beginning” (John 8.44)…
The trigger of this demonic bacchanalia, in the firm conviction of the truly
Orthodox Church, was the rejection by most of Orthodox Russia, and of the
Orthodox world in general, of the person and idea of the Orthodox Autocracy,
“he who restrains” the coming of the Antichrist.
Thus “in October 1917,” writes Lebedev, “a satanic sect came to power in
Russia that formed a secret conspiracy within the communist party (of the
Bolsheviks). The threads leading to the centre of this sect’s administration went
far beyond the ocean… At the base of this organization there lay the Masonic
principle of many-levelled initiation. Thus ordinary communists knew
absolutely nothing about the real aims of their leaders, while those, in their turn,
did not know the aims of the ‘high-ups’… Thus the RCP(B)-CPSU was a party-
werewolf from the beginning: it was one thing in its words, its slogans, its
declarations and its official teaching of Marxism-Leninism, but in fact it was
completely the opposite. This party created a state-werewolf in its image and
likeness: according to the constitution, the law and its official decrees it was one
thing, but in essence, in spirit and in works it was something completely
different!
“There has never been any such thing in the history of humanity! There have
been cruel, unjust or lying rulers, whose works did not accord with their words.
But never have there been rulers, or governments, which set as their aim the
annihilation of a people and a people’s economy that came into their possession!
But this is precisely what they began to do in Russia.
“There are now various estimates of the victims of the Bolshevik regime
(higher and lower). It goes without saying that it is impossible to establish exact
figures. We have tried to take a middle course. And according to such middling
estimates, from 1917 to 1945 in one way or another (through shooting, camps
and prisons, the two famines of the beginning of the 1920s and 1930s, the
deliberately ‘Pyrrhic’ victories in the Second World War) up to 80 million Great
Russians only were annihilated (not counting Ukrainians, Belorussians and
other nationalities of the former Russian empire). In all, up to 100 million. From
1917 to 1926 20 million were simply shot. We must think that from 1927 to 1937
not less than 10 million. Under ‘collectivization’ 4 million were immediately
shot. So that out of the 80 million who perished by 1945 about 30-40 million
were simply executed. These figures could not have been made up of political
enemies, representatives of the ‘former ones’ (landowners and capitalists), nor
of ‘their own’, that is, those communists who for some reason or other became
unsuitable. All these together constituted only a small percentage of those who
perished. The main mass – tens of millions – were the ‘simple’ Russian People,
that is, all the firmly believing Orthodox people who, even if they did not
oppose the new power, could not be re-educated and re-persuaded… These
were simple peasants and town-dwellers, who in spite of everything kept the
Orthodox faith. And these were the overwhelming majority of the Russian
127
People. Among them, of course, there perished the overwhelming majority of
the clergy and monastics (by 1941 100,000 clergy and 205 bishops had been
annihilated).
“At the same time, from 1917 to 1945, from the offspring of the off-scourings
of the people, but also from unfortunate fellow-travellers for whom self-
preservation was higher than all truths and principles, a new people grew up –
the ‘Soviet’ people, or ‘Sovki’, as we now call ourselves. From 1918 children in
schools no longer learned the Law of God, but learned atheist filthy thinking
(and it is like that to the present day). After 1945 it was mainly this new, ‘Soviet’
people that remained alive. Individual representatives of the former Russian,
that is, Orthodox People who survived by chance constituted such a tiny
number that one could ignore them, since they could no longer become the basis
of the regeneration of the true, real Rus’…”215
Some will quarrel with some details of this analysis. Thus Lebedev’s figures
for those killed count among the higher estimates.216 Again, already in the 1920s
and 1930s a larger proportion of the population was probably genuinely Soviet
and anti-Orthodox than Lebedev admits. On the other hand, more genuinely
Russian and Orthodox people survived into the post-war period than he admits.
Nevertheless, his words have been quoted here because their main message
about the Russian revolution is true. Too often commentators in both East and
West have tried to push the Russian revolution into the frame of “ordinary”
history, grossly underestimating the unprecedented scale of the tragedy – and
its anti-Russian nature.
The Russian revolution brought to an end the Christian period of history,

characterized by mainly monarchical governments ruling – or, at any rate,
claiming to rule – by Christian principles, and ushered in the Age of the
Antichrist…
The terms “Antichrist” and “The Age of the Antichrist” need to be defined. St.
John of Damascus writes: “Everyone who confesses not that the Son of God
came in the flesh and is perfect God, and became perfect man after being God, is
Antichrist (I John 2.18, 22; 4.3). But in a peculiar and special sense he who comes
at the consummation of the age is called Antichrist. First, then, it is requisite that

215 Lebedev, “Sovmestimost’ Khrista i Veliara – k 70-letiu ‘sergianstva’”, Russkij
Pastyr’, 28-29, 1997, pp. 174-175.

216 Official figures for those condemned for counter-revolution and other serious
political crimes between 1921 and 1953 come to only a little more than four
million, of whom only about 800,000 were shot. This, of course, excludes those
killed in the Civil War and other armed uprisings, and in the great famines in
Ukraine and elsewhere. See GARF, Kollektsia dokumentov; Popov, V.P.
Gosudarstvennij terror v sovietskoj Rossii. 1923-1953 gg.; istochniki i ikh
interpretatsia, Otechestvennie arkhivy, 1992, N 2. p. 28. For commentaries on these
figures, see http://mitr.livejournal.com/227089.html;
http://community.livejournal.com/idu_shagayu/2052449.html.
128
the Gospel should be preached among all nations, as the Lord said (Matthew
24.14), and then he will come to refute the impious Jews.”217
Archimandrite Justin (Popovich) writes: “The Antichrist will be, as it were, an

incarnation of the devil, for Christ is the incarnation of God. The Antichrist will
be the personification of evil, hatred, lying, pride and unrighteousness, for
Christ is the personification of goodness, love, truth, humility and righteousness.
Such will be the chief Antichrist, who will appear before the Second Coming of
the Lord Christ, and will stand in the place of God and proclaim himself to be
God (whom He will destroy at His glorious Second Coming with the breath of
His mouth (II Thessalonians 2.4)). But before him there will be forerunners,
innumerable antichrists. For an antichrist is every one who wishes to take the
place of Christ; an antichrist is every one who wishes, in place of the truth of
Christ, to place his own truth, in place of the righteousness of Christ – his own
righteousness, in place of the love of Christ – his own love, in place of the
Goodness of Christ – his own goodness, in place of the Gospel of Christ – his
own gospel…
“In what does his main lie consist? In the rejection of the God-Man Christ, in
the affirmation that Jesus is not God, not the Messiah=Christ, not the Saviour.
Therefore this is the work of the Antichrist. The main deceiver in the world is
the devil, and with him – the Antichrist. It goes without saying that a deceiver is
every one who in anyway rejects that Jesus is God, the Messiah, the Saviour.
This is the main lie in the world, and all the rest either proceeds from it, or is on
the way to it.”218
So anyone who rejects the Divinity of Christ is an antichrist, while the

Antichrist, or the chief Antichrist, will appear as an evil world-ruler towards the
end of the world. In the first sense, of course, there have been multitudes of
antichrists long before 1917. As the Holy Apostle John said already in the first
century: “Children, it is the last times, and as you have heard that the Antichrist
will come, so even now there are many antichrists” (I John 2.18). As for the
Antichrist, he has not appeared yet. So in what sense could the Antichrist be
said to have appeared in the period surveyed in this book?
In order to answer this question we need to turn to a prophecy of the Holy

Apostle Paul concerning the Antichrist: “You know what is restraining his
appearance in his time. The mystery of iniquity is already at work: only he who
restrains will continue to restrain until he is removed from the midst. And then
the lawless one will be revealed”(II Thessalonians 2.6-8). Now the unanimous
teaching of the Early Church, as of more recent commentators such as St.
Theophan the Recluse, is that “he who restrains” is the Roman emperor, or, more
generally, all legitimate State power on the Roman model. In the pre-revolutionary
period this legitimate State power was incarnated especially in the Russian Tsar,
the last Orthodox Christian Emperor, whose empire was known as “the Third

St. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV, 26.
217
Popovich, Interpretation of the Epistles of St. John the Theologian, Munich,

218
2000, pp. 36, 38.
129
Rome”. Thus his “removal from the midst” would be followed, according to the
prophecy, by the appearance of the Antichrist.
Now in 1905 the Tsar’s October Manifesto, which significantly limited his
autocratic power and therefore his ability to restrain “the mystery of iniquity”,
or the revolution, was followed immediately by the appearance of the St.
Petersburg Soviet led by Lev Trotsky. In March, 1917, when the Tsar abdicated,
the Soviets again appeared immediately, and in October they won supreme
power in the country. The Church had existed without a Christian Emperor in
the first centuries of her existence, and she would continue to do so after 1917.
Nevertheless, “from the day of his abdication,” as St. John Maximovich writes,
“everything began to collapse. It could not have been otherwise. The one who
united everything, who stood guard for the truth, was overthrown.”219 So if we
expect the Antichrist to appear after the removal of “him who restrains”, the
Orthodox emperor, then the significance of the appearance of Soviet power
under the leadership of Lenin immediately after the removal of the tsar is
obvious.
Of course, it is also obvious that neither Lenin not Stalin was the Antichrist
for the simple reason that the Antichrist, according to all the prophecies, will be
a Jewish king who claims to be the Messiah and God, whereas Lenin was not
only not mainly Jewish (although most of his leading followers were Jewish),
but also an atheist and an enemy of all religions, including the Jewish one.
Moreover, the Soviet Antichrist was not the only Beast in this period. Whether
in imitation of him, or in reaction to him, but using essentially the same
methods, a number of Antichrist tyrants appeared around the world.
This phenomenon has been called “totalitarianism”, a term that has received
criticism but which seems to us to be a more or less accurate characterization.
For what all these Antichrists had in common was a desire to possess the totality
of man. For those living under one of the totalitarian dictators of the twentieth
century there was no private space they could retreat to in order to get away
from the pressure of public politics. Everything – politics, religion, science, art,
even personal relationships – came under the scrutiny of the totalitarianism in
question, and was subject to its unprecedentedly harsh judgement…

219 St. John Maximovich, “Homily before a Memorial Service for the Tsar-Martyr”,
in Man of God: Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, Redding, Ca., 1994, p. 133.
130
13. THE CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION
Why did the Church not intervene in this great crisis, as she had intervened
on similar occasions in Russian history? After all, on the eve of the revolution,
she had canonized St. Hermogen, Patriarch of Moscow in the Time of Troubles,
as if to emphasize that, just as St. Hermogen had refused to recognize the false
Demetrius, so the time was coming when it would again be necessary to
distinguish between true and false political authorities. So surely the Church
would stand up against Bolshevism and in defence of the monarchy as St.
Hermogen did then?
However, at this critical moment the Synod was at a loss. On February 26, it
refused the request of the assistant over-procurator, Prince N.D. Zhevakhov, to
threaten the creators of disturbances with ecclesiastical punishments.220 Then,
on February 27, it refused the request of the over-procurator himself, N.P.
Rayev, that it publicly support the monarchy. Ironically, therefore, that much-
criticised creation of Peter the Great, the office of Over-Procurator of the Holy
Synod, proved more faithful to the Anointed of God at this critical moment than
the Holy Synod itself…
“On March 2,” writes Babkin, “the Synodal hierarchs gathered in the
residence of the Metropolitan of Moscow. They listened to a report given by
Metropolitan Pitirim of St. Petersburg asking that he be retired (this request was
agreed to on March 6 – M.B.). The administration of the capital’s diocese was
temporarily laid upon Bishop Benjamin of Gdov. But then the members of the
Synod recognized that it was necessary immediately to enter into relations with
the Executive committee of the State Duma. On the basis of which we can assert
that the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church recognized the Provisional
Government even before the abdication of Nicholas II from the throne. (The next
meeting of the members of the Synod took place on March 3 in the residence of
the Metropolitan of Kiev. On that same day the new government was told of the
resolutions of the Synod.)
“The first triumphantly official session of the Holy Synod after the coup
d’état took place on March 4. Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev presided and the
new Synodal over-procurator, V.N. Lvov, who had been appointed by the
Provisional government the previous day, was present. Metropolitan Vladimir
and the members of the Synod (with the exception of Metropolitan Pitirim, who
was absent – M.B.) expressed their sincere joy at the coming of a new era in the
life of the Orthodox Church. And then at the initiative of the over-procurator the
royal chair… was removed into the archives… One of the Church hierarchs
helped him. It was decided to put the chair into a museum.

220 A.D. Stepanov, “Mezhdu mirom i monastyrem” (“Between the World and the
Monastery”), in Tajna Bezzakonia (The Mystery of Iniquity), St. Petersburg, 2002, p.

491.
131
“The next day, March 5, the Synod ordered that in all the churches of the
Petrograd diocese the Many Years to the Royal House ‘should no longer be
proclaimed’. In our opinion, these actions of the Synod had a symbolical
character and witnessed to the desire of its members ‘to put into a museum’ not
only the chair of the Tsar, but also ‘to despatch to the archives’ of history royal
power itself.
“The Synod reacted neutrally to the ‘Act on the abdication of Nicholas II from
the Throne of the State of Russia for himself and his son in favour of Great
Prince Michael Alexandrovich’ of March 2, 1917 and to the ‘Act on the refusal of
Great Prince Michael Alexandrovich to accept supreme power’ of March 3. On
March 6 it decreed that the words ‘by order of His Imperial Majesty’ should be
removed from all synodal documents, and that in all the churches of the empire
molebens should be served with a Many Years ‘to the God-preserved Russian
Realm and the Right-believing Provisional Government’.”221
But was the new government, whose leading members were Masons222, really
“right-believing”? Even leaving aside the fact of their membership of Masonic
lodges, which is strictly forbidden by the Church, the answer to this question
has to be: no. When the Tsar opened the First State Duma in 1906 with a
moleben, the Masonic deputies sniggered and turned away, openly showing
their disrespect both for him and for the Church. And now the new government,
while still pretending to be Christian, openly declared that it derived its
legitimacy, not from God, but from the revolution. But the revolution cannot be
lawful, being the incarnation of lawlessness.
On March 7, with the support of Archbishop Sergius (Stragorodsky) of

Finland, the newly appointed Over-Procurator, Prince V.E. Lvov223, transferred
the Synod’s official organ, Tserkovno-Obschestvennij Vestnik (Church and Society

221 Babkin, “Sviatejshij Sinod Pravoslavnoj Rossijskoj Tserkvi i Revoliutsionnie
Sobytia Fevralia-Marta 1917 g.” (“The Most Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox
Church and the Revolutionary Events of February-March, 1917”),
http://www.monarhist-spb.narod.ru/D-ST/Babkin-1, pp. 2, 3. Archbishop
Nathanael of Vienna (+1985), the son of over-procurator Vladimir Lvov, said that
his family used to laugh at the incongruity of wishing “Many Years” to a merely
“Provisional” Government (“Neobychnij Ierarkh” (An Unusual Hierarch), Nasha
Strana, N 2909, February 5, 2011, p. 3).
222 This is also now generally accepted even by western historians. Thus Tsuyoshi
Hasegawa writes: “Five members, Kerensky, N.V. Nekrasov, A.I. Konovalov, M.I.
Tereshchenko and I.N. Efremov are known to have belonged to the secret political
Masonic organization” (“The February Revolution”, in Edward Acton, Vladimir
Cherniaev, William Rosenberg (eds.), Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution
1914-1921, Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 59).
223 Lvov was, in the words of Bishop Gregory (Grabbe), “a not completely normal
fantasist” (Russkaia Tserkov’ pered litsom gospodstvuiushchego zla (The Russian

Church in the Face of Dominant Evil), Jordanville, 1991, p. 4). Grabbe’s estimate of
Lvov is supported by Oliver Figes, who writes: “a nobleman of no particular talent
or profession, he was convinced of his calling to greatness, yet ended up in the
1920s as a pauper and a madman living on the streets of Paris” (A People’s Tragedy,
London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 449).
132
Messenger), into the hands of the “All-Russian Union of Democratic Orthodox
Clergy and Laity”, a left-wing grouping founded in Petrograd on the same day
and led by Titlinov, a professor at the Petrograd Academy of which Sergius was
the rector.224 Archbishop (later Patriarch) Tikhon protested against this transfer,
and the small number of signatures for the transfer made it illegal. However, in
his zeal to hand this important Church organ into the hands of the liberals, Lvov
completely ignored the illegality of the act and handed the press over to
Titlinov, who promptly began to use it to preach his Gospel of “Socialist
Christianity”, declaring that “Christianity is on the side of labour, not on the
side of violence and exploitation”.225
Also on March 7, the Synod passed a resolution “On the Correction of Service
Ranks in view of the Change in State Administration”. In accordance with this, a
commission headed by Archbishop Sergius (Stragorodsky) was formed that
removed all references to the Tsar in the Divine services. This involved changes
to, for example, the troparion for the Church New Year, where the word
“Emperor” was replaced by “people”, and a similar change to the troparion for
the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. Again, on March 7-8 the Synod passed a
resolution, “On Changes in Divine Services in Connection with the Cessation of
the Commemoration of the Former Ruling House”. The phrase “formerly ruling”
(tsarstvovavshego) implied that there was no hope of a restoration of any
Romanov to the throne.
Then, on March 9, the Synod addressed all the children of the Church: “The
will of God has been accomplished. Russia has entered on the path of a new
State life. May God bless our great Homeland with happiness and glory on its
new path… For the sake of the many sacrifices offered to win civil freedom, for
the sake of the salvation of your own families, for the sake of the happiness of
the Homeland, abandon at this great historical moment all quarrels and
disagreements. Unite in brotherly love for the good of Russia. Trust the
Provisional Government. All together and everyone individually, apply all your
efforts to this end that by your labours, exploits, prayer and obedience you may
help it in its great work of introducing new principles of State life…”
But was it true that “the will of God has been accomplished”? Was it not
rather that God had allowed the will of Satan to be accomplished, as a
punishment for the sins of the Russian people? And if so, how could the path be
called a “great work”? As for the “new principles of State life”, everyone knew
that these were revolutionary in essence…

224 As Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) testified, “already in 1917 he [Sergius]
was dreaming of combining Orthodox Church life with the subjection of the
Russian land to Soviet power…” (“Preemstvennost’ Grekha” (The Heritage of Sin),
Tsaritsyn, p. 7).
225 See Mikhail V. Shkarovskii, “The Russian Orthodox Church”, in Acton,
Cherniaev and Rosenberg, op. cit., p. 417; “K 80-letiu Izbrania Sv. Patriarkha
Tikhona na Sviashchennom Sobore Rossijskoj Tserkvi 1917-18gg.” (Towards the
Election of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon at the Sacred Council of the Russian
Church, 1917-18), Suzdal’skie Eparkhial’nie Vedomosti (Suzdal Diocesan News), N 2,
November, 1997, p. 19.
133
Indeed, it could be argued that, instead of blessing the Masonic Provisional
Government in its epistle of March 9, the Synod should have applied to it the
curse pronounced in 1613 against those who would not obey the Romanov
dynasty: “It is hereby decreed and commanded that God's Chosen One, Tsar
Michael Feodorovich Romanov, be the progenitor of the Rulers of Rus' from
generation to generation, being answerable in his actions before the Tsar of
Heaven alone; and should any dare to go against this decree of the Sobor -
whether it be Tsar, or Patriarch, or any other man, - may he be damned in this
age and in the age to come, having been sundered from the Holy Trinity...”
Babkin writes that the epistle of March 9 “was characterised by B.V. Titlinov,
professor of the Petrograd Theological Academy, as ‘an epistle blessing a new
and free Russia’, and by General A.I. Denikin as ‘sanctioning the coup d’état
that has taken place’. To the epistle were affixed the signatures of the bishops of
the ‘tsarist’ composition of the Synod, even those who had the reputation of
being monarchists and ‘black hundredists’, for example, Metropolitan Vladimir
of Kiev and Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow. This witnessed to the ‘loyal’
feelings of the Synodal hierarchs…”226
Why did the hierarchs sanction the coup so quickly? Probably in the hope of
receiving internal freedom for the Church. This is hinted at in a declaration of
six archbishops to the Holy Synod and Lvov on March 8: “The Provisional
Government in the person of its over-procurator V.N. Lvov, on March 4 in the
triumphant opening session of the Holy Synod, told us that it was offering to
the Holy Orthodox Russian Church full freedom in Her administration, while
preserving for itself only the right to halt any decisions of the Holy Synod that
did not agree with the law and were undesirable from a political point of view.
The Holy Synod did everything to meet these promises, issued a pacific epistle
to the Orthodox people and carried out other acts that were necessary, in the
opinion of the Government, to calm people’s minds…”227
Lvov broke his promises and proceeded to act like a tyrant, which included
expelling Metropolitan Macarius from his see. It was then that Metropolitan
repented of having signed the March 9 epistle. And later, after the fall of the
Provisional Government, he said: “They [the Provisional Government]
corrupted the army with their speeches. They opened the prisons. They released
onto the peaceful population convicts, thieves and robbers. They abolished the
police and administration, placing the life and property of citizens at the
disposal of every armed rogue… They destroyed trade and industry, imposing
taxes that swallowed up the profits of enterprises… They squandered the
resources of the exchequer in a crazy manner. They radically undermined all the
sources of life in the country. They established elections to the Constituent
Assembly on bases that were incomprehensible to Russia. They defiled the
Russian language, distorting it for the amusement of half-illiterates and

226 Babkin, op. cit., pp. 3-4.
227 Babkin, Dukhovenstvo, pp. 195-198.
134
sluggards. They did not even guard their own honour, violating the promise
they had given to the abdicated Tsar to allow him and his family free departure,
by which they prepared for him inevitable death…
“Who started the persecution on the Orthodox Church and handed her head
over to crucifixion? Who demanded the execution of the Patriarch? Was it those
whom the Duma decried as ‘servants of the dark forces’, labelled as enemies of
the freedom of the Church?... No, it was not those, but he whom the Duma
opposed to them as a true defender of the Church, whom it intended for, and
promoted to the rank of, over-procurator of the Most Holy Synod – the member
of the Provisional Government, now servant of the Sovnarkom – Vladimir
Lvov.”228
Lvov was indeed thoroughly unsuited for the post of over-procurator – he

ended up as a renovationist and enemy of Orthodoxy. In appointing him the
Provisional Government showed its true, hostile attitude towards the Church. It
also showed its inconsistency: having overthrown the Autocracy and
proclaimed freedom for all people and all religions, it should have abolished the
office of over-procurator as being an outdated relic of the State’s dominion over
the Church. But it wanted to make the Church tow the new State’s line, and
Lvov was to be its instrument in doing this. Hence his removal of all the older,
more traditional hierarchs, his introduction of three protopriests of a Lutheran
orientation into the Synod and his proclamation of the convening of an All-
Russian Church Council – a measure which he hoped would seal the Church’s
descent into Protestant-style renovationism, but which in fact, through God’s
Providence, turned out to be the beginning of the Church’s true regeneration
and fight back against the revolution…
Meanwhile, the Council of the Petrograd Religio-Philosophical Society went

still further, denying the very concept of Sacred Monarchy. Thus on March 11
and 12, it resolved that the Synod’s acceptance of the Tsar’s abdication “does not
correspond to the enormous religious importance of the act, by which the
Church recognized the Tsar in the rite of the coronation of the anointed of God.
It is necessary, for the liberation of the people’s conscience and to avoid the
possibility of a restoration, that a corresponding act be issued in the name of the
Church hierarchy abolishing the power of the Sacrament of Royal Anointing, by
analogy with the church acts abolishing the power of the Sacraments of Marriage and
the Priesthood.”229
Fortunately, the Church hierarchy rejected this demand. For not only can the
Sacrament of Anointing not be abolished, since it is of God: even the last Tsar
still remained the anointed Tsar after his abdication. As Shakespeare put it in
Richard II, whose plot is closely reminiscent of the tragedy of the Tsar’s
abdication:

228 Metropolitan Macarius, in Groyan, op. cit., pp. 183-184.
229 Groyan, op. cit., p. 142. Italics mine (V.M.).
135
Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord.
For since the power of the anointed autocrat comes from God, not the people,
it cannot be removed by the people. The converse of this is that if the people
attempt to remove the autocrat for any other reason than his renunciation of
Orthodoxy, then they themselves sin against God and deprive themselves of His
Grace. That is why St. John of Kronstadt had said that if Russia were to be
deprived of her tsar, she would become a “stinking corpse”. And so it turned
out: as a strictly logical and moral consequence, “from the day of his
abdication,” as St. John Maximovich wrote, “everything began to collapse. It
could not have been otherwise. The one who united everything, who stood
guard for the truth, was overthrown…”230
For, as St. John said in another place: “The Tsar was the embodiment of the
Russian people’s… readiness to submit the life of the state to the righteousness
of God: therefore do the people submit themselves to the Tsar, because he
submits to God. Vladyka Anthony [Khrapovitsky] loved to recall the Tsar’s
prostration before God and the Church which he makes during the coronation,
while the entire Church, all its members, stand. And then, in response to his
submission to Christ, all in the Church make a full prostration to him.”231
In agreement with this, the philosopher Ivan Alexandrovich Ilyin wrote:

“Faithfulness to the monarchy is a condition of soul and form of action in which
a man unites his will with the will of his Sovereign, his dignity with his dignity,
his destiny with his destiny… The fall of the monarchy was the fall of Russia
herself. A thousand-year state form fell, but no ‘Russian republic’ was put in its
place, as the revolutionary semi-intelligentsia of the leftist parties dreamed, but
the pan-Russian disgrace foretold by Dostoyevsky was unfurled, and a failure of
spirit. And on this failure of spirit, on this dishonour and disintegration there
grew the state Anchar of Bolshevism, prophetically foreseen by Pushkin – a sick
and unnatural tree of evil that spread its poison on the wind to the destruction
of the whole world. In 1917 the Russian people fell into the condition of the mob,

230 St. John Maximovich, “Homily before a Memorial Service for the Tsar-Martyr”,
in Man of God, p. 133. Cf. Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev): "There is no need to say
how terrible a 'touching' of the Anointed of God is the overthrow of the tsar by his
subjects. Here the transgression of the given command of God reaches the highest
degree of criminality, which is why it drags after it the destruction of the state
itself" (Russkaia Ideologia (The Russian Ideology), St. Petersburg, 1992, pp. 50-51).
And so, insofar as it was the disobedience of the people that compelled the Tsar to
abdicate, leading inexorably to his death, "we all," in the words of Archbishop
Averky, "Orthodox Russian people, in one way or another, to a greater or lesser
degree, are guilty of allowing this terrible evil to be committed on our Russian
land" (Istinnoe Pravoslavie i Sovremennij Mir (True Orthodoxy and the
Contemporary World), Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, p. 166).
231 St. John Maximovich, “The Nineteenth Anniversary of the Repose of His
Beatitude Metropolitan Anthony”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 19, 1955, pp. 3-4.
136
while the history of mankind shows that the mob is always muzzled by despots
and tyrants…
“The Russian people unwound, dissolved and ceased to serve the great
national work – and woke up under the dominion of internationalists. History
has as it were proclaimed a certain law: Either one-man rule or chaos is possible in
Russia; Russia is not capable of a republican order. Or more exactly: the
existence of Russia demands one-man rule – either a religiously and nationally
strengthened one-man rule of honour, fidelity and service, that is, a monarchy, or
one-man rule that is atheist, conscienceless and dishonourable, and moreover
anti-national and international, that is, a tyranny.”232
However, the democratic wave continued, and the Church was carried along
by it. The hierarchy made some protests, but these did not amount to a real
“counter-revolution”. Thus on April 14, a stormy meeting took place between
Lvov and the Synod during which Lvov’s actions were recognised to be
“uncanonical and illegal”. At this session Archbishop Sergius apparently
changed course and agreed with the other bishops in condemning the unlawful
transfer of Tserkovno-Obshchestvennij Vestnik. However, Lvov understood that
this was only a tactical protest. So he did not include Sergius among the bishops
whom he planned to purge from the Synod; he thought – rightly - that Sergius
would continue to be his tool in the revolution that he was introducing in the
Church. The next day Lvov marched into the Synod at the head of a detachment
of soldiers and read an order for the cessation of the winter session of the Synod
and the retirement of all its members with the single exception of Archbishop
Sergius (Stragorodsky) of Finland.233
Thus in little more than a month since the coup, the Church had been
effectively placed in the hands of a lay dictator, who had single-handedly
dismissed her most senior bishops in the name of the “freedom of the
Church”… Here we see a striking difference in the way in which the Provisional
Government treated secular or political society, on the one hand, and the
Church, on the other. While Prince G.E. Lvov, the head of the government,
refused to impose his authority on anyone, whether rioting peasants or

232 Ilyin, Sobranie Sochinenij (Collected Works), Moscow, 1994, volume 4, p. 7; in
Valentina D. Sologub, Kto Gospoden’ – Ko Mne! (He who is the Lord’s – to me!),
Moscow, 2007, p. 53.
233 According to I.M. Andreyev, “the whole of the Synod had decided to go into
retirement. Archbishop Sergius had taken part in this resolution. But when all the
members of the Synod, together with Archbishop Sergius, actually came to give in
their retirement, the Over-Procurator, who had set about organizing a new Synod,
drew Archbishop Sergius to this. And he took an active part in the new Synod”
(Kratkij Obzor Istorii Russkoj Tserkvi ot revoliutsii do nashikh dnej (A Short Review of
the History of the Russian Church from the Revolution to our Days), Jordanville,
1952, p. 74. Bishop Gregory (Grabbe) wrote: “I can remember the opinions of those
who knew him and who considered him to be a careerist and the complaints of
hierarchs that he promised to retire with other members of the Synod in protest
against Lvov, then he changed his mind and became head of the Synod” (Letter of
April 23 / May 6, 1992 to Nicholas Churilov, Church News, April, 2003, p. 9).
137
rampaging soldiers, granting “freedom” – that is, more or less complete licence
– to any self-called political or social “authority”, Prince V.E. Lvov, the over-
procurator, granted quite another kind of “freedom” to the Church – complete
subjection to lay control…
Meanwhile, the turmoil in Russia gave the opportunity to the Georgian

Church to reassert its autocephalous status, voluntarily given up over a century
before. On March 12, without the agreement of the Holy Synod of the Russian
Church, and in spite of the protests of the exarch of Georgia, Archbishop Platon,
a group of Georgian bishops proclaimed the autocephaly of their Church and
appointed Bishop Leonid (Okropiridze) of Mingrelia as locum tenens of the
Catholicos with a Temporary Administration composed of clergy and laity.234
The Russian Synod sent Bishop Theophylact to look after the non-Georgian
parishes in Georgia. But he was removed from Georgia, and the new exarch,
Metropolitan Cyril (Smirnov), was not allowed into the capital. The result was a
break in communion between the two Churches.235
In the same month of March the Russian government ceased subsidising the
American diocese. The ruling Archbishop Eudocimus (Mescheriakov) went to
the All-Russian Council in August, leaving his vicar, Bishop Alexander
(Nemolovsky) of Canada, as his deputy. But then Protopriest John Kedrovsky
with a group of renovationist priests tried to remove Bishop Alexander and take
power into their own hands “without submitting to imperial power or
hierarchical decrees”.236
On April 29, the new Synod headed by Archbishop Sergius proclaimed the
principle of the election of the episcopate, the preparation for a Council and the
establishment of a Preconciliar Council. This Address triggered a revolution in
the Church. The revolution consisted in the fact that all over the country the
elective principle with the participation of laymen replaced the system of
“episcopal autocracy” which had prevailed thereto. In almost all dioceses
Diocesan Congresses elected special “diocesan councils” or committees
composed of clergy and laity that restricted the power of the bishops. The
application of the elective principle to almost all ecclesiastical posts, from parish
offices to episcopal sees, resulted in the removal of several bishops from their
sees and the election of new ones in their stead. Thus Archbishops Basil
(Bogoyavlensky) of Chernigov, Tikhon (Nikanorov) of Kaluga and Anthony
(Khrapovitsky) of Kharkov were removed. Archbishop Joachim (Levitsky) of
Nizhni-Novgorod was even arrested and imprisoned for a time before being

234 V. Egorov, K istorii provozglashenia gruzinami avtokefalii svoej Tserkvi v 1917 godu
(Towards a History of the Proclamation by the Georgians of the Autocephaly of

their Church in 1917), Moscow, 1917, p. 9; in Monk Benjamin (Gomareteli), Letopis’
tserkovnykh sobytij Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi nachinaia s 1917 goda (Chronicle of Church
Events, beginning from 1917), www.zlatoust.ws/letopis.htm, p. 6.
235 Monk Benjamin, op cit., pp. 8-9.
236 Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 7.
138
shot. The retirement of Archbishop Alexis (Dorodnitsyn) of Vladimir was
justified by his earlier closeness to Rasputin. The others were accused of being
devoted to the Autocracy.237
Although the spirit behind this revolutionary wave was undoubtedly anti-
ecclesiastical in essence, by the Providence of God it resulted in some changes
that were beneficial for the Church. Thus the staunchly monarchist Archbishop
Anthony, after being forced to retire, was later reinstated at the demand of the
people. Again, Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin) of Lithuania was elected
metropolitan of Moscow (the lawful occupant of that see, Metropolitan
Macarius, was later reconciled with him), and Archbishop Benjamin (Kazansky)
was made metropolitan of Petrograd. However, there were also harmful
changes, such as the election of Sergius Stragorodsky as Archbishop of
Vladimir.
In the countryside, meanwhile, “there was a strong anti-clerical movement:

village communities took away the church lands, removed priests from the
parishes and refused to pay for religious services. Many of the local priests
managed to escape this fate by throwing in their lot with the revolution.”238
However, several priests were savagely killed – the martyrdom of the Church
began, not with the Bolshevik coup, but with the liberal democratic revolution.
From June 1 to 10 the All-Russian Congress of clergy and laity took place in
Moscow with 800 delegates from all the dioceses. As Shkarovskii writes, it
“welcomed the revolution, but expressed the wish that the Church continue to
receive the legal and material support of the state, that divinity continue to be
an obligatory subject in school, and that the Orthodox Church retain its schools.
Consequently, a conflict soon broke out with the government. The Synod
protested against the law of 20 June which transferred the [37,000] parish church
schools to the Ministry of Education. A similar clash occurred over the intention
to exclude divinity from the list of compulsory subjects.”239
The transfer of the church schools to the state system was disastrous for the
Church because the state’s schools were infected with atheism. It would be one
of the first decrees that the coming Council of the Russian Orthodox Church
would seek (unsuccessfully) to have repealed…
In general, the June Congress carried forward the renovationist wave; and
although the June 14 decree “On Freedom of Conscience” was welcome, the
government still retained de jure control over the Church. Even when the
government allowed the Church to convene her own All-Russian Local Council
of in August, it retained the right of veto over any new form of self-
administration that Council might come up with. Moreover, the Preconciliar

238 Figes, op. cit., p. 350.
239 Shkarovskii, op. cit., p. 418.
139
Council convened to prepare for the forthcoming Council was to be chaired by
the Church’s leading liberal, Archbishop Sergius…
With the Tsar gone, and the Church led by liberals and treated with contempt
by the State, it is not surprising that the conservative peasant masses were
confused. Thus a telegram sent to the Holy Synod on July 24, 1917 concerned
the oath of loyalty that the Provisional Government was trying to impose on
them: “We Orthodox Christians ardently beseech you to explain to us in the
newspaper Russkoye Slovo what constitutes before the Lord God the oath given
by us to be faithful to the Tsar, Nicholas Alexandrovich. People are saying
amongst us that if this oath is worth nothing, then the new oath to the new Tsar
is also worth nothing.
“Is that so, and how are we to understand all this? Following the advice of
someone we know, we want this question decided, not by ourselves, but by the
Governing Synod, so that everyone should understand this in the necessary
way, without differences of opinion. The zhids [Jews] say that the oath is
nonsense and a deception, and that one can do without an oath. The popes
[priests] are silent. Each layman expresses his own opinion. But this is no good.
Again they have begun to say that God does not exist at all, and that the
churches will soon be closed because they are not necessary. But we on our part
think: why close them? – it’s better to live by the church. Now that the Tsar has
been overthrown things have got bad, and if they close the churches it’ll get
worse, but we need things to get better. You, our most holy Fathers, must try to
explain to all of us simultaneously: what should we do about the old oath, and
with the one they are trying to force us to take now? Which oath must be dearer
to God. The first or the second? Because the Tsar is not dead, but is alive in
prison. And is it right that all the churches should be closed? Where then can we
pray to the Lord God? Surely we should not go in one band to the zhids and
pray with them? Because now all power is with them, and they’re bragging
about it…”240
The hierarchy had no answers to these questions…
What could it have done? It could and should have rallied round the sacred
principle of the Orthodox Autocracy and used its still considerable influence
among the people to restore monarchical rule. As Bishop Diomedes writes: “It
was necessary in the name of the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church to
persuade the Ruling House not to leave the Russian State to be destroyed by
rebels, and to call all the rebels to repentance by anathematizing them with the
11th anathema of the Sunday of Orthodoxy.”241

240Groyan, op. cit., pp. CXXII-CXXIII.
241 Bishop Diomedes, Address of November 21 / December 4, 2008,
http://www.russia-talk.com/otkliki/ot-601.htm.
140
A clear precedent existed: in the recently canonized Patriarch Hermogen’s
call to liberate Russia from foreign Catholic rule and restore a lawful monarchy
in 1612. Like Hermogen, the Holy Synod in 1917 could have called the Russian
people to arms against those who had in effect forced the abdication of both the
Tsar and Great Prince Michael, and who were therefore, in effect, rebels against
lawful authority and subject to anathema. It could have approached any
member of the Romanov dynasty – with the exception of Grand Duke Cyril
Vladimirovich, who had already declared his allegiance to the revolution - with
an invitation that he ascend the throne.
But the opportunity was lost. The years of anti-monarchist propaganda had
done their work: some hierarchs supported the revolution, others rejected it, but
the Synod as a whole sided with its supporters. It was simply not prepared to
lead the people in such a way as to oppose the rebels and protect the
monarchical principle. Of course, following the example of St. Hermogen in this
way would have been very difficult, requiring great courage; and blessing a
civil war in the midst of a world war would of course have been extremely
bold… But it was not impossible…
There was another alternative, less radical than the one just mentioned, but
honourable and more in accordance with the manifestos of the two last Tsars.
As Babkin writes, this alternative “was laid out in the actions and sermons of
Bishop Andronicus (Nikolsky) of Perm and Kungur. On March 4 he addressed
an archpastoral epistle ‘to all Russian Orthodox Christians’ in which, having
expounded the essence of the ‘Acts’ of March 2 and 3, he characterized the
situation in Russia as an ‘interregnum’. Calling on everyone to obey the
Provisional Government in every way, he said: “We shall beseech the all-
Merciful One [God – M.B.] to establish authority and peace on the earth, that He
not leave us long without a Tsar, like children without a mother… May He help
us, as three hundred years ago He helped our forefathers, to receive a native
Tsar from Him, the All-Good Provider, in a unanimous and inspired manner.
Analogous theses were contained in the sermon that the Perm archpastor gave
in his cathedral church on March 5.
“On March 19 Bishop Andronicus and the Perm clergy in his cathedral
church and in all the city churches swore an oath of allegiance and service to the
Russian state themselves and brought the people to swear it in accordance with
the order established by the Provisional Government. But while swearing
allegiance to the Provisional Government as a law-abiding citizen, Vladyka
Andronicus actively conducted monarchical agitation, pinning his hopes of a
‘regeneration’ of the only temporarily ‘removed’ from power tsarist
administration on the Constituent Assembly.
“The ‘dangerous activity’ of the Perm archpastor (this is precisely how it was
evaluated by the local secular authorities and in the office of the Synod) drew
the attention of the Committee of social security and the Soviet of workers’ and
soldiers’ deputies of the city of Perm, from whom on March 21 a telegram was
sent to the over-procurator of the Holy Synod complaining that ‘Bishop
141
Andronicus in a sermon compared Nicholas II to Christ in His Passion, and
called on the flock to have pity on him.’ In reply, on March 23, the over-
procurator demanded of the rebellious bishop that he give an explanation and
account of his activity, which was directed to the defence of the old order and
‘to re-establishing the clergy against the new order’.
“The correspondence elicited between the Bishop of Perm and the over-
procurator by his ‘counter-revolutionary’ activity was completed on April 16
when Bishop Androniucs said in a detailed letter of explanation: ‘Michael
Alexandrovich’s act of abdication that legalized the Provisional Government
declared that after the Constituent Assembly we can have a tsarist
administration, like any other, depending on what the Constituent Assembly
says about it... I have submitted to the Constituent Assembly, and I will submit
to a republic, if that is what the Constituent Assembly declares. But until then
not one citizen is deprived of the freedom to express himself on any form of
government for Russia; otherwise even the Constituent Assembly would be
superfluous if someone has already irreversibly decided the question on
Russia’s form of government. As I have already said many times, I have
submitted to the Provisional Government, I submit now and and I call on
everyone to submit… I am perplexed on what basis you find it necessary… to
accuse me ‘of stirring up the people not only against the Provisional
Government, but also against the spiritual authorities in general’.”
Babkin cites many examples of priests and parishes praying simultaneously

for the Tsar and the Provision Government until the end of April. All these
instances were based on the theoretical possibility, pointed out by Bishop
Andronicus, that the Constituent Assembly could vote for a restoration of the
monarchy. And so, he concludes, since, in March, 1917 “the monarchy in Russia,
in accordance with the act of Great Prince Michael Alexandrovich, continued to
exist as an institution”, the Synod should have acted as if there was an
“interregnum” in the country.242
The weakness of the Church at this critical moment was the result of a long
historical process. Having been deprived of its administrative independence by
Peter the Great, the Church hierarchy was not ready to stand alone against the
new regime and in defence of the monarchical principle in March, 1917. Instead,
in the early days of March, it hoped that, in exchange for recognizing it and
calling on the people to recognize it, it would receive full administrative
freedom… But it was deceived: when Lvov came to power, he began to act like
a tyrant worse than the old tsarist over-procurators. And then a wave of
democratization began at the diocesan and parish levels… Thus was the
prophecy of St. Ignaty (Brianchaninov) fulfilled: “Judging from the spirit of the
times and the intellectual ferment, we must suppose that the building of the
Church, which has already been wavering for a long time, will collapse quickly
and terribly. There will be nobody to stop this and withstand it. The measures

242 Babkin, Dukhoventstvo, p. 210.
142
undertaken to support [the Church] are borrowed from the elements of the
world hostile to the Church, and will rather hasten her fall than stop it…”243
If the Church hierarchy, traditionally the main support of the Autocracy,

faltered, it is not surprising that the people as a whole faltered, too.
I.L. Solonevich writes: “I remember the February days of our great and
bloodless [revolution] – how great a mindlessness descended on our country! A
100,000-strong flock of completely free citizens knocked about the prospects of
Peter’s capital. They were in complete ecstasy, this flock: the accursed bloody
autocracy had come to an end! Over the world there was rising a dawn
deprived of ‘annexations and contributions’, capitalism, imperialism, autocracy
and even Orthodoxy: now we can begin to live! According to my professional
duty as a journalist, overcoming every kind of disgust, I also knocked about
among these flocks that sometimes circulated along the Nevsky Prospect,
sometimes sat in the Tauris palace, and sometimes went to watering holes in the
broken-into wine cellars. They were happy, this flock. If someone had then
begun to tell them that in the coming third of a century after the drunken days
of 1917 they would pay for this in tens of millions of lives, decades of famine
and terror, new wars both civil and world, and the complete devastation of half
of Russia, - the drunken people would have taken the voice of the sober man for
regular madness. But they themselves considered themselves to be completely
rational beings…”244
And so we must conclude that in March, 1917 the Church – de facto, if not de
jure - renounced Tsarism, one of the pillars of Russian identity for nearly 1000
years. With the exception of a very few bishops, such as Metropolitan Macarius
of Moscow and Archbishop Andronicus of Perm, the hierarchy hastened to
support the new democratic order. As Bishop Gregory (Grabbe) writes: “There
were few who understood at that moment that, in accepting this coup, the
Russian people had committed the sin of oath-breaking, had rejected the Tsar,
the Anointed of God, and had gone along the path of the prodigal son of the
Gospel parable, subjecting themselves to the same destructive consequences as
he experienced on abandoning his father.”245 However, the fact that Tsarism
was renounced only de facto and not de jure means that Bishop Diomedes’
thesis that the whole Church lost grace in 1917 is false. The pusillanimity of
individual hierarchs, however senior or numerous, does not amount to heresy.
Nevertheless, that a very serious sin – the sin of treason, of oath-breaking – had
been committed in the name of the Church cannot be denied…

243 Sokolov, L.A. Episkop Ignatij Brianchaninov (Bishop Ignaty Brianchaninov), Kiev,
1915, vol. 2, p. 250.

244 Solonevich, in “Ot Ipatyevskogo Monastyria do Doma Ipatyevskogo” (From the
Ipatiev Monastery to the Ipatiev House), Pravoslavnie Monastyri (Orthodox

Monasteries), 29, 2009, p. 10.
245 Grabbe, op. cit., p. 4.
143
The only question remaining was: could the Church cleanse herself of this
sin, so that, strengthened by the Grace of God, she might lead the people out of
the abyss of the revolution?
The process appeared to begin with the convening of the Local Council of the
Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow on August 15, 1917. Thus when, on the
day after the Bolshevik coup, October 26 (old style), Lenin nationalized all land,
making the Church’s and parish priests’ property illegal, the Local Council
reacted strongly. In a letter to the faithful on November 11, the Council called
the revolution “descended from the Antichrist and possessed by atheism”:
“Open combat is fought against the Christian Faith, in opposition to all that is
sacred, arrogantly abasing all that bears the name of God (II Thessalonians
2.4)… But no earthly kingdom founded on ungodliness can ever survive: it will
perish from internal strife and party dissension. Thus, because of its frenzy of
atheism, the State of Russia will fall… For those who use the sole foundation of
their power in the coercion of the whole people by one class, no motherland or
holy place exists. They have become traitors to the motherland and instigated an
appalling betrayal of Russia and her true allies. But, to our grief, as yet no
government has arisen which is sufficiently one with the people to deserve the
blessing of the Orthodox Church. And such will not appear on Russian soil until
we turn with agonizing prayer and tears of repentance to Him, without Whom
we labour in vain to lay foundations…”246
This recognition of the real nature of the revolution came none too early. On
November 15, a Tver peasant, Michael Yefimovich Nikonov, wrote to the
Council: “We think that the Most Holy Synod made an irreparable mistake
when the bishops greeted the revolution. We do not know the reasons for this.
Was it for fear of the Jews? In accordance with the prompting of their heart, or
for some laudable reasons? Whatever the reason, their act produced a great
temptation in the believers, and not only in the Orthodox, but even among the
Old Ritualists. Forgive me for touching on this question – it is not our business
to judge that: this is a matter for the Council, I am only placing on view the
judgement of the people. People are saying that by this act of the Synod many
right-thinking people were led into error, and also many among the clergy. We
could hardly believe our ears at what we heard at parish and deanery meetings.
Spiritual fathers, tempted by the deception of freedom and equality, demanded
that hierarchs they dislike be removed together with their sees, and that they
should elect those whom they wanted. Readers demanded the same equality, so
as not to be subject to their superiors. That is the absurdity we arrived at when
we emphasized the satanic idea of the revolution. The Orthodox Russian people
is convinced that the Most Holy Council in the interests of our holy mother, the
Church, the Fatherland and Batyushka Tsar, should give over to anathema and
curse all self-called persons and all traitors who trampled on their oath together
with the satanic idea of the revolution. And the Most Holy Council will show to
its flock who will take over the helm of administration in the great State. We

246 On the same day, however, the Council decreed that those killed on both sides
in the conflict should be given Christian burials.
144
suppose it must be he who is in prison [the Tsar], but if he does not want to rule
over us traitors,… then let it indicate who is to accept the government of the
State; that is only common sense. The act of Sacred Coronation and Anointing
with holy oil of our tsars in the Dormition Cathedral [of the Moscow Kremlin]
was no simple comedy. It was they who received from God the authority to rule
the people, giving account to Him alone, and by no means a constitution or
some kind of parliament of not quite decent people capable only of
revolutionary arts and possessed by the love of power… Everything that I have
written here is not my personal composition alone, but the voice of the Russian
Orthodox people, the 100-million-strong village Russia in which I live.”247
Many people were indeed disturbed by such questions as: had the Church
betrayed the Tsar in March 1917? Were Christians guilty of breaking their oath
to the Tsar by accepting the Provisional Government? Should the Church
formally absolve the people of their oath to the Tsar? The leadership of the
Council passed consideration of these questions, together with Nikonov’s letter,
to a subsection entitled “On Church Discipline”. This subsection had several
meetings in the course of the next nine months, but came to no definite
decisions…248
On January 19, 1918 (old style) Patriarch Tikhon anathematized the

Bolsheviks: “By the power given to Us by God, we forbid you to approach the
Mysteries of Christ, we anathematize you, if only you bear Christian names and
although by birth you belong to the Orthodox Church. We also adjure all of you,
faithful children of the Orthodox Church of Christ, not to enter into any
communion with such outcasts of the human race: ‘Remove the evil one from
among you’ (I Corinthians 5.13).” The decree ended with an appeal to defend
the Church, if necessary, to the death. For “the gates of hell shall not prevail
against Her” (Matthew 16.18).249
The significance of this anathema lies in the fact that the Bolsheviks were to
be regarded, not only as apostates from Christ (that was obvious), but also as
having no moral authority, no claim to obedience whatsoever – an attitude taken by
the Church to no other government in the whole of Her history. Coming so soon
after the Bolsheviks’ dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, it indicated that
now that constitutionalism had proved its uselessness in the face of demonic
barbarism, it was time for the Church to enter the struggle in earnest…250

247 http://www.ispovednik.org/fullst.php?nid=31&binn_rubrik_pl_news=136.
248 M. Babkin, “Pomestnij Sobor 1917-1918 gg.: O Prisyage pravitel’stvu voobsche i
byvshemu imperatoru Nikolaius II v chastnosti” (The Local Council of 1917-1918:
On the Oath to the Government in general and to the former Emperor Nicholas II
in particular), http://www.portal-credo.ru/site/print.php?act=lib&id=2704.
249 Russian text in M.E. Gubonin, Akty Sviateishego Patriarkha Tikhona (The Acts of
His Holiness Patriarch Tikhon), Moscow: St. Tikhon's Theological Institute, 1994,
pp. 82-85; Deiania Sviaschennogo Sobora Pravoslavnoj Rossijskoj Tserkvi (The Acts of
the Sacred Council of the Russian Orthodox Church), 1917-1918, Moscow, 1918,
1996, vol. 6, pp. 4-5 (Act 66.6).
250 On January 1, 1970 the Russian Church Abroad under Metropolitan Philaret of
New York confirmed this anathema and added one of its own against “Vladimir
145
It was important that the true significance of the anathema for the Church’s
relationship with the State be pointed out. This was done immediately after its
proclamation, when Count D.A. Olsufyev pointed out that at the moleben they
had just sung ‘many years’ to the powers that be – that is, to the Bolsheviks
whom they had just anathematized! “I understand that the Apostle called for
obedience to all authorities – but hardly that ‘many years’ should be sung to
them. I know that his ‘most pious and most autocratic’ [majesty] was replaced
by ‘the right-believing Provisional Government’ of Kerensky and company…
And I think that the time for unworthy compromises has passed.”251
On January 22 the Patriarch’s anathema was discussed in a session of the

Council presided over by Metropolitan Arsenius of Novgorod, and the
following resolution was accepted: “The Sacred Council of the Orthodox
Russian Church welcomes with love the epistle of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon,
which punishes the evil-doers and rebukes the enemies of the Church of Christ.
From the height of the patriarchal throne there has thundered the word of
excommunication [preshchenia] and a spiritual sword has been raised against
those who continually mock the faith and conscience of the people. The Sacred
Council witnesses that it remains in the fullest union with the father and
intercessor of the Russian Church, pays heed to his appeal and is ready in a
sacrificial spirit to confess the Faith of Christ against her blasphemers. The
Sacred Council calls on the whole of the Russian Church headed by her
archpastors and pastors to unite now around the Patriarch, so as not to allow
the mocking of our holy faith.” (Act 67.35-37).252
In April the feast of the Holy New Martyrs and Confessors was instituted. In
July the Tsar and his family were killed. But just as the Council had paid no
attention to him during his life, not calling for his release from prison, so now
they did not glorify him after his death – although the Patriarch did condemn
his murder.
On April 15 the Council decreed: “Clergymen serving in anti-ecclesiastical

institutions… are subject to being banned from serving and, in the case of
impenitence, are deprived of their rank”. On the assumption that “anti-
ecclesiastical institutions” included all Soviet institutions, this would seem to
have been a clearly anti-Soviet measure.
Unfortunately, however, on August 15, 1918, the Council took a step

backwards, declaring invalid all defrockings based on political considerations.

Lenin and the other persecutors of the Church of Christ, dishonourable apostates
who have raised their hands against the Anointed of God, killing clergymen,
trampling on holy things, destroying the churches of God, tormenting our brothers
and defiling our Fatherland”
(http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=print_page&pid=1775)
251 Deiania, op. cit., vol. 6, p. 7; quoted in A.G. Yakovitsky, “Sergianstvo: mif ili
real’nost? (Sergianism: myth or reality?), Vernost’, N 100, January, 2008.

252 Deiania, op. cit., vol. 6, p. 36.
146
They applied this measure particularly to the eighteenth-century Metropolitan
Arsenius (Matsevich) of Rostov, and Priest Gregory Petrov. Metropolitan
Arsenius had indeed been unjustly defrocked for his righteous opposition to
Catherine II’s anti-Church measures. However, Fr. Gregory Petrov had been one
of the leaders of the Cadet party in the Duma in 1905 and was an enemy of the
monarchical order. How could his defrocking be said to have been unjust in
view of the fact that the Church had officially prayed for the Orthodox
Autocracy, and Petrov had worked directly against the fulfilment of the
Church’s prayers? The problem was: too many people, including several
hierarchs, had welcomed the fall of the Tsarist regime. If the Church was not to
divide along political lines, a general amnesty was considered necessary. But if
true recovery can only begin with repentance, and repentance must begin with
the leaders of the Church, this decree amounted to covering the wound without
allowing it to heal.
As Bishop Dionysius (Alferov) of Novgorod writes, the Council could be

criticized for its “its legitimization of complete freedom of political orientation
and activity, and, besides, its rehabilitation of the Church revolutionaries like
Gregory Petrov. By all this it doomed the Russian Church to collapse,
presenting to her enemies the best conditions for her cutting up and annihilation
piece by piece.
“That this Council… did not express the voice of the complete fullness of the
Russian Church is proved by the decisions of two other Councils of the time:
that of Karlovtsy in 1921, and that of Vladivostok in 1922.
“At the Karlovtsy Council remembrance was finally made of St. Sergius’
blessing of the Christian Sovereign Demetrius Donskoj for his battle with the
enemies of the Church and the fatherland, and of the struggle for the Orthodox
Kingdom of the holy Hierarch Hermogenes of Moscow. The question was raised
of the ‘sin of February’, but because some of the prominent activists of the
Council had participated in this, the question was left without detailed review.
The decisions of this Council did not receive further official development in
Church life because of the schisms that began both in the Church Abroad and in
the monarchist movement. But the question of the re-establishment of the
Orthodox Kingdom in Russia had been raised, and thinkers abroad worked out
this thought in detail…”
On August 16, it was announced at the Council that a department

for the reunification of the Christian Churches was being opened: “The
Sacred Council of the Orthodox Russian Church, which has been
gathered and is working in conditions that are so exceptionally
difficult for the whole Christian Church, when the waves of unbelief
and atheism threaten the very existence of the Christian Church,
would take upon itself a great responsibility before history if it did
not raise the question of the unification of the Christian Churches and
147
did not give this question a fitting direction at the moment when not
only one Christian confession, but the whole of Christianity is
threatened by huge dangers on the part of unbelief and atheism.
“The task of the department is to prepare material for a decision of

the present Council on this question and on the further development
of the matter in the inter-Council period…”
On September 20, the last, 170 th session of the Council, the project
for a commission on the reunification of the Churches was reviewed
and confirmed by the Council. The president of the department on the
unification of the Churches, Archbishop Eudocimus (Meshchersky) of
Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, said: “I am very sad that the report
has come at such a difficult time, when the hours of our sacred union
in this chamber are coming to an end, and when at the end of work my
thoughts are becoming confused and I cannot report to you everything
that I could tell you. From our point of view, the Council should have
directed its attention at this question long ago. If the Church is alive,
then we cannot remain in the narrow limits she has existed in up to
now. If we have no courage to preach beyond the bounds of our
fatherland, then we must hear the voice coming from there to us. I
have in mind the voice of the Anglo-American Episcopalian Churches,
who sincerely and insistently seek union or rapprochement, and do
not find any insurmountable obstacles on the path to the indicated
end. Considering the union of the Christian Churches to be especially
desirable in the period of intense struggle with unbelief, crude
materialism and moral barbarism that we are experiencing now, the
department suggests to the Sacred Council that it adopt the following
resolution:
“‘1. The Sacred Council of the Orthodox Russian Church, joyfully

beholding the sincere strivings of the Old Catholics and Anglicans for
union with the Orthodox Church on the basis of the teaching and
traditions of the Ancient-Catholic Church, blesses the labours and
endeavours of the people who work to find paths towards union with
the named friendly Churches.
“‘2. The Council directs the Holy Synod to organize a permanent

Commission attached to the Holy Synod with branches in Russia and
abroad for the further study of the Old Catholic and Anglican
questions, to explicate by means of relations with the Old Catholics
and Anglicans the difficulties that lie on the path to union, and
possible aids to the speedy attainment of the final end.’”
The decisions of the Council of a theological or dogmatic

significance were subject to confirmation by a special assembly of
bishops. At the last such assembly, on September 22, 1918, this
decision was not reviewed. It is possible that for that reason the
148
“Resolution regarding the unification of the Churches” did not enter
the official “Collection of the Decrees and Resolutions of the Sacred
Council of the Orthodox Russian Church of 1917-1918”. 253
In September, 1918 the Bolsheviks shut down the Local Council and
initiate the “Red Terror”, probably the most intense and large-scale
persecution of the Orthodox Church since the time of Diocletian. This
was probably the reason why the Resolution was not reviewed and not
put into practice. There may also have been a deeper, providential
reason: that this Resolution was not pleasing to God, in that it
threatened to open the doors of the Russian Church to the heresy of
ecumenism, of which the Anglicans were the leaders, at precisely the
moment of her greatest weakness…
This conclusion is supported by the fact that in the inter-war years,

and right up to General Assembly of the World Council of Churches in
1961, the Russian Church – with the exception of the Paris Russian
Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the American Metropolia
- took no direct part in the ecumenical movement. The other Churches,
on the other hand, and especially the Greek Churches, were deeply
involved from the early 1920s, and recognized Anglican Orders at an
early stage. 254
Paradoxically, therefore, the Red Terror saved Russia from

ecumenism until the 1960s, when the communists decided to order the
official Russian Church into the ecumenical movement for entirely
political reasons.

253 Sviataia Rus’ (Holy Rus’), 2003.
See Archimandrite Kallistos Ware and Rev. Colin Davey (eds.), Anglican-Orthodox Dialogue:
254
The Moscow Agreed Statement, 1977, chapter 2.
149
14. THE JEWS AND THE REVOLUTION
We need to distinguish between at least three levels at which the revolution

took place. First, there was the level of the out-and-out revolutionaries, usually
intelligenty who were supported by many from the industrial proletariat and
the revolutionary-minded peasantry, who were aiming to destroy Russian
tsarism and Russian Orthodox civilization completely before embarking on a
world revolution that would dethrone God and traditional authority from the
hearts and minds of all men everywhere. This level was led by Lenin, Trotsky
and Stalin; it was composed mainly of Jews, but also contained Russians,
Latvians, Georgians, Poles and other nationalities. They were possessed by the
revolutionary faith to the greatest extent, and owed no allegiance to any nation
or traditional creed or morality.
Secondly, there was the level of the Freemasons, the mainly aristocratic and
middle-class Duma parliamentarians and their supporters in the country at
large, who were not aiming to destroy Russia completely, but only to remove
the tsar and introduce a constitutional government on the English model. This
level was led by Guchkov, Rodzyanko and Kerensky; it was composed mainly
of Russians, but also contained most of the intelligentsia of the other nations of
the empire. They believed in the revolutionary faith, but still had moral scruples
derived from their Christian background.
Thirdly, there were the lukewarm Orthodox Christians, the great mass of
ordinary Russians, who did not necessarily want either world revolution or a
constitutional government, but who lacked the courage and the faith to act
openly in support of Faith, Tsar and Fatherland. It is certain that if very many
Russians had not become lukewarm in their faith, God would not have allowed
the revolution to take place. After the revolution, many from this level, as well
as individuals from the first two levels, seeing the terrible devastation that their
lukewarmness had allowed to take place, bitterly repented and returned to the
ranks of the confessing Orthodox Christians.
Liberals ascribed the revolutionary character of the Jews to antisemitism, and,

in the Russian case, to pogroms and the multitude of restrictions placed on them
by the tsars. However, as we have seen in volume four, far fewer Jews died in
the pogroms than Russian officials in terrorist attacks (1845 by the year 1909),
while the restrictions were placed on the Jews in order to protect the Russian
peasant, who was ruthlessly exploited by them. For, as Solzhenitsyn points out,
these restrictions “were never racial [as they were in Western Europe]. They
were applied neither to the Karaites [who rejected the Talmud], nor to the
mountain Jews, nor to the Central Asian Jews.” 255 Rather, as the future
Hieromartyr John Vostorgov said in 1906: “The Jews are restricted in their rights
of residence… as a predatory tribe that is dangerous in the midst of the peaceful
population because of its exploitative inclinations, which… have found a

255 Solzhenitsyn, Dvesti let vmeste (Two hundred years together), Moscow, 2002, vol.
2, p. 292.
150
religious sanction and support in the Talmud… Can such a confession be
tolerated in the State, when it allows its followers to practise hatred and all
kinds of deceit and harm towards other confessions, and especially
Christians? … The establishment of the Pale of Settlement is the softest of all
possible measures in relation to such a confession. Moreover, is it possible in
this case not to take account of the mood of the masses? But this mood cannot be
changed only by issuing a law on the complete equality of rights of the Jews. On
the contrary, this can only strengthen the embitterment of the people…”256
In other words, restrictions were placed only on those Jews who practised
Talmudism, with its vicious anti-Christianity and moral double standards.
Moreover, the restrictions were very generously applied. The boundaries of the
Pale (a huge area twice the size of France) were extremely porous, allowing
large numbers of Jews to acquire higher education and make their fortunes in
Great Russia – to such an extent that by the time of the revolution the Jews
dominated Russian trade and, most ominously, the Russian press. Stolypin
wanted to remove the restrictions on the Jews. But in this case the Tsar resisted
him, as his father had resisted Count Witte before him.257
This was not because the Tsar felt no responsibility to protect the Jews; he
spoke about “my Jews”, as he talked about “my Poles”, “my Armenians” and
“my Finns”. And his freedom from anti-semitism is demonstrated by his
reaction to the murder of Stolypin by a Jewish revolutionary, Bogrov, in Kiev on
September 1, 1911. As Robert Massie writes: “Because Bogrov was a Jew, the
Orthodox population was noisily preparing a retaliatory pogrom. Frantic with
fear, the city’s Jewish population spent the night packing their belongings. The
first light of the following day found the square before the railway station
jammed with carts and people trying to squeeze themselves on to departing
trains. Even as they waited, the terrified people heard the clatter of hoofs. An
endless stream of Cossacks, their long lances dark against the dawn sky, rode
past. On his own, Kokovtsev had ordered three full regiments of Cossacks into
the city to prevent violence. Asked on what authority he had issued the
command, Kokovtsev replied: ‘As head of the government.’ Later, a local official
came up to the Finance Minister to complain, ‘Well, Your Excellency, by calling
in the troops you have missed a fine chance to answer Bogrov’s shot with a nice
Jewish pogrom.’ Kokovtsev was indignant, but, he added, ‘his sally suggested
to me that the measures which I had taken at Kiev were not sufficient…

256 Vostorgov, in Fomin, S. and Fomina, T., Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia
before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. II, p. 624.

257 As Witte recorded in his Memoirs: “’Are you right to stand up for the Jews?’
asked Alexander III. In reply Witte asked permission to answer the question with a
question: ‘Can we drown all the Russian Jews in the Black Sea? If we can, then I
accept that resolution of the Jewish question. If not, the resolution of the Jewish
question consists in giving them a chance to live. That is in offering them equal
rights and equal laws.’” (Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, London: Arrow, 1993, p.
69). But Witte’s reply misses the point, as if the choice lay between killing all the
Jews or giving them complete equality. No State can give complete freedom to a
section of the population that does not respect the law and endangers the lives or
livelihoods of the majority.
151
therefore I sent an open telegram to all governors of the region demanding that
they use every possible means – force if necessary – to prevent possible
pogroms. When I submitted this telegram to the Tsar, he expressed his approval
of it and of the measure I had taken in Kiev.’”258
In the end, the Pale of Settlement was destroyed, not by liberal politicians,
but by right-wing generals. In 1915, as the Russian armies were retreating, some
Jews were accused of spying for the enemy and were shot, while the Jewish
population in general was deemed unreliable. So a mass evacuation of the Jews
from the Pale was ordered. But the results were disastrous. Hordes of frightened
Jews fleeing eastwards blocked up vital roads along which supplies for the front
were destined. Landing up in large cities such as Moscow and Petrograd where
there had been no large Jewish population before, these disgruntled new
arrivals only fuelled the revolutionary fires. And so was created precisely the
situation that the Pale of Settlement had been designed to avert. As the Jews
poured from the western regions into the major cities of European Russia, they
soon acquired prominent executive positions in all major sectors of government
and the economy…
As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, the February revolution brought only

harm and destruction to the Russian population. However, “Jewish society in
Russia received in full from the February revolution everything that it had
fought for, and the October coup was really not needed by it, except that
cutthroat part of the Jewish secular youth that with its Russian brother-
internationalists had stacked up a charge of hatred for the Russian state
structure and was rearing to ‘deepen’ the revolution.” It was they who through
their control of the Executive Committee of the Soviet – over half of its members
were Jewish socialists – assumed the real power after February, and propelled it
on – contrary to the interests, not only of the Russian, but also of the majority
Jewish population, - to the October revolution.259
Nevertheless, at the time of the October revolution only a minority of the

Jews were Bolsheviks (in the early 1900s they constituted 19% of the party). “At
the elections to the Constituent Assembly ‘more than 80% of the Jewish
population of Russia voted’ for Zionist parties. Lenin wrote that 550,000 were
for Jewish nationalists. ‘The majority of the Jewish parties formed a single
national list, in accordance with which seven deputies were elected – six
Zionists’ and Gruzenberg. ‘The success of the Zionists’ was also aided by the
[published not long before the elections] Declaration of the English Foreign
Minister Balfour [on the creation of a ‘national centre’ of the Jews in Palestine],
‘which was met by the majority of the Russian Jewish population with
enthusiasm [in Moscow, Petrograd, Odessa, Kiev and many other cities there
were festive manifestations, meetings and religious services]’.”260

258 Massie, op. cit., p. 229.
259 Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., pp.41, 43.
260 Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., p. 73.
152
The unprecedented catastrophe of the Russian revolution required an
explanation… For very many this lay in the coming to power of the Jews, and
their hatred for the Russian people. However, Archbishop Andrew of Ufa, the
future hieromartyr, wrote: “In defence of the Russian people, they try to say that
the people have been confused by the Jews, or deceived by their own leaders...
A bad excuse! It's a fine people and a fine Christian religious disposition that
can be confused by any rogue that comes along!...”
Nevertheless, that the revolution brought power to the Jews, who had been
plotting against the Russian state for decades, if not centuries, is undeniable. “In
1917,” writes the pro-Semite David Vital, “five of the twenty-one members of
the Communist Party’s Central Committee were Jews, and it has been estimated
that at the early post-1917 congresses between 15 and 20% per cent of the legates
were Jewish”. 261 These percentages remained fairly stable: by 1922 Jews
constituted 15% of Bolshevik Party membership (Russians constituted 65%).262
But these are conservative estimates: some give much higher estimates,
especially in the higher reaches of the Party and Government apparatus. Thus
Douglas Reed writes: “The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which
wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians (including Lenin263) and 9
Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive
Commission (or secret police) comprised 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts,
Georgians and others. The Council of People’s Commissars consisted of 17 Jews
and five others. The Moscow Che-ka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and
13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially
published in 1918-1919 were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central
committees of small, supposedly ‘Socialist’ or other non-Communist parties…
were 55 Jews and 6 others.”264
Richard Pipes admits: “Jews undeniably played in the Bolshevik Party and
the early Soviet apparatus a role disproportionate to their share of the
population. The number of Jews active in Communism in Russia and abroad
was striking: in Hungary, for example, they furnished 95 percent of the leading
figures in Bela Kun’s dictatorship. They also were disproportionately
represented among Communists in Germany and Austria during the
revolutionary upheavals there in 1918-23, and in the apparatus of the
Communist International.”265

261 Vital, op. cit., p. 703.
262 Donald Rayfield, Stalin and his Hangmen, London: Viking, 2004, p. 74.
263 However, Lenin was partly Jewish. His grandfather was called Israel before his
baptism by an Orthodox priest, and his great-grandfather’s name was Moishe

Blank. See Lina Averina, "Evrejskij koren'" (The Jewish Root), Nasha Strana (Our
Country), January 22, 1997; Michael Brenner, “Lenin i ego yevrejskij praded”
(Lenin and his Jewish Great-Grandfather),
http://inosmi.ru/history/20110228/166930202.html.
264 Reed, The Controversy of Zion, Durban, South Africa, 1978, p. 274.
265 Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, London: Fontana, 1995, pp.
112-13.
153
The London Times correspondent in Russia, Robert Wilton, reported: ”Taken
according to numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the
commissars that rule Bolshevik Russia they are nine in ten; if anything the
proportion of Jews is still greater.”266
The Jews were especially dominant in the most feared and blood-thirsty part
of the Bolshevik State apparatus, the Cheka, which, writes Brendon, “consisted
of 250,000 officers (including 100,000 border guards), a remarkable adjunct to a
State which was supposed to be withering away. In the first 6 years of Bolshevik
rule it had executed at least 200,000. Moreover, the Cheka was empowered to
act as ‘policeman, gaoler, investigator, prosecutor, judge and executioner’. It
also employed barbaric forms of torture.”267
So complete was the Jewish domination of Russia as a result of the revolution

that it is a misnomer to speak about the “Russian” revolution; it should more
accurately be called the Russian-Jewish revolution, or even the Jewish
revolution. That the Russian revolution was actually Jewish, but at the same time
part of an international revolution of Jewry against the Christian and Muslim
worlds, is indicated by an article by Jacob de Haas entitled “The Jewish
Revolution” and published in the London Zionist journal Maccabee in November,
1905: “The Revolution in Russia is a Jewish revolution, for it is a turning point in
Jewish history. This situation flows from the fact that Russia is the fatherland of
approximately half of the general number of Jews inhabiting the world… The
overthrow of the despotic government must exert a huge influence on the
destinies of millions of Jews (both in Russia and abroad). Besides, the revolution
in Russia is a Jewish revolution also because the Jews are the most active
revolutionaries in the tsarist Empire.”
But why were the Jews the most active revolutionaries? What was it in their
upbringing and history that led them to adopt the atheist revolutionary
teachings and actions of Russia’s “superfluous young men” more ardently than
the Russians themselves? Hatred of Christ and the Christians was, of course,
deeply imbedded in the Talmud and Jewish ritual – but the angry young men
that began killing thousands of the Tsar’s servants even before the revolution of
1905 had rejected the Talmud as well as the Gospel, and even all religion in
general.
“The motivation of those Jews who worked for the Cheka was not Zionist or
ethnic. The war between the Cheka and the Russian bourgeoisie was not even
purely a war of classes or political factions. It can be seen as being between
Jewish internationalism and the remnants of a Russian national culture… What
was Jewish except lineage about Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev or
Sverdlov? Some were second- or even third-generation renegades; few even
spoke Yiddish, let alone knew Hebrew. They were by upbringing Russians

266Reed, op. cit., p. 276.
267Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley. A Panorama of the 1930s, London: Pimlico, 2001,
p. 11.
154
accustomed to a European way of life and values, Jewish only in the superficial
sense that, say, Karl Marx was. Jews in anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia had few ways
out of the ghetto except emigration, education or revolution, and the latter two
courses meant denying their Judaism by joining often anti-Jewish institutions
and groups.”268
This can be illustrated from the deathbed confession of Yurovsky, the Tsar’s
murderer: “Our family suffered less from the constant hunger than from my
father’s religious fanaticism… On holidays and regular days the children were
forced to pray, and it is not surprising that my first active protest was against
religious and nationalistic traditions. I came to hate God and prayer as I hated
poverty and the bosses.”269
At the same time, the Bolshevik Jews did appear to sympathize with
Talmudism more than with any other religion. Thus in 1905 the Jewish
revolutionaries in Kiev boasted that they would turn St. Sophia cathedral into a
synagogue. Again, in 1918 they erected a monument to Judas Iscariot in
Sviazhsk270, and in 1919 - in Tambov.271 And when the Whites reconquered
Perm region in 1918 they found many Jewish religious inscriptions in the former
Bolshevik headquarters and on the walls of the basement of the Ipatiev House in
Yekaterinburg where the Tsar and his family had been shot. Moreover, while
officially rejecting all religion, the revolutionaries did not reject the unconscious
emotional energy of Talmudic Judaism and of the fierce pride of nation that had
once been the chosen people of God. Having fallen away from that chosen
status, and been scattered all over the world by the wrath of God, they resented
their replacement by the Christian peoples with an especially intense
resentment. Roma delenda est – Christian Rome had to be destroyed, and
Russia as “The Third Rome”, the Rome that now reigned, had to be destroyed
first of all. The atheist revolutionaries of the younger generation took over this
resentment and hatred even while rejecting its religious-nationalist-historical
basis…
L.A. Tikhomirov wrote: “It is now already for nineteen centuries that we
have been hearing from Jewish thinkers that the religious essence of Israel
consists not in a concept about God, but in the fulfilment of the Law. Above
were cited such witnesses from Judas Galevy. The very authoritative Ilya del

268 Rayfield, op. cit., p. 72.
269 Yurovsky, in Radzinsky, op. cit., p. 177.
270 The Danish writer Halling Keller was present at the unveiling of the monument
to Judas in Sviazhsk. He wrote: “The local Soviet discussed to whom to raise a

statue for a long time. It was thought that Lucifer did not completely share the
idea of communism. Cain was too much of a legendary personality, so they
decided on Judas Iscariot since he was a completely historical personality. They
represented him at full height with his fist raised to heaven.” (M. Nazarov,
“Presledovania Tserkvi i dukhovnaia sut’ bol’shevizma” (The Persecutions of the
Church and the spiritual essence of Bolshevism), in Vozhdiu Tret’ego Rima (To the
Leader of the Third Rome), ch. 3)
271 See Leningradskaia Panorama (Leningrad Panorama), N 10, 1990, p. 35.
155
Medigo (15th century) in his notable Test of Faith says that ‘Judaism is founded
not on religious dogma, but on religious acts’.
“But religious acts are, in essence, those that are prescribed by the Law. That
means: if you want to be moral, carry out the Law. M. Mendelsohn formulates
the idea of Jewry in the same way: ‘Judaism is not a revealed religion, but a
revealed Law. It does not say ‘you must believe’, but ‘you must act’. In this
constitution given by God the State and religion are one. The relationships of
man to God and society are merged. It is not lack of faith or heresy that attracts
punishment, but the violation of the civil order. Judaism gives no obligatory
dogmas and recognizes the freedom of inner conviction.’
“Christianity says: you must believe in such-and-such a truth and on the

basis of that you must do such-and-such. New Judaism says: you can believe as
you like, but you have to do such-and-such. But this is a point of view that
annihilates man as a moral personality…”272
Thus Talmudism creates a personality that subjects faith and truth to the
imperative of action. That is, it is the action that is first proclaimed as necessary –
the reasons for doing it can be thought up later. And this corresponds exactly
both to the philosophy of Marx, for whom “the truth, i.e. the reality and power,
of thought must be demonstrated in action”273, and to the psychological type of
the Marxist revolutionary, who first proclaims that Rome (i.e. Russia) must be
destroyed, and then looks for an ideology that will justify destruction. Talmudic
Law is useful, indeed necessary, not because it proclaims God’s truth, but in
order to secure the solidarity of the Jewish people and their subjection to their
rabbinic leaders. In the same way, Marxist theory is necessary in order to unite
adherents, expel dissidents and in general justify the violent overthrow of the
old system.274

272 Tikhomirov, Religiozno-filosofskie Osnovy Istorii (The Religio-Historical
Foundations of History), Moscow, 1997, pp. 379, 380.
273 Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach, 1845.
274 This point has been well developed by Pipes: “Important as ideology was,… its
role in the shaping of Communist Russia must not be exaggerated. If any

individual or a group profess certain beliefs and refer to them to guide their
conduct, they may be said to act under the influence of ideas. When, however,
ideas are used not so much to direct one’s personal conduct as to justify one’s
domination over others, whether by persuasion of force, the issue becomes
confused, because it is not possible to determine whether such persuasion or force
serves ideas or, on the contrary, ideas serve to secure or legitimize such
domination. In the case of the Bolsheviks, there are strong grounds for maintaining
the latter to be the case, because they distorted Marxism in every conceivable way,
first to gain political power and then to hold on to it. If Marxism means anything it
means two propositions: that as capitalist society matures it is doomed to collapse
from inner contradictions, and that this collapse (‘revolution’) is effected by
industrial labor (‘the proletariat’). A regime motivated by Marxist theory would at
a minimum adhere to these two principles. What do we see in Soviet Russia? A
‘socialist revolution’ carried out in an economically underdeveloped country in
which capitalism was still in its infancy, and power taken by a party committed to
the view that the working class left to its own devices is unrevolutionary.
Subsequently, at every stage of its history, the Communist regime in Russia did
156
So the Russian revolution was Jewish not so much because of the ethnic
composition of its leaders as because the Satanic hatred of God, Christ and all
Christians that is characteristic of the Talmudic religion throughout its history
was transferred from the nationalist Talmudic fathers to their internationalist
atheist sons.

whatever it had to do to beat off challengers, without regard to Marxist doctrine,
even as it cloaked its actions with Marxist slogans. Lenin succeeded precisely
because he was free of the Marxist scruples that inhibited the Mensheviks. In view
of these facts, ideology has to be treated as a subsidiary factor: an inspiration and
a mode of thinking of the new ruling class, perhaps, but not a set of principles that
either determined its actions or explains them to posterity. As a rule, the less one
knows about the actual course of the Russian Revolution the more inclined one is
to attribute a dominant influence to Marxism…” (op. cit., pp. 501-502)
157
15. 1918: THE FALL OF GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
The fall of the Autocracy in Russia in 1917 was the signal for the
fall of Monarchism throughout Europe and the Middle East.
At the centre of the struggle were the German and Austro-

Hungarian monarchies, still fighting with some success at the
beginning of the year 1918. The Russian army, deprived of the Tsar,
was rudderless and demoralized; many of its soldiers had surrendered
to the Germans. Again, as Robert Tombs writes, “the Italian army
collapsed at the battle of Caporetto in October 1917, losing 700,000
men, many of whom surrendered or went home. Part of the French
army, as we have seen, had mutinied in 1917. Yet the German army
too was showing signs of disintegration – 10 percent of men being
transported from the Eastern to the Western Front late in 1917
deserted on they way. Trench warfare, though less deadly than war in
the open, was psychologically more stressful because of the feeling of
helplessness it created (gas, for example, was terrifying, but rarely
fatal). It caused many kinds of breakdown, especially in exhausted
men (highly religious teetotalers were thought most fragile).” 275
The Kaiser was subject to pressures from liberals similar to those

that had overthrown the Tsar, and in his Easter Message of 1917 he
promised constitutional reform after the war. Then, in July the
Reichstag called for a peace without annexations or indemnities that
chimed in well with peace feelers from Petrograd and with the
American President’s 14 Points. However, the German Army’s
successes on the field culminating in the brutal, annexationist treaty
with Russia at Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918 put paid to the liberals’
hopes of peace - for the time being.
As we have seen, America joined the war not so much out of any
great love for the Entente – on the contrary, one of the Americans’
main war-aims was to destroy the political and economic foundations
of the old-style imperialist states of Britain and France – as out of
hatred of what was seen as the Prussian and militarist essence of the
German regime. Consequently, Wilson was not interested so much in
Germany’s unconditional surrender and humiliation, as in her
liberalization, her transformation into a real democracy; this would be
“peace without victory”, a peace dictated and largely effected by
himself. Thus the struggle was between, on the one hand, Wilson and
the German liberals who supported Wilson’s 14 Points, and on the
other, the nationalists in all the European Great Powers, who looked
for a final and crushing victory by one or the other side…

275 Tombs, The English and their History, New York: Alfred A. Knopfer, 2014, p. 628.
158
The defeats of Russia and Romania in the spring of 1918 gave
Germany and Austria access to vast and desperately needed natural
resources in the East: the oil-fields of Romania and the wheat of
Ukraine. They also released large numbers of soldiers that the Kaiser
and his generals now hurled against the British and French lines in a
last desperate bid to reach Paris and win the war. As Tony Colvin
writes, “In mid-February, fifty-nine British divisions defended 126
miles of front against eighty-one German divisions, while ninety-nine
French and one American division faced seventy-one German
divisions on 324 miles of front. Another twenty-five German divisions
were in reserve, to bring their total to 177 against 159. Never had the
German chance of success been greater than on 21 March, when their
Spring Offensive, Der Kaiserschlacht, began.” 276
General Douglas Haig, commander of the British army in France

since late 1915, had been fiercely condemned by Lloyd George, the
British Prime Minister since December, 1916, for unnecessary losses in
war. So nothing he said was believed. This, writes Colvin, was
“unfortunate, because he correctly forecast the date of the German
offensive and its aim of destroying the British. Haig also in May
correctly predicted German defeat in 1918, while the government
opted for 1920. The disconnect between London and the army, which
was repeated in the Second World War, cost many lives…” 277
Adam Tooze writes: “Through skillful diversionary tactics and by

concentrating almost half the German Army on the British sector, on
21 March 1918 Ludendorff managed to raise the odds in his favour at
the point of attack to 2.6:1. Beginning at 4.40 a.m., 11,000 guns and
mortars delivered a devastating five-hour barrage against the British
front line around St. Quentin, followed by a concentrated thrust by 76
divisions across a 50-kilometre front. Winston Churchill, who
witnessed the attack, described it as ‘the greatest onslaught in the
history of the world’. Never had so much manpower or firepower been
concentrated on a single battlefield. By nightfall the leading German
assault teams had penetrated to a depth of 10 kilometres. At Amiens it
seemed that the Kaiser’s army might split the Western Front in two.
“On 23 March the Emperor declared a day of national celebration

and marked the occasion by unleashing the first barrage from the
gargantuan Big Bertha guns against Paris. His Imperial Majesty was in
a buoyant mood, announcing to his entourage that ‘when an English
parliamentarian comes pleading for peace, he will first have to bow
down before the Imperial standard, because what was at stake was a
victory of monarchy over democracy’…” 278

276 Colvin, “The Final Months of Conflict”, Trinity College Newsletter, Spring, 2018, p. 16.
277 Colvin, op. cit., p. 16.
278 Tooze, The Deluge, p. 140.
159
It was truly a critical moment. But, not for the first or last time, the
Germans were over-confident. As Tony Colvin writes, the cost of the
forty-day Kaiserschlacht was dreadful, “with a ‘butcher’s bill of 9,704
British Commonwealth officers and 236,300 other ranks. Wounded or
killed in just forty days, compared with 244,897 casualties over the 105
days of the Passchendaele offensive. Nineteen British divisions were
weakened, six more severely weakened, ten completely exhausted and
five broken up. Lloyd George then sent 544,000 reinforcements to
France from Britain, two divisions from Italy and two from Palestine.
The French lost over 90,000 men. German casualties were comparable
to the Allied total, and they never fully recovered…” 279
The British lines buckled and bent, but did not break – a latter-day
Waterloo with no less important consequences for world history.
Having withstood the worst that the Germans could throw at them,
the Allies surged onto the offensive in July, piercing the Hindenburg
line and sending the Germans reeling. August 8 was “the black day of
the German Army”, according to Hindenburg himself. In September
the Austrians, hurled back by the French, British and Serbian forces
invading from Salonica, sued for peace; while on September 29 the
Bulgarians surrendered, witnessing to the importance of the largely-
forgotten Balkan front. Austria, defeated by the Italians at Vittorio-
Veneto, secured an armistice on November 3 (Hungary secured one on
November 13). By October the German Army, though still fighting on
foreign soil, was a spent force, its morale broken. Many deserted…
Having sent the Kaiser off to exile in the Netherlands, where he

lived for several more years the comfortable life of an English
gentleman, the liberal government of Count Max von Baden signed an
armistice agreement with the Entente, which came into effect at the
11 th hour on the 11 th day of the 11 th month…
Although the battles of 1918 had been close, and the losses on both sides
enormous, in the end the result was clear and decisive. In Germany, as in Russia,
it had been the propaganda of liberalism, symbolised above all by Wilson’s 14
Points, that had undermined the nation’s will to continue fighting for their king.
It would be a different matter in 1945...
Thus Hew Strachan writes: “Max von Baden may have been both an
aristocrat and the Kaiser’s choice as chancellor, but he was also a liberal. He had
formed a government that represented the Reichstag majority and on 5 October
had declared his acceptance of its programme. The allies, however, did not
recognise this shift towards parliamentary government. Wilson’s responses to

279 Colvin, op. cit., p. 16.
160
the German request for an armistice, and in particular his noted of 14 and 23
October, increasingly emphasised that they would only deal with a democratic
Germany. They revealed, too, that Germany’s ploy of trying to separate a
conciliatory Wilson from his vengeful European partners was not working. It
was evident that he and they were united in seeing the armistice not as a pause
in the fighting in order to thrash out peace terms but as a means to bring the
war to a definite end. The German army would be emasculated both as a
fighting force and as a factor in domestic politics. Ludendorff’s resolve returned.
He said that Wilson’s note of 23 October should be rejected and the war
resumed. But the prospect of the armistic had opened ‘enchanting celestial
pictures’ which neither army nor people would agree to again abandoning. At
the front, ‘There was no going back psychologically,’ a Catholic chaplain
recalled. ‘No power in the world could have induced the average soldier at the
front to take part in fighting that was to last still longer.’ At home there was
resignation, not resistance. ‘They are acting almost like criminals who have
broken into a neighbour’s house, with no thought of defending themselves
when caught red-handed… The only fear they have is that peace might slip
away at the last minute.’
“On the western front fighting continued with no mitigation in its ferocity. Its
mobility once again put civilians and their property more at risk than they had
been when the front was static. Germans looted and pillaged as they retreated.
At sea U-boats still torpedoed neutral shipping, and at the end of October the
navy planned to take the fleet to sea to fight one last climactic battle. Word of
the proposed ‘death ride’ got out. By 3 and 4 November disturbances gripped
the fleet in Kiel, with the sailors’ demands focusing not on professional
grievances but on issues like constitutional reform, peace, and the removal of
the royal family. The mutiny spread to Wilhelmshaven, and then merged with
spontaneous workers’ risings elsewhere. On 9 November a general strike broke
out in Berlin. The Reichstag was in danger of forfeiting its authority to the
sailors’, workers’ and – increasingly – soldiers’ councils that were being set up;
the majority Socialists were fearful of losing control of the workers to the
Independent Socialists; and the Spartacists wanted to ensure that the councils
prepared for the next stage of the revolution that had now begun and which
would establish a Soviet system in Germany. The army held the balance, and
the Kaiser sought to use it to impose his authority in Berlin. At last it confronted
the choice between the nation and the monarchy, which had been implicit in
much of its behaviour throughout the war. But the man who had done most to
marginalise the Kaiser did not see his actions through to their logical conclusion.
Ludendorff had been forced to resign on 26 October. He had been replaced by
Groener. On 8 November the new first quartermaster-general received thirty-
nine reports on feeling in the army, only one of which said that the troops were
ready to fight for Wilhelm. ‘The army,’ Groener told its supreme commander,
‘will march home in peace and order under its leaders and commanding
generals, but not under the command of Your Majesty; for it no longer stands
behind Your Majesty.’”280

280 Strachan, op. cit., pp. 318-320.
161
*
Turning now to the Balkan front, we may recall that the war had begun in the
East with the Austrians attacking the Serbs and being defeated by them at the
battle of Cer. Eventually, sheer force of numbers enabled the Austrians to
conquer Belgrade. But in November, 1914 the Serbs drove the Austrians back –
an extraordinary feat of arms.
A lull in the fighting, now set in as typhus swept through the armies. The
Austrians sued for a separate peace. But in August, 1915 the Serb parliament in
Niš voted to continue the war of liberation; the Austrian overtures were
rejected…
In October, the Austrians advanced again, but now stiffened by German

troops under General Mackensen and supported by the Bulgarians from the
East. The Serbs were forced to retreat through Kosovo, and then over the
Albanian and Montenegrin mountains to Durazzo on the Adriatic. Alexander
led the terrible and heroic retreat, known as “the Serbian Golgotha”. But when
he arrived at Durazzo, the promised Allied help in the form of Italian supplies
and transports were not to be seen…
Alexander “trusted Nicholas II and knew him to be a friend. So from his sick
bed he dictated a letter to the Tsar: ‘In hope and faith that on the Adriatic shore
we should receive succour promised by our Allies, and the means to reorganize,
I have led my armies over the Albanian and Montenegrin hills. In these most
grievous circumstances I appeal to Your Imperial Majesty, on whom I have ever
relied, as a last hope and I beseech Your high intervention on our behalf to save
us from sure destruction and to enable us to recoup our strength and offer yet
further resistance to the common enemy. To that end it will be necessary for the
Allied fleet to transport the army to some more secure place, preferably Salonika.
The famished and exhausted troops are in no condition to march to Valona as
designated by the Allied higher command. I hope that this my appeal may find
response from Your Imperial Majesty, whose fatherly love for the Serbian
people has been constant and that You will intervene with the Allies to save the
Serbian Army from a catastrophe which it has not deserved, a catastrophe
otherwise inevitable.’
“No one stirred to save the Serbian Army till the Tsar got busy. The
governments of the West paid little attention to the Serbian exploit, which only
became famous after the war was over. It needed a sharp note from Sazonov to
spur the Allies to activity.
“Tsar Nicholas replied: ‘With feelings of anguish I have followed the retreat
of the brave Serb troops across Albania and Montenegro. I would like to express
to Your Royal Highness my sincere astonishment at the skill with which under
Your leadership, and in face of such hardships and being greatly outnumbered
by the enemy, attacks have been repelled everywhere and the army withdrawn.
162
In compliance with my instructions my Foreign Minister has already appealed
repeatedly to the Allied Powers to take steps to insure safe transport from the
Adriatic. Our demands have now been repeated and I have hope that the
glorious troops of Your Highness will be given the possibility to leave Albania. I
firmly believe that Your army will soon recover and be able once more to take
part in the struggle against the common enemy. Victory and the resurrection of
great Serbia will be consolation to You and our brother Serbs for all they have
gone through.’”281
The Serbian retreat of 1915, heroic though it was, contained a message that
few Serbs were ready to receive at that time. In 1912 Serbian troops had
conquered Kosovo, and Montenegrin troops – Northern Albania, after inflicting
terrible atrocities on the Albanians. Now, three years later, they were retreating
across the same territory – and the Albanians inflicted revenge. Was there not an
element of Divine justice accompanying this all-too-human vengeance? For
while not formally responsible for the assassination at Sarajevo in 1914, or of the
retreat through Kosovo in 1915, in a deeper sense the Serbs had been
responsible – not solely, but definitely in part – for the terrible cycle of
vengeance that took over the whole region in these years, beginning with the
struggle for Macedonia and continuing with the Balkan Wars and the First
World War. Since the mid-nineteenth century the Serbs had elevated the land
and the battle of Kosovo to a mythic status that hardly accorded with Orthodox
teaching. The true significance of the original Battle of Kosovo lay in Tsar
Lazar’s choice of a Heavenly Kingdom in preference to an earthly kingdom,
heavenly rewards (salvation, Paradise, God’s glory) over earthly ones (lands,
power, vainglory). From the mid-nineteenth century the more nationalist among
the Serbs completely turned round this message to read: the conquest of the
earthly land of Kosovo (and other formerly Serbian lands) is worth any sacrifice
and justifies almost any crime. Thus “Apis”, besides taking part in the regicide
of 1903, confessed to participation in plots to murder King Nicholas of
Montenegro, King Constantine of Greece, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany and King
Ferdinand of Bulgaria!282
That such a murderous fanatic should be in charge of Serbia’s military

intelligence tells us much about the influence within Serbia of the nationalist-
revolutionary madness. “In fact,” as Stevenson writes, “Serbia’s army and
intelligence service were out of control…”283 And it was greatly to the credit of
Prince Alexander that he tried to bring these forces back under control. In 1917,
in Salonika, Apis and two others were tried and executed, and two hundred of
his leading followers imprisoned.
But 1917, tragically, was also the year of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas and
the Russian revolution. Now the Orthodox Emperor, according to the teaching
of the Orthodox Church, is to be identified with the figure whom St. Paul calls

281 Graham, op. cit., pp. 98-99.
282 Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006, p. 369.
283 David Stevenson, 1914-1918: The History of the First World War, London: Penguin,
2005, p. 12.
163
“him who restrains” the coming of the Antichrist (II Thessalonians 2.7). Without
the support of “him who restrains”, Alexander faced an uphill task in
restraining the power of the revolution in his own land… Nevertheless, now
“Alexander began to think of the disintegration of the Austrian Empire and the
liberation of the Croats and Slovenes…”284
The famous Serbian Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich pointed out that it was the
Russians, not the Serbs, who, by sacrificing themselves for the Serbs, “have
repeated the Kosovo tragedy in our time. If the Russian Tsar Nicholas II had
been striving for an earthly kingdom, a kingdom of petty personal calculations
and egoism, he would be sitting to this day on his throne in Petrograd. But he
chose the Heavenly Kingdom, the Kingdom of sacrifice in the name of the Lord,
the Kingdom of Gospel spirituality, for which he laid down his own head, for
which his children and millions of his subjects laid down their heads…”285
In the spring of 1916 Prince Alexander and his 160,000 troops were gradually
recovering on the Greek island of Corfu. He then decided to travel to Rome,
Paris and London in order to convince the Allies to re-equip his army and
transport them to Salonika to open up a new front. With difficulty, he succeeded
in convincing them, and in the summer the Serbian army, together with French,
British, Russian and Italian contingents, reassembled in Salonika in “the Army
of the East”. In September the Serbs advanced against the Bulgarians, and by
November were in Monastir (Bitola). They dug in for the winter. The next year
America entered the war, and thousands of Serb, Croat and Slovene immigrants
joined the Army of the East. In June, Alexander signed a Corfu Declaration to
the effect that he was fighting for a free Yugoslav state combining the three
peoples, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, in one.286 In September, 1918 the great
offensive began, and on October 29 Alexander entered in triumph into a ruined
Belgrade, before taking possession of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dalmatia,
Croatia, Slovenia and Voivodina…287
At the same time as the revolution in Russia, Greece was undergoing its own
revolution, both political and ecclesiastical. Though less bloody, its results were
hardly less disastrous for the Greek people. For in the space of a few years they
lost their monarchy, their army and a vast part of their ancestral lands in Asia
Minor. Worst of all, as in Russia, a large part of the Church apostasized to the
papal calendar. The revolution began, as in Russia, with a military coup
engineered by the Cretan Freemason Eleutherios Venizelos, who as Prime

284 Stephen Graham, Alexander of Yugoslavia, Yale University Press, 1939, Hamden,
Conn.: Archon Book, 1972, p. 95.

285 Victor Salni and Svetlana Avlasovich, “Net bol’she toj liubvi, kak esli kto
polozhit dushu svoiu za drugi svoia” (There is no greater love than that a man
should lay down his life for his friend),
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=print_page*pid=966.
286 The Corfu Declaration quite explicitly saw itself as “the first step toward
building the new state of Yugoslavia”.

(http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/greaterserbia_corfudeclaration.htm).
287 Graham, op. cit., pp. 102-103.
164
Minister fell out with King Constantine over the direction Greece should take in
the Great War.
“Greece had entered the Great War,” writes Misha Glenny, “flushed with its
successes in the Balkan Wars, which had been won at relatively little cost to
itself. The country was united and optimistic. Yet just over two years after the
outbreak of the war, the country had been torn down the middle both
geographically and politically. In the north, Venizelos had established the so-
called Government of National Defence with its capital in Salonika and under
the patronage of the Entente’s Army of the Orient. Venizelos had fled there to
join rebel army commanders when it became clear that Athens could not
accommodate two men intent on running the country’s foreign affairs –
especially since the Prime Minister wanted at all costs to join the Entente and his
chief rival, King Constantine (1913-17, 1920-2), did not…
“In Athens, the Germanophile monarch had built up considerable public

support for his policy of neutrality. But his most important power base was the
officer corps of the army. Constantine’s resistance to the Entente’s perpetual
interference in Greece’s affairs, notably to the Allies’ attempt to seize control of
the country’s postal and transport systems during the war, won him support.
There is only circumstantial evidence that Constantine ever considered actually
joining the Central Powers. He may have been influenced to a degree by his
wife, Sophie, Kaiser Wilhelm’s sister, but the Greek King was no fool. He could
see perfectly well that the Entente controlled the Mediterranean and had 300,000
troops in Salonika backing Venizelos’s insurrection (although the same troops
also prevented the hotter heads in the Venizelist military leadership from
attacking the areas loyal to the King). To declare for the Central Powers would
have provoked a massive assault from the Entente and plunged the country into
a violent civil conflict.
“Yet the French diplomatic mission in Athens bombarded the Quai d’Orsay
and the Prime Minister, Aristide Briand, with fanciful reports of conspiracies
directed by German agents in Athens. The French government trusted neither
Constantine nor Venizelos. Throughout 1916, a powerful lobby comprising
General Sarrail and the senior Embassy officials in Athens urged on Paris the
policy of establishing a protectorate over Greece, humiliating Constantine with
ultimatums whose conditions he could not possibly fulfil without provoking his
own army. This diplomatic pressure culminated in the event of 1 December,
1916, when French and British troops under the command of the French
Admiral Dartige du Fournet landed at Piraeus and marched on Athens. The
army resisted the Allied assault. Dartige had assumed that his display of
superior force would be a stroll. He was wrong. Within hours of entering
Athens, fifty-seven French and five British soldiers had been killed and many
more were wounded. The Allies beat a hasty retreat. The monarchist soldiers
were enraged at this violation of Greek sovereignty. [However, in the spring of
1917] the French finally succeeded in forcing Constantine’s abdication and exile.
165
Venizelos returned to Athens in triumph to govern the reunited country. He
began by purging the armed forces and civil service of known monarchists…”288
The Greeks were now firmly on the side of the Allies, and were able to take
part in the victorious campaign against Bulgaria and the Central Powers in the
autumn of 1918. And so Venizelos could take a seat at Versailles…
Bulgaria was the only power to join the Germans voluntarily, and suffered
accordingly. In 1915 she had betrayed her benefactor, Russia, in spite of an
anguished plea from the Tsar. In 1918 she lost territory to Serbia and Romania.
It was Romania that benefited most from the war, in spite of the fact that she
joined the Allied cause late (during the Brusilov offensive of 1916), was fairly
comprehensively defeated by Germany, and only rejoined the Allied side on
November 10, 1918, one day before the armistice. “On the basis of this action,”
writes Barbara Jelavich, “the Romanian representatives claimed the territories
promised in the agreement of 1916 with the Allies, despite the fact that the
government had subsequently made a separate peace with Germany. The
Romanian army was in occupation of most of the lands in question, including
Bessarabia. In April 1919 the Romanian forces penetrated into Hungarian
territory and launched a drive against the Communist regime of Bela Kun. They
were soon in occupation of Budapest.
“In the final agreement, the Treaty of Trianon of June 1920, Romania received
Transylvania, Bessarabia, Crişana, and Bukovina. The Banat was divided, with
part going to Romania and part to the new Yugoslav state. The drawing of the
frontier with Hungary caused a major conflict at the peace conference. Brătianu
wished the boundary to be at the Tisza River, which would have meant the
annexation of solidly Hungarian territory. Although the maximum Romanian
demands were not met, the treaty did incorporate 1.7 million Hungarians into
Romania. The war thus gave the Romanian nationalists just about everything
they could desire – Transylvania, Bessarabia, Bukovina, and a part of the Banat.
The disadvantage of this settlement was that minorities now comprised 28
percent of the total Romanian population, a condition that was to complicate
domestic politics in the future…”289
In the end, as Brendan Simms and Timothy Less writes, “Austria-Hungary

could not contain the burgeoning desire for self-determination among its
myriad people within a centralized monarchical framework. Efforts initially
focused on a revised federal structure giving more power to the various
nationalities. But the more power the centre conceded, the more power its
people demanded. Eventually, the empire endured a flight into war in 1914 as
the leadership tried to stamp out the south Slav problem once and for all. Amid

Glenny, The Balkans, 1804-1999, London; Granta Books, 2000, pp. 349-351.
288
Jelavich, History of the Balkans, Cambridge University Press, 1983, vol. 2, pp.
289
122-124.
166
the carnage, the Czechs in particular pressed for complete independence, and
others did the same. At war’s end, the Allied powers granted their wish.”
In the words of Count Ottakar Czernin, Austria-Hungary’s foreign minister

for most of the First World War: ‘We were bound to die. We were at liberty to
choose the manner of our death and we chose the most terrible…’”290
The First World War thus ended with the destruction of the two heterodox
empires – Ottoman Turkey and Austria-Hungary – that had dominated the non-
Russian Orthodox peoples for so long, while those peoples had now expanded
their borders very considerably. The question was: would these newly-enlarged
states treat their minorities any better than the old heterodox empires had done?
And the other, still more important question was: would the spiritual life of the
Orthodox be enhanced by their new conquests? The answer to both these
questions, as the next generation quickly demonstrated, was: no. Instead, by
1945 a new, far more terrible multinational empire, that of International
Communism, would have enveloped the whole of Eastern Europe with the
exception of Greece…
In general the similarity between the fall of the Russian and German empires
was striking: the disappointment caused by an unsuccessful war; the food
shortages; the leftist political demands; the power wielded by the workers’
councils; the dissatisfaction with the Royal Family; the refusal of the army
generals to fight for the king… There was justice in this similarity of fates:
Germany had destroyed Russia by exporting to her the virus borne by Lenin
and Trotsky, and Germany now fell to the same virus borne this time by the
Spartacists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. And although Germany
recovered temporarily, the similarity reappeared as Germany descended into
totalitarianism under Hitler, a mutant form of that original Bolshevik virus…

290 Brendan and Lees, “A Crisis Without End. The Disintegration of the European
Project”, New Statesman, 6-12 November, 2015, pp. 23, 27.
167
16. WHITE TSAR AND RED TERROR
It was one thing for the Bolsheviks to have won power: it was quite another
thing to keep it. Everybody was against them, even the other socialist parties,
who felt – rightly – that they had been tricked into surrendering power to them
at the Congress of Soviets in October. Bolshevism was at its weakest in 1918, not
only militarily (the Latvian riflemen were its only real fighting force), but also
politically, as fury over its dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the
shameful surrender at Brest-Litovsk alienated its closest allies, the Left SRs. If
the formidable military and economic power that was Germany could be
defeated, why not the Bolsheviks? Surely, it would require only a small push
from the West, and the whole unstable edifice would come tumbling down?
But it did not; and in the West’s failure to overthrow Bolshevism at its
weakest point we can see the weakest point of Western Democracy in general. If
the abdication of the Tsar gladdened the hearts of the liberals, they must have
been appalled at the Bolsheviks’ dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. For all
those with eyes to see, it must have been evident that the Bolsheviks were not
only no democrats and no better than the German militarists, but probably
much worse. And yet the liberals remained blindly, irrevocably devoted to the
monster they had spawned and which trampled on all their liberal ideals.
The most naïve and blind in 1918, as in 1945, were the Americans. It was one
of Wilson’s most radical advisors, William Bullitt, who dissuaded him from a
decisive intervention against the Bolsheviks. “’In Russia today,’ Bullitt insisted,
‘there are the rudiments of a government of the people, by the people, and for
the people.’ The real threat to democracy lay not in Lenin’s Sovnarkom (Council
of People’s Commissars), but in the forces of reactionary imperialism that were
alive within the Entente as much as in the Central Powers. ‘Are we going to
make the world safe for this Russian democracy,’ Bullitt demanded, ‘by
allowing the allies to place [the Japanese] Terauchi in Irkutsk, while Ludendorff
establishes himself in Petrograd?’ On 4 March 1918, Bullitt’s arguments
prevailed. The President swung firmly against any Allied intervention, on the
advice of Bullitt and Colonel House he renewed the attempt to enlist the
Russian revolution in a democratic alliance against reactionary Germany.
Wilson appealed directly to the Congress of Soviets, which was meeting on 12
March to hear Lenin’s arguments for ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty.
Under even more incongruous circumstances than in January, Wilson restated
the message of the 14 Points. Ignoring the fact that the Congress of Soviets was
standing in for the repressed Constituent Assembly, Wilson expressed ‘every
sympathy’ for Russia’s effort to ‘weld herself into a democracy’. He demanded
that she be left free of ‘any sinister or selfish influence, which might interfere
with such development’.”291
The Japanese took the hint, and in April countermanded the order to land
troops in Vladivostok. The Congress of Soviets, however, rejected Wilson’s

291 Tooze, op. cit., p. 145.
168
overtures. For Lenin had decided that the only chance of survival for the
Bolshevik regime lay in an alliance with – or rather, in humiliating subjection to
– the German militarists.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany deprived Russia of about a quarter

of her territory, a third of her population and a half of her industry. It was
immediately denounced by Patriarch Tikhon, but justified by Lenin on the
grounds that now Soviet Russia could recuperate while Germany and the
Western Powers fought each other. The Tsar had promised that he would never
sign a unilateral truce with Germany – and kept his promise. Lenin promised to
take Russia out of the war – and did so on the worst possible terms. His aim was
to turn the international war into a civil war fought, not against Germans (of
whom Lenin was, after all, a paid agent292), but against Russians. That war had
already begun in the south of the country, where the White armies, having
survived a difficult first winter, were gathering their strength.
Even after the signing of the Treaty, the military situation continued to
deteriorate from the Bolshevik’s point of view. In the south, the Germans,
furious at the Ukrainian Rada’s refusal to cultivate all its land so as to feed
starving Germans and Austrians, had overthrown it and installed in its place a
former tsarist cavalry officer, Skoropadsky. Thus “only six weeks after the
ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, under the pressure of economic necessity
the German military had unilaterally abandoned any residual claim to be acting
as the protector of the legitimate cause of self-determination. Skoropadskyi
spoke virtually no Ukrainian and filled his cabinet with conservative Russian
nationalists. The real power-holders in Germany seemed to have lost interest in
the project of creating a viable Ukrainian nation state. Instead, they appeared to
be readying Kiev as the launching pad for a conservative conquest of all of
Russia…”293
This was indeed a great threat to the Bolsheviks, and if God had been willing
and the German armies had not begun to falter at precisely that moment on the
western front, then a German-sponsored restoration of Tsarism in Russia (let us
remember that both the Tsars, Nicholas and Michael, were still alive) was a
distinct possibility then, less than a year after the October revolution.
“If these threats were not menacing enough, by May Lenin’s regime faced an
even more direct threat from the north. Along with the other Baltic states,
Finland had declared independence from Russia in December, 1917. In line with
Lenin’s nationalities policy, Petrograd had given its blessing. But at the same
time it directed local Bolsheviks with strong trade union support to seize control
of Helsinki. By the last week of January, Finland was plunged into civil war. In

292 Even after smuggling Lenin and his men into Russia in the sealed train, the
Germans continued to pay him vast sums of money. Thus a “top secret” document
of the Reichsbank in Berlin dated January 8, 1918 informed the Foreign Affairs
Commissar that 50 million rubles were to be sent to the Sovnarkom (Istoki Zla, op.
cit., p. 39).
293 Tooze, op. cit., p. 150.
169
early March 1918 as German troops marched into Ukraine, the Kaiser and
Ludendorff settled on a plan for a joint German-Finnish force that would first
wipe out the Finnish Bolsheviks before continuing the march south towards
Petrograd. Icy weather delayed the arrival of General von der Goltz’s German
expeditionary force until early April. But when they joined up with the Finnish
White Guards of General Mannerheim they made up for lost time. By 14 April,
after heavy fighting, they had cleared Helsinki of Red Guards. As a token of
German appreciation, von der Goltz distributed food aid to the cheering
burghers of the city. The civil war ended on 15 May, but the killing did not.
Following a reprisal shooting of White prisoners of war by Red Guards, the
Finnish-German combat group unleashed a ‘White terror’ that by early May had
claimed the lives of more than 8,000 leftists. At least 11,000 more would die of
famine and disease in prison camps. In the spring of 1918 Finland became the
stage for the first of a series of savage counter-revolutionary campaigns that
were to open a new chapter in twentieth-century political violence.
“In the first week of May 1918, with the terror in full swing, Mannerheim and
his German auxiliaries pushed menacingly towards the Russian fortress of Ino
guarding the northern gateway to Petrograd. To the Soviets it seemed as though
the Kaiser and his entourage had thought better of the compromise they had
settled for at Brest. Why after all should Germany allow itself to be constrained
by a mere treaty, one furthermore that the Soviets themselves had dismissed as
nothing more than a scrap of paper? If Lenin’s strategy of balancing between the
imperialist powers was to work, he would have to go beyond merely ratifying
Brest. After signing the treaty he had tacked away from the Germans,
encouraging Trotsky to cultivate close contacts with emissaries of the Entente
and the United States in Petrograd and Moscow. Now in early May he
embarked on a second desperate gamble. If the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was no
longer enough to satisfy German imperialism, Lenin would put more flesh on
the bare bones of the peace.”294
Lenin proposed large-scale economic concessions in order to buy off the

Germans. And the militarists and big businessmen were interested. But the
liberals in the Reichstag were not. “On 18 May after an urgent intercession by
Chancellor Hertling, Ludendorff agreed to halt the Finno-German march on
Petrograd. As in Japan, civilian political control asserted itself as a basic safety
catch against the more radical fantasies of the German imperialists…”295
Lenin, like another Houdini, had escaped the net…
The Bolsheviks had been very fortunate. At one time the Party had
once been so thoroughly penetrated by Tsarist agents as to make its

294 Tooze, op. cit., pp. 150-151.
295 Tooze, op. cit., p. 155.
170
success extraordinarily improbable. 296 Again, Kornilov’s attempted
coup, and Kerensky’s reaction to it, had played into their hands at a
critical time.
That the Bolsheviks hung on to power in their first year was probably owing
to three factors. First, they decided very quickly not to nationalize the land that
the peasants had seized from the landowners, thus neutralizing the appeal of
their main political opponents, the Social Revolutionaries. Secondly, on
December 20, 1917 the Cheka, with Felix Dzerzhinsky at its head, was founded
in order to defend “the fruits of October” by all means possible, including the
most extreme cruelties. And thirdly, in spite of strong opposition within the
Party and throughout the country, Lenin moved, as we have seen, to neutralize
the external threat coming from the Germans.
The critical question as far as the Civil War was concerned was: were the
Whites going to fight under the banner of Orthodoxy and Tsarism or not?
Tsarism meant, not Tsar Nicholas necessarily, who had abdicated, but the
monarchical principle. However, the physical presence of Tsar Nicholas,
whether as the actual ruler or as the senior representative of the old dynasty,
was important. As long as the Tsar was alive, the possibility of a just and
successful war against Bolshevism under the banner of Orthodoxy and Tsarism
still existed. That is why the attempts to rescue the Tsar from captivity were not
romantic side-shows, but critically important.
And that is why the Bolsheviks proceeded to kill the Tsar… For, as Trotsky
wrote: “In essence this decision was inevitable. The execution of the tsar and his
family was necessary, not simply to scare, horrify and deprive the enemy of
hope, but also to shake up our own ranks, show them that there was no going
back…” 297
And so, on the night of July 17, 1918 Blessed Maria Ivanovna, the fool-for-
Christ of Diveyevo, began to shout and scream: “The Tsar’s been killed with
bayonets! Cursed Jews!” That night the tsar and his family and servants were
shot in Yekaterinburg.298

296 Alan Bullock writes: “One of the most celebrated Okhrana agents, Roman
Malinovski, became Lenin’s trusted chief agent in Russia and led the Bolshevik
deputies in the Fourth Duma. In 1908-10, four out of five members of the
Bolsheviks’ St. Petersburg Committee were Okhrana agents. Persistent rumours
that Stalin was one as well have never been confirmed…” (Hitler and Stalin: Parallel
Lives, London: HarperCollins, 1991, p. 435, note)
297 Trotsky, in Edvard Radzinsky, The Last Tsar, London: Arrow Books, 1993, p. 297.
298 It has been claimed that the murders were Cabbalistic and ritualistic. Strange
cabbalistic symbols were supposedly found on the walls of the room where the
crime took place which have been deciphered to mean: "Here, by order of the
secret powers, the Tsar was offered as a sacrifice for the destruction of the state.
Let all peoples be informed of this." See Nikolai Kozlov, Krestnij Put' (The Way of
the Cross), Moscow, 1993; Enel, "Zhertva" (Sacrifice), Kolokol' (Bell), Moscow, 1990,
N 5, pp. 17-37, and Michael Orlov, "Ekaterinburgskaia Golgofa" (The Golgotha of
Yekaterinburg), Kolokol' (Bell), 1990, N 5, pp. 37-55; Lebedev, op. cit., p. 519;
Prince Felix Yusupov, Memuary (Memoirs), Moscow, 1998, p. 249. However, doubt
171
The Royal Family had given a wonderful example of truly Christian love in
their lives. And in their deaths they showed exemplary patience and love for
their enemies. Thus Martyr-Great-Princess Olga Nikolayevna wrote from
Tobolsk: "Father asks the following message to be given to all those who have
remained faithful to him, and to those on whom they may have an influence,
that they should not take revenge for him, since he has forgiven everyone and
prays for everyone, that they should not take revenge for themselves, and
should remember that the evil which is now in the world will be still stronger,
but that it is not love that will conquer evil, but only love..."
And in the belongings of the same holy martyr were found these verses by S.
Bekhteyev:
Now as we stand before the gates of death,

Breathe in the lips of us Thy servants
That more than human, supernatural strength
To meekly pray for those that hurt us.
The next day, at Alapayevsk, Great Princess Elizabeth was killed together
with her faithful companion, the Nun Barbara, and several Great Princes. Tsar
Michael had already been shot in June with his English secretary…
The murder of the Tsar and his family was not the responsibility of the
Bolsheviks only, but of all those who, directly or indirectly, connived at it. As St.
John Maximovich explained: “The sin against him and against Russia was
perpetrated by all who in one way or another acted against him, who did not
oppose, or who merely by sympathizing participated in those events which took
place forty years ago. That sin lies upon everyone until it is washed away by
sincere repentance…”299

is cast on the ritual murder hypothesis by the fact that when Sokolov’s archive was
sold at Sotheby’s in 1990, the critical piece of evidence – the symbols on the wall-
paper – were missing (Bishop Ambrose of Methone, personal communication, June
4, 2010). Other problems with the ritual murder hypothesis are discussed in Dmitri
Lyskov, “U Versii o Ritual’nom ubijstve tsarskoj sem’i est’ serieznie problem”
Vzgliad, December 8, 2017.
299 St. John, “Homily before a Memorial Service for the Tsar-Martyr”, in Man of God:
Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco, Richfield Springs, N.Y, 1994, p. 133.
Archbishop Averky of Syracuse continues the theme: “It is small consolation for us
that the Royal Family was killed directly by non-Russian hands, non-Orthodox
hands and non-Russian people. Although that is so, the whole Russian people is
guilty of this terrible, unprecedented evil deed, insofar as it did not resist or stand
against it, but behaved itself in such a way that the evil deed appeared as the
natural expression of that mood which by that time had matured in the minds and
hearts of the undoubted majority of the unfortunate misguided Russian people,
beginning with the ‘lowers’ and ending with the very ‘tops’, the upper
aristocracy” (“Religiozno-misticheskij smysl ubienia Tsarkoj Sem’i” (The
Religious-Mystical Meaning of the Killing of the Royal Family),
http://www.ispovednik.org/fullest.php?nid=59&binn_rubrik_pl_news=132.
172
On hearing of the Tsar’s murder, Patriarch Tikhon immediately condemned
it. He had already angered the government by sending the Tsar his blessing in
prison; and he now celebrated a pannikhida for him, blessing the archpastors
and pastors to do the same. Then, on July 21, he announced in the Kazan
cathedral: “We, in obedience to the teaching of the Word of God, must condemn
this deed, otherwise the blood of the shot man will fall also on us, and not only
on those who committed the crime…”300
However, the people as a whole did not condemn the evil deed. The result
was a significant increase in their suffering… For “he who restrains” the coming
of the Antichrist, the Orthodox Autocracy, had been removed, and now, with all
restraint removed, the world entered the era of the collective Antichrist...
After the murder of the White Tsar there began the Red Terror; not only mass
killings for simply belonging to the wrong class, but the taking of hostages to
guarantee “good behaviour”. It was proclaimed officially on September 5301, the
same day on which the Great Terror of the French revolution had begun. The
Bolsheviks always liked to emphasize their spiritual descent from the Jacobins…
The excuse given was the attempted murder of Lenin by the SR Jewess Fanya
(Dora) Kaplan, who said: “I shot Lenin because I believe him to be a traitor [to
socialism]”. However, Dzerzhinsky, head of the Cheka, declared that the real
organizers of the plot had been the Bolsheviks’ enemies in the just-beginning
Civil War, the English and the French…
Of course, the Bolsheviks had been terrorizing the population of Russia from
the beginning. And only three weeks before Lenin was shot he had written to
the Bolsheviks in Penza urging them “to organize public executions to make the
people ‘tremble’ ‘for hundreds of kilometres around’. While still recovering
from his wounds, he instructed, ‘It is necessary secretly – and urgently –to
prepare the terror… ’”302 Now the terror assumed was on a vastly greater scale
than anything seen before…
As the intelligence experts Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin write,

“it is clear that the Cheka enormously outstripped the [pre-revolutionary]
Okhrana in both the scale and the ferocity of its onslaught on political
opposition. In 1901 4,113 Russians were in internal exile for political crimes, of
whom only 180 were on hard labour. Executions for political crimes were
limited to those involved in actual or attempted assassinations. During the civil
war, by contrast, Cheka executions probably numbered as many as 250,000…

300 Gubonin, op. cit., p. 143.
301 http://bessmertnybarak.ru/article/postanovlenie_o_krasnom_terrore/.
302 Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the
West, London: Allen Lane 1999, p. 34.
173
“Even at a time when the Soviet regime was fighting for its survival during
the civil war, many of its own supporters were sickened by the scale of the
Cheka’s brutality. A number of Cheka interrogators, some only in their teens,
employed tortures of scarcely believable barbarity. In Kharkov the skin was
peeled off victims’ hands to produce ‘gloves’ of human skin; in Voronezh naked
prisoners were rolled around in barrels studded with nails; in Poltava priests
were impaled; in Odessa captured White officers were tied to planks and fed
slowly into furnaces; in Kiev cages of rats were fixed to prisoners’ bodies and
heated until the rats gnawed their way into the victims’ intestines.”303
The Cheka in 1918 outnumbered the old Police departments by a factor of 20;
later they were 200 times larger, later still – 1000 times. KGB numbers reached
one million. Their informants numbered three to five million.304
We have seen that Leninism, far from being a scientifically based doctrine,
was much closer in essence to pagan demon-worship with its incessant demand
for more and more blood. The murder of the Tsar and his family was
particularly marked by its ritual character. As the number of victims mounted,
the Church, slow hitherto in exposing the full horror of the persecution, began
to protest more loudly.
Thus on August 8, 1918, the Patriarch addressed the Russian Church as

follows: “Sin has fanned everywhere the flame of the passions, enmity and
wrath; brother has risen up against brother; the prisons are filled with captives;
the earth is soaked in innocent blood, shed by a brother’s hand; it is defiled by
violence, pillaging, fornication and every uncleanness. From this same
poisonous source of sin has issued the great deception of material earthly goods,
by which our people is enticed, forgetting the one thing necessary. We have not
rejected this temptation, as the Saviour Christ rejected it in the wilderness. We
have wanted to create a paradise on earth, but without God and His holy
commandments. God is not mocked. And so we hunger and thirst and are
naked upon the earth, blessed with an abundance of nature’s gifts, and the seal
of the curse has fallen on the very work of the people and on all the
undertakings of our hands. Sin, heavy and unrepented of, has summoned Satan
from the abyss, and he is now bellowing his slander against the Lord and
against His Christ, and is raising an open persecution against the Church.”305
In characterizing Socialism in similar terms to those used by Dostoyevsky’s

Grand Inquisitor, the Patriarch certainly gave a valid critique of Socialism as it
was and still is popularly understood – that is, as a striving for social justice on
earth, or, as the former Marxist Fr. Sergius Bulgakov put it in 1917, “the thought
that first of all and at any price hunger must be conquered and the chains of
poverty broken… Socialism does not signify a radical reform of life, it is charity,

303 Andrew and Mitrokhin, op. cit., pp. 37, 38.
304 Sergei Fedulov, "А razve v tsarskoj Rossii ne bylo analoga KGB?” (Was there
really no analogue to the KGB in Tsarist Russia?)
305 Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj Tserkvi, 1917-1945 (The Tragedy of the Russian
Church, 1917-1945), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, p. 52; Gubonin, op. cit., p. 146.
174
one of its forms as indicated by contemporary life – and nothing more. The
triumph of socialism would not introduce anything essentially new into life.”306
From this point of view, Socialism is essentially a well-intentioned movement
that has gone wrong because it fails to take into account God, the
commandments of God and the fallenness of human nature. The guilt of the
Socialists consists in the fact that, rather than seeking paradise in heaven and
with God through the fulfilment of His commandments, they “have wanted to
create a paradise on earth, but without God and His holy commandments”.
The result has been hell in this life and (to quote from the anathema of 1918)
“the fire of Gehenna in the life to come”…
However, as Igor Shafarevich has demonstrated, Socialism in its more radical

form – that is, Revolutionary Socialism (Bolshevism, Leninism) as opposed to
Welfare Socialism - is very little concerned with justice and not at all with
charity. Its real motivation is simply satanic hatred, hatred of the whole of the
old world and all those in it, and the desire to destroy it to its very foundations.
Its supposed striving for social justice is only a cover, a fig-leaf, a propaganda
tool for the attainment of this purely destructive aim, which can be analyzed
into four objects: the destruction of: (i) hierarchy, (ii) private property, (iii) the
family, and (iv) religion.307
1. Hierarchy. Hierarchy had already largely been destroyed by the time the
Bolsheviks came to power: from that time the only hierarchy was the
Communist Party and all others were equally miserable in relation to it. All
foreign hierarchies were also targeted. For, as the Third Communist
International (the Comintern), founded in Moscow in March, 1919, declared: its
goal was “the fighting, by every means, even by force of arms, for the overthrow
of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet
republic”.
2. Private Property. Lenin proclaimed: “Loot the loot” (grab’ nagrablennoe),

and by the end of the Civil War most property had passed into the hands of the
new aristocracy, the Communist Party.
Lenin’s plans were aided by the peasants’ refusal to admit the right of any
but peasants to the land. Pipes writes: “The peasant was revolutionary in one
respect only: he did not acknowledge private ownership of land. Although on
the eve of the Revolution he owned nine-tenths of the country’s arable, he
craved for the remaining 10 percent held by landlords, merchants, and
noncommunal peasants. No economic or legal arguments could change his
mind: he felt he had a God-given right to that land and that someday it would
be his. And by his he meant the commune’s, which would allocate it justly to its
members. The prevalence of communal landholding in European Russia was,

306Bulgakov, Sotsializm i Khristianstvo (Socialism and Christianity), Moscow, 1917.
307Shafarevich, "Sotsializm", in Solzhenitsyn, A. (ed.) Iz-pod Glyb (From Under the
Rubble), Paris: YMCA Press, 1974; Sotsializm kak Iavlenie Mirovoj Istorii (Socialism
as a Phenomenon of World History), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, p. 265.
175
along with the legacy of serfdom, a fundamental fact of Russian social history. It
meant that along with a poorly developed sense for law, the peasant also had
little respect for private property. Both tendencies were exploited and
exacerbated by radical intellectuals for their own ends to incite the peasants
against the status quo.
“Russia’s industrial workers were potentially destabilizing not because they

assimilated revolutionary ideologies – very few of them did and even they were
excluded from leadership positions in the revolutionary parties. Rather, since
most of them were one or at most two generations removed from the village and
only superficially urbanized, they carried with them to the factory rural
attitudes only slightly adjusted to industrial conditions. They were not socialists
but syndicalists, believing that as their village relatives were entitled to all the
land, so they had a right to the factories…”308
3. The Family. In 1975 Archbishop Andrew (Rymarenko) of Rockland

explained to Alexander Solzhenitsyn: “I saw everything that happened before
the revolution and what prepared it. It was ungodliness in all forms, and chiefly
the violation of family life and the corruption of youth…”309
Oliver Figes writes: “The Bolsheviks envisaged the building of their

Communist utopia as a constant battle against custom and habit. With the end
of the Civil War they prepared for a new and longer struggle on the ‘internal
front’, a revolutionary war for the liberation of the communistic personality
through the eradication of individualistic (‘bourgeois’) behaviour and deviant
habits (prostitution, alcoholism, hooliganism and religion) inherited from the
old society. There was little dispute among the Bolsheviks that this battle to
transform human nature would take decades. There was only disagreement
about when the battle should begin. Marx had taught that the alteration of
consciousness was dependent on changes to the material base, and Lenin, when
he introduced the NEP, affirmed that until the material conditions of a
Communist society had been created – a process that would take an entire
historical epoch – there was no point trying to engineer a Communist system of
morality in private life. But most Bolsheviks did not accept that the NEP
required a retreat from the private sphere. On the contrary, as they were
increasingly inclined to think, active engagement was essential at every moment
and in every battlefield of everyday life – in the family, the home and the inner
world of the individual, where the persistence of old mentalities was a major
threat to the Party’s basic ideological goals. And as they watched the
individualistic instincts of the ‘petty-bourgeois’ masses become stronger in the
culture of the NEP, they redoubled their efforts. As Anatoly Lunacharsky wrote
in 1927: ‘The so-called sphere of private life cannot slip away from us, because it
is precisely here that the final goal of the Revolution is to be reached.’

Pipes, op. cit., p. 494.
308
Archbishop Andrew, “The Restoration of the Orthodox Way of Life”, The

309
Orthodox Word, July-August, 1975, p. 171.
176
“The family was the first arena in which the Bolsheviks engaged the struggle.
In the 1920s, they took it as an article of faith that the ‘bourgeois family’ was
socially harmful: it was inward-looking and conservative, a stronghold of
religion, superstition, ignorance and prejudice; it fostered egotism and material
acquisitiveness, and oppressed women and children. The Bolsheviks expected
that the family would disappear as Soviet Russia developed into a fully socialist
system, in which the state took responsibility for all the basic household
functions, providing nurseries, laundries and canteens in public centres and
apartment blocks. Liberated from labour in the home, women would be free to
enter the workforce on an equal footing with men. The patriarchal marriage,
with its attendant sexual morals, would die out – to be replaced, the radicals
believed, by ‘free unions of love’.
“As the Bolsheviks saw it, the family was the biggest obstacle to the
socialization of children. ‘By loving a child, the family turns him into an
egotistical being, encouraging him to see himself as the centre of the universe,’
wrote the Soviet educational thinker Zlata Lilina. Bolshevik theorists agreed on
the need to replace this ‘egotistic love’ with the ‘rational love’ of a broader
‘social family’. The ABC of Communism (1919) envisaged a future society in
which parents would no longer use the word ‘my’ to refer to their children, but
would care for all the children in their community. Among the Bolsheviks there
were different views about how long this change would take. Radicals argued
that the Party should take direct action to undermine the family immediately,
but most accepted the arguments of Bukharin and NEP theorists that in a
peasant country such as Soviet Russia the family would remain for some time
the primary unity of production and consumption and that it would weaken
gradually as the country made the transition to an urban socialist society.
“Meanwhile the Bolsheviks adopted various strategies – such as the

transformation of domestic space – intended to accelerate the disintegration of
the family. To tackle the housing shortages in the overcrowded cities the
Bolsheviks compelled wealthy families to share their apartments with the urban
poor – a policy known as ‘condensation’ (uplotnenie). During the 1920s the most
common type of communal apartment (kommunalka) was one in which the
original owners occupied the main rooms on the ‘parade side’ while the back
rooms were filled by other families. At that time it was still possible for the
former owners to select their co-inhabitants, provided they fulfilled the ‘sanitary
norm’ (a per capita allowance of living space which fell from 13.5 square metres
in 1926 to just 9 square metres in 1931). Many families brought in servants or
acquaintances to prevent strangers being moved in to fill up the surplus living
space. The policy had a strong ideological appeal, not just as a war on privilege,
which is how it was presented in the propaganda of the new regime (‘War
against the Palaces!’), but also as part of a crusade to engineer a more collective
way of life. By forcing people to share communal apartments, the Bolsheviks
believed that they could make them communistic in their basic thinking and
behaviour. Private space and property would disappear, the individual
(‘bourgeois’) family would be replaced by communistic fraternity and
organization, and the life of the individual would become immersed in the
177
community. From the middle of the 1920s, new types of housing were designed
with this transformation in mind. The most radical Soviet architects, like the
Constructivists in the Union of Contemporary Architects, proposed the
complete obliteration of the private sphere by building ‘commune houses’
(doma kommuny) where all the property, including even clothes and
underwear, would be shared by the inhabitants, where domestic tasks like
cooking and childcare would be assigned to teams on a rotating basis, and
where everybody would sleep in one big dormitory, divided by gender, with
private rooms for sexual liaisons. Few houses of this sort were ever built,
although they loomed large in the utopian imagination and futuristic novels
such as Yevgeny Zamiatin’s We (1920). Most of the projects which did
materialize, like the Narkomfin (Ministry of Finance) house in Moscow (1930)
designed by the Constructivist Moisei Ginzburg, tended to stop short of the full
communal form and included both private living spaces and communalized
blocks for laundries, baths, dining rooms and kitchens, nurseries and schools.
Yet the goal remained to marshal architecture in a way that would induce the
individual to move away from private (‘bourgeois’) forms of domesticity to a
more collective way of life.
“The Bolsheviks also intervened more directly in domestic life. The new Code
on Marriage and the Family (1918) established a legislative framework that clearly
aimed to facilitate the breakdown of the traditional family. It removed the
influence of the Church from marriage and divorce, making both a process of
simple registration with the state. It granted the same legal rights to de facto
marriages (couples living together) as it gave to legal marriages. The Code
turned divorce from a luxury for the rich to something that was easy and
affordable for all. The result was a huge increase in casual marriages and the
highest rate of divorce in the world – three times higher than in France or
Germany and twenty-six times higher than in England by 1926 – as the collapse
of the Christian-patriarchal order and the chaos of the revolutionary years
loosened sexual morals along with family and communal ties.”310

310 Figes, The Whisperers, London, 2007, pp. 7-10. Figes continues: “In the early
years of Soviet power, family breakdown was so common among revolutionary

activists that it almost constituted an occupational hazard. Casual relationships
were practically the norm in Bolshevik circles during the Civil War, when any
comrade could be sent at a moment’s notice to some distant sector of the front.
Such relaxed attitudes remained common through the 1920s, as Party activists and
their young emulators in the Komsomol [Communist Youth League] were taught to
put their commitment to the proletariat before romantic love or family. Sexual
promiscuity was more pronounced in the Party’s youthful ranks than among Soviet
youth in general. Many Bolsheviks regarded sexual licence as a form of liberation
from bourgeois moral conventions and as a sign of ‘Soviet modernity’. Some even
advocated promiscuity as a way to counteract the formation of coupling
relationships that separated lovers from the collective and detracted from their
loyalty to the Party.
“It was a commonplace that the Bolshevik made a bad husband a father because
the demands of the Party took him away from the home. ‘We Communists don’t
know our own families,’ remarked one Moscow Bolshevik. ‘You leave early and
come home late. You seldom see your wife and almost never your children.’ At
Party congresses, where the issue was discussed throughout the 1920s, it was
178
On November 18, 1920 Lenin decreed the legalization of abortions (the first
such decree in the world); they were made available free of charge at the
mother’s request. For “in Soviet Russia,” writes Pipes, “as in the rest of Europe,
World War I led to a loosening of sexual mores, which here was justified on
moral grounds. The apostle of free love in Soviet Russia was Alexandra
Kollontai, the most prominent woman Bolshevik. Whether she practiced what
she preached or preached what she practiced, is not for the historian to
determine; but the evidence suggests that she had an uncontrollable sex drive
coupled with an inability to form enduring relationships. Born the daughter of a
wealthy general, terribly spoiled in childhood, she reacted to the love lavished
on her with rebellion. In 1906 she joined the Mensheviks, then, in 1915, switched
to Lenin, whose antiwar stand she admired. Subsequently, she performed for
him valuable services as agent and courier.
“In her writings, Kollontai argued that the modern family had lost its
traditional economic function, which meant that women should be set free to
choose their partners. In 1919 she published The New Morality and the Working
Class, a work based on the writings of the German feminist Grete Meisel-Hess.
In it she maintained that women had to be emancipated not only economically
but also psychologically. The ideal of ‘grand amour’ was very difficult to realize,
especially for men, because it clashed with their worldly ambitions. To be
capable of it, individuals had to undergo an apprenticeship in the form of ‘love
games’ or ‘erotic friendships’, which taught them to engage in sexual relations
free of both emotional attachment and personal domination. Casual sex alone
conditioned women to safeguard their individuality in a society dominated by
men. Every form of sexual relationship was acceptable: Kollontai advocated
what she called ‘successive polygamy’. In the capacity of Commissar of
Guardianship (Prizrenia) she promoted communal kitchens as a way of
‘separating the kitchen from marriage’. She, too, wanted the care of children to
be assumed by the community. She predicted that in time the family would
disappear, and women should learn to treat all children as their own. She
popularized her theories in a novel, Free Love: The Love of Worker Bees (Svobodnaia
liubov’: liubov’ pchel trudovykh) (1924), one part of which was called, ‘The Love of
Three Generations’. Its heroine preached divorcing sex from morality as well as

recognized that Bolsheviks were far more likely than non-Party husbands to
abandon wives and families, and that this had much to do with the primacy of
Party loyalties over sexual fidelity. But in fact the problem of absent wives and
mothers was almost as acute in Party circles, as indeed it was in the broader circle
of the Soviet intelligentsia, where most women were involved in the public sphere.
“Trotsky argued that the Bolsheviks were more affected than others by
domestic breakdown because they were ‘most exposed to the influence of new
conditions’. As pioneers of a modern way of life, Trotsky wrote in 1923, the
‘Communist vanguard merely passes sooner and more violently through what is
inevitable’ for the population as a whole. In many Party households there was
certainly a sense of pioneering a new type of family – one that liberated both
parents for public activities – albeit at the cost of intimate involvement with their
children.” (pp. 10-11)
179
from politics. Generous with her body, she said she loved everybody, from
Lenin down, and gave herself to any man who happened to attract her.
“Although often regarded as the authoritarian theoretician of Communist sex

morals, Kollontai was very much the exception who scandalized her colleagues.
Lenin regarded ‘free love’ as a ‘bourgeois’ idea – by which he meant not so
much extramarital affairs (with which he himself had had experience) as casual
sex…
“Studies of the sexual mores of Soviet youth conducted in the 1920s revealed
considerable discrepancy between what young people said they believed and
what they actually practiced: unusually, in this instance behaviour was less
promiscuous than theory. Russia’s young people stated they considered love
and marriage ‘bourgeois’ relics and thought Communists should enjoy a sexual
life unhampered by any inhibitions: the less affection and commitment entered
into male-female relations, the more ‘communist’ they were. According to
opinion surveys, students looked on marriage as confining and, for women,
degrading: the largest number of respondents – 50.8 percent of the women and
67.3 of the women – expressed a preference for long-term relationships based on
mutual affection but without the formality of marriage.
“Deeper probing of their attitudes, however, revealed that behind the façade
of defiance of tradition, old attitudes survived intact. Relations based on love
were the ideal of 82.6 percent of the men and 90.5 percent of the women: ‘This is
what they secretly long for and dream about,’ according to the author of the
survey. Few approved of the kind of casual sex advocated by Kollontai and
widely associated with early Communism: a mere 13.3 percent of the men and
10.6 of the women. Strong emotional and moral factors continued to inhibit
casual sex: one Soviet survey revealed that over half of the female student
respondents were virgins…”311
In this continuing conservatism of Soviet youth we see the continuing

influence of the Orthodox Church, into which most Russians had been baptized.
The Church resisted all the Soviet innovations, including civil marriage,
abortion and divorce on demand. And soon the State, too, reversed its teaching,
outlawing abortion in 1936 and condemning free love. But this was not the
result of some kind of revival of religion and morality. It was necessitated by the
simple fact, emphasized by Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow in the nineteenth
century, that the State is founded on the family, and the destruction of the
family finally leads to the destruction of the State…
4. Religion. Of these four destructive ends of Bolshevism, the most

fundamental is the destruction of religion, especially Orthodox
Christianity. The incompatibility between Socialism and Christianity
was never doubted by the apostles of Socialism. Religion was to Marx
“opium for the people”, and to Lenin – “spiritual vodka”. Lenin wrote

311 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 330, 331-332, 333.
180
that “every religious idea, every idea of a god, even flirting with the
idea of God is unutterable vileness of the most dangerous kind”. 312
And in 1918 he said to Krasin: “Electricity will take the place of God.
Let the peasant pray to electricity; he’s going to feel the power of the
central authorities more than that of heaven.” 313 On May 1, 1919 Lenin
sent a secret instruction toe the head of the Cheka, Dzerzhinsky:
“arrest… popes [priests] as counter-revolutionaries and saboteurs,
shoot them mercilessly everywhere. And as many as possible.” 314
As regards the Bolshevik attitude to law, this was described by Latsis: “In the
investigation don’t search for materials and proofs that the accused acted in
word or deed against Soviet power. The first question which you must put to
him is: what is his origin, education, upbringing or profession. These are the
questions that must decide the fate of the accused… If it is possible to accuse the
Cheka of anything it is not in excessive zeal in executions, but in not applying
the supreme penalty enough… We were always too soft and magnanimous
towards the defeated foe!”315
As for morality in general, in his address to the Third All-Russian congress of

the Union of Russian Youth in October, 1920, Lenin wrote: "In what sense do we
reject morality and ethics? In the sense in which it is preached by the
bourgeoisie, which has derived this morality from the commandments of God.
Of course, as regards God, we say that we do not believe in Him, and we very
well know that it was in the name of God that the clergy used to speak, that the
landowners spoke, that the bourgeoisie spoke, so as to promote their
exploitative interests. Or… they derived morality from idealistic or semi-
idealistic phrases, which always came down to something very similar to the
commandments of God. All such morality which is taken from extra-human,
extra-class conceptions, we reject. We say that it is a deception, that it is a
swindle, that it is oppression of the minds of the workers and peasants in the
interests of the landowners and capitalists. We say that our morality is entirely
subject to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. Our morality
derives from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat."316
Of course, there is an inner contradiction here. If God exists, and all the older
systems of morality are nonsense, why entertain any notions of good and evil?
And why prefer the interests of the proletariat to anyone else’s? In fact, if God
does not exist, then, as Dostoyevsky said, everything is permitted. And this is

312 Lenin, Letter to Gorky (1913), Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij (Collected Works)
(second edition, 1926-1932), vol. 17, pp. 81-86. Cf. S.G. Pushkarev, Lenin i Rossia
(Lenin and Russia), Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, 1986, introduction; R. Wurmbrand,
Was Karl Marx a Satanist?, Diane books, 1978.
313 Liberman, S.I. “Narodnij komisar Krasin” (The People’s Commissar Krasin),
Novij Zhurnal (The New Journal), N 7, 1944, p. 309; quoted in Volkogonov, D.

Lenin, London: Harper Collins, 1994, p. 372.
314 V. Karpov, Genralissimus, Kaliningrad, 2004, p. 79.
315 Latsis, Ezhenedel’nik ChK (Cheka Weekly), N 1, November 1, 1918; in Priest
Vladimir Dmitriev, Simbirskaia Golgofa (Simbirsk’s Golgotha), Moscow, 1997, p. 4.

316 Lenin, op. cit., vol. 41, p. 309.
181
what we actually find in Bolshevism – everything was permitted, including the
murder of the proletariat provided it benefited the interests of the Communist
Party. In any case, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote: “The line dividing good
and evil passes not between states, not between classes, and not between parties
– it passes through each human heart – and through all human hearts…”317
And again he wrote: “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…”318
Using his position as the head of the Church and last man in Russia who was
allowed to speak his mind, on October 26, 1918 the patriarch wrote to the
Sovnarkom: “’All those who take up the sword will perish by the sword’
(Matthew 26.52). This prophecy of the Saviour we apply to you, the present
determiners of the destinies of our fatherland, who call yourselves ‘people’s
commissars’. For a whole year you have held State power in your hands and
you are already preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the October
revolution, but the blood poured out in torrents of our brothers pitilessly
slaughtered in accordance with your appeals, cries out to heaven and forces us
to speak to you this bitter word of righteousness.
“In truth you gave it a stone instead of bread and a serpent instead of a fish
(Matthew 7.9, 10). You promised to give the people, worn out by bloody war,
peace ‘without annexations and requisitions’. In seizing power and calling on
the people to trust you, what promises did you give it and how did you carry
out these promises? What conquests could you renounce when you had brought
Russia to a shameful peace [the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk] whose humiliating
conditions you yourselves did not even decide to publish fully? Instead of
annexations and requisitions our great homeland has been conquered, reduced
and divided, and in payment of the tribute imposed on it you will secretly
export to Germany the gold which was accumulated by others than you… You
have divided the whole people into warring camps, and plunged them into a
fratricide of unprecedented ferocity. You have openly exchanged the love of
Christ for hatred, and instead of peace you have artificially inflamed class
enmity. And there is no end in sight to the war you have started, since you are
trying to use the workers and peasants to bring victory to the spectre of world
revolution… It is not enough that you have drenched the hands of the Russian
people in the blood of brothers, covering yourselves with contributions,
requisitions and nationalisations under various names: you have incited the
people to the most blatant and shameless looting. At your instigation there has
been the looting or confiscation of lands, estates, factories, houses and cattle;
money, objects, furniture and clothing are looted. At first you robbed the more

317 Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULag (The GULag Archipelago), Paris: YMCA Press,
volume 2, p. 602.
318 Solzhenitsyn, Acceptance Speech, Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion,
1983; Russkaia Mysl' (Russian Thought), N 3465, 19 May, 1983, p. 6.
182
wealthy and industrious peasants under the name of ‘bourgeois’, thereby
multiplying the numbers of the poor, although you could not fail to realise that
by devastating a great number of individual citizens the people’s wealth is
being destroyed and the country itself ravaged.
“Having seduced the dark and ignorant people with the opportunity of easy
and unpunished profit, you darkened their consciences and drowned out in
them the consciousness of sin. But with whatever names you cover your evil
deeds – murder, violence and looting will always remain heavy sins and crimes
that cry out to heaven for revenge.
“You promised freedom. Rightly understood, as freedom from evil, that does
not restrict others, and does not pass over into licence and self-will, freedom is a
great good. But you have not given that kind of freedom: the freedom given by
you consists in indulging in every way the base passions of the mob, and in not
punishing murder and robbery. Every manifestation both of true civil and the
higher spiritual freedom of mankind is mercilessly suppressed by you. Is it
freedom when nobody can get food for himself, or rent a flat, or move from city
to city without special permission? Is it freedom when families, and sometimes
the populations of whole houses are resettled and their property thrown out
into the street, and when citizens are artificially divided into categories, some of
which are given over to hunger and pillaging? Is it freedom when nobody can
openly express his opinion for fear of being accused of counter-revolution?
“Where is freedom of the word and the press, where is the freedom of
Church preaching? Many bold Church preachers have already paid with the
blood of their martyrdom; the voice of social and state discussion and reproach
is suppressed; the press, except for the narrowly Bolshevik press, has been
completely smothered. The violation of freedom in matters of the faith is
especially painful and cruel. There does not pass a day in which the most
monstrous slanders against the Church of Christ and her servers, and malicious
blasphemies and sacrilege, are not published in the organs of your press. You
mock the servers of the altar, you force a bishop to dig ditches (Bishop
Hermogen of Tobolsk), and you send priests to do dirty work. You have placed
your hands on the heritage of the Church, which has been gathered by
generations of believing people, and you have not hesitated to violate their last
will. You have closed a series of monasteries and house churches without any
reason or cause. You have cut off access to the Moscow Kremlin, that sacred
heritage of the whole believing people… It is not our task to judge earthly
powers; every power allowed by God would attract to itself Our blessing if it
were in truth a servant of God subject to the good, and was ‘terrible not for
good deeds, but for evil’ (Romans 13.3,4). Now we extend to you, who are using
your power for the persecution of your neighbours and the destruction of the
innocent, Our word of exhortation: celebrate the anniversary of your coming to
power by liberating the imprisoned, by stopping the blood-letting, violence,
destruction and restriction of the faith. Turn not to destruction, but to the
establishment of order and legality. Give the people the rest from civil war that
they desire and deserve. Otherwise ‘from you will be required all the righteous
183
blood that you have shed’ (Luke 11.51), ‘and you who have taken up the sword
will perish by the sword’.”319
Pipes writes: “The effect that persecution had on religious sentiments and
practices during the first decade of Communist rule is difficult to assess. There
is a great deal of circumstantial evidence, however, that people continued to
observe religious rituals and customs, treating the Communists as they would
heathen conquerors. Although the observance of religious holidays had been
outlawed, the prohibition could not be enforced. As early as 1918 workers
received permission to celebrate Easter provided they did not absent themselves
from work for more than five days. Later on, the authorities acquiesced in the
suspension of work on Christmas under both the old and new calendars. There
are reports of religious processions (krestnye khody) in the capital as well as in
provincial towns. In the rural districts, the peasants insisted on regarding as
legitimate only marriages performed by a priest.
“Religious fervor, which, along with monarchic sentiments, had perceptibly

ebbed in 1917, revived in the spring of 1918, when many Christians courted
martyrdom by demonstrating, holding protest meetings, and fasting. The fervor
increased with each year: in 1920, ‘The Churches filled with worshippers;
among them there was not that predominance of women that could be noted
before the revolution. Confession acquired particular importance… Church
holidays attracted immense crowds. Church life in 1920 was fully restored and
perhaps even exceeded the old, pre-Revolutionary one. Without a doubt, the
inner growth of church self-consciousness among Russian believers attained a
height unknown during the preceding two centuries.’
“Tikhon confirmed this judgement in an interview with an American

journalist the same year, saying that ‘the influence of the church on the lives of
the people was stronger than ever in all its history’. Confirming these
impressions, one well-informed observer concluded in 1926 that the church had
emerged victorious from its conflict with the Communists: ‘The only thing the
Bolsheviks had achieved was to loosen the hierarchy and split the church’.
“But ahead of it lay trials such as no church had ever endured…”320
To these four “internal” aims of Bolshevism should be added a fifth,

“external” one: world revolution. Lenin said: “Our cause is an international
cause, and so long as a revolution does not take place in all countries… our
victory is only half a victory, or perhaps less.”
“The Third Communist International (Comintern),” writes Christopher

Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin, “founded in Moscow in March 1919, set itself
‘the goal of fighting, even by force of arms, for the overthrow of the

319 Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian Christian
Movement), 1968, NN 89-90, pp. 19-23; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 25-26.
320 Pipes, op. cit.,pp. 367-368.
184
international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic’.
For the next year or more, Comintern’s Chairman, Grigori Yevseyevich
Zinoviev, lived in a revolutionary dream-world in which Bolshevism was about
to conquer Europe and sweep across the planet. On the second anniversary of
the Bolshevik Revolution, he declared his hope that, within a year, ‘the
Communist International will triumph in the entire world’. At the Congress of
the Peoples of the East, convened at Baku in 1920 to promote colonial revolution,
delegates excitedly waved swords, daggers and revolvers in the air when
Zinoviev called on them to wage a jihad against imperialism and capitalism.
Except in Mongolia, however, where the Bolsheviks installed a puppet regime,
all attempts to spread their revolution beyond Soviet borders foundered either
because of lack of popular support or because of successful resistance by
counter-revolutionary governments…”321

321 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The KGB and the World, London: Penguin, 2006, pp. 1-2.
185
17. VERSAILLES: (1) DEMOCRACY AND SELF-
DETERMINATION
Twenty-seven national delegations assembled for a peace conference in

Versailles between January and May 1919. “The most intractable problem,”
writes Tombs, “was that Germany remained potentially the strongest state on
the Continent and, with Russia gripped by revolution, relatively more powerful
than before the war. When the armistice came, it was not clear – certainly not to
the Germans – that they had really been defeated, rather than tricked into
surrender and ‘stabbed in the back’ by revolutionaries. German troops were still
on foreign soil. Only small border areas were occupied. The Allies’ strength was
melting away – Britain’s citizen-soldiers, convinced the job was finished were
clamouring to go home. With the eclipse of Russia and Austria, Germany
towered over central and eastern Europe. Britain’s particular fears had been
removed, however. The German navy had sailed to Scapa Flow to surrender
and had scuttled itself. Its colonies had been seized. Belgium was liberated. So
early on differences emerged between British (and similar Dominion and
American) views and those of France and other Continental states, who
remained worried about a resurgence of Germany. The British Cabinet decided
that it should throw in its lot with the Americans, and Woodrow Wilson’s new
world order, rather than relying on a close alliance with France to maintain
European security. Lord Robert Cecil, the former Minister of Blockade, drew up
plans for a League of Nations, for the time being excluding Germany.
“The French wanted more concrete guarantees of security, focusing on the

Rhine barrier. They wanted the west bank turned into an independent buffer
state to block further aggression and, by making Germany vulnerable to
invasion, to act as a ring through its nose. Wilson and Lloyd George, hopeful of
reconciliation with Germany, refused. Deadlock was broken when Britain and
American offered France an indefinite security guarantee. Lloyd George even
suggested a Channel tunnel to facilitate military aid. Clemenceau gave in and
settled for permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland frontier zone by
Germany and a fifteen-year Allied occupation. Germany was to be allowed an
army of only 100,000 men, with no tanks and no air force, and a small navy with
no submarines, monitored by an Allied control commission. A hostage to
fortune was given by a declaration that this was a step towards ‘a general
limitation of the armaments of all countries.’…”322
No war in history has changed its course so radically and decisively than the
First World War. “The Great War,” writes Adam Tooze, “may have begun in the
eyes of many participants as a clash of empires, a classic great power war, but it
ended as something far more morally and politically charged – a crusading
victory for a coalition that proclaimed itself the champion of a new world order.
With an American president in the lead, the ‘war to end all wars’ was fought
and won to uphold the role of international law and to put down autocracy and
militarism. As one Japanese observer remarked: ‘Germany’s surrender has

322 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 653-654.
186
challenged militarism and bureaucratism from the roots. As a natural
consequence, politics based on the people, reflecting the will of the people,
namely democracy (minponshugi), has, like a race to heaven, conquered the
thought of the entire world.’ The image that Churchill chose to describe the new
order was telling – ‘twin pyramids of peace rising solid and unshakable’.
Pyramids are nothing if not massive monuments to the fusion of spiritual and
material power. For Churchill, they provided a striking analogue to the
grandiose ways in which contemporaries conceived of their project of civilizing
international power. Trotsky characteristically cast the scene in rather less
exalted terms. If it was true that domestic politics and international relations
would no longer be separate, as far as he was concerned, both could be reduced
to a single logic. The ‘entire political life’, even of states like France, Italy and
Germany, down to ‘the shifts of parties and governments, will be determined in
the last analysis by the will of American capitalism…’
“… this moralization and politicization of international affairs was a high-

stakes wager. Since the wars of religion in the seventeenth century, conventional
understanding of international politics and international law had erected a
firewall between foreign policy and domestic politics. Conventional morality
and domestic notions of law had no place in the world of great power
diplomacy and war. By breaching this wall, the architects of the new ‘world
organization’ were quite consciously playing the game of revolutionaries.
Indeed, by 1917 the revolutionary purpose was being made more and more
explicit. Regime change had become a precondition for armistice negotiations.
Versailles assigned war guilt and criminalized the Kaiser. Woodrow Wilson and
the Entente had pronounced a death sentence on the Ottoman and Habsburg
empires. By the end of the 1920s,… ‘aggressive’ war had been outlawed. But,
appealing as these liberal precepts might have been, they begged fundamental
questions. What gave the victorious powers the right to lay down the law in this
way? Did might make right? What wager were they placing on history to bear
them out? Could such claims form a durable foundation of an international
order?...”323
Much depended now on America. The other Great Powers were massively in
debt to her and could not afford to cross her; so America had a unique
opportunity to impose her vision of politics on the world. But, as President
Wilson made clear on many occasions, America’s vision of the new international
order was not that of Britain or France, being opposed both to old-style
imperialism of the British type, especially British control of the seas, and to
France’s overriding desire to keep Germany down, to guarantee that no power
would invade her from across the Rhine as Germany did in 1870 and 1914. The
Versailles Conference would end in a compromise between America’s
seemingly internationalist and anti-imperialist vision and the demands of the
old imperial nationalisms… However, as Tooze points out, it would be more
accurate to recognize Wilson as “an exponent of turn-of-the-century high

323 Tooze, The Deluge, London: Penguin, 2015, pp. 8-9.
187
nationalism, bent on asserting America’s exceptional claim for pre-eminence on
a global scale”324…
The victory of the Allies in the First World War was a pyrrhic one. France,
Britain and Italy increased their territories at the expense of their defeated
enemies; but none had the power, economic, financial or psychological, to really
absorb or profit from them – old-style imperialism was on its last legs, and
would disappear completely by the 1960s. Serbia and Romania, as we shall see,
while increasing their territories, thereby also increased their problems in the
shape of large ethnic minorities, and found that they had bitten off more than
they could chew. The Greeks would regret their attempt to take advantage of
the defeated Ottomans. The only real beneficiary from the war was a latecomer,
America; her president would now attempt to dictate the peace at the Peace
Conference in Versailles…
“Dictate” was the word, because while Wilson had to negotiate with the
other victorious nation states, France, Britain and Italy, neither he nor any of the
other western leaders had any intention of negotiating with Germany. The
Germans were asked to sign the Versailles treaty only after all the negotiations
had been conducted without them. The resulting peace was therefore not so
much a treaty with Germany as a diktat to her. This was in sharp contrast with
the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which did not exclude defeated France, but
strove to re-include her into the international system as soon as possible. But
Vienna had been dominated by the peacemaker Tsar Alexander I: there was no
Tsar at Versailles… Moreover, the Germans had surrendered on the terms of
Wilson’s famous “14 Points” of January, 1918, several of which were flouted, as
we shall see. The anger this injustice caused was, it is claimed, one of the main
causes of the rise of Hitler and the Second World War…
“In the view of President Wilson,” writes Bernard Simms, “Imperial

Germany represented a profound ideological challenge to American political
values. ‘The world must be made safe for democracy,’ he told Congress in his
speech in support of war with Germany. ‘Its peace must be planted on the tested
foundation of political liberty.’ German aggression, he explained, was the
product of Wilhelmine despotism: ‘German rulers have been able to upset the
peace of the world only because the German people… were allowed to have no
opinion of their own.’ It was the opinion of the American government that the
defence of US democracy at home required its defence abroad. Wilson’s aim
was not so much to make the ‘world safe for democracy’, as to make America
safer in the world through the promotion of democracy…”325
In fact, the Germans very quickly got rid of the Kaiser after their
defeat (whose control of the country had, in any case, never been more
than partial), and adopted a democratic constitution. Moreover,

Tooze, op. cit., p. 348.
324
Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, London: Allen Lane, 2013, pp. 310-
325
311.
188
America’s promotion of democracy went with a diminution of free
speech in America herself. 326
Russia, like Germany, was not invited to the negotiations. But this was more
understandable, and more in accord with liberal and Christian principles. For
Russia was now ruled by the Bolsheviks, who had vowed to overthrow all
governments, and had helped to set up short-lived communist states in
Hungary and Bavaria, together with the Third International, at the very time
that the conference was being held. For, as Alistair Horne writes: “There was a
spectre at the feast, called Communism. On the very day of the signature of the
Peace Treaty, a Communist-led Metro and bus strike had paralysed the city.” 327
Five of the 14 Points, writes Tooze, “restated the liberal vision of a new
system of international politics to which Wilson had been committed since May
1916. There must be an end to secret diplomacy.328 Instead, there must be ‘open
covenants of peace openly arrived at’ (Point 1), freedom of the seas (Point 2), the
removal of barriers to the free and equal movement of trade (Point 3),
disarmament (Point 4). The fourteenth point called for what would soon be
known as the League of Nations, ‘a general association of nations… under
specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political
independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’ (Point 14).
But this international framework did not promise or require from its members
any particular type of domestic constitution. Nowhere in the 14 Points does
Wilson mention democracy as a norm. Rather he stressed the freedom of nations
to choose their own form of government. This, however, was not stated in terms
of an emphatic act of self-determination. The phrase ‘self-determination’
appears nowhere either in the 14 Points or in the speech with which Wilson
delivered them to Congress on 8 January 1918. In January of that year it was the
Bolsheviks and Lloyd George who tossed this explosive concept into the
international arena. Wilson would not adopt it until later in the spring.
“With regard to the colonial question, what concerned Wilson were not the
rights of the oppressed people so much as the violence of inter-imperialist

326 Thus “the Espionage Act of 1917… gave the government far more powers than
merely the ability to take foreign agents out of circulation. It gave the government
the discretion to determine whether criticism of the war could be treated as high
treason. Together with a later amendment, the Espionage Act of 1917 was a
comprehensive attack on freedom of speech.
“And Wilson, who had always supported liberal causes in domestic policy, took a ruthless
approach to dissidents. Some 1,500 Americans were convicted of holding views that diverged
from the government's war policy, including Eugene Debs, the presidential candidate of the
Socialist Party. Wilson, the son of a minister, was extremely adept at hating. As David Lloyd
George, Britain's wartime prime minister, would later say: ‘Wilson loved mankind but didn't
like people.’” (Hans Hoyng, “’We Saved the World’: WWI and America’s Rise as a
Superpower”, Spiegel Online International, January 24, 2014,
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-world-war-i-helped-america-rise-to-
superpower-status-a-944703.html#ref=nl-international)
327 Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, London: Pan Books, 2002, p. 372.
328 Early in 1918 the Bolsheviks had published, the secret treaty signed by Britain
and France with Italy in order to tempt the Italians to join the Entente. (V.M.)
189
competition. Point 5 called for the claims of the rival powers to be settled not by
war, but by ‘a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment’. As far
as the subordinate populations themselves were concerned, Wilson called
simply for the ‘observance of the principle that in determining all questions of
sovereignty… the interests of the populations concerned must have equal
weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be
determined’. Quite apart from the fact that the claims of the colonial powers
were thereby given no less weight than those of the subordinate populations, it
was significant that Wilson spoke here of the interests, not the voice, of those
populations. This was entirely compatible with a deeply paternalistic view of
colonial government.
“The significance of this choice of words becomes clear when it is contrasted

with what Wilson had to say about the territorial question at issue in the
European war. Here too he invoked not an absolute right to self-determination
but the gradated view of the capacity for self-government that was typical of
conservative nineteenth-century liberalism. At one end of the scale he called for
Belgium to be evacuated and restored (Point 7), ‘without any attempt to limit
the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations’. Alsace-
Lorraine was to be returned and any occupied French territory to be ‘freed’ from
German domination (Point 8). Italy’s boundaries were to be adjusted ‘along
clearly recognizable lines of nationality’ (Point 9). But with regard to the peoples
of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires (Point 2), the Balkans (Point 11) and
Poland (Point 13), the tone was more paternalistic. They would need ‘friendly
counsel’ and ‘international guarantees’. What this foreign oversight would
guarantee was not ‘self-determination’ but ‘security of life and an absolutely
unmolested opportunity of autonomous development’. This is the muted socio-
biological vocabularly typical of Wilson’s world view. There was no ‘French’
radicalism in the 14 Points.
“It was near the halfway stage of this manifesto (Point 6) that Wilson
addressed the situation in Russia. Given the events since November 1917, one
might have expected him to be at pains to draw a sharp distinction between the
Russian people and the Bolshevik regime that had violently usurped the right to
represent them. Secretary of State Lansing in private memoranda to Wilson was
demanding that America should denounce Lenin’s regime ‘as a despotic
oligarchy as menacing to liberty as any absolute monarchy on earth’. But no
such distinction was made in the 14 Points. On the contrary, Wilson extended to
the Bolsheviks praise of a kind he had never offered to the Provisional
Government. Whereas in May 1917 Wilson had lined up with the Entente in
lecturing Alexander Kerensky and Irakli Tsereteli on the need to continue the
war, he now characterized the Bolshevik delegation, who were about to agree a
separate peace, as ‘sincere and in earnest’. The spokesmen of the Russian people,
the Bolsheviks, were speaking, Wilson opined, in the ‘true spirit of modern
democracy’, stating Russia’s ‘conception of what is right, of what is humane and
honourable for them to accept… with frankness, a largeness of view, a
generosity of spirit, and a universal human sympathy, which must challenge the
admiration of every friend of mankind… whether their present leaders believe it
190
or not, it is our heartfelt desire and hope that some way may be opened
whereby we may be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain their
utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace. Echoing the Bolshevik negotiating
position at Brest, Wilson called for the peace to begin with the withdrawal of all
foreign forces, so as to allow Russia the ‘unhampered and unembarrassed
opportunity for the independent determination of her own political
development and national policy’. What is striking about this formulation was
precisely Wilson’s unproblematic use of the term ‘Russia’ and ‘national policy’
with regard to an empire that was in the process of violent decomposition. At
the moment when the 14 Points began to circulate around the world, nationalist
movements in Ukraine, the Baltic and Finland were dissociating themselves
from the Soviet regime to which Wilson was giving such fulsome praise…”329
Wilson’s partiality to Lenin in Point 6 foreshadows Roosevelt’s naivety in

relation to Stalin at Teheran and Yalta, and reveals a besetting blindness of
American foreign policy: its inability, almost until it was too late, to see the real
nature of the Soviet regime. For by praising the Soviet “democracy” and
allowing it virtually carte blanche in reconquering the lands evacuated by the
German Armies, Wilson consolidated Bolshevik power at the moment of its
greatest weakness. For as the German Armies retreated from the lands they had
conquered in the former Tsarist empire, it was essential that the Allies recognize
and strengthen the Baltic, Polish and Ukrainian states that now emerged in their
wake, so as to weaken the struggling Soviet regime. Allied intervention in the
Russian Civil War was necessitated first of all by the “oversight” of the
Versailles Treaty in not applying the principle of self-determination to these
regions.
However, if the application of the principle of self-determination would have

been useful in these regions, in others it was disastrous… As Niall Ferguson
writes, “From December 1914 onwards Wilson had argued that any peace
settlement ‘should be for the advantage of the European nations regarded as
Peoples and not for any nation imposing its governmental will upon alien
people’. In May 1915 he went further, asserting unequivocally that ‘every people
has a right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live’. He repeated
the point in January 1917 and elaborated on its implications in points five to
thirteen of the Covenant, the League would not merely guarantee the territorial
integrity of its member states but would be empowered to accommodate future
territorial adjustments ‘pursuant to the principle of self-determination’. This
was not entirely novel, needless to say. British liberal thinkers since John Stuart
Mill had been arguing that the homogeneous nation-state was the only proper
setting for a liberal polity, and British poets and politicians had spasmodically
stuck up for the right to independence of the Greeks and the Italians, whom
they tended to romanticize. When trying to imagine an ideal map of Europe in
1857, Giuseppe Mazzini had imagined just eleven nation states ordered on the
basis of nationality. But never before had a statesman proposed to make
national self-determination the basis for a new European order. In combination

329 Tooze, op. cit., pp. 120-122.
191
with the League, self-determination was to take precedence over the integrity of
the sovereign state, the foundation of international relations since the Treaty of
Westphalia two and a half centuries before.
“Applying the principle of self-determination proved far from easy, however,

for two reasons. First,.. there were more than thirteen million Germans already
living east of the border of the pre-war Reich – perhaps as much as a fifth of the
total German-speaking population of Europe. If self-determination were applied
vigorously Germany might well end up bigger, which was certainly not the
intention of Wilson’s fellow peacemakers. From the outset, then, there had to be
inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in the way Germany was treated: no Anschluss of
the rump Austria to the Reich – despite the fact that the post-revolutionary
governments in both Berlin and Vienna voted for it – and no vote at all for the
250,000 South Tyroleans, 90 per cent of whom were Germans, on whether they
wanted to become Italian, but plebiscites to determine the fate of northern
Schleswig (which went to Denmark), eastern Upper Silesia (to Poland) and
Eupen-Malmédy (to Belgium). France reclaimed Alsace and Lorraine, lost in
1871, despite the fact that barely one in ten of the population were French-
speakers. In all, around 3.5 million German-speakers ceased to be German
citizens under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Equally important, under the
terms of the 1919 Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, more than 3.2 million Germans
in Bohemia, southern Moravia and the hastily constituted Austrian province of
Sudetenland found themselves reluctant citizens of a new state, Czechoslovakia.
There were just under three-quarters of a million Germans in the new Poland,
the same number again in the mightily enlarged Romania, half a million in the
new South Slav kingdom later known as Yugoslavia and another half million in
the rump Hungary left over after the Treaty of Trianon.
“The second problem for self-determination was that none of the

peacemakers saw it as applying to their own empires – only in the empires they
had defeated. Wilson’s original draft of Article III of the League Covenant had
explicitly stated that: ‘Territorial adjustments… may in the future become
necessary by reason of changes in present racial conditions and aspirations or
present social and political relationships, pursuant to the principle of self-
determination, and… may… in the judgement of three-fourths of the Delegates
be demanded by the welfare and manifest interest of the peoples concerned.’
“This was too much even for the other Americans at Paris. Did Wilson
seriously contemplate, asked General Tasker Bliss, ‘the possibility of a League of
Nations being called upon to consider such questions as the independence of
Ireland, of India, etc., etc.?’ His colleague, the legal expert David Hunter Miller
warned that such an Article would create permanent ‘dissatisfaction’ and
‘irredentist agitation’. [This is precisely what happened anyway, especially in
the British Empire, from Ireland to Egypt and from Iraq to India.330] As a result,
Wilson’s draft was butchered. What became Article X merely reasserted the old
Westphalian verity: ‘The Members of the League undertake to respect and

330 Tooze, op. cit., chapter 20.
192
preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing
political independence of all Members of the League’. As the British historian
turned diplomat James Headlam-Morley sardonically noted: ‘Self-determination
is quite démodé’. He and his colleagues ‘determine[d] for them [the nationalities]
what they ought to wish’, though in practice they could not wholly ignore the
results of the plebiscites in certain contested areas. There were, it is true, serious
attempts to write ‘minority rights’ into the various peace treaties, beginning
with Poland. But here again British cynicism and self-interest played an
unconstructive role. Revealingly, Headlam-Morley was as sceptical of minority
rights as he was of self-determination. As he noted in his Memoir of the Paris
Peace Conference: ‘Some general clause giving the League of Nations the right to
protect minorities in all countries which were members… would give [it] the
right to protect the Chinese in Liverpool, the Roman Catholics in France, the
French in Canada, quite apart from more serious problems, such as the Irish…
Even if the denial of such a right elsewhere might lead to injustice and
oppression, that was better than to allow everything which means the negation
of the sovereignty of every state in the world.’…
“All over Europe there were… collisions between the ideal of the nation state
and the reality of multi-ethnic societies. Previously diversity had been
accommodated by the loose structures of the old dynastic empires. Those days
were now gone. The only way to proceed, if the peace was to produce visible
political units, was to accept that most of the new nation states would have
sizeable ethnic minorities…
“… The single most important reason for the fragility of peace in Europe was
the fundamental contradiction between self-determination and the existence of
these minorities. It was, of course, theoretically possible that all the different
ethnic groups in a new state would agree to sublimate their differences in a new
collective identity. But more often than not what happened was that a majority
group claimed to be the sole proprietor of the nation state and its assets. In
theory, there was supposed to be protection of the rights of minorities. But in
practice the new governments could not resist discrimination against them…”331
Of course, the principle of national self-determination was part of the

ideology of the French revolution, so it was nothing new. But during the
nineteenth century the principle had been applied only in the direction of the
synthesis of nations, that is, the reunification of large nations such as Germany
and Italy out of the many small principalities into which they had been divided
since the Middle Ages. National self-determination through analysis, or break-
up, had not been practised; and the continued existence of the great multi-ethnic
empires of the Romanovs and the Habsburgs had prevented people from
understanding what self-determination practised thoroughly and on a large
scale really meant. Indeed, before 1914 “none of the European states conceived
the goal of the war as achieving statehood for all national peoples, and some,

331 Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 159-163, 164, 166.
193
like Russia and Austria, may have greatly feared this.”332 But now, after the
Great War, the largely American-induced craze was for breaking down even
relatively small nation-states and giving independence to their constituent sub-
nations. But the new nation-states, while happy to break free from the
Romanovs and Habsburgs, refused to admit that any of their national minorities
had the right to be liberated. And they and took their insecurities out on the
potential rebels – usually in a more intolerant manner than their former
suzerains…
Thus throughout Central and Eastern Europe, from Poland to Romania, and
from the Baltic States to Yugoslavia, chaos reigned as the newly liberated
nations fought for Lebensraum, not so much with their former rulers, who had
disappeared, as with their former fellows in captivity. The two largest
unliberated minorities were the Germans and the Jews, and it would have made
sense for them to unite against their enemies – but they didn’t. Orthodox-
Catholic conflicts were especially evident – between Catholic Poles and
Orthodox Ukrainians and Belorussians in Poland, between Orthodox
Romanians and Catholic Hungarians in Romania, and between Orthodox Serbs
and Catholic Croats and Slovenes in Yugoslavia.
Perhaps the most serious flouting of the principle of national self-

determination was in relation to Germany. Large German minorities were
placed beyond her borders into such countries as Poland and Czechoslovakia,
and anomalies were created such as the Danzig corridor and the separation of
East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The Germans were also indignant that
the British blockade of their country was continuing.
“Their indignation,” writes Tombs, “was less than justified. The blockade
indeed continued until the treaty was concluded, but no longer applied to food.
The Allies never seriously considered breaking up the German Reich, deciding
only to occupy the strategic Rhineland for fifteen years. Little of the territory
permanently transferred was ‘German’ – most was conquered French, Danish
and Polish land now restored, and several disputed areas were left to Germany
after plebiscites. Besides, the disintegration of the German Empire (like that of
the Austrian, Russian and Turkish) had been spontaneous, and it was
impossible, as well as unthinkable, for the Allies to reverse it. The treaty boldly
respected self-determination. Critics of the treaty were strangely contemptuous
of the new states, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, but showed intense
concern for the rights of German minorities incorporated into them.”333
A big problem at the peace conference was the completely unreasonable

attitude of Italy. At the secret Treaty of London in 1915, Italy had joined the
Entente in exchange for the promise, after the war, of parts of Istria, Dalmatia,
Albania and Asia Minor. When the armistice with Austria-Hungary was signed
on November 3, 1918, Italian troops poured into those parts of Istria and

332 Bobbitt, op. cit., p. 391.
333 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 654-655.
194
Dalmatia assigned to her by the secret treaty. Of course, one of Wilson’s
Fourteen Points had specifically abjured such secret treaties. But neither Italy
nor any of the European Great Powers allowed this Point (or, of course, the
Points about national self-determination) to interfere with their Realpolitik…
Besides, the Italian Prime Minister Orlando declared in parliament that Italy’s
victory in the war had been the greatest in recorded history. This fantasy, writes
David Gilmour, “encouraged him and his supporters to make extravagant
claims at the peace conference… In addition to gaining what he called Italy’s
‘God-given’ borders in the Alps, Orlando demanded Fiume [Rijeka], a Croatian
port with an Italian middle class that had formerly been administered by
Hungary. Although the city had not been included in the provisions of the
Treaty of London, and though it was superfluous now that Trieste was in Italian
hands, Orlando insisted on acquiring a place which, he mysteriously asserted,
was ‘more Italian than Rome’. Sonnino, who was still foreign minister, was even
more demanding than Orlando…”334
The only person prepared to stand up to the Italians was President Wilson,
whose Ninth Point had stated that “readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should
be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality”. This, continues
Gilmour, “was plainly an appalling principle for Sonnino, who was intent on
acquiring a large chunk of Dalmatia even though its population of 610,000 was
almost entirely Slav and included only 18,000 Italian speakers. One Italian
diplomat supported his view by arguing that self-determination may have been
‘applicable to many regions but not to the shores of the Adriatic’. Arguments of
this sort bewildered the American president, who could not understand how
the nation of Garibaldi and Mazzini could aspire to rule subject peoples.”335
Wilson appealed to the Italian people to renounce their leaders’ unjust claims.
This caused a nationalist reaction in Italy, which pushed to the fore the futurist
poet and war hero Gabriele D’Annunzio. In September, 1919, in a famous
swashbuckling adventure, he marched on Rijeka; and although the garrison had
been ordered by Rome to resist him, he seized it with a force of 2,500 Sardinian
Grenadiers.
“Over the next eighteen months,” writes Misha Glenny, “theatre and politics
merged into an astonishing spectacle. The set pieces were D’Annunzio’s
impassioned speeches from the balcony of the Governor’s Palace overlooking
Piazza Dante in the centre of Fiume. He drove his audience into frenzies of
patriotism, worshipping huge blood-bespattered flags as the central icons of the
new politics. As a Dutch historian has noted, ‘virtually the entire ritual of
Fascism came from the ‘Free State of Fiume’: the balcony address, the Roman
salute, the use of religious symbols in a new secular setting, the eulogies to the
‘martyrs’ of the cause and the employment of these relicts in political
ceremonies. Moreover, quite aside from the poet’s contribution to the form and

334 Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy, London: Penguin, 2011, p. 290.
335 Gilmour, op. cit., p. 291.
195
style of Fascist politics, Mussolini’s movement first started to attract great
strength when the future dictator supported D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume.’
Throughout the fourteen-month existence of the Free State of Fiume, the
government in Rome denounced D’Annunzio’s adventure but never felt
compelled to remove the municipal dictator by force. Fiume attracted thousands
upon thousands of mutinous Italian soldiers, so that within five months of
having proclaimed his city state, he had to appeal to the troops to stop signing
up for his militia. Fiume could no longer accommodate or feed them. On a
number of occasions, the Italian government was deeply concerned that
D’Annunzio understood Fiume as a prologue to an assault on Rome itself. Yet
despite the animosity between D’Annunzio and Nitti, the regime in Fiume
bolstered the Italian delegation’s position in Paris. The Italian government also
did nothing to prevent D’Annunzio’s attempts to spread his irredentist message
into Dalmatia, and when, in the summer of 1920, Italians embarked on a violent
spree against Croats and Slovenes inside Italian-occupied areas, Rome was slow
to respond.
“Gradually Yugoslav resistance to Italy’s expansionist programme was worn

down. In the middle of January 1920, Clemenceau called in Trumbić and Pašić
and told them to give up Fiume or else the entire London Treaty would be
implemented while Fiume was still up for discussion. The Yugoslav delegation
held out for another nine months with commendable, if progressively less
effective, support from Washington. But in November 1920, its representatives
were finally forced to sign the Treaty of Rapallo. This created an independent
Fiumean state under the control of neither Italy nor the SCS. But the Yugoslavs
had to make substantial concessions in Istria and the Dalmatian islands…”336

336 Glenny, The Balkans, 1804-1999, London: Granta Books, 2000, pp. 376-377.
196
18. VERSAILLES: (2) REPARATIONS AND DEBT-RELIEF
Particular controversy was aroused by Articles 231 and 235 of the Treaty…
“The notorious Clause 231,” writes Tombs, “– the so-called War Guilt Clause or
Kriegschuldfrage (and similar clauses for Germany’s allies) – in English specified
‘responsibility’, not guilt, thought the German word Schuld means both ‘debt’
and ‘guilt’. Allied governments insisted that Germany and Austria-Hungary
were indeed mainly responsible for the war – a view broadly endorse by most
modern historians. This was bitterly contested by the new German government
in a propaganda campaign (orchestrated by a special section of the Foreign
Ministry) which tried to shift the blame onto the Russians and the French.
Nearly a century later, the terms of the debate have changed little; and, while
infinitely less impassioned, it still has political implications.”337
Article 235 concerned reparations, which were eventually fixed at 132 billion
marks (£6.6 billion), in spite of the fact that Wilson had declared that “there shall
be no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages… Every territorial
settlement involved in this war must be made in the interest and for the benefit
of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any mere adjustment or
compromise of claims amongst rival states.”338
Bernard Simms writes; “Defeat, territorial losses and the prospect of a huge
reparations bill put unbearable pressure on the Weimar Republic. [The Treaty of
Versailles] was henceforth indelibly associated in the public mind with national
humiliation comparable to that experienced during the Thirty Years War or at
the hands of Napoleon. The Social Democrat president, Friedrich Ebert,
lamented that ‘Versailles conditions with their economic and political
impossibilities are the greatest enemy of German democracy and the strongest
impetus for communism and nationalism. Quartermaster-General William
Groener warned that the League [of Nations, from which Germany was
excluded] was designed for ‘the maintenance of the political encirclement of
Germany’. Max Weber counseled repudiation of the treaty, even at the price of
an Allied occupation of the whole country, on the grounds that the young
republic would be crippled at birth by the stigma of Versailles. The German
military leadership, however, ruled out a resumption of the war, which would
have risked total defeat, followed by an Allied invasion and possibly partition.
Their first priority, and that of the Social Democrat-led government, was to keep
the Reich intact. This meant dealing with regional movements which threatened
its integrity, and revolutionary eruptions which might give the Allies an excuse
to intervene. A left-wing Spartacist uprising under Rosa Luxemburg and the
younger Karl Liebknecht was put down with severity; the Bavarian Republic of
Kurt Eisner met a similar fate. Gritting her teeth, Germany signed the Treaty of
Versailles…”339

337 Tombs, op. cit., p. 655.
338 Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 402.
339 Simms, op. cit., pp. 322-323. Simms goes on to describe some positive effects of
the Treaty from the German point of view: “Yet if defeat and revolution were
197
Had the Germans been unjustly treated? The problem was that the Allies
were pursuing mutually incompatible aims. On the one hand, they wanted
justice, and a guarantee that the Germans would not become strong enough to
rearm. This required truly “Carthaginian” reparations – heavier than the ones
they actually imposed. On the other hand, they wanted a quick revival of the
world economy, including that of the power-house of Europe, Germany. This
required minimal reparations…
An influential point of view was expressed by John Maynard

Keynes, a member of the British delegation to Versailles. He described
the Peace of Versailles as “Carthaginian”, a phrase suggested to him
by the South African delegate, General Jan Smut. It referred, writes
Antony Lentin, “to the peace concluded in 201 BC after the Second
Punic War, when Rome stripped Carthage of its army, navy and
overseas possessions and imposed a 50-year indemnity. Otherwise
Carthage was left independent and able to recover economically,
which eventually it did. Keynes actually seems to have been thinking
of the ‘peace’ of 146 BC, when, after the Third Punic War, the Romans
slaughtered the inhabitants of Carthage or sold them into slavery,
annexing what remained of Carthaginian territory. Keynes quoted and
endorsed the German view that the Treaty of Versailles signalled ‘the
death sentence of many millions of German men, women and
children’.” 340
There is an parallel between the Second and Third Punic Wars, on the one
hand, and the First and Second World Wars, on the other. As with Carthage, it
took two great wars to subdue Germany; and in both cases the reparations were
greater after the second war than after the first. But the Germans suffered
significantly less proportionately than the Carthaginians. After the First War
Germany was still allowed an army of 100,000 men and was still an independent

mortal threats to the Reich, they also represented an opportunity to break with the
federal traditions which had prevented Germany from realizing her true fiscal and
military potential for so long. At the top of the agenda was the permanent
unification of the Prussian, Bavarian, Württemburgian and Saxon armies, which
had hitherto been under unitary command only in time of war. In October 1919 the
new Reichswehrministerium not only amalgamated the war ministries in Stuttgart,
Munich and Dresden with that in Berlin, but took on the functions of the Prussian
general staff. Likewise, in the debates preceding the Weimar constitution, the
constitutional lawyer Hugo Preuss, who drafted most of it, argued that ‘The
outward strengthening of the Empire so that the outside world is faced only by a
single Empire rather than individual tribes is necessary for the [continued]
existence of Germany.’ The resulting constitution created a much more centralized
Germany, in which the regions lost many of the federal powers, especially in the
fiscal sphere, they had retained in 1871. Taken together with the creation of a
single German army, the centralization of fiscal powers would inevitably
transform the European balance. The German Republic of 1919 was therefore
potentially much more powerful than the Empire of 1871 had ever been…”
340 Lentin, “Germany: A New Carthage?” History Today, January, 2012, p. 20.
198
state that had lost, apart from Alsace-Lorraine, less than four percent of her
territory.341
Moreover, as Tombs points out, during the war “the Germans had proved
harsh occupiers, exploiting forced labour, pillaging conquered territories (for
example, removing most of the northern French textile industry to Germany
lock, stock and barrel), and systematically wrecking everything as they retreated.
In the words of the Allies’ blunt official statement: ‘Somebody must suffer the
consequences of the war. Is it to be Germany or only the peoples she has
wronged?’ They hoped that financial liability might deter future aggressors.
They were also determined to recoup some of their own losses, obtain security,
and satisfy their electorates… Germany had suffered negligible damage; but in
France alone 15,000 square kilometres of territory had been devastated. It
seemed just that Germany should help to ‘repair’ the damage, for without
reparations the European victors would have been economically weaker than
the vanquished.”342
Although her economy suffered significantly in the 1920s, this was by no

means exclusively caused by reparations. And from 1933 she recovered quickly
to become again, by 1939, the most powerful state in Europe. If millions of
Germans died between the two wars, this was not caused primarily by the
reparations, but by the Spanish flu. Moreover, if the Allies had felt strong
enough to occupy the whole of Germany after the war as the Romans had
occupied Carthage, they might well have prevented the communist coup in
Bavaria and the civil war between the Brownshirts and the Blackshirts that
brought Hitler to power…
As Robert and Isabelle Tombs write: “Keynes’s main thrust was the
impossibility as well as the iniquity of the sums imposed through ‘revenge’ and
‘greed’. This was a travesty of the truth. Modern economic historians mostly
agree that the reparations were reasonable, and within Germany’s capacities.
Keynes made himself the invaluable accomplice of a calculated propaganda
effort by the new German republic to undermine the treaty. His personal
motives were guilt as a liberal intellectual involved in running a war sharpened
by his crush on an ‘exquisitely clean’ Hamburg banker named Karl
Melchior…”343
“In reality,” writes Niall Ferguson, “the peace terms were not unprecedented
in their harshness and the German hyperinflation was mainly due to the
irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies adopted by the Germans themselves.
They thought they could win the peace by economic means. In British minds
they did. The Germans were also more successful than any other country in

342 Tombs, op. cit., p. 655.
343 Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, London: Pimlico, 2007, p. 512. However, as
A.N. Wilson points out, Keynes “surprised all his friends by falling in love and
making a very happy marriage to Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballet dancer” (After
the Victorians, London: Hutchinson, 2005, p. 287).
199
defaulting on their debts, including the reparations demanded from them by the
Allies. However, this victory was pyrrhic: it was won by democratic politicians
at the expense of democracy and their own power…”344
The French were criticised for insisting on greater reparations than the
Anglo-Saxons wanted. But no victor nation in history has refrained from
exacting reparations from a defeated enemy. And the losses incurred by the
French in men and material were huge – far greater than those of the Germans,
whose territory remained untouched throughout the war. Moreover, however
vengeful the French may or may not have been, they were more far-sighted than
their Allies, being more accurate than Keynes in their prediction of the economic
consequences.345 “The final German payments were never more than five billion
pounds, largely financed [and in the end written off] by the Allies. The political
and human catastrophe that followed Versailles had, in fact, little to do with the
actual economic impact of the Treaty.” 346 As for the political and military
consequences, the French Marshal Foch predicted with uncanny accuracy: “This
is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years… The next time, remember, the
Germans will make no mistake. They will break through into northern France
and seize the Channel ports as a base of operations against England…”347
Tony Judt makes the point well: “Germany (contrary to widespread belief at
the time) was not crushed in the war or the post-war settlement: in that case its
rise to near-total domination of Europe a mere twenty-five years later would be
hard to explain. Indeed, because Germany didn’t pay its First World War debts
the cost of victory to the Allies exceeded the cost of defeat to Germany, which
thus emerged relatively stronger than in 1913. The ‘German problem’ that had
surfaced in Europe with the rise of Prussia a generation before remained
unsolved.”348
Tombs writes: “Reparations finally demanded totalled £6.6bn in 1913 princes,

not to mention civilian losses: damage to building in France alone was estimated
at $17bn. Moreover, less than half the sum demanded of Germany was
considered by the Allies to be actually recoverable. During the 1920s reparations
and eventually debts were repeatedly scaled down, and Germany in reality paid
very little – about £1bn over thirteen years of wrangling, less than one-third in
cash. As the former Minister of Blockade, Lord Robert Cecil, saw it, reparations
caused ‘the maximum of financial disturbance with the minimum of result’.

344 Ferguson, The Pity of War. 1914-1918, London: Penguin, 1999, p. 397.
345 But, as Lentin writes (op. cit., p. 21), “Neither the acute and prophetic analysis
published soon after, Jacques Bainville’s Les consequences de la paix (1920), which
has never been translated into English, nor the detailed refutation of Keynes by
Etienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace or The Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes
(1944), succeeded in stemming [Keynes’] influence, though while none of Keynes’
predictions were realised almost every one of Bainville’s were.”
347 Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 802.
348 Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Pimlico, 2007, p. 4.
200
“More than any other work, Keynes’s book discredited the Versailles
settlement and highlighted – and exaggerated – differences between the former
allies. His assertions shaped opinion for generations. Many still believe them.
Rejection of the treaty became one of the fundamental principles of the Labour
Party, but it extended far beyond the left. German economic revival was
regarded as in Britain’s economic interests, and its political revival desirable to
balance French ambitions. As the Foreign Office put it, ‘From the earliest years
following the war, it was our policy to eliminate those parts of the Peace
Settlement which, as practical people, we knew to be untenable and
indefensible.’ Thus was born ‘appeasement’, which dominated interwar British
policy, made enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles impossible, and
encouraged British and American disengagement from Europe.
“The League of Nations was formally established by the Treaty of Versailles,

with its headquarters and secretariat in Geneva, run by Sir Edward Grey’s
former private secretary, Sir Eric Drummond. It provided hope of a better world,
and sometimes a way of avoiding difficult decisions. A League of Nations
Union spread nationwide in Britain and attracted cross-party support, including
former conscientious objectors and former war heroes, Tory grandees and TUC
leaders. By 1927 it had 654,000 members and many affiliated organizations.
Stanley Baldwin, the Tory leader, was a vice-chairman, and the chairman, Lord
Robert Cecil, son of the former Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and a former Tory
minister, became one of the most active peace campaigners, winning the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1937. The Labour Party called in 1928 for ‘whole-hearted support
of the League of Nations as the arbiter of international peace and order, in
preference to the basing of peace upon separate pacts, ententes and alliances’.
Disarmament became the league’s chief preoccupation.
“The problems of postwar Europe were many and profound. Germany was
largely surrounded by new, relatively weak states whose very existence many
Germans resented. Many of its politicians and people were unreconciled to
defeat: resentment of the Treaty of Versailles was the one tie that bound the
deeply divided nation together. The victors were disunited: America and then
Britain reneged on their promise to reneged on their promise to guarantee
France’s security after the American Senate (in a debate in which Keynes was
repeatedly cited) refused to ratify the Versailles treaty or join the League of
Nations, despite Woodrow Wilson having been one of its moving spirits. The
best chance of lasting peace would have been continuing Allied solidarity, a
British alliance with France, and compromise over reparations and debt. This
sounds simple; it proved impossible. The fundamental flaw of the treaty was
not (as a leading British newspaper stated recently) that its ‘harsh terms would
ensure a second war’, but rather that (as a contemporary French critic put it) it
‘was too gentle for what is in it that is harsh’). The victor powers would not,
perhaps could not, either fully conciliate Germany or fully dominate it.”349

349 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 657-658.
201
In any case, German reparations were only part of a larger problem that
Keynes knew a lot about but which he chose to speak about little: the mutual
indebtedness of most of the nations as a result of the war. While usury had been
an important factor in international politics since at least the fifteenth century, it
was only now that it became that terrible curse which continues to lay its
crushing hand on the life of nations to this day… .
The most indebted nations were France and Italy. “Early in 1919 the Italians,
who in relation to their modest national income were carrying the most
unbearable level of foreign debt, suggested that as a prelude to the peace
Washington might consider a general reapportionment of the costs of the war.
The logic was simple. If the United States, by far the richest and least indebted
of any of the combatants, were to grant substantial, well-publicized concessions
to its European allies, they could afford both financially and politically to
moderate their claims on Germany. Clemenceau’s government promptly
associated itself with this call. America’s reaction was no less swift. On 8 March
1919, Treasury Under-Secretary Carter Glass cabled Paris that any such
proposal would be treated as a veiled threat of default. Under such
circumstances Washington could not be expected to consider any new credits.
Washington insisted that Clemenceau should make a public commitment to
refrain from any further demands for debt relief. When, in April 1919, faced
with the impasse in the Versailles negotiations, the French resumed their calls
for concessions, they were reminded that Clemenceau’s promise had been read
into the congressional record. Paris was instructed in humiliating terms to put
its financial household in order.
“To the British, these clashes between America and France were far from
unwelcome. As Lloyd George wrote to London, the Americans were forming
the view that ‘the French have been extraordinarily greedy… and… in
proportion to their increasing suspicion of the French is their trust of the British.’
Yet the British could not fault the logic of the French and Italian proposals. It
was Keynes’s task at the Treasury to prepare the British response, which was
presented to the Americans at the end of March. As Keynes acknowledged, a
complete cancellation of inter-Allied claims would impose a loss of £1.668
billion on the US. But Britain as a large net creditor to the Entente would also
bear a substantial loss, running to £651 million. The chief beneficiaries would be
Italy, which would be relieved of £700 million in debt, and France, which would
be granted £510 million in debt relief. Among the great powers there was
absolutely no precedent for such enormous transfers of monies, but in light of
the relative strength of the Allied economies and the damage they had suffered
in the war, this did not seem unreasonable. All the arguments that Keynes
would later deploy with such dramatic effect against reparations were first put
to use in March 1919 in an effort to persuade Washington of the disastrous
consequences of upholding the entangling network of inter-Allied war debts.
Keynes was quite frank about the desperate situation in which France found
itself. If Britain and America were to insist on full repayment, ‘victorious France
must pay her friends and allies more than four times the indemnity which in the
defeat of 1870 she paid Germany. The hand of Bismarck was light compared
202
with that of an ally or of an associate.’ How were the populations of Europe to
be brought to accept an infuriatingly inadequate reparations settlement, if not
by means of generous concessions from those who could afford to make
them?”350
Thus the problems thrown up by the peace proved almost as intractable as

those created during “the war to end all wars”. The economic recovery of
Europe depended on low reparations from Germany and the revival of the
German economy, which would be impossible if the neighbouring economies of
France and Italy remained mired in impossible levels of international debt.
What was required was the Biblical remedy of a jubilee remittance of all, or at
any rate the major part, of inter-governmental debts – in other words, the
Christian virtue of generosity from creditors to debtors – a virtue rarely seen in
world history between nations. But the only nation that could take the lead in
this good work, America, fell at this hurdle – with catastrophic consequences for
the world economy. In the late 1940s, after another still more catastrophic world
war, the Americans would correct this mistake through their exceptionally
generous Marshall Plan, leading to the most prosperous period in world
history…
The tragic irony was that the American president had presented his vision as
in sharp Christian contrast with the egoistic politics of the past. “Wilson the
Just”, as he was called, “was hailed as the saviour of Europe. In France peasant
families knelt to pray as his train passed; in Italy wounded soldiers tried to kiss
the hem of his garments…“ “No doubt Wilson was something of a Presbyterian
minister manqué, as J.M. Keynes charged. Clemenceau said that talking to
Wilson was ‘something like talking to Jesus Christ’.”351
“As [his biographer, Lord] Devlin noted, ‘It was almost, but not quite, as if he
were trying to bring Christianity into public life.’ Wilson seems to have believed,
with [his adviser, Colonel] House, that truly democratic institutions that
actually reflected the will of the people and made commensurate demands on
their attention and contributions would yield just such a spiritual change in
mankind.”352 This was truly hubris on a grand scale – the idea that one man
could come to a foreign continent whose ways and exceedingly complicated
history he hardly knew, and, armed only with good intentions, recreate its
system of inter-state relations on the model of the American Constitution,
thereby creating Eternal Peace. Only Christ could have attained such a goal –
and He would have attained it without reference to the American
Constitution…
The Anglo-Saxons wanted an economic revival in Germany for another

reason: to counteract the power of Bolshevism and the threat of revolution in the

350 Tooze, op. cit., pp. 298-299.
351 Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, London: Pimlico, 2001,
p. 13. And he quipped that “the good Lord” had been content with 10
Commandments rather than Wilson’s 14.
203
West. The decade 1910-20 had seen unprecedented industrial unrest and strikes
throughout the industrialized nations, not least in America herself. And for
workers who had seen inflation drastically reduce their pay packets in real
terms, the propaganda of Bolshevism was proving distinctly attractive.
“Bolshevism, the US Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, warned in October

1918 even before the war had ended, ‘must not be allowed to master the people
of Central Europe, where it would become a greater menace to the world than
Prussianism’. For this reason Churchill called for ‘the building up of a strong yet
peaceful Germany which will not attack our French Allies, but will at the same
time act as a moral bulwark against Bolshevism’, and thus ‘build a dyke of
peaceful, lawful, patient strength and virtue against the flood of Red barbarism
flowing from the east’.”353
Churchill and the Americans would be saying the same thing over thirty
years later, when “the flood of Red barbarism” had overflowed the German
dyke… But that was because the “dyke of virtue” had not been built in
Germany by the Germans themselves. For they refused to repent of their
responsibility for the First World War, thereby making the Second War
inevitable…
In the end, the Allies fell between the two stools of their mutually
contradictory aims. And, to make matters still worse, they were not powerful
enough to act on the principles they proclaimed, or carry out the decisions they
actually made. For whatever the merits and faults of the treaty, it was necessary
for all the signatories to display determination in carrying out its provisions, not
excluding those on reparations and rearmament. But the American Senate
refused to ratify it, while the British did not want to commit themselves. This
left the French, who, of course, had the strongest stake in the provisions. But
they were worried about losing the support of their allies and being left alone
against the Germans; so they, too, made compromises. Thus it could be argued
that it was not the reparation clauses themselves, but the feebleness displayed
by the Allies in enforcing them, that caused the real long-term damage by
encouraging German truculence and nationalism.
And so appeasement began, not in the 1930s, but immediately after the war.
And if its justification was a desire not simply to stimulate the revival of the
German economy, but also to dampen German nationalism, then it failed
completely. For, as David Stevenson writes, “by the early 1930s… Allied
concessions over the Versailles terms seemed to have done nothing to check the
progress of the German extremists. Although reparations were ended in all but
name at the Lausanne conference of 1932, and the former Allies accepted the
principle of parity of armaments at the Geneva conference of 1931-3, support for
the Nazis continued to expand, driving the last Weimar government into
authoritarianism at home and assertiveness abroad. The army leaders had
secretly resumed strategic planning after 1924, and in 1932 Brüning’s successor,

353 Simms, op. cit., pp. 319-320.
204
Franz von Papen, adopted a big rearmament programme. The growth of
nationalism not only among the public but also among the country’s leadership
is essential to an explanation of why Hitler was appointed chancellor, at
Hindenburg’s invitation and with the army’s approval, in January, 1933.
“In short, the war was essential to the Nazi takeover not only through its
contribution to the economic crisis but also through its role in reawakening
German nationalism as the memory of 1914-18 was re-evaluated.”354
19. FROM SERBIA TO YUGOSLAVIA
The Balkan nations had sustained large losses in the war, especially the Serbs,
who lost more men proportionately than any other combatant - half of their
male population between 18 and 55. But most now had larger domains - and
troublesome minorities. “The national question,” as Barbara Jelavich writes,
“was complicated by the extremely harsh attitude that each Balkan government
was to adopt toward its non-national citizens or, particularly in the case of
Yugoslavia, toward those parties that did not agree with the central regime.
They were regularly regarded as a source of weakness and disloyalty, which
indeed they were often forced to become. As we have seen, the nineteenth
century witnessed the organization of successful national movements among
the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Romanians and South Slavic people of
the Habsburg Empire. During the period of national revival, the Balkan leaders
had constantly attacked the Habsburg and Ottoman empires for their alleged
oppression of national minorities. Yet, in fact, both empires, neither of which
was organized on the national principle, gave all of their people a part in state
life. The millet system and the community governments allowed most Balkan
people under Ottoman rule to run their own affairs on the personal and local
level; if an individual wished to convert to Islam he could rise to the highest
offices. Within the Habsburg Empire status was often determined more by class
than by nationality. The small Croatian nobility stood on an equal footing with
the Hungarian or German, or any other. Even among the Romanian and Serbian
populations, which, because they consisted predominantly of peasants, were in
a definitely weaker position, national religious institutions were available, and
education in the national language could be acquired. Needless to say, the
general treatment of all minorities was anything but ideal, but the picture was
not completely bleak.
“The new national regimes were to adopt a much more unconciliatory view.
The position of a member of a minority could be much worse under their rule
than under the old empires. In general, any action against the central regime or
in support of a change of status could be regarded as treason… Members of the
Croatian Peasant Party were sent to jail for favouring a program that called for
the revision of the centralist Yugoslav constitution, not for seeking a breakup of
the state. Strong police repression was applied against any sign of Albanian or
Macedonian sentiment. The national leaderships throughout the peninsula

354 Stevenson, 1914-1918, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 570.
205
acquired the habit of applying the word foreign to minority citizens, even when
the families might have lived in the region for centuries. Hungarian, Turkish,
German, Albanian, and Italian nationals in Yugoslavia were often regarded in
this light; Hungarians, Germans, Ukrainians, and Jews shared the same fate in
Romania.
“The postwar period was also to witness what was perhaps the worst
solution to this problem short of outright expulsion or the extermination of
national groups. The mandatory exchange of populations, first inaugurated
between Greece and Turkey and then extended on a voluntary basis to the
Bulgarian-Greek problem, was an action with possibly disastrous consequences
for the future…”355
On December 1, 1918, after national parliaments in Croatia and Slovenia had

approved the idea, the old kingdom of Serbia was transformed into the new
kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes under King Alexander. The
politicians meeting at Versailles de facto recognized the new state. For Point Ten
of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, presented before the end of the war, had spoken of
the “autonomous development” of the peoples of Austria-Hungary, and Point
Eleven stipulated that Romania, Montenegro and Serbia should be restored to
independence. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Great Lodge “Yugoslavia” was
founded in the same year of 1919…
Immediately there was chaos… As Serbian police imposed iron discipline in

Croatia and Slovenia, Italian troops poured into Istria and Dalmatia. Moreover,
the chaos extended further south: “according to one report”, writes Niall
Ferguson, “as many as a thousand Muslim men were killed [by the Serbs] and
270 villages pillaged in Bosnia in 1919.”356
Many non-Serbs in these former Hapsburg lands now wondered whether the
union had not been a huge mistake.
Whether or not it was a mistake, it was certainly a huge, unprecedented and

extremely risky political experiment involving the merging of a well-established,
highly centralised and militarised monarchy with two other South Slavic
nations that had already created de facto independent democratic states on the
territory of the former Habsburg empire.
Mistakes were made in the formation of the new state. The first was in the
title: “the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” implied that these three
nations entered on equal terms, while the others that found themselves,
voluntarily or involuntarily, parts of it – Bosnian Muslims, Kosovan Albanians,
Montenegrins (whose monarchy was abolished), Macedonians, Germans,
Hungarians and Jews – were not even worth a mention.

355 Jelavich, History of the Balkans, Cambridge University Press, 1983, vol. 2, pp.
135-136.
356 Ferguson, The Pity of War, 1914-1918, London: Penguin, 1999, p. 390.
206
Secondly, no constitution had been agreed, so for the first two and a half
years, until the passing of the so-called Vidovdan constitution in 1921, the
question of the rights of minorities could not be resolved, and was “solved”
only by the army and police force of the old Serbian kingdom. No wonder that
so many thought that this was no more or less than the old Serbian kingdom
upgraded to the status of an “empire”, and that the Croatian and Slovene lands
had simply been annexed to it – albeit not by force, but by cunning diplomacy…
Thirdly, as a result of Italian aggression and the indifference of the other

Great Powers, the new state did not have internationally agreed frontiers. The
Treaty of Rapallo (1920) gave much Slav land to the Italians. Later, “in March
1922,” writes Glenny, “a fascist coup overthrew [the Italian] government in a
dress rehearsal for Mussolini’s seizure of power later that year. Italy then
exerted immense pressure on Yugoslavia to concede Italian sovereignty over
Fiume, and in January 1924, old Nikola Pašić, in his last spell as Prime Minister,
travelled to Rome to sign away the city. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes had been mutilated at birth. As Rijeka, Zadar, most of Istria and the
islands of Lošinj, Cres and Lastovo slipped from Yugoslavia’s grasp into the
bosom of revolutionary Italy, tensions between Serbs and Croats deepened. The
‘Vidovdan’ (St. Vitus’ Day) constitution, promulgated in 1921 on the sacred
Serbian date of 28 June, which commemorated Kosovo Polje and, more recently,
Sarajevo, was regarded by all Yugoslavs as a victory for the centralizing aims of
the Serbs. In Croatia, it greatly compounded the profound sense of loss and
alienation that Croats, and especially Dalmatians, had felt at Italy’s irredentist
programme…”357
Fourthly, while the smaller nations grumbled, the leaders of the largest
parties of the two largest nations, Pašić for the Serbs and Radić for the Croats,
were not present at the formation of the new state. And so as Pašić tacitly
withdrew from the obligations he had undertaken in the Corfu Declaration,
Radić rejected the legitimacy of the state and resorted to gross obstructionism –
while King Alexander desperately tried to keep the peace between them.
If this sounds as if Alexander was the righteous peace-maker amidst a bunch

of self-interested and irresponsible politicians, this is true, but only partly true.
For while Alexander’s intentions were pure, and probably purer than those of
the politicians, the fact was that he was under an illusion that Pašić and Radić
were not under. This was the illusion shared by most of western humanity at
that time, that all that was needed to unite the nations in peace and brotherhood
was goodwill and a common adherence to the ideal of democracy, regardless of
different historical traditions, different political systems and, above all, different
religious beliefs. Both Pašić and Radić, each in their own very different ways,
understood that the idea of Yugoslavia as multi-ethnic yet Serb-dominated,
democratic yet monarchical, multi-faith yet officially Orthodox state, was an
illusion; and while they can be blamed, as Alexander did blame them, for not

357 Glenny, op. cit., p. 377.
207
trying harder to bridge the unbridgeable, they could not be blamed for believing
that it could not work in the long run.
While officially wedded to the Yugoslav idea, Alexander instinctively

stepped back from taking the measures that would have brought it fully into
being – probably because he knew that his own people, the Serbs, would never
have accepted it. Thus he always resisted making the state into a confederation,
insisting on its centralist character. And he continued to rely almost exclusively
on Serbs from the old kingdom to staff the major posts in the army, police and
administration…
208
20. THE SECOND GREEK REVOLUTION
When Eleutherios Venizelos came to power in Greece during the war, he

began to purge, not only the military and the civil service, but also the Orthodox
Church. Thus when Metropolitan Theocletos of Athens anathematized him in
1916, he had him defrocked. Then he recalled his friend and fellow Cretan and
Freemason 358 , Meletios Metaxakis, from America and enthroned him as
Archbishop of Athens in November, 1918. 359 Meletios immediately started
commemorating Venizelos at the Liturgy instead of the King. This led to an
ideological schism within the Synod between the Venizelists and the Royalists.
The latter included St. Nektarios of Pentapolis and Metropolitan Germanos of
Demetrias, the future leader of the True Orthodox Church. Almost
simultaneously, Patriarch Germanos V of Constantinople was forced into
retirement when his flock protested against what they saw as his compromising
politics in relation to the Turks.360
Now the Greek government wanted to introduce the western, Gregorian

calendar into Greece. And so Meletios promptly, in January, 1919, raised this
question in the Church. The only obstacle to the introduction of the new
calendar, he declared, was the Apostolic Canon forbidding the celebration of
Pascha at the same time as the Jewish Passover or before the spring equinox. But
since, he went on, “the government feels the necessity of changing to the
Gregorian calendar, let it do so without touching the ecclesiastical calendar.”
And he set up a Commission to investigate the question.361
The Commission was set up with Metropolitan Germanos of Demetrias as

the representative of the hierarchy. In May 20, 1919, on the initiative of Meletios
Metaxakis, the Synod raised the question of changing to the new calendar.
Meletios told the Synod: “The situation in Russia has changed, and the
possibility of becoming closer to the West has become more real. We consider it
necessary to introduce a rapid calendar reform.”
However, the Commission headed by Metropolitan Germanos was more

cautious: “In the opinion of the Commission, the change of the Julian calendar
provided it does not contradict canonical and dogmatic bases, could be realised
on condition that all the other Orthodox Autocephalous Churches agree, and
first of all, the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate, to which it would be necessary
to present the initiative in any action in this sphere, so long as we do not change

358 On the influence of Masonry on Greek Orthodoxy in the early twentieth century, see Monk
Seraphim (Zissis), “The Influence of Freemasonry on Early Greek Ecumenism”, geopolitika.ru,

August 15, 2017.
359 "To imerologiakon skhisma apo istorikes kai kanonikes apopseos exetazomenon"
(The Calendar Schism from an Historical and Canonical Point of View), Agios
Agathangelos Esphigmenites (St. Agathangelos of Esphigmenou), N 130, March-
April, 1992, p. 16.
361 Eleutherios Goutzidis, Ekklesiologika Themata (Ecclesiological Themes), Athens,
1980, pp. 67-68.
209
to the Gregorian calendar, but compose a new, more scientifically exact
Gregorian calendar, which would be free from the inadequacies of both of the
calendars – the Julian and the Gregorian – at present in use.”
“One of the committee members who voted in favour of this position,” writes
Fr. Basile Sakkas, “was Chrysostom Papadopoulos, then an Archimandrite and
Professor of Theology at the University of Athens.”362 In 1919 he had declared
that if the Church changed the calendar it would become schismatic. But later,
as Archbishop of Athens, he introduced the new calendar into the Greek
Church…
When the conclusions of the commission had been read out, Meletios
changed his tune somewhat: “We must not change to the Gregorian calendar at
a time when a new and scientifically perfect calendar is being prepared. If the
State feels that it cannot remain in the present calendar status quo, it is free to
accept the Gregorian as the European calendar, while the Church keeps the
Julian calendar until the new scientific calendar is ready.”363
Two things are clear from these events of 1919. First, Meletios was very
anxious to accommodate the government if he could. And yet he must have
realized that blessing the adoption of the new calendar by the State would
inevitably generate pressure for its introduction into the Church as well.
Secondly, while he did not feel strong enough to introduce the new calendar
into the Church at that time, he was not in principle against it, because he either
did not understand, or did not want to understand, the reasons for the Church’s
devotion to the Julian calendar, which have nothing to do with scientific
accuracy, and all to do with faithfulness to the Tradition and Canons of the
Church and the maintenance of Her Unity.
The new calendar was not the only innovation Meletios wanted to introduce:
what he wanted, writes Bishop Ephraim, “was an Anglican Church with an
eastern tint, and the faithful people in Greece knew it and distrusted everything
he did. While in Athens, he even forbade the chanting of vigil services (!)
because he considered them out of date and a source of embarrassment when
heterodox – especially Anglicans – visited Athens. The people simply ignored
him and continued to have vigils secretly.”364
However, the heart of Greek Orthodoxy was not Athens, but Constantinople.
It was necessary for Venizelos to get his own man on the Ecumenical throne.
That man would eventually be Metaxakis.

362 Sakkas, The Calendar Question, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983,
p. 23.
363 Goutzidis, op. cit., p. 68.
364 Monk (now Metropolitan of Boston) Ephraim, Letter on the Calendar Issue,
Brookline, Mass.: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1968, second edition 1979, St.
Nectarios Educational Series, N 2.
210
But in the meantime, until Metaxakis could be transferred, he needed
someone else to stir up the kind of nationalist ferment he needed. Fortunately
for Venizelos, the patriarchal locum tenens in 1919, Metropolitan Dorotheos of
Prussa, was just the right man for the job. He introduced two important and
closely related innovations in the conduct of the patriarchate towards the
Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and the western heresies, on the other. Thus
on January 21, 1919, protected by a Greek-Cretan regiment stationed in the city,
Dorotheus proceeded to abolish the teaching of Turkish in Greek schools. Then,
on March 16, a resolution for “Union with Greece” was passed in the
Constantinopolitan churches, after which the patriarchate and the Greeks
refused to communicate with the Sublime Porte. When the Greeks also refused
to participate in the November elections, the break with the Turkish authorities
was complete.
The patriarchate had in effect carried out a political coup d’état against the
Ottoman Empire, thereby reversing a 466-year tradition of submission to the
Muslims the political sphere.365 Since such a daring coup required political and
military support from outside, the patriarchate set about making friends with
those to whom, from a religious point of view, it had always been inimical. Thus
in January, 1919, a Greek-Armenian conference was held to coordinate the
activities of the two groups in the city.366 Then, in the summer, Metropolitan
Nicholas of Caesarea in the name of the patriarchate accepted the invitation of
the Joint Commission of the World Conference on Faith and Order, a forerunner
of the World Council of Churches, to participate in its preliminary conference in
Geneva the following year. He said that the patriarchate was “thereby stretching
out a hand of help to those working in the same field and in the same vineyard
of the Lord”. This statement, which in effect recognized that the western heretics
belonged to the True Church, was probably the first statement from the
Ecumenical Patriarchate explicitly endorsing the great heresy of ecumenism.
Then, in January, 1920, Metropolitan Dorotheos and his Synod issued what
was in effect a charter for Ecumenism. This encyclical was the product of a
conference of professor-hierarchs of the Theological School at Khalki, led by
Metropolitan Germanos of Seleucia (later of Thyateira and Great Britain).
It was addressed “to all the Churches of Christ everywhere”, and declared
that “the first essential is to revive and strengthen the love between the
Churches, not considering each other as strangers and foreigners, but as kith
and kin in Christ and united co-heirs of the promise of God in Christ.”
It went on: “This love and benevolent disposition towards each other can be
expressed and proven especially, in our opinion, through:

365 Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations,
1918-1974, Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1983, pp. 54-57.
366 Alexandris, op. cit., p. 58.
211
“(a) the reception of a single calendar for the simultaneous celebration of the
great Christian feasts by all the Churches;
“(b) the exchange of brotherly epistles on the great feasts of the single
calendar..;
“(c) close inter-relations between the representatives of the different

Churches;
“(d) intercourse between the Theological Schools and the representatives of

Theological Science and the exchange of theological and ecclesiastical
periodicals and writings published in each Church;
“(e) the sending of young people to study from the schools of one to another
Church;
“(f) the convening of Pan-Christian conferences to examine questions of

common interest to all the Churches;
“(g) the objective and historical study of dogmatic differences..;
“(h) mutual respect for the habits and customs prevailing in the different
Churches;
“(i) the mutual provision of prayer houses and cemeteries for the funeral and
burial of members of other confessions dying abroad;
“(j) the regulation of the question of mixed marriages between the different
confessions;
“(k) mutual support in the strengthening of religion and philanthropy.”367
The unprecedented nature of the encyclical consists in the facts: (1) that it was
addressed not, as was Patriarch Joachim’s encyclical of 1903, to the Orthodox
Churches only, but to the Orthodox and heretics together, as if they were all
equally “co-heirs of God in Christ”; (2) that the proposed rapprochement was
seen as coming, not through the acceptance by the heretics of the Truth of
Orthodoxy and their sincere repentance and rejection of their errors, but
through other means; and (3) the proposal of a single universal calendar for
concelebration of the feasts, in contravention of the canonical law of the
Orthodox Church. There is no mention here of the only possible justification of
Ecumenism from an Orthodox point of view – the opportunity it provides of
conducting missionary work among the heretics. On the contrary, one of the
first aims of the ecumenical movement was and is to prevent proselytism among

367 Vasilios Stavrides, Istoria tou Oikoumenikou Patriarkheiou (1453 – simeron) (A
History of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (1453 to the present day)), Thessalonica,

1987, pp. 248-249.
212
the member-Churches. That is why the potential proselytes from among the
Catholics and Protestants are declared to be in no need of conversion, being
already “co-heirs of God in Christ”.
From this time the Ecumenical Patriarchate began sending representatives to

ecumenical conferences in Geneva in 1920, in Lausanne in 1927 and in
Edinburgh in 1937.368 The World Conference on Faith and Order was organized
on the initiative of the American Episcopalian Church; and the purpose of the
Joint Commission’s approaches to the Churches was that “all Christian
Communions throughout the world which confess our Lord Jesus Christ as God
and Savior” should be asked “to unite with us in arranging for and conducting
such a conference”.369
The real purpose of the 1920 encyclical was political, to gain the support of
the western heretics, and especially the Anglicans, in persuading their
governments to endorse Dorotheos’ and Venizelos’ plans for Greek control of
Constantinople and Smyrna and its hinterland. Thus on February 24, 1920,
Dorotheos wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury: “We beseech you
energetically to fortify the British government… in its attempts to drive out the
Turks [from Constantinople]. By this complete and final expulsion, and by no
other means, the resurrection of Christianity in the Near East and the restoration
of the church of Hagia Sophia can be secured.”370
The tragedy of the Greek position was that, in spite of the support of the
Anglican Church for Dorotheos, and of Lloyd George for Venizelos, the Allies
never committed themselves to the creation of a Greek kingdom in Asia Minor.
The reason was obvious: it would have meant full-scale war with Turkey – an
unattractive prospect so soon after the terrible losses of the Great War, and
when British troops were still fighting in Soviet Russia and other places. From
the Allied Powers’ point of view, their troops were stationed in Constantinople,
not as a permanent occupation force, but only in order to protect the Christian
minority. In fact, the Greeks, by their fiercely nationalist attitude, antagonized
the Turks and led to the creation of a powerful Turkish nationalist movement,
which eventually destroyed the centuries-old Greek civilization in Asia Minor.
The Greeks forgot – as other Orthodox nations such as the Serbs also forgot -
that one nationalism inevitably elicits another, equal and opposite nationalism...
With the fall of Venizelos, his brother Mason and Cretan Metaxakis also fell -
temporarily. In February, 1921, he returned to America, campaigning on behalf
of Venizelos, and presenting the novel argument that all the Orthodox in
America should be under the Patriarchate of Constantinople because of Canon
28 of the Fourth Ecumenical Council. 371 He immediately returned into

368 Stavrides, op. cit., pp. 260, 247.
369 Fr. George Macris, The Orthodox Church and the Ecumenical Movement, Seattle: St.
Nectarios Press, 1986, pp. 4-5.
370 Alexandris, op. cit., p. 62.
371 This was reported in June, 1921 to the Serbian Orthodox Church by Bishop
Nicholas (Velimirovich), who had been sent to American to investigate the needs
213
communion with the Anglicans. Thus the Greek ambassador in Washington
reported to the prefect in Thessalonica that on December 17, 1921, “vested, he
took part in a service in an Anglican church, knelt in prayer with the Anglicans
before the holy table, which he venerated, gave a sermon, and blessed those
present in the church” of the heretics.372
Meletios won over the epitropos of the Greek Archdiocese, Rodostolos

Alexandros, and the two of them first broke relations with the Church of Greece.
Then, at a clergy-laity conference in the church of the Holy Trinity, New York,
he declared the autonomy of the Greek Archdiocese from the Church of Greece,
changing its name to the grandiloquent: “Greek Archbishopric of North and
South America”. This was more than ironical, since it had been Metaxakis
himself who had created the archdiocese as a diocese of the Church of Greece
when he had been Archbishop of Athens in 1918! Metaxakis’ new diocese broke
Church unity in another way, in that it was done without the blessing of the
Russian Church, which until then had included all the Orthodox of all
nationalities in America under its own jurisdiction. And once the Greeks had
formed their own diocese, other nationalities followed suit. Thus on August 14,
1921 Patriarch Gregory of Antioch asked Patriarch Tikhon’s blessing to found a
Syrian diocese in North America. Tikhon replied on January 17, 1922 that the
Antiochian Patriarch would first have to get the agreement of the Russian
bishops in America…
Meanwhile, the Patriarchate in Constantinople was still beating the

nationalist and anti-monarchist drum. In December, 1920, it called for the
resignation of the king for the sake of the Hellenic nation, and even considered
excommunicating him! Then, in March, a patriarchal delegation headed by
Metropolitan Dorotheos travelled to London, where they met Lord Curzon, the
British foreign secretary, King George V and the archbishop of Canterbury – the
first such trip to the West by the senior prelate of Orthodoxy since Patriarch
Joseph’s fateful participation in the council of Florence in 1438. And there, like
Joseph, Dorotheos had a heart attack and died, just as he was to receive the
honorary vice-presidency of the World Congress for the friendship of the World
through the Churches.373 The terrible tragedy that was about to be suffered by
the Greek nation in Asia Minor must be attributed in no small part to God’s
wrath at the nationalist-ecumenist politics of Dorotheos and his Synod – a
classic example of the destructive consequences of the intrusion of political
passions into the life of the Church.

of the Serbs there. Canon 28 talks about the “barbarian” lands in Thrace and other
places being placed under Constantinople. Nobody before Metaxakis had
interpreted it to mean jurisdiction over the whole world outside the traditional
patriarchates…
372 Archimandrite Theokletos A. Strangas, Ekklesias Ellados Istoria (A History of the
Church of Greece), Athens, 1970, vol. II, p. 1118; quoted in “Oecumenical Patriarch
Meletios (Metaxakis)”, Orthodox Tradition, vol. XVII, NN 2 & 3, 2000, p. 11.
373 Monk Paul, Neoimerologitismos-Oikoumenismos (Newcalendarism-Ecumenism),
Athens, 1982, p. 35.
214
*
Greece was counted as a victor nation at Versailles in 1919. This gave

Venizelos the opportunity to put his nationalist expansionist plans into effect.
The French Prime Minister Briand had been right to suspect, some years before,
that “Venizelos may have very long teeth when peace negotiations open. He has
not renounced his dream to recreate the Byzantine Empire… Now, a large-scale
expansion of Greece would be a threat to the peace of the world. I have for a
long time desired the cooperation of the Greeks but not under these
conditions…”374
In May, 1919, the Italians, having withdrawn from the Paris Peace
Conference, began to occupy parts of Turkey – Antalya in the south and
Marmaris in the west. The other Great Powers were alarmed. This gave
Venizelos his chance to try and put his “great idea” – the restoration of the
Byzantine empire – into practice.
Margaret Macmillan writes: “He had been working hard from the start of the
Peace Conference to press Greek claims, with mixed success. Although he tried
to argue that the coast of Asia Minor was indisputably Greek in character, and
the Turks in a minority, his statistics were highly dubious. For the inland
territory he was claiming, where even he had to admit that the Turks were in a
majority, Venizelos called in economic arguments. The whole area (the Turkish
provinces of Aidin and Brusa and the areas around the Dardanelles and Izmir)
was a geographic unit that belonged to the Mediterranean; it was warm, well
watered, fertile, opening out to the world, unlike the dry and Asiatic plateau of
the hinterland. The Turks were good workers, honest, in their relations, and a
good people as subjects, he told the Supreme Council at his first appearance in
February. ‘But as rulers they were insupportable and a disgrace to civilisation,
as was proved by their having exterminated over a million Armenians and
300,000 Greeks during the last four years.’ To show how reasonable he was
being, he renounced any claims to the ancient Greek settlements at Pontus on
the eastern end of the Black Sea. He would not listen to petitions from the
Pontine Greeks, he assured [the American official] House’s assistant, Bonsal: ‘I
have told them that I cannot claim the south shore of the Black Sea, as my hands
are quite full with Thrace and Anatolia.’ There was a slight conflict with Italian
claims, but he was confident the two countries could come to a friendly
agreement. They had, in fact, already tried and it had been clear that neither was
prepared to back down, especially on Smyrna.
“The thriving port of Smyrna lay at the heart of Greek claims. It had been
Greek in the great Hellenic past and in the nineteenth century had become
predominantly Greek again as immigrants from the Greek mainland had
flocked there to take advantage of the new railways which stretched into the
hinterland and opportunities for trade and investment. The population was at

374 Briand, in Misha Glenny, The Balkans, 1804-1999, London: Granta Books, 2000,
pp. 348-349.
215
least a quarter of a million before the war and more Greeks lived there than in
Athens itself. They dominated the exports – from figs to opium to carpets –
which coursed down from the Anatolian plateau in Asia Minor. Smyrna was a
Greek city, a centre of Greek learning and nationalism – but it was also a crucial
part of the Turkish economy.
“When Venizelos reached out for Smyrna and its hinterland, he was going
well beyond what could be justified in terms of self-determination. He was also
putting Greece into a dangerous position. Taking the fertile valleys of western
Asia Minor was perhaps necessary, as he argued, to protect the Greek colonies
along the coast. From another perspective, though, it created a Greek province
with a huge number of non-Greeks as well as a long line to defend against
anyone who chose to attack from central Anatolia. His great rival General
Metaxas, later dictator of Greece, warned of this repeatedly. ‘The Greek state is
not today ready for the government and exploitation of so extensive a territory.’
Metaxas was right.”375
The Italians and the Americans rejected the Greek claims on Smyrna; but the
British and the French were sympathetic. The deadlock was resolved when the
Italians walked out of the Peace Conference and landed troops on the coast of
Western Asia Minor. This gave Lloyd George his chance to intervene on behalf
of Venizelos. The Americans were won over, and the Greeks were told that they
could land in Smyrna and “wherever there is a threat of trouble or massacre”.
“The whole thing,” wrote Henry Wilson, the British military expert, “is mad and
bad”...376
Lord Curzon, the soon-to-be British Foreign Minister, was also worried,
though he was far from being a Turkophile. As he said: “The presence of the
Turks in Europe has been a source of unmitigated evil to everybody concerned.
I am not aware of a single interest, Turkish or otherwise, that during nearly 500
years has benefited from that presence.”377 “That the Turks should be deprived
of Constantinople is, in my opinion, inevitable and desirable as the crowning
evidence of their defeat in war, and I believe that it will be accepted with
whatever wrathful reluctance by the Eastern world.” “But,” he went on, “when
it is realized that the fugitives are to be kicked from pillar to post and that there
is to be practically no Turkish Empire and probably no Caliphate at all, I believe
that we shall be giving a most dangerous and most unnecessary stimulus to
Moslem passions throughout the Eastern world and that sullen resentment may
easily burst into savage frenzy”. And he called the landing in Smyrna “the
greatest mistake that had been made in Paris”.378
The landing took place on May 15, 1919. Unfortunately, it was handled badly,
and some hundreds of Turkish civilians were killed. Although the Greeks

375 Macmillan, Peacemakers, London: John Murray, 2003, pp. 440-441.
376 Macmillan, op. cit., p. 443.
377 Curzon, in Matthew Stewart, “Catastrophe at Smyrna”, History Today, vol. 54
(7), July, 2004, pp. 28-29.

378 Macmillan, op. cit., p. 451.
216
arrested those responsible and did all they could to make amends, international
opinion, stirred up by Turkish propaganda and the American representative in
Constantinople, Admiral Bristol, began to turn against them, ignoring the mass
slaughter of Greeks in Western Asia Minor, Pontus and the Caucasus. Then, on
May 16, Kemal Ataturk slipped out of Constantinople on an Italian pass, and
arrived in Samsun to organize the nationalist movement that eventually
defeated the Greeks and created the modern state of Turkey. By the end of the
year he had created a new Turkish capital in Ankara. Although, on May 20, the
Allies had recognized the Sultan, and not Ataturk, as Turkey’s legitimate ruler,
the Italians were already secretly negotiating with Ataturk, and the French were
not slow to follow suit. Only the British – more precisely, Lloyd George –
continued to support Venizelos.
On June 14, Venizelos asked the Supreme Council to allow the Greeks to
extend their occupation zone. However, the western powers said no. They were
exhausted from more than four years of war, had already been demobilizing
their armies around the globe, and with the defeat of the Whites in Russia, this
process accelerated. The last thing they wanted was another full-scale war with
the Turks. Besides, the Americans were concerned that their Standard Oil
Company should have large concessions in Mesopotamia, which they believed
Ataturk could give them, and the French wanted an intact Turkey in order to
pay back her pre-war loans. The British toyed with the idea of supporting an
independent Kurdistan in Ataturk’s rear, but by the spring of 1920 this plan had
been dropped. Soon they also abandoned their protectorates in Georgia and
Baku.
In April, 1920, the Sultan’s government appealed to the allies to help him
fight Ataturk, but the allies refused. In fact, the French were already arming
Ataturk by this time. In spite of this, in May, the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres
were announced. They were harsh on Turkey, ceding Smyrna to the Greeks,
founding a free Armenia and creating a free Kurdistan. The eastern part of Asia
Minor was divided up into French, Italian and British occupation zones;
Mesopotamia and the Straits were ceded to Britain, and Syria to France.
Constantinople was kept as an international city, and the Turkish army was
reduced to a token force. But none of this was going to become reality… The
Treaty also ignored the territorial concessions to Russia that had been agreed
during the Great War. This incensed the Soviets, who now began to support
Kemal…
As the Turkish nationalist forces advanced westwards, they encountered

British troops about one hundred miles from Constantinople. The British drove
them off, but called for reinforcements. There were no British reinforcements, so
it had to be Greek ones. In June, Lloyd George and the Supreme Council agreed
to Venizelos’ plans to move inland from Smyrna to relieve the pressure exerted
by Kemal on the British at Chanak.
“The British high commissioner in Constantinople wrote angrily to Curzon:

‘The Supreme Council, thus, are prepared for a resumption of general warfare;
217
they are prepared to do violence to their own declared principles; they are
prepared to perpetuate bloodshed indefinitely in the Near East, and for what?
To maintain M. Venizelos in power in Greece for what cannot in the nature of
things be more than a few years at the outside.’ Curzon agreed completely:
‘Venizelos thinks his men will sweep the Turks into the mountains. I doubt it
will be so.’”379
At first, however, the Greeks did well. They defeated the Turks at Chanak
and seized Eastern Thrace. By August, 1920, 100,000 soldiers had penetrated 250
miles inland. But the alarmed Allies then sent token forces of their own to
separate the Greeks from the Turks. Harold Nicolson wrote: “By turning their
guns against the Greeks – their own allies – the Great Powers saved Kemal’s
panic-stricken newly-conscripted army at the eleventh hour from final
destruction.”380
In October, the French signed a treaty with Ataturk, which enabled them to
withdraw their troops from Cilicia, which freed more Turkish troops for the
Greek front. The Turks were now receiving supplies from the Italians, the
French and the Soviets, and began to regroup in the centre of the country… In
November Venizelos and his liberal party suffered a stunning and quite
unexpected defeat in the Greek elections. King Constantine returned to power.
This made no difference to the war because the king felt honour-bound to try
and finish what Venizelos had begun. Or rather, it made things worse, because
the king then conducted a purge of pro-Venizelos officers which weakened the
army at a critical time.
On March 25, 1921, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Greek

revolution, meetings took place in 500 Cypriot churches, and petitions were
addressed to the English authorities that Cyprus should be reunited with Greece.
At the same time the Greek army in Asia Minor began its advance on Ankara;
soon they had won control of the whole of the western escarpment of the
Anatolian plateau. However, on March 31 the Turks conducted a successful
counter-attack.
The Greeks would have been well-advised to seek peace at this point, but
they did not. Massacres of Turks were taking place in the Greek-controlled
region, and of Greeks in the Turk-controlled region. Passions were too high for
either side to contemplate peace. In the summer King Constantine arrived in
Smyrna, and it was agreed to resume the advance. In August the Greeks
arrived at the summit of Mount Tchal, overlooking Ankara. However, they were
in a poor state, hungry, diseased and in danger of having their lines of
communication cut by Turkish irregulars. The Turks counter-attacked, and
September 11 the Greeks retreated to the west bank of the Sakarya river. “For
approximately nine months,” wrote Sir Winston Churchill, “the Turks waited

Macmillan, op. cit., p. 459.
379
Nicolson, History, 1919-1925, 1934, p. 250; quoted in Jean de Murat, The Great
380
Extirpation of Hellenism & Christianity in Asia Minor, Miami, 1999, p. 95.
218
comfortably in the warmth while the Greeks suffered throughout the icy-cold of
the severe winter”.381 Finally, on August 26, 1922, the Turks began a general
offensive. The Greek army was routed. Early in September the Turkish army
entered Smyrna, the Greek Metropolitan Chrysostom was murdered and the
city deliberately set on fire.
At this moment Lord Beaverbrook arrived in Constantinople on a special

mission for the British. On learning the facts, he told the American Admiral
Bristol: “Our behaviour to the Greeks was rotten! We have behaved to them
with dirty duplicity! They were prompted and supported by us in beginning
their campaign. But we abandoned them without support at their most critical
moment so that the Turks could exterminate them and destroy them forever!
Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, supported them and prompted them
himself to make the landing at Smyrna. He supported them with every means
except for giving them money which his Treasury did not have to give. And
now we are leaving them exposed to disaster!” Then he turned to Admiral
Bristol: “And what are you doing in this matter?”382
The Allies did nothing: allied ships in Smyrna were ordered to observe strict
“neutrality”, and the Greek government failed to send any of its own. It took the
heroic efforts of a Methodist minister from New York, Asa Jennings, to
galvanize the Greeks and the Allies into action, and a massive evacuation began.
Then the Greek government fell, the king resigned, Prime Minister Gounaris
was executed together with six army leaders383, and Colonels Nicholas Plastiras
and Stylianus Gonatas took control. But the evacuation continued, and
hundreds of thousands were rescued from certain death either through fire or at
the hands of the Turks. Nevertheless, it is calculated that 100,000 Greeks died in
Smyrna, with many thousands of other nationalities, while 160,000 were
deported into the interior in terrible conditions.
Meanwhile, writes Adam Tooze, “on 23 September 1922, a battalion-strength

detachment of Turkish troops entered the neutralized buffer zone within full
view of the British forces. London ordered an ultimatum to be delivered
demanding their immediate withdrawal. Britain and nationalist Turkey were on
the point of full-scale war. The prospect was daunting, not only because the
Turks outgunned the British on the spot, but because behind Ataturk, as behind
Germany at Rapallo, stood the Soviet Union. The Soviets were believed to have
offered submarines with which to break the Royal Navy’s stranglehold of the
eastern Mediterranean. On 18 September British naval forces were ordered to
sink any Soviet vessels that approached them. To make matters worse, a week
earlier the Greek Army rebelled against the ‘pro-German’ king they blamed for
the disaster in Anatolia. This was no fascist takeover avant la lettre. The aim of
the coup was to restore Lloyd George’s great ally, the pro-Western Prime
Minister Eleftherios Venizelos…

381 Churchill, Memoirs; in Murat, op. cit., p. 108.
382 Murat, op. cit., p. 128.
383 Barbara Jelavich, History of the Balkans, Cambridge University Press, 1983, vol. 2,
pp. 131-132, 173-174; "1922-1982", Orthodox Christian Witness, October 4/17, 1982.
219
“At no point, until the confrontation with Hitler over the Sudetenland, was
Britain closer to entering a major war. And Lloyd George’s position was based
on bluff. If fighting had broken out, the British would almost certainly have
been overwhelmed. Perhaps not surprisingly the British commander on the spot
chose not to deliver the aggressive ultimatum. On 11 October 1922 an armistice
was negotiated. War was averted…”384
But for Greece the tragedy was already accomplished. Fr. Raphael Moore
calculates that the following numbers of Greeks were killed in Asia Minor: in
1914 – 400,000 in forced labour brigades; 1922 - 100,000 in Smyrna; 1916-22 –
350,000 Pontians during forced deportations; 1914-22 – 900,000 from
maltreatment, starvation in all other areas.385 At the Treaty of Lausanne in July,
1923 the Turkish nation state was established: the “Great Idea” of Greek
nationalism was dead, drowned in a sea of blood…

385 Moore, ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU, January 17, 1999.
220
21. THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR
The Russian Civil War was one of the bloodiest conflicts in history.
According to Niall Ferguson, “almost as many people died during the Civil War
period as people of all nations during the First World War; one estimate for total
demographic losses in the Civil War period is as high as 8 million; around 40
per cent of these deaths can be attributed to the Bolshevik policies.”386 Simon
Sebag Montefiore calculates between 10 and 20 million.387 However, even this
may be a considerable underestimate: by August, 1920, 29 percent of the age
group 16-49 had been eliminated388, and Pipes estimates the human casualties of
the revolution – whose essence, as Lenin admitted, was civil strife - as 23 million
by 1922.
The defeat of the Whites has been attributed to many factors – the Reds’
occupation of the centre, the Whites’ difficulties of communication, the fitful
intervention of the western powers, the betrayal of the Whites by the Poles…
Certainly the Reds did not represent a formidable opponent at first. Having
destroyed the old Imperial army, it was extremely difficult for them to build up
an effective new army. By the spring of 1920 80% of the officer corps was staffed
by former tsarist officers, who services were retained only through blackmail -
the threat that their families would be massacred if they did not comply. Even
so, there were very many desertions to the Whites – 1.76 million in 1919 alone,
the Whites’ most successful year.389
But in spite of this advantage, the Whites failed ultimately because, as Elder
Aristocles of Moscow (+1918) said, “The spirit [among the Whites] is not
right.”390 For many of them were aiming, not at the restoration of Orthodoxy
and the Orthodox tsardom, but at the reconvening of the Constituent Assembly
or the restoration of the landowners’ lands. Of course, as noted above, if the
White armies approaching Yekaterinburg from the East in July, 1918 had
managed to rescue the Tsar alive, the task of the Whites would have been easier
– which is precisely why the Reds killed them. For as Trotsky said: “If the White
Guardists had thought of unfurling the slogan of the kulaks’ Tsar, we would not
have lasted for two weeks…” But even a living Tsar would probably have
availed little in view of the fact that in their majority neither the White soldiers
nor the populations whose interests they sought to represent were monarchists.
Thus in 1919, when the Romanov Great Princes who were in the Crimea
approached General Denikin with a request to enter the ranks of the White
Army, they were refused. “The reasons,” writes Prince Felix Yusupov, “were

386 Ferguson, The Pity of War. 1914-1918, London: Penguin, 1999, p. 392.
387 Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercius, 2012, p. 441.
388 Pipes, op. cit., p. 509.
389 Pipes, op. cit., p. 60.
390 Udivitel’nij Moskovskij Podvizhnik i Tselitel’ Starets Aristoklij (The Wonderful
Moscow Ascetic and Healer, Elder Aristocles), Moscow, 1997.
221
political: the presence of relatives of the imperial family in the ranks of the
White Army was not desirable. The refusal greatly upset us…”391
Certainly, the White armies could not be described as consciously

monarchist, with the possible exception of Wrangel’s towards the end. 392 Thus
the leading White General A.I. Denikin said during the war: “You think that I’m
going to Moscow to restore the throne of the Romanovs? Never!” And after the
war he wrote: “It is not given us to know what state structure Russia would
have accepted in the event of the victory of the White armies in 1919-20. I am
sure, however, that after an inevitable, but short-lived struggle of various
political tendencies, a normal structure would have been established in Russia
based on the principles of law, freedom and private property. And in any case –
no less democratic than that which the reposed Marshal [Pisludsky] introduced
in Poland…”393
Not having firmly Orthodox and monarchical convictions, but rather, as V.

Shambarov writes, “a complete absence of a political programme”394, the Whites
were bound to be disunited amongst themselves and weak in opposing Red
propaganda in their rear. This was especially evident on the northern front,
where Red propaganda was effective amongst both the White Russians and the
British.395 But it was hardly less true on the other fronts.
Thus Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) commented: “Unfortunately, the

most noble and pious leader of this [the White] army listened to those unfitting
counsellors who were foreign to Russia and sat in his Special council and
destroyed the undertaking. The Russian people, the real people, the believing
and struggling people, did not need the bare formula: ‘a united and undivided
Russia’. They needed neither ‘Christian Russia’, nor ‘Faithless Russia’, nor
‘Tsarist Russia’, nor ‘the Landowners’ Russia’ (by which they will always
understand a republic). They needed the combination of the three dear words –

391 Yusupov, Memuary (Memoirs), Moscow, 1998, p. 250.
392 Thus Protodeacon German Ivanov-Trinadtsaty writes: “Even if the White Army
officially supported the principle of ‘non-pre-determination’ in relation to the
future political order of Russia, according to the witness of General P.N. Wrangel,
90% of his Russian Army was composed of monarchists, and set itself only one
task – the overthrow of the Bolshevik yoke.” (“90 let Velikogo Rossijskogo
Iskhoda” (90 Years of the Great Russian Exodus), Nasha Strana, N 2905, December
4, 2010, p. 2).
393 Denikin, Kto spas Sovetskuiu vlast’ ot gibeli? (Who Saved Soviet Power from
Destruction?), Paris, 1937, in A.I. Denikin and A.A. von Lampe, Tragedia Beloj
Armii (The Tragedy of the White Army), Moscow, 1991, p. 8.
394 Shambarov, Belogvardeischina (Whiteguardism), Moscow, 2002.
395 Anthony Lockley, “Propaganda and the First Cold War in North Russia, 1918-
1919”, History Today, vol. 53 (9), September, 2003, pp. 46-53. As Michael Nazarov
points out, “there sat in the White governments at that time activists like, for
example, the head of the Archangel government Tchaikovsky, who gave to the
West as an explanation of the Bolshevik savageries the idea that ‘we put up with
the destructive autocratic regime for too long,… our people were less educated
politically than the other allied peoples’?” (Tajna Rossii (The Mystery of Russia),
Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, 1999, pp. 85-86)
222
‘for the Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland’. Most of all, they needed the first
word, since faith rules the whole of the state’s life; the second word was
necessary since the tsar guards and protects the first; and the third was needed
since the people is the bearer of the first words.”396
St. John Maximovich summed up the situation: “If the higher military
leaders, instead of beseeching his Majesty ‘on their knees’ to abdicate, had
carried out what they were bound to do in accordance with their oath, the
artificially incited rebellion would have been suppressed and Russia would
have been saved… A terrible sin before God and a state crime was carried out.
God only knows the extent to which any of them expiated their sin. But there
was hardly any open repentance. After the fall of the Provisional Government,
and the loss of the power it had seized, there was a call to struggle for Russia.
But although it elicited noble feelings among many and a corresponding
movement, there was no expression of repentance on the part of the main
criminals, who continued to think of themselves as heroes and saviours of
Russia. Meanwhile, Trotsky in his Memoirs admitted that they (the Soviets)
feared above all the proclamation of a Tsar, since then the fall of Soviet power
would have been inevitable. However, this did not happen, the ‘leaders’ were
also afraid. They inspired many to struggle, but their call was belated and their
courage did not save Russia. Some of them laid down their lives and shed their
blood in this struggle, but far more innocent blood was shed. It continues to be
poured out throughout Russia, crying out to heaven.”397
St. John was once asked: “Is it necessary to pray for the white generals?” He
said: “Of course, it is necessary to pray for them. But it is also necessary to
remember that they were all traitors to their oath."398
Another weakness of the Whites was their failure to curb anti-semitic

excesses in their ranks, especially among the Cossacks. However, as Pipes
writes, “while the Cossack detachments of the Southern Army committed
numerous atrocities (none can be attributed to the Volunteer army), a careful
reckoning of the pogroms by Jewish organizations indicates that the worst
crimes were the work of independent gangs of Ukrainians.”399
Hatred of Jews was common to all classes of society, of all ideological

persuasions. A 1920 estimate put the numbers of Jews killed by Whites and
Reds together at 150,000. 400 Now historians have paid more attention to
atrocities committed by the Whites than to those committed by the Reds.

396 Metropolitan Anthony, in Archbishop Nikon (Rklitsky), Zhizneopisanie
Blazhennejshago Antonia, Mitropolita Kievskago i Galitskago (A Life of his Beatitude
Anthony, Metropolitan of Kiev and Galich), New York, 1960, vol. VI, p. 4.
397 St. John Maximovich, in Fomin, op. cit., p. 286.
398 St. John Maximovich, according to the witness of Protopriest Michael Ardov.
399 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 109-110.
400 Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 392.
223
Nevertheless, the fact remains that shameful acts of plunder, torture and rape
were committed by the Whites. And while, as Pipes goes on to say, “it is
incorrect to lay wholesale blame for the massacres of the Jews on the White
Army, it is true that Denikin [commander of the Volunteer Army] remained
passive in the face of these atrocities, which not only stained the reputation of
his army but also demoralized it…
“Personally, Denikin was not a typical anti-Semite of the time: at any rate, in
his five-volume chronicle of the Civil War he does not blame the Jews either for
Communism or for his defeat. On the contrary, he expresses shame at their
treatment in his army as well as the pogroms and shows awareness of the
debilitating effect these had on the army’s morale. But he was a weak, politically
inexperienced man who had little control over the behaviour of his troops. He
yielded to the pressures of anti-Semites in his officer corps from fear of
appearing pro-Jewish and from a sense of the futility of fighting against
prevailing passions. In June 1919 he told a Jewish delegation that urged him to
issue a declaration condemning the pogroms, that ‘words here were powerless,
that any unnecessary clamor in regard to this question will only make the
situation of Jews harder, irritating the masses and bringing out the customary
accusations of “selling out to the Yids”.’ Whatever the justice of such excuses for
passivity in the face of civilian massacres, they must have impressed the army
as well as the population at large that the White Army command viewed Jews
with suspicion and if it did not actively encourage pogroms, neither was it
exercised about them…
“The only prominent public figure to condemn the pogroms openly and
unequivocally was the head of the Orthodox Church, Patriarch Tikhon. In an
Epistle issued on July 21, 1919, he called violence against Jews ‘dishonor for the
perpetrators, dishonour for the Holy Church’.”401
Paradoxically, the population was probably more anti-Bolshevik in the Red-

occupied areas than elsewhere – because they had had direct experience of
Bolshevik cruelty. As General A.A. von Lampe writes, “the border regions,
which naturally attracted to themselves the attention of those Russians who did
not want to submit to the dictatorship established in the centre, did not know
Bolshevism, that is, they probably did not know the results of its practical
application on the skin of the natives. They had not experienced the delights of
the Soviet paradise and were not able to exert themselves fully to avoid the
trials and torments that were coming upon them.
“The population of these provinces, of course, knew the war that was
exhausting the whole of Russia. The population also knew the revolution, which
gave them the so-called ‘freedoms’!… The population, with the complicity of the
soldiers, who had known on the front only the declaration of rights, but not the

401 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 110, 111.
224
obligations of the soldier, knew only about their rights and did not at all
represent to themselves that all these rights were bound up with certain
obligations.
“On the territory of this population a real war was being waged, a civil war
with its gunfights that did not always hit only those who were fighting in the
direct line of fire; with its repressions, not only in relation to people and their
property, but also to the settlements themselves, which sometimes, in the course
of a battle, were mercilessly and inexorably razed to the ground… The
population had to sacrifice their rights and their comforts. The White army was
not that equipped and organized army that we are accustomed to imagine when
we pronounce that word; immediately on coming into contact with the
population it was forced to take from it fodder, horses, reserves of food and,
finally, the people themselves!
“War on a given territory always brings with it many deprivations and

sufferings. War, and in particular civil war, feeds itself and supplements itself! And,
of course, the population could not welcome this; it, as I have already said,
thought not about its responsibilities, but only about its rights, and it expected
from the Whites only the immediate restoration of order and normal conditions
of life, not thinking on its side to offer it any help at all.
“The whole sum of unpleasantnesses brought by the drawn-out war was very
sharply experienced by the population; and at the same time it was being
forcibly corrupted by the Red and socialist propaganda promising them
deliverance from all these woes, promises of complete prosperity and complete
dominion, promises which, as we know, have seduced not only Russia, but are
disturbing no small part of the population of the whole world to this day…
“All this came down to the fact that the inconveniences caused by the Whites
ranged the population against them…
“The Reds threatened and threatened very unambiguously to take everything

and in fact took a part – the population was deceived and… relieved. The Whites
promised legality, and took only a little – and the population was embittered…
“The Reds promised everything, the Whites only that which was fitting
according to the law…
“The Reds had terror and machine-guns as arguments and measures of

persuasion; the Whites threatened – with the law…
“The Reds decisively rejected everything and raised arbitrariness into a law;
the Whites, in rejecting the Reds, of course could not also reject the methods of
arbitrariness and violence employed by the Reds…
“The population demanded nothing from the Reds since the only thing they
could wish for once they had fallen into their hands was peace, and they did
225
not, of course, demand that! But from the Whites the population demanded… a
miracle, they demanded that the Whites, with one wave of their white hands,
should remove all the blood from Russia…”402
But the bloodbath was only just beginning, and the longed-for miracle was
not forthcoming. For Russia was not yet worthy of it, nor able to profit from it
spiritually. Moreover, for the patriarch to bless the White armies would have
been equivalent to a call to the population in the Red-occupied areas to rise up
against their oppressors – a very difficult call, which would probably have
ended in disaster.
It is probably for these reasons that in mid-1918, in spite of the pleas of his
close advisor, Prince G.I. Trubetskoy, the Patriarch refused to bless a White
general in the south, saying that he was not engaging in politics.
But he did bless the one Orthodox general who had not betrayed his oath to
the Tsar, General Theodore Keller. Moreover, he secretly blessed the White
armies in Siberia under Admiral A.V. Kolchak, the most monarchist of the
White leaders and their formal head, who was close to the Church. Thus already
in November, 1918, in view of the lack of communication with the Patriarch, an
autonomous Temporary Higher Church Authority (THCA) was formed in
Siberia under the leadership of Archbishop Sylvester of Omsk.
At the request of Admiral Kolchak, the THCA moved to Omsk, and sent 2000
out of the 3500 clergy living on the territories occupied by Kolchak’s armies to
serve in the armies as military chaplains. In April, 1919 a Council of the THCA
took place in Omsk which anathematised the leaders of the Bolshevik party and
ordered the commemoration of Kolchak during Divine services as the Supreme
Ruler of Russia. In an address to the clergy the Council declared: “The pastors of
the Church have the moral right to struggle against Bolshevism, and nobody
must look on this struggle as unfitting to the Church, as the Church’s
interference into political and social affairs of the State.”403
Kolchak believed that the Orthodox Church combined with an authoritarian

system of power based on theocratic principles would help him stabilize the
situation in Siberia. “The spiritual power of the soldiers has weakened,” he said.
“Political slogans and the ideas of the Constituent Assembly and of an
undivided Russia no longer have any effect. Much more comprehensible is the
struggle for the faith, and this only religion can do.”404
Perhaps for this reason, in January, 1919 the Patriarch appeared to reverse his
apolitical stance, at any rate in relation to the Siberian armies. For to Admiral
Kolchak he sent a disguised priest with a tiny photograph of an icon of St.

402 Von Lampe, “Prichiny neudachi vooruzhennogo vystuplenia belykh” (The
Reasons for the Failure of the Whites’ Armed Intervention), Berlin, 1929, in
Denikin and von Lampe, op. cit., pp. 28-30.
403 Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 35-36.
226
Nicholas and the following message: “As is well known to all Russians and, of
course, to your Excellency, before this Icon, revered by the whole of Russia,
every day on December 6, the day of the Winter Nicholas feast, there was a
prayer service, which ended with the whole people chanting: ‘Save, O Lord, Thy
people…’ with all the worshippers on their knees. And then on December 6,
1917, after the October revolution, the people of Moscow, faithful to the faith
and tradition, at the end of the prayer service, chanted on their knees: ‘Save, O
Lord…’ Soldiers and police came up and drove away the worshippers, and fired
at the Icon from rifles and weapons. The holy hierarch on this icon on the wall
of the Kremlin was depicted with a cross in his left hand and a sword in his
right. The bullets of the fanatics flew around the holy hierarch without touching
the God-pleaser anywhere. However, fragments of shells from the explosions
tore off the plaster on the left side of the Wonderworker, which destroyed
almost the whole of the left side of the holy hierarch on the Icon with the hand
in which was the cross. On the same day, on the orders of the powers of the
antichrist this Holy Icon was draped with a big red flag with a satanic emblem.
It was firmly attached to the lower and side edges. On the wall of the Kremlin
the inscription was made: ‘Death to the Faith – the Opium of the People’. On
December 6 in the next year, many people gathered for the prayer service,
which was coming to its end undisturbed by anyone! But when the people fell
on their knees and began to chant: ‘Save, O Lord…’ the flag fell from the Icon of
the Wonderworker. The atmosphere of prayerful ecstasy cannot be described!
One had to see it, and he who saw it remembers it and feels it to this day. There
was chanting, sobbing, cries and hands raised on high, rifle fire, many were
wounded, many were killed… and… the place was cleared. The next day, early
in the morning, with My Blessing, it was declared in front of the whole people
what the Lord had shown through His God-pleaser to the Russian people in
Moscow on December 6, 1918.
“I am sending you a photographic copy of the Wonderworking Icon as my

blessing to you, Your Excellency, in your struggle with the temporary atheist
power over the suffering people of Russia… I ask you, honoured Alexander
Vasilyevich, look how the Bolsheviks succeeded in striking out the left hand of
the God-pleaser with the cross, which demonstrates as it were the temporary
trampling of the Orthodox faith… But the punishing sword of the God-pleaser
has remained as a help and blessing to your Excellency in your Christian
struggle for the salvation of the Orthodox Church in Russia.”405

405 Kniazev, V.V. Zhizn’ za vsekh i smert’ za vsekh (Life for all and death for all),
Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, pp. 20-23; S. Volkov, Admiral Aleksandr
Vasilievich Kolchak, Moscow, 1991, pp. 70-81; Fr. Stefan Krasovitsky, "Otvet
apologetu kommunisticheskoj ideologii" (Reply to an Apologist of the Communist
Ideology), Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox Russia), N 1553, February 15/28, 1996, p.
15. According to another source, the Patriarch sent Bishop Nestor with the icon of
St. Nicholas to Kolchak in Omsk with the instruction: “Tell the people that if they
do not unite and take Moscow again by armed force, then we will perish and Holy
Rus’ will perish with us” (Gubanov, op. cit., p. 131).
227
However, this anti-Soviet stance was not maintained. On October 8, 1919,
much to the sorrow of the Whites, the Patriarch issued a decree entitled “On the
non-interference of the clergy in the civil war”, in which he called on the clergy
to “refrain from participation in political parties and demonstrations”, and to
submit to the “orders” of the Soviet authorities. “People point out that with a
change in authority the Church servers sometimes welcome this change with
the ringing of bells and the organization of triumphant services and various
ecclesiastical festivities. But if this happens in some places, it takes place either
at the demand of the new authorities themselves, or in accordance with the
desire of the masses of the people, but not at all at the initiative of the Church
servers, who in accordance with their rank must stand higher and beyond all
political interests. They must remember the canonical rules of the Holy Church,
by which She forbids Her servers from interfering in the political life of the
country, and from belonging to any parties, and still more from making service
rites and sacred actions into an instrument of political demonstrations.”406
This statement marks the beginning of a significant shift in the Church’s

attitude from one of open enmity towards the Bolsheviks to qualified neutrality
and civil obedience.
Izvestia commented on it as follows: “The Patriarch and the circles around

him have evidently become convinced of the solidity of Soviet power and
become more cautious. [Soviet power], of course, is not expecting that the
Patriarch should invite the clergy subject to him to express sympathy for Soviet
power. The most that these circles are capable of is neutrality. Such tactics are
recommended by the Patriarch’s appeal… In any case, the epistle of the
Patriarch is characteristic in this respect, that it involuntarily confirms the
strength of Soviet power, and that the Orthodox clergy are now too frightened
to quarrel with it openly.”407
This shift in attitude took place when Denikin’s Volunteer Army looked on
the point of breaking through to Moscow. So we cannot excuse it on the
grounds that the Patriarch thought that the Reds were going to win the war.
More probably, the Patriarch realised that the Whites, though better than the
Reds, were motivated, as we have seen, not so much by the positive ideal of
Orthodoxy as by the negative ideal of anti-Bolshevism – and only that which is
truly positive and spiritual can merit the blessing of God and His Church in
order to conquer the enemies of God and the Church.
It may well have been right for the Patriarch not to follow the example of St.
Hermogen and call the people to rise up against Bolshevism. Nevertheless, the
failure of the Church to issue an unequivocal condemnation of Bolshevism was
a weakness that her enemies, both political and ecclesiastical, were quick to
exploit. The Patriarch’s anti-Soviet statements were construed as dabbling in

406 Regelson, op. cit., p. 237; Sokolov, op. cit., p. 16; Shkarovskii, “The Russian
Orthodox Church”, op. cit., p. 423; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 38-39; Zhukov, op.
cit, p. 92.
407 Izvestia, October 22, 1919; in Zhukov, op. cit., pp. 92-93, footnote 50.
228
politics; while his refusal to bless the White armies was construed as the
equivalent of a blessing on the Soviet State…
However, even if the Church did not expose the evil of Bolshevism with
complete clarity, the Bolsheviks were providing their own proofs of their
antichristianity by their behaviour. Thus Shkarovskii writes: “The spread of civil
war was accompanied by a hardening of Bolshevik anti-religious policies. The
RKP(b) anticipated that religious faith and the Church would soon die away
completely, and that with a ‘purposeful education system’ and ‘revolutionary
action’, including the use of force, they could be overcome fairly quickly. At a
later stage Soviet atheist literature referred to this period as ‘Sturm und Drang’.
In the programme adopted at the Eighth RKP(b) Congress in March 1919, the
party proposed a total assault on religion, and talked of the coming ‘complete
disappearance of religious prejudice’.
“In order to attain this goal the authorities brought in ever-increasing

restrictions. On 3 April 1919 the Commissariat of Justice decreed that voluntary
monetary collections among the faithful were permissible ‘only for the needs of
a particular church building’. At the beginning of 1919 a complete ban was
introduced on religious instruction for anybody under the age of 18. Existing
monasteries were only permitted to function if they turned themselves into
labour communes or workshops. The closure of cloisters began at the end of
1918. By 1921, 722 monasteries had been nationalized, over half of those existing
in Russia. From the summer of 1918 the authorities waged a campaign to
destroy ‘holy relics’. This offended the faithful and was a crude intervention in
the affairs of the Church, an attempt to regulate its way of life and worship. In
the spring of 1919 these actions became widespread, and became a means of
conducting anti-religious propaganda by deeds. On 14 March the Commissariat
of Justice decreed that they should be welcomed. The authorities also looked
upon the Church as a ready source of additional state funds. In 1919 they began
a speculative trade in valuable artefacts, including items which they had seized
from churches….
“… Despite all the obstacles placed in its way, the Orthodox Church was able
to conserve its structure during the civil war. Thousands of small churches
which were supposed to have been closed down, even in the capitals, continued
to function, as did religious schools. Charitable works continued, and religious
processions took place, until the autumn of 1921 in Petrograd.
“A very small number of priests served in the Red Army. The right-wing
section of the clergy was active in its support of the White cause… Military
chaplains served with the White armies – Kolchak had around 2,000, Denikin
had more than 1,000, and Wrangel had over 500. All this provided further
ammunition for the Bolsheviks’ anti-clerical campaign. During 1920 state bodies
continued the tactic of excluding religion from all aspects of life. A circular
issued by the People’s Commissariat of Justice on 18 May resulted in almost all
the diocesan councils being liquidated in Russia. A further 58 holy relics were
229
uncovered by the summer.408 On 29 July the Sovnarkom approved a proposal
from the justice commissariat ‘On the Countrywide Liquidation of Relics’.
However, the authority of the Church prevented this proposal from being
carried out in full. Eight months late, on 1 April 1921, a secret circular issued by
the commissariat admitted defeat on this score. By the autumn of 1920 the
nationalization of church property had been completed. A report produced by
the Eighth Department of the Commissariat of Justice stated that 7,150 million
roubles, 828,000 desiatiny of church lands, and 1,112 buildings for rent had been
expropriated by the state.”409
Still more staggering than the material losses were the losses in lives. Thus in
1918-19, 28 bishops and 1,414 priests were killed410; estimates of numbers of
clergy killed between 1918 and 1921 range from 1434 to 9000411; while by the end
of 1922 2233 clergy of all ranks and two million laymen had been executed.412
These figures prove the truth of Vladimir Rusak’s assertion: “The Bolsheviks’
relationship to the Church was realized independently of legislation. Violence,
bayonets and bullets – these were the instruments of the Bolsheviks’ ‘ideological’
struggle against the Church.”413
However, as Shkarovskii writes, “the first wave of attacks on religion had not
brought the results which had been expected by such Bolshevik theorists as N.I.
Bukharin. The majority of the population of Russia remained religious, for all
the barbaric methods which had been tried to tear people away from the Church.
The patriarchate also emerged from the civil war undefeated.”414
Moreover, with the suppression of all military and political opposition to the
Bolsheviks, the Church remained the only significant anti-communist force in

408 The campaign was counter-productive from the Bolsheviks’ point of view
because the relics of the saints were often found to be incorrupt. Thus “St. Sergius
of Radonezh was said to have been found perfectly preserved, to the rapturous joy
of the onlookers and the consternation of the monastery’s communist custodian,
who was subsequently beaten up by the crowd.” (Richard Overy, The Dictators,
London: Penguin, 2005, p. 274). The relics of St. Theodosius of Chernigov were
also found to be incorrupt (see photograph opposite page 182 in I.M. Andreyev,
Russia’s Catacomb Saints, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 1982. (V.M.)
409 Shkarovskii, “The Russian Orthodox Church”, op. cit., pp. 422, 423.
410 Ermhardt, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ i kommunisticheskoe gosudarstvo, 1917-
1941 (The Russian Orthodox Church and the Communist State, 1917-1941),
Moscow: Terra, 1996, p. 69.
411 Edward E. Roslof, Red Priests, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2002, p. 27.

412 Shumilin, in Arfed Gustavson, The Catacomb Church, 1960, p. 34. In Petrograd
alone 550 clergy and monks of all ranks were shot in the period 1917-1922 (Anatoly
Latyshev, "Provesti besposhadnij Massovij Terror Protiv Popov" (The Conducting
of Ruthless Mass Terror against the Priests), Argumenty i Fakty (Arguments and
Facts), N 26, 1996).
413 Rusak, Pir Satany, op. cit.
414 Shkarovskii, op. cit., pp. 423-424.
230
the country.415 So the Bolsheviks were compelled to resort to a kind of warfare
that had a far more sophisticated ideological content...
Kirill Alexandrov sums up the losses of this first stage of the

revolution: “I. The general losses through those who died during the
years of the Civil War (1917–1920), in the first place as a result of a
worsening of the general conditions of under the influence of the
Leninist experiments, constituted not less than 7.5 million peope.
Included in this figure are the victims of the terror, the armed struggle
and banditism. Some specialists have given higher figures, proceeding
from the difference in the numbers of the population between 1917
and 1920-22…
“II. The famine of 1921-22 was not only the result of the climatic
drought in the Volga region, but also a direct consequence of the
destruction of the village economy by the politics of ‘war
communism’. The ban on ‘bourgeois’ trade in accordance with Marxist
theory, the robbery of the countryside through Leninist food
battalions, the annihilation of free entrepreneurship led to a reduction
in the area seeded and the destruction of the food reserves of Russia.
There were famines also in Tsarist Russia, but the indices of death by
famine in the Leninist state look anomalous. Under Alexander III, in
1891-92, about 375,000 people died from famine and the cholera that
accompanied it. In 1921-22, according to the estimates of the specialist
demographers of the Russian Academy of Sciences more than 4.5
million died.
“Moreover, even during the introduction of the New Economic

Policy, which assisted the reanimation of the tortured country, Lenin
had no intention of condemning the practice of ‘war communism’.
Speaking at the 9 th Congress of the Soviets in December, 1921, the
leader of the communists declared that the experience acquired by the
party in 1918-20 ‘was majestic, lofty and great, and had a universal
significance’…” 416
22. FROM WAR COMMUNISM TO NEP

415 It should be remembered that at this stage this was exclusively an anti-Orthodox
rather than an anti-religious struggle; for Lenin viewed Islam as an ally in

spreading world revolution to the countries of the East, and he did not persecute
the Catholics or Protestants.
416 Alexandrov, “Stalin i sovremennaia Rossia: vybor istoricheskikh otsenik ili
vybor buduschego?” (Stalin and contemporary Russia: a choice of historical

estimates or a choice of the future?), report read at the Russian Centre, San
Francisco, February 3, 2017.
231
The Whites had effectively lost the Civil War by November, 1920, when the
last White forces under General Wrangel were evacuated from the Crimea to
Constantinople. The Reds were now free to redirect their forces to the goal of
world revolution, and invaded Poland. However, things did not go all their way,
and they were forced: (1) to abandon the goal of world revolution in view of the
Red Army’s defeat on the Vistula in Poland; (2) to abandon grain requisitioning
and the militarization of labour in view of the continuation of major peasant
rebellions in Western Siberia and Tambovschina, and a major rebellion of the
sailors in Kronstadt; and (3) to clamp down hard on dissent within the
Communist Party itself.
1. The Polish War. At a critical point in the Civil War in 1919, the Poles under
General Pilsudski decided to enter into negotiations with the Reds. This,
according to General Denikin, was the decisive event that guaranteed the defeat
of the Whites. Be that as it may, the Poles made up for this in the next year by
decisively defeating the Red Army on the banks of the Vistula in August, 1920.
The Bolsheviks’ defeat suggested to them, as Adam Zamoyski writes, “that

the whole world was ranged against them, and that the masses in other
countries could not be relied on to support them. This gave rise to a siege
mentality, isolationism and the doctrine of ‘communism in one country’,
expressed to the outside world in a sulky, defensive aggressiveness. Hurt pride
is in evidence in the attitude of most of Russia’s leaders to the rest of the world,
beginning with Lenin.
“The isolation in which Russia spent the 1920s and 1930s undoubtedly
assisted Stalin in his seizure of power and his reign of terror, and it ultimately
pushed her into the arms of the other regime born of humiliation and fired by a
determination to overthrow the Versailles settlement – Nazi Germany. And
when his troops marched into Poland in support of the Germans in 1939, Stalin
showed that he had learned the lessons of 1919-20 [he served as political
commissar in the Russo-Polish war]. There would be no attempt to win the
Poles over to communism; his previous experience had taught him that they
were not amenable. So he set about extirpating not only nobles, priests and
landowners, but also doctors, nurses and veterinary surgeons, and in general
anyone who might show the slightest sign of independent thought or even
curiosity – the scores of charges which entailed immediate arrest and
deportation included possessing a stamp collection. Over 1,500,000 people were
caught up in this fine net. Army officers, for whom Stalin felt a particular hatred,
were murdered in the forest of Katyn and elsewhere, other ranks and civilians
were despatched to the Gulag, where a majority died. After 1945 he would do
his best to extend the same principles to the rest of Poland.
“How differently things might have turned out in Russia had some kind of
peace been negotiated back at the beginning of 1919, and the whole war avoided,
it would be idle to speculate. It would be equally pointless, if fascinating, to try
to extrapolate the consequences of a Russian victory at Warsaw in 1920: Poland
and the Baltic states would have been turned into Soviet republics, followed
232
almost certainly by Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, and very probably
Germany, and the rest of Europe would have been profoundly affected; whether
this would have led to world revolution or an international crusade leading to
the destruction of Soviet Russia is anybody’s guess….”417
Abandoning world revolution went right against one of the central tenets of
Leninism. On arriving in Petrograd in April, 1917, Lenin had declared: “I am
happy to greet in your persons the victorious Russian revolution, and greet you
as the vanguard of the world-wide proletarian army”. The two went together: in
fact, Lenin thought that revolution in Russia would fail if it were not
transformed – soon - into world-wide revolution. Nor was it an impossible
prospect in the early years after the Great War, when disillusion with western
civilization was at its height. For here, as Brendon writes, “was the promise of
an end to the capitalist system, which institutionalised greed and exploitation,
whose by-products were unjust empires and cruel wars. Instead each would
give according to his ability and receive according to his need. The Communist
creed tapped the idealism of the generation which mourned the lost generation.
Old Socialists like George Lansbury said that the Bolsheviks were ‘doing what
Christians call the Lord’s work’ and that Lenin’s devotion to the cause of
humanity made his whole life like ‘that of one of the saints of old’ [!].
Communism also appealed to those who craved power. Soon Communist
parties were springing up everywhere, encouraged by money and propaganda
from Russia (in Britain, for example, the Soviet trade delegation sold tsarist
diamonds to subsidise the Daily Herald). In 1919 Red revolution broke out in
Germany and Hungary. In 1920 some 35 countries sent delegates to the second
Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) at Petrograd. It
predictably resolved that ‘The International Proletariat will not sheathe its
sword until Soviet Russia become a link in the federation of Soviet republics of
the whole world.’”418
But the Soviet defeat on the Vistula put an end to those hopes – for the
present. And with that defeat the mood of the masses changed, aided not a little
by the foolish tactics of the Comintern in refusing to allow alliances with any
more moderate socialist party. “The world rejected the revolutionary gospel of
the Bolsheviks just as it had rejected that of the Jacobins and for much the same
reasons… The German and Hungarian uprisings were suppressed. In America,
where Secretary of State Lansing warned that Bolshevik forces ‘are menacing
the present social order in nearly every European country and… may have to be
reckoned with even in this country’, there was a Red Scare. In England the
Labour party repudiated Communism, which was not surprising in view of
Lenin’s offer to support their leaders as a rope supports a hanged man. In Japan
the authorities passed a law against ‘thought crime’ and the ‘thought police’ (by
no means a figment of George Orwell’s imagination) devised new methods of
reminding offenders of their loyalty to the Emperor. In France the Right
branded Communism as a German aberration and the Left split over whether to

417 Zamoyski, Warsaw 1920, London: Harper Press, 2008, pp. 133-134.
418 Brendon, op. cit., pp. 11-12.
233
embrace it. In Italy fear of Communism helped to bring Mussolini’s Fascists to
power…”419
2. The Peasant Rebellions. The peasants had never served the Bolsheviks
with enthusiasm, and now, after the defeat of the Whites, they rose up against
them. “Until March 1921,” writes Richard Pipes, “the Communists tried and in
some measure succeeded in placing the national economy under state control.
Later this policy came to be known as ‘War Communism’ – Lenin himself first
used this term in April 1921 as he was abandoning it. It was a misnomer coined
to justify the disastrous consequences of economic experimentation by the
alleged exigencies of the Civil War and foreign intervention. Scrutiny of
contemporary records, however, leaves no doubt that these policies were, in fact,
not so much emergency responses to war conditions as an attempt as rapidly as
possible to construct a Communist society. War Communism involved the
nationalization of the means of production and most other economic assets, the
abolition of private trade, the elimination of money, the subjection of the
national economy to a comprehensive plan, and the introduction of forced labor.
“These experiments left Russia’s economy in shambles. In 1920-21, compared

to 1913, large-scale industrial production fell by 82 percent, worker productivity
by 74 percent, and the production of cereals by 40 percent. The cities empty as
their inhabitants fled to the countryside in search of food: Petrograd lost 70
percent of its population, Moscow over 50 percent; the other urban and
industrial centers also suffered depletions. The non-agricultural labor force
dropped to less than a half of what it had been when the Bolsheviks took power:
from 3.6 to 1.5 million. Workers’ real wages declined to one-third of the level of
1913-14. A hydralike black market, ineradicable because indispensable, supplied
the population with the bulk of consumer goods. Communist policies had
succeeded in ruining the world’s fifth-largest economy and depleting the wealth
accumulated over centuries of ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’. A contemporary
Communist economist called the economic collapse a calamity ‘unparalleled in
the history of mankind’.
“The Civil War ended, for all practical purposes, in the winter of 1919-20, and
if war needs had been the driving force behind these policies, now would have
been the time to give them up. Instead, the year that followed the crushing of
the White armies saw the wildest economic experiments, such as the
‘militarization’ of labor and the elimination of money. The government
persevered with forcible confiscations of peasant food ‘surplus’. The peasants
responded by hoarding, reducing the sown acreage, and selling produce on the
black market in defiance of government prohibitions. Since the weather in 1920
happened to be unfavourable, the meagre supply of bread dwindled still further.
It was now that the Russian countryside, until then relatively well off compared
to the cities in terms of food supplies, began to experience the first symptoms of
famine.

419 Brendon, op. cit., p. 12.
234
“The repercussions of such mismanagement were not only economic but also
social: they eroded still further the thin base of Bolshevik support, turning
followers into enemies and enemies into rebels. The ‘masses’, whom Bolshevik
propaganda had been telling that the hardships they had endured in 1918-19
were the fault of the ‘White Guards’ and their foreign backers, expected the end
of hostilities to bring back normal conditions. The Civil War had to some extent
shielded the Communists from the unpopularity of their policies by making it
possible to justify them as militarily necessary. This explanation could no longer
be invoked once the Civil War was over…
“It now began to dawn even on those willing to give the Bolsheviks the
benefit of the doubt, that they had been had, that the true objective of the new
regime was not improving their lot but holding on to power, and that to this
end it was prepared to sacrifice their well-being and even their very lives. This
realization produced a national rebellion unprecedented in its dimensions and
ferocity. The end of one Civil War led immediately to the outbreak of another:
having defeated the White armies, the Red Army now had to battle partisan
bands, popularly known as ‘Greens’ but labelled by the authorities ‘bandits’,
made up of peasants, deserters, and demobilized soldiers.
“In 1920 and 1921, the Russian countryside from the Black Sea to the Pacific
was the scene of uprisings that in numbers involved and territory affected
greatly eclipsed the famous peasant rebellions of Stenka Razin and Pugachev
under tsarism. Its true dimensions cannot even now be established, because the
relevant materials have not yet been properly studied. 420 The Communist
authorities have assiduously minimized its scope: thus, according to the Cheka,
in February, 1921, there occurred 118 peasant risings. In fact, there were
hundreds of such uprisings, involving hundreds of thousands of partisans.
Lenin was in receipt of regular reports from this front of the Civil War, which
included detailed maps covering the entire country, indicating that vast
territories were in rebellion. Occasionally, Communist historians give us a
glimpse of the dimensions of this other Civil War, conceding that some ‘bands’
of ‘kulaks’ numbered 50,000 and more rebels. An idea of the extent and
savagery of the fighting can be obtained from official figures of the losses
suffered by the Red Army units engaged against the rebels. According to recent
information, the number of Red Army casualties in the campaign of 1921-22,
which were waged almost exclusively against peasants and other domestic
rebels, came to 237,908. The losses among the rebels were almost certainly as
high and probably much higher.”421
The Peasant Civil War finally failed because the rebels were scattered and
disunited, and the Reds were able to destroy each rising separately. Moreover,
with the exception of the rebellion in the Tambov region led by Antonov, they

420 One indication of the scale of the suffering is the fact that in Western Siberia,
the scene of one of the largest peasant rebellions, more priests were killed in 1921
than in any other year – a pattern not found in any other region. Nearly one
hundred priests were shot in the Tobolsk area alone. (V.M.)
421 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 371-373.
235
“aimed not to march on Moscow so much as to cut themselves off from its
influence”.422 So those who wanted power most ended by clining onto it…
3. The Worker Rebellions. But terrible as the peasant rebellions were, they
were not such a direct threat to the regime as the rebellions of those who
constituted the primary support of the Bolsheviks – the workers of Petrograd
and the sailors of Kronstadt. And so on March 7, Trotsky ordered Tukhachevsky,
the commander of the defeated Red Army in Poland, to attack the sailors across
the ice at Kronstadt.
The next day the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Kronstadt

published a statement that condemned the revolution in no uncertain terms: “In
carrying out the October Revolution, the working class hoped to achieve its
liberation. The outcome has been even greater enslavement of human beings.
Power has passed from a monarchy based on the police and gendarmerie into
the hands of usurpers – Communists – who have given the toilers not freedom
but the daily dread of ending up in the torture chambers of the Cheka, the
horrors of which exceed many times the rule of tsarism’s gendarmerie. The
bayonets, the bullets, the coarse shouts of the oprichniki from the Cheka – this is
the fruit of the long struggles and sufferings of Soviet Russia’s toilers. The
glorious emblem of the toilers’ state – the hammer and sickle – Communist
authority has in truth replaced with the bayonet and the iron bar, created to
protect the tranquil and careless life of the new bureaucracy, the Communist
commissars and functionaries. But basest and most criminal of all is the moral
slavery introduced by the Communists: they have also laid their hands on the
inner world of the working people, compelling them to think only as they do.
By means of state-run trade unions, the workers have been chained to their
machines, so that labor is not a source of joy but a new serfdom. To the protests
of peasants, expressed in spontaneous uprisings, and those of the workers,
whom the very conditions of life compel to strike, they have responded with
mass executions and an appetite for blood that by far exceeds that of tsarist
generals. Toiling Russia, the first to raise the red banner of the liberation of labor,
is thoroughly drenched with the blood of the victims of Communist rule. In this
sea of blood, the Communists drown all the great and bright pledges and
slogans of the toilers’ revolution. It has become ever more clear, and by now is
self-evident, that the Russian Communist Party is not the protector of the
working people that it claims to be, that the interests of the working people are
foreign to it, and that, having gained power, its only fear is of losing it, and
hence that all means [to that end] are permissible: slander, violence, deception,
murder, revenge on the families of those who have revolted… The current
revolt finally offers the toilers a chance to have their freely elected, functioning
soviets, free of violent party pressures, to refashion the state-run trade unions
into free associations of workers, peasants, and the working intelligentsia. At
last, the police baton of Communist autocracy is smashed…”423

422 Oliver Figes, Peasant Russia, Civil War, Oxford, 1989, pp. 322-323; quoted in
Pipes, op. cit., p. 375.

423 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 383-384.
236
Sadly, it was the Kronstadt sailors, not the “Communist autocracy”, that
were smashed; but their defeat, coinciding with the crushing of a peasant
rebellion in Western Siberia that interrupted vital food shipments for two weeks,
marked a critical turning-point. “On March 15, as the Red Army stood poised to
launch the final assault on the naval base, Lenin announced what was to become
the linchpin of the New Economic Policy, the abandonment of arbitrary food
confiscation known as prodrazverstka in favor of a tax in kind. Prodrazverstka
had been the most universally despised feature of ‘War Communism’ –
despised by peasants, whom it robbed of their produce, but also by the urban
population, whom in deprived of food.
“Requisitioning had been enforced in an appallingly arbitrary manner. The

Commissariat of Supply determined the quantity of foodstuffs it required – a
quantity determined by what was needed to feed the consumers in the cities
and the armed forces, without regard to what the producers could provide. This
figure it broke down, on the basis of inadequate and often outdated information,
into quotas for each province, district, and village. The system was as inefficient
as it was brutal: in 1920, for example, Moscow set the prodrazverska at 583
million puds (9.5 million tons) but managed to collect only half that amount.
“Collectors acted on the premise that peasants lied when they claimed that
the grain they were forced to surrender was not surplus but essential to provide
food for their families and seed, and that they could compensate for the loss by
digging up their hoard. This the peasants may have been able to do in 1918 and
1919. But by 1920 they had little if anything left to hoard: as a result,… in the
case of Tambov province, prodrazverstka, even if incompletely realized, left
them with next to nothing. Nor was this all. Zealous collectors impounded not
only ‘surplus’ and food needed for sustenance, but grain set aside for the next
season’s sowing: one high Communist official admitted that in many areas the
authorities appropriated one hundred percent of the harvest. Refusal to pay
resulted in the confiscation of livestock and beatings. In addition, collecting
agents and local officials, empowered to label resistance to their demands as
‘kulak’-inspired, or ‘counterrevolutionary’, felt at liberty to appropriate food,
cattle, even clothing for their personal use. The peasants resisted fiercely: in the
Ukraine alone, they were reported to have killed 1,700 requisition officials.
“A more self-defeating policy would be hard to conceive. The system

operated on the absurd principle that the more the peasant produced the more
would be taken from him; from which it followed with inexorable logic that he
would produce little if anything beyond his own needs. The richer a region, the
more it was subjected to government plunder, and the more prone it was to
curtail production: between 1916-17 and 1920-21, the decline in the sown
acreage in the center of the country, an area of grain deficits, was 18 percent,
whereas in the main region of grain surpluses it was 33 percent. And since
yields per acre declined from shortage of fertilizer and draft animals as well,
grain production, which in 1913 had been 80.1 million tons, dropped in 1920 to
46.1 million tons. If in 1918 and 1919 it has still been possible to extract a
237
‘surplus’, by 1920 the peasant had learned his lesson and made sure there was
nothing to surrender. It apparently never occurred to him that the regime would
take what it wanted even if it meant that he went breadless and seedless.
“Prodrazverstka had to be abandoned for both economic and political

reasons. There was nothing left to take from the peasant, who faced starvation;
and it fuelled nationwide rebellions. The Politburo finally decided to drop
prodrazverstka on March 15. The new policy was made public on March 23.
Henceforth, the peasants were required to turn over to government agencies a
fixed amount of grain; arbitrary confiscations of ‘surplus’ were terminated…
“While the economic benefits of the new agrarian policy were not
immediately apparent, the political rewards were reaped at once. The
abandonment of food requisitioning took the wind out of the sails of rebellion.
The following year, Lenin could boast that peasant uprisings, which previously
had ‘determined the general picture of Russia’, had virtually ceased…”424
At the same time, Moscow introduced “The New Economic Policy” (NEP), a
humiliating retreat from Communist ideals allowing the return of some small-
scale private trade. It worked. “The benefits appeared first and foremost in
agriculture. In 1922, thanks to donations and purchases of seed grain abroad as
well as favourable weather, Russia enjoyed a bumper crop. Encouraged by the
new tax policy to increase the cultivated acreage, peasants expanded production:
the acreage sown in 1925 equalled that of 1913. Yields, however, remained lower
than before the Revolution, and the harvest proportionately smaller: as late as
1928, on the eve of collectivization, it was 10 percent below the 1913 figure…”425
4. The Tenth Party Congress. The year that climaxed in the crushing of the
peasants’ and Kronstadt sailors’ rebellions had revealed that the popularity of
the Communist Party was at an all-time low. Characteristically, Lenin reacted,
not by brightening up the party’s image, but by crushing dissent within it. In the
same fateful month of March, 1921, the Tenth Party Congress tightened the
screws on political dissent at just the moment when a degree of economic
liberalization was being introduced, thereby destroying the last bastion of free
speech in the country.
It did so by crushing a movement called “the Workers’ Opposition” that was

led by Alexander Shliapnikov and his mistress, Alexandra Kollontai. For “the
emergence of the Workers’ Opposition,” writes Pipes, “brought into the open a
smouldering antagonism that went back to the late nineteenth century, between
a minority of politically active workers and the intellectuals who claimed to
represent them and speak in their behalf. Radical workers, usually more
inclined to syndicalism that Marxism, cooperated with the socialist intelligentsia
and allowed themselves to be guided by them because they knew they were
short of political experience. But they never ceased to be aware of a gulf

424 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 389-391, 392.
425 Pipes, op. cit., p. 395.
238
between themselves and their partners: and once a ‘workers’ state’ had come
into being, they saw no reason for submitting to the authority of the ‘white
hands’.
“The concerns expressed by the Workers’ Opposition stood at the center of

the deliberations of the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921. Shortly before it
convened, Kollontai released for internal party use a brochure in which she
assailed the regime’s bureaucratization. (Party rules prohibited venting party
disputes in public.) The Workers’ Opposition, she argued, made up exclusively
of labouring men and women, felt that the Party’s leadership had lost touch
with labor: the higher up the ladder of authority one ascended, the less support
there was for the Workers’ Opposition. This happened because the Soviet
apparatus had been taken over by class enemies who despised Communism: the
petty bourgeoisie had seized control of the bureaucracy, while the ‘grand
bourgeoisie’, in the guise of ‘specialists’, had taken over industrial management
and the military command.
“The Workers’ Opposition submitted to the Tenth Congress two resolutions,

one dealing with party organization, the other with the role of trade unions. It
was the last time that independent resolutions – that is, resolutions not
originating with the Central Committee – would be discussed at a party
congress. The first document spoke of a crisis in the party caused by the
perpetuation of habits of military command acquired during the Civil War, and
the alienation of the leadership from the labouring masses. Party affairs were
conducted without either glasnost’ or democracy, in a bureaucratic style, by
elements mistrustful of workers, causing them to lose confidence in the party
and to leave it in droves. To remedy this situation, the party should carry out a
thorough purge to rid itself of opportunistic elements and increase worker
involvement. Every Communist should be required to spend at least three
months a year doing physical labor. All functionaries should be elected by and
accountable to their members: appointments from the Center should be made
only in exceptional cases. The personnel of the central organs should be
regularly turned over: the majority of the posts should be reserved for workers.
The focus of party work should shift from the Center to the cells.
“The resolution on trade unions was no less radical. It protested the

degradation of unions, to the point where their status was reduced to ‘virtual
zero’. The rehabilitation of the country’s economy required the maximum
involvement of the masses: ‘The systems and methods of construction based on
a cumbersome bureaucratic machine stifle all creative initiative and
independence’ of the producers. The party must demonstrate trust in the
workers and their organizations. The national economy ought to be reorganized
from the bottom up by the producers themselves. In time, transferred to a new
body, an All-Russian Congress of Producers, not appointed by the Communist
Party, but elected by the trade unions and ‘productive’ associations. (In the
discussion of this resolution, Shliapnikov denied that the terms ‘producers’
included peasants.) Under this arrangement, the Party would confine itself to
politics, leaving the direction of the economy to labor.
239
“These proposals by veteran Communists from labor ranks revealed a
remarkable ignorance of Bolshevik theory and practice. Lenin, in his opening
address, minced no words in denouncing them as representing a ‘clear
syndicalist deviation’. Such a deviation, he went on, would not be dangerous
were it not for the economic crisis and the prevalence in the country of armed
banditry (by which he meant peasant rebellions). The perils of ‘petty bourgeois
spontaneity’ exceeded even those posed by the Whites: they required greater
party unity than ever. As for Kollontai, he dismissed her personal relations with
the leader of the Workers’ Opposition (‘Thank God, we know well that
Comrade Kollontai and Comrade Shliapnikov are “bound by class ties [and]
class consciousness”’).
“Worker defections confronted Lenin and his associates with a problem: how
to govern in the name of the ‘proletariat’ when the ‘proletariat’ turned its back
on them. One solution was to denigrate Russia’s working class. It was now often
heard that the ‘true’ workers had given their lives in the Civil War and that their
place had been taken by social dregs. Bukharin claimed that Soviet Russia’s
working class had been ‘peasantified’ and that, ‘objectively speaking’, the
Workers’ Opposition was a Peasant Opposition, while a Chekist told the
Menshevik Dan that the Petrograd workers were ‘scum’ (svoloch) left over after
all the true proletarians had gone to the front. Lenin, at the Eleventh Party
Congress, denied that Soviet Russia even had a ‘proletariat’ in Marx’s sense,
since the ranks of industrial labor had been filled with malingerers and ‘all
kinds of casual elements’. Rebutting such charges, Shliapnikov noted that 16 of
the 41 delegates of the Tenth Congress supportive of the Workers’ Opposition
had joined the Bolshevik party before 1905 and all had done so before 1914…
“… Trotsky criticized Shliapnikov for making a ‘fetish of democracy’: ‘The

principle of elections within the labor movement is, as it were, placed above the
Party, as if the Party did not have the right to assert its dictatorship even in the
event that this dictatorship temporarily clashed with the transient mood within
the worker democracy.’ It was not possible to entrust the management of the
economy to workers, if only because there were hardly any Communists among
them: in this connection, Trotsky cited Zinoviev to the effect that in Petrograd,
the country’s largest industrial center, 99 percent of the workers either had no
party preference, or, to the extent that they did, sympathized with the
Mensheviks or even the Black Hundreds. In other words, one could have either
Communism (‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’) or worker rule, but not both:
democracy spelled the doom of Communism…
“The Workers’ Opposition suffered a decisive defeat and was ordered to

dissolve. It was doomed from the outset not only because it challenged
powerful vested interests of the central apparatus, but because it accepted the
undemocratic premises of Communism, including the idea of a one-party state.
It championed democratic procedures in a party that was by its ideology and,
increasingly, by its structure committed to ignoring the popular will…
240
“To make impossible further dissent in the party, Lenin had the Tenth
Congress adopt a new and fateful rule that outlawed the formation of ‘factions’:
these were defined as organized groupings with their own platforms. The key,
concluding article of the resolution ‘On the unity of the party’, kept secret at the
time, provided severe penalties for violators: ‘In order to maintain strict
discipline within the party and in all soviet activities, [in order] to attain the
greatest unity by eliminating all factionalism, the Congress authorizes the
Central Committee in instances of violations of discipline, or the revival or
tolerance of factionalism, to apply all measures of party accounting up to
exclusion from the party.’
“Although Lenin and the majority that voted for his resolution seem to have
been unaware of its potential implications, it was destined to have the gravest
consequences: Leonard Schapiro regards it as the decisive event in the history of
the Communist Party. Simply put, in Trotsky’s words, the ruling transferred
‘the political regime prevailing in the state to the inner life of the ruling party’.
Henceforth, the party, too, was to be run as a dictatorship…”426
As we have seen, after the catastrophe of the Civil War, which left Russia in
ruins and far more backward than it had been under Tsarism, the Bolsheviks
decided to retreat somewhat from War Communism to a kind of State
Capitalism which was called “the New Economic Policy” (NEP). As Eric
Hobsbawm writes, “NEP was indeed brilliantly successful in restoring the
Soviet economy from the ruin of 1920. By 1926 Soviet industrial production had
more or less recovered its pre-war level, though this did not mean much. The
USSR remained as overwhelmingly rural as in 1913 (82 per cent of the
population in both cases), and indeed only 7.5 per cent were employed outside
agriculture. What the mass of peasants wanted to sell to the cities; what it
wanted to buy from them; how much of its income it wanted to save; and how
many of the many millions who chose to feed themselves in the village rather
than face city poverty wanted to leave the farms: this determined Russia’s
economic future, for, apart from the state’s tax income, the country had no other
available source of investment and labour. Leaving aside all political
considerations, a continuation of NEP, modified or not, would at best produce a
modest rate of industrialisation. Moreover, until there was a great deal more
industrial development, there was little that the peasants could buy in the city to
tempt them to see their surplus rather than to eat and drink it in the villages.
This (known as the ‘scissors crisis’) was to be the noose that eventually
strangled NEP. Sixty years later a similar but proletarian ‘scissors’ undermined
Gorbachev’s perestroika. Why, Soviet workers were to argue, should they raise
their productivity to earn higher wages unless the economy produced the
consumer goods to buy with these higher wages? But how were these goods to
be produced unless Soviet workers raised their productivity?

426 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 451-453, 454, 455.
241
“It was therefore never very likely that NEP – i.e. balanced economic growth
based on a peasant market economy steered by the state which controlled its
commanding heights – would prove a lasting strategy. For a regime committed
to socialism the political arguments against it were in any case overwhelming.
Would it not put the small forces committed to this new society at the mercy of
petty commodity production and petty enterprise which would regenerate the
capitalism just overthrown? And yet, what made the Bolshevik Party hesitate
was the prospective cost of the alternative. It meant industrialisation by force: a
second revolution, but this time not rising from below but imposed by state
power from above.”427
The man to lead this second revolution turned out to be Stalin…

427 Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, London: Abacus, 1994, pp. 379-380.
242
23. SELF-DETERMINATION IN THE RUSSIAN BORDERLANDS
On November 2, 1917, Lenin and Stalin proclaimed their Declaration of the

Rights of the People of Russia, which granted the right to self-determination to
the peoples of the former Russian empire. This chimed in with the ideology of
the American President Woodrow Wilson, and the same principle was
proclaimed both at the first session of the talks leading to the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk in March, 1918 and at the Versailles Conference in 1919. Of course, the
Bolsheviks’ use of the principle was entirely opportunistic. They appealed to it
when they wanted to place obstacles in the path of the invading German armies,
but renounced it when they returned to take the place of the Germans as
despotic conquerors and occupiers… Still, encouraged by what was now a
generally agreed principle of international politics (except in Britain and
France), several nationalities of the former Russian empire now declared their
independence. At the same time, these nations wanted their own independent
Orthodox Churches. So several schisms from the Russian Orthodox Church took
place.
However, in the East as in the West, the attainment of sovereignty by several

smaller nations exarcebated rather than resolved the national question in several
regions. The problem was that each newly formed nation-state contained within
itself still smaller nationalities; and these felt less secure under their new rulers
than they had under the larger empires that had now passed away – the
Russian, the Ottoman, the Habsburg and the Hohenzollern. In the East, the
Pandora’s box effect created by this process greatly facilitated the ultimate
triumph of Soviet power, which first encouraged nationalist separatism, and
then, when each newly formed nation was particularly small and vulnerable,
pounced like an eagle on its prey to include all in the new empire…
1. Ukraine. On April 12, 1917, a "Congress of the clergy and laymen of the
Kievan diocese" was convened in Kiev, which declared that “the autonomous
Ukraine must have a Ukrainian church which is independent of the Synod [of
the Russian Orthodox Church”.
Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev was opposed to this ecclesiastical nationalism.

In August, 1917, on the eve of the convocation of an extraordinary congress of
the Kievan diocese, he wrote: “Our local and rapidly growing sorrows add to
the misfortune experienced by the whole of the Russian land. I am speaking
about a tendency which has surfaced in southern Russia and which threatens to
destroy the peace and unity of the Church. It is terrible for us even to hear
people talk about separating the churches of southern Russia from the one
Orthodox Church of Russia. After their long cooperation, can there be any
grounds for such aims? What is their origin? Did not the preachers who spread
Orthodoxy throughout Russia come from Kiev? Among the God-pleasing
brethren of the Kiev-Caves Lavra do we not see men who came from all corners
of Holy Russia? Is it not true that the Orthodox of southern Russia have
laboured in all parts of Russia, serving the Church and as scholars in various
243
fields? And conversely, is it not true that the Orthodox of northern Russia have
laboured for salvation in various professions in southern Russia? Did they not
erect the one great Russian Orthodox Church together? Could the Orthodox of
southern Russia possibly reproach the Orthodox of northern Russia for falling
away from the faith in some way or for distorting the teachings of faith and
morality? Certainly not. Based on my personal experience I can testify that in all
the dioceses where God has allowed me to serve, the Orthodox teachings of
faith and morality are kept pure and unchanged, and there is everywhere unity
in the Church's teachings and liturgical practices. Why should there be any
separation? Where will it lead? Indeed, only the enemies both without and
within will have cause to rejoice. Our love for our native soil should not
suppress and stifle our love for the whole of Russia and for the one Russian
Orthodox Church."
The metropolitan concluded by appealing to the clergy and laymen to "take

every possible measure to promote unity among themselves and with the whole
of the Russian Orthodox Church," and to "devote serious thought and proper
preparation to the upcoming congress, thoroughly to discuss the issues
presented there, and pass resolutions which are correct, legal, beneficial and
which merit implementation."
However, the congress, which took place on August 8 and 9, 1917, took an
entirely different direction. On August 9, the metropolitan was so offended by
the proceedings of the congress that he fell seriously ill and had to leave the
meeting immediately. In a defiant public statement, the delegates interpreted
the metropolitan's departure as escapism and an expression of his lack of
respect for the meeting.
In October, the Provisional Government fell. The Ukrainian government

wished to use the change to turn their autonomous status into one of full
independence. And the same tendencies were strongly present in the Church. A
special committee in charge of convening a Council of the Orthodox clergy and
lay people of the Ukraine was organized in Kiev in mid-November of 1917
according to a resolution passed at the third Cossack military assembly.
Archbishop Alexis Dorodnitsyn (formerly of Vladimir), who was in retirement
in the Kiev Caves Lavra, stood at the head of this committee. This committee
was joined by representatives from among the clergy of Kiev (Fathers
Lipkovsky, Tarnavsky, Filipenko and others), who played active roles in the
above-mentioned organizations, such as the Executive Committee, Church
Advisory Council to the Metropolitan of Kiev, etc.
At a meeting on November 23, this committee "discussed the present position

of the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine now that the Ukrainian government is
being separated from the government of Russia, and took into account the
pronouncement of the Russian Patriarch, who might extend his authority to
include the Ukrainian Church as well". They passed a whole series of
resolutions, which amounted to sweeping changes in the status and
administration of the Church in the Ukraine. The organizational committee was
244
renamed "the provisional Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council", and an
executive committee established to convene a provisional Ukrainian Orthodox
Church Council was proclaimed "the provisional government of the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church". It was also decided that this new ecclesiastical government
should appoint commissars to all the dioceses of the Ukraine. On November 24,
a general meeting of the Orthodox parish councils of Kiev was convened at
which these moves towards Ukrainian ecclesiastical autocephaly were
condemned and the fear was expressed that an autocephalous Church might
join the uniates and come under the Pope.
A few days later the metropolitan arrived in Kiev. On December 4 a meeting

convened by the Union of Orthodox Parish Councils was held under the
presidency of the metropolitan and attended by Metropolitan Platon of Georgia.
In the days that followed several attempts were made by the autocephalists to
remove Metropolitan Vladimir and his vicar bishops from Kiev. At the end of
the month another delegation came to the metropolitan and demanded that he
leave Kiev. He replied with emotion: "I am not afraid of anyone or anything. I
am at all times prepared to give my life for Christ's Church and for the
Orthodox faith, to prevent its enemies from mocking it. I will suffer to the very
end in order to preserve Orthodoxy in the very place where it first took root in
Russia." And then, going up to one member of the delegation and pointing at
his heart, he said: "Do you know that the first revolutionary was the devil, and
you are making a revolution in the Church of Christ?" Then he wept bitterly.
The metropolitan considered the convening of an All-Ukrainian Council

untimely in view of the Bolshevik seizure of power. Nevertheless, he was forced
to prepare for the opening of a new Council, and opened its first session on
January 7, 1918 with a moleben on Sophia square and a welcoming speech to the
delegates. He was unanimously elected to the chairmanship of the Council, and
attended every meeting until the civil war broke out in Kiev.
Artillery shells began to fall on the Lavra on January 15, as the Bolsheviks,
overthrowing the principle of self-determination, tried to overthrow the Rada
government. However, the metropolitan continued with his religious duties,
displaying great calm. On January 23, he celebrated his last Divine Liturgy with
the brotherhood of the Lavra. That evening, after occupying Kiev, the
Bolsheviks took control of the Lavra, and violence began. Metropolitan Vladimir
was killed...
In March, 1918, the Germans conquered Kiev. But after their defeat in the
world war in November, Petlyura captured Kiev. In August, 1919, Kiev was
liberated by the Whites. But then the Red Army regained the upper hand.
Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev set off for the Kuban, where he
became honorary president of the Higher Church Authority that had been
formed there.
Fr. Nicholas Denysenko writes: “The Ukrainian autocephalists

requested independence from Moscow over and over again, to no
245
avail. In early 1919, when Ukraine was ruled by the Directory (under
Symon Petliura), the state issued a law decreeing the autocephaly of
the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and commissioned Oleksander
Lototsky, who had served as minister of confessions under the
Hetmanate, to receive recognition from Constantinople. The 1919 state
law on autocephaly was the only official act of the Ukrainian state
attempting to assist the Church in securing autocephaly until the
recent appeal by Ukraine’s Parliament.
“The collapse of the Directory and the failure of the autocephalists

to reach an agreement with the Russian bishops led to the convocation
of two councils in Kyiv: a local council in May 1921 proclaiming
autocephaly, and then an All-Ukrainian council which created an
episcopate in October 1921 through the employment of an innovative
conciliar rite of consecration.” 428
The “innovative conciliar rite” came about as follows. First, Metropolitan

Michael (Ermakov) appeared at the Sophia cathedral and called on those
present not to introduce a scandal into Church life, and pointed out that
Patriarch Tikhon had “blessed Divine services in the Ukrainian language when
that was desired by a majority of parishioners, including women, whom the
Patriarch blessed to take part in Church work with full rights”. The
metropolitan hoped that the delegates “will not transgress the Church canons or
the will of his Holiness the Patriarch”. He did not give his blessing to the
assembly, pointing out its anticanonicity, and suggested that the participants
disperse to their homes. When the metropolitan had departed, on October 23 the
participants proceeded to a so-called “conciliar consecration”. That is, since no
bishops had joined them, they were forced to create bishops for themselves in a
manner that no other Orthodox Church recognized as canonical, earning for
themselves the title of the “Lypkovsky samosvyaty” after the first “bishop” to
be thus consecrated, Basil Lypkovsky. As Lypkovsky himself wrote: “30 priests
and all the laymen – as many as could fit into the walls of the Sophia cathedral -
took part in the consecration. At the moment of consecration a wave of
enthusiasm ran through the crowd. The members of the council and all those
present put their hands on each other’s shoulders until a chain of hands went up
to the priests who surrounded me.” Then they took Lipkovsky to the relics of
Great Martyr Mercurius (according to other sources – St. Clement of Rome) and
placed on his head the dead head of the saint.
That is how Lypkovsky became a “bishop”. On October 24 and 30 several

other bishops were consecrated. The Council also introduced a married
episcopate and second marriages for priests.429

428 Denysenko, “The Appeal of the Ukrainian Parliament and the Ecumenical Patriarchate”,
Public Orthodoxy, June 20, 2016.

429 Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 58; M.V. Shkarovsky, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’
pri Staline i Khruscheve (The Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin and
Khruschev), Moscow, 2005, p. 175, footnote 2; Archbishop Leontius (Filippovich),
“Tserkovnij shovinizm i samosviatstvo na Ukraine. K Istorii vozniknovenia UAPTs
246
Although the Ukrainian autocephalists were a clearly schismatic movement,
they did not share the modernist ideology of the Muscovite renovationists, and
entered into union with them only in the autumn of 1924, evidently with the
aim of securing the recognition of their own autocephaly from Constantinople,
with whom the renovationists were in communion. That is why it was not until
January 5, 1924 that the patriarch extended his anti-renovationist anathema of
1923 to the autocephalists, who soon came under the control of Soviet agents.
A further complication was introduced by the Polish church’s illegal

declaration of autocephaly from the Russian Church (with the blessing of the
Ecumenical Patriarchate) in 1924. As Denysenko writes, “the Church in
Poland… had a majority of Ukrainian people because of the large Volynian
eparchy. The Ukrainian autocephalists coming from the Church in Poland
viewed the 1924 Tomos of autocephaly as superseding the 1918 All-Ukrainian
council…”430
In January, 1930 the authorities convened a council which dissolved the

whole of the Ukrainian autocephalists’ Church organization…
2. Bessarabia. One of the consequences of the revolution was that Moldavia,

60% of whose population was Romanian, was united to the Romanian State.
Before the revolution, writes Jelavich, “Romanians as such did not face
prejudice, and there were Romanian as well as Russian large landowners. The
widespread discontent was economic and social more than national. The
position of the peasants was regulated by the Russian emancipation laws of the
1860s and subsequent reform measures, but, as in other parts of Russia, these
had not solved the basic agrarian problems. Since conditions were roughly the
same in the Regat, independent Romania did not hold a great attraction for the
peasant majority. The main demand of all peasants was a breakup of the large
estates and a distribution of their lands…
“Because of these conditions, the Russian revolutions in March and

November 1917 were bound to have a great effect. They influenced not only the
disaffected peasants, but also the many soldiers in the province who had
deserted the rapidly disintegrating Russian army… As early as July 1917 the
peasants began to seize the land; by the end of the year they had appropriated
about two-thirds.
“In October 1917 a provisional government for Bessarabia was organized,

with its center at Kishinev… This government remained in control of the
province from November 1917 to November 1918. In December 1917 it declared

v 20-e gody XX st.”(Church Chauvinism and self-consecration in Ukraine.Towards
a history of the appearance of the UAOC in the 20s of the 20 t h century”),
http://catacomb.org.ua/php?name=Pages&go=print_page&pid=821.
430 Denysenko, op. cit.
247
itself the Democratic Moldavian Republic and expressed the desire to join a
Soviet federative republic…”431
However, in view of the discussions that had begun between the Soviet and
German governments, this decision disturbed the Allied Powers, and with the
approval of France the Romanian army invaded the province. On March 27, the
Moldavian parliament, surrounded by Romanian soldiers, voted for the union
of Bessarabia with Romania, and the Kishinev diocese was handed over to the
Romanian Church. It was suggested to Archbishop Anastasy (Gribanovsky) of
Kishinev that he join the Romanian Church; but he refused. In May he left the
province, and the Kishinev archiepiscopate fell under the jurisdiction of the
Romanian Church. On June 14, the Holy Synod of the Romanian Church
appointed Bishop Nicodemus (Muntianu) of Khush as deputy locum tenens of
the see (he later became Patriarch of Romania). He began to “Romanize” the
Bessarabian Church, introduced the Romanian language into the Kishinev
seminary and in some monasteries replaced Russian and Ukrainian superiors
with Romanian ones.
In October, 1918 Patriarch Tikhon wrote to Metropolitan Pimen of Moldavia

and Suceava, the president of the Romanian Synod, protesting strongly at the
anticanonical seizure of the Kishinev diocese by the Romanian Church. The
Romanians paid no attention to this admonition, and in 1919 placed in the see of
Kishinev Archimandrite Gurias (Grossu), a Russian priest of Moldavian
extraction, and a graduate of the Kiev Academy… And so, writes K.V. Glazkov,
“while with one hand the Romanian authorities mercilessly destroyed the
communist opposition (for example, mass punitive operation were undertaken
against Bolsheviks in the army, and Romanian units took part in the
suppression of the red revolution in 1918 in Hungary), with the other hand they
suppressed every kind of dissidence. A number of deputies of the Popular
Assembly who were opponents of the union of Bessarabia and Romania were
shot, after which the National Assembly itself was dissolved, while on the same
day the pro-Romanian deputies triumphantly overthrew the monuments to
Tsars Alexander I and Alexander II in the capital. In January, 1920, the White
armies of General Bredov…, in whose carts were fugitives, women and children,
were shot from Romanian machine-guns as they approached the Dniester. In
this way the new authorities in Bessarabia spoiled for good their relations with
the Russians.
“We should note that from the very beginning the Russian hierarchy and
clergy, as if foreseeing the possibility of church-political disturbances, adopted
quite a cold attitude to the inclusion of Bessarabia into Romania. This act was
even condemned by Archbishop Anastasy (Gribanovsky) of Kishinev and
Khotyn (latter first-hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad). Hoping
for the speedy victory of the White movement, the representatives of the
Bessarabian Church together with the zemstvo took part in the creation of a

431 B. Jelavich, History of the Balkans, Cambridge University Press, 1983, volume 2,
pp. 158-159.
248
Committee for the liberation of Bessarabia. Therefore the Romanian Synod
began the canonical submission of the Bessarabian diocese by demanding that
Vladykas Anastasy, Gabriel and Dionysius separate from the Russian Orthodox
Church in spite of the protests of Patriarch Tikhon. When the hierarchs refused
to do this, the Romanian military units arrested them and exiled them from the
country. But the believers were told that the hierarchs had left their diocese
voluntarily. In the place of Metropolitan Anastasy there arrived from Bucharest
the Romanian Archbishop Nicodemus; he was met by the clergy and laity by no
means in a friendly manner. The ecclesiastical authorites [of the Russian Church]
Abroad did not recognise the lawfulness of the union of the Kishinev diocese to
the Romanian Church. It was violence, deceit and transgression of the Church
canons, and not at all the commandments of God, that were laid at the
foundation of their actions on the territory of Bessarabia by the Romanian civil
and ecclesiastical authorities. How could the coming events unfold except in
conditions of further imposition of terror?
“In the Kishinev spiritual seminary and spiritual schools the Romanian
authorities removed the teaching of Russian and Church Slavonic languages,
clearly intending to create a situation in which in Bessarabia as a whole there
would remain no priests able to serve in Church Slavonic. Also, Church
Slavonic service books were removed from the churches, and the priests were
banned from delivering sermons in Russian. Direct physical persecution began
against the zealots for the language of Saints Cyril and Methodius. In the village
of Rechul the nuns of the local monastery were beaten with birch-rods by
Romanian gendarmes for taking part in services in Church Slavonic, while an
old priest of the village of Goreshte who was suspected of sympathising with
the opposition was tortured with wet lashes until he lost consciousness, after
which he went mad. It may be that the whole guilt of the priest consisted in the
fact that he, like many true patriots, did not want to commemorate the
Romanian king, his family and the Synod at the liturgy.
“The majority of the zealots for Church Slavonic as the liturgical language
were Russians, but many Moldavian priests and laypeople fought steadfastly
against forcible Romanianization. ‘The Moldavians,’ reported the Romanian
counter-intelligence of Beltsky uyezd, ‘are hostile to the Romanian
administration, they avoid the Romanian clergy…, they threaten the priests
when they commemorate the name of the king in church.’…
“In July, 1922 there was formed in Kishinev a multi-national ‘Union of

Orthodox Christians’. Soon Bessarabian patriots came to lead the Union. They
were closely linked with the Russian communion in Kishinev. According to
certain information, Russian monarchists led by General E. Leontovich took part
in the organisation of the Union. In 1924 the re-registration of another
organisation took place – the Orthodox Brotherhood of Alexander Nevsky,
which was led by activists of Moldavian, Gagauz and Russian nationalities –
Protopriest Michael Chakir, Priest Nicholas Lashku and K.K. Malanetsky, etc.
All these were branded by the secret police as ‘ardent pan-Russists’, while the
249
brotherhood was called the centre for the preservation and propaganda of
Russian monarchist ideas…”432
3. Transcaucasia. In Transcaucasia, writes Dov Kontorer, “everything was at

first festal: in November, 1917 in Tbilisi a Transcaucasian commissariat was
established representing a combined government of Georgian socialists,
Armenian Dashnaks and Azerbaidzhani Musavatists. The power of this organ
extended – theoretically, at least – over the whole territory of Transcaucasia,
except for the region of Baku, where the Bolsheviks were in power. The
Transcaucasian commissariat refused to recognize the results of the Brest peace,
according to which Soviet Russia conceded to Turkey not only the territories
conquered in the First World War, but also the districts of Kars, Ardagan and
Batum. This led to the destruction of peaceful negotiations at a conference in
Trabzon in March-April, 1918. Meanwhile the continuing collapse of State in
Transcaucasia was combined with an excessively bold external politics. In the
spring of 1918 the Turks were in quite a difficult situation. Nevertheless, at the
cost of some short military actions, they succeeded in seizing Batumi, Ozurgeti,
Akhaltsikhe and a series of other territories.
“It was against this background that an ‘independent federal democratic

republic’ was proclaimed in Transcaucasia. It lasted for about a month. On May
26, 1918 the Georgian Mensheviks headed by N.S. Chkheidze, I.G. Tsereteli and
N.N. Jordania, declared Georgia to be an independent republic… But the reality
of Georgian ‘independence’ was such that the new government immediately
had to summon German forces onto its territory ‘for defence against the Turks’,
and at the same time to sign a peace agreement with Turkey according to which
Georgia lost even more than it had according to the conditions of the Brest peace
which it had rejected.”433
The British occupied Georgia from November, 1918 to July, 1920, after which
the country was independent under the Menshevik Jordania until the Bolshevik
invasion in February, 1921…
The Bolsheviks had gained only a negligible share of the vote in May, 1918.
But, as Jean-François Revel writes, “as in the Afghanistan fifty-eight years later,
the Kremlin’s puppets in Georgia appealed for the Red Army’s help. The
republic was invaded, occupied, annexed. And, as in Afghanistan, the
occupying power was held in check by fierce local resistance. In 1924,
insurrectionists even succeeded in liberating half of Georgia; the rising was
drowned in blood by the aptly named Red Army, but only with the aid of heavy
armored and air reinforcements. As it did after the Afghanistan invasion, an
‘indignant’ West was content to ‘follow the events in this part of the world

432 Glazkov, “Istoricheskie prichiny niekotorykh sobitij v istorii Rumynskoj
Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi do II Mirovoj vojny” (The Historical Reasons for some Events
in the History of the Romanian Orthodox Church before the Second World War),
Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), NN 3-4, May-August, 2000, pp. 46-48.
433 Kontorer, “Ultima Thule”, http://yaqir-
mamlal.livejournal.com/121209.html?view=4676729#t4676729.
250
attentively so as to seize the opportunities that might arise to assist this
country’s return to a normal situation by peaceful means in accordance with the
rules of international law’ [Resolution adopted by the League of Nations on
September 24, 1924].”434
Georgian ecclesiastical independence had been proclaimed even earlier than

Georgian political independence. On March 12, 1917, an Assembly of the
bishops, clergy and laity of Georgia proclaimed the re-establishment of the
autocephaly of the Georgian Church, which led to a break in communion with
the Russian Church. In the summer, however, “the Georgian Church sent a
special deputation to the Most Holy Russian Synod to inform the Most Holy
Synod about the re-establishment of the autocephaly of the Georgian Church
and greet it. The Russian Synod through the mouth of Archbishop Sergius of
Finland confirmed ‘that Russian Church consciousness has never been foreign
to the thought of the necessity of returning to the Georgian Church her former
constitution… If this thought has not been realised up to now, for this there
were special reasons’ not depending on Church actors, but ‘now, in the days of
the general liberating spring, Russian Church consciousness is ready to
welcome the fulfilment … of the long-time dream’ of the Orthodox Georgians,
and the Russian hierarchs hope ‘that God will order all for the good, and that
certain roughnesses in this matter will be smoothed over’ and that at the
forthcoming Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church a fraternal meeting
of representatives of the two Churches is bound to take place in order to find a
path to mutual understanding’.”435
In September, a General Council of the Georgian Church confirmed the Acts

of the March Council. On October 1 Bishop Kirion Sadzaguelachvili was
enthroned as Catholicos-Patriarch in Tbilisi by three vicar bishops over the
protests of three Georgian hierarchs: Demetrius (Abashidze) of Simferopol,
Antony of Gori and Nazarius (Lezhavy). On December 29 / January 11, 1918,
Patriarch Tikhon also protested against the re-establishment of Georgian
autocephaly, pointedly addressing Kirion as only a bishop.436

434 Revel, How Democracies Perish, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983, p. 61.
435 Catholicos Leonid to Patriarch Tikhon, August 5, 1919; Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
p. 9.
436 Georgia, he wrote, had united with Russia more than a century before, and from
that time the highest ecclesiastical authority in Georgia had belonged to the Holy
Synod. However, when, in 1905, an attempt was made to restore the autocephaly of
the Georgian Church, the Holy Synod in 1906 decreed that this question should be
handed over for discussion at the All-Russian Council, the decisions of which the
Georgian hierarchs were obliged to wait for. “According to canon law, the
agreement and permission of the Mother [kiriarkhal’noj] Church to the
autocephaly of the other Local Church which before was subject to her jurisdiction
is required. Usually the Church which is seeking independence addresses the
Mother Church with her request, and, on the basis of data of a political and
ecclesiastical character, seeks her agreement to the reception of autocephaly. The
request is directed in the name of both the ecclesiastical and civil authorities of the
country, and also of the people; it must be a clearly expressed declaration
concerning the general and unanimous desire to receive ecclesiastical
independence. That is how it was in Greece, in Serbia and in Romania, but it was
251
However, the Russian and Georgian governments confirmed this election.437
Kirion immediately seized the exarchal house and ordered the portraits of the
Tsar and the previous exarchs removed. After his first and last liturgy as
Catholicos, he fell ill. According to one version, he had been poisoned;
according to another, he had poisoned himself. In June, 1918, after retreating to
a monastery, he committed suicide. 438
“In December, 1918,” continues Kontorer, “with the defeat of Germany in the
First World War, the German soldiers in Transcaucasia were replaced by a
British expeditionary force. They saw their task in guaranteeing the
uninterrupted work of the oil industry and the Batumi-Baku railway, while
keeping internal peace in the region interested them very little. As a lawful
result of this, there began a series of embittered ethnic wars that accompanied a
‘parade of sovereignties’ in Transcaucasia.
“The best known was the Armenian-Azerbaidzhani war, which was

accompanied on both sides by the massive slaughter of the peaceful population
(in contemporary terminology: ‘ethnic cleansing’). In the autumn of 1920 there
entered into the conflict, with the agreement of Georgia, the young Kemalist
state of Turkey. Having attained a rapid and complete victory on the field of
battle, it imposed significant territorial concessions on Armenia in negotiations
in Alexandropol. These were partially reviewed later when the RSFSR and
Turkey concluded an agreement in Moscow in 1921.
“But it was not only the major Transcaucasian nations who warred against
each other at this time. The assertion of national identity in conditions of the
collapse of the previous imperial statehood was accompanied almost
everywhere by blood civil conflict. Thus in Georgia the Menshevik government
of Noe Jordania conducted in relation to a whole series of national minorities a
politics that would be described today as an attempt at genocide. In particular,
at that time Georgia exterminated about 18,000 Osetians, which helped greatly
to make the population of Northern Osetia to cling desperately to the possibility
of remaining within Soviet Russia, while that part of the Osetian population

not like that in Bulgaria, where the well-known schism arose. And it was also not
like that, unfortunately, in the Transcaucasus in 1917… In pointing out your errors
and mistakes, we suggest to you, Most Reverend Bishops, that you submit to the
demand of the ecclesiastical canons and, following the canonical order, appear at
the All-Russian Sacred Council, and, recognising your errors, convey your desire
concerning the autocephaly of the Georgian Church to the court of the whole All-
Russian Council, so that you may not be subjected to the judgement of the canons
and not fall into the great and terrible sin of alienation from the Holy, Catholic
and Apostolic Church…” (Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 71-75; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p.
14)
437 K.D. Kafafov, “Vospominania o vnutrennykh delakh Rossijskoj imperii”
(Reminiscences of the Internal Affairs of the Russian Empire), Voprosy Istorii
(Historical Questions), N 7, 2005, p. 93.
438 Archimandrite Seraphim, “Russkie sviaschennomucheniki i mucheniki v
Gruzii”, Pravoslavnij Put’, 1965, pp. 23-32).
252
which lived compactly to the south of the Great Caucasian Ridge was extremely
grateful to Moscow for the creation within Georgia of the South Osetian
autonomous republic.”439
For in February, 1921 the Bolsheviks, at the initiative of the Georgians Stalin
and Ordzhonikidze, had invaded Georgia, and after a short war of three weeks
took control of the country. Soon the Church was deprived of juridical status,
and churches and monasteries began to be closed…
“On February 7, 1922,” writes Fr. Elijah Melia, “Catholicos Ambrose sent to
the Inter-Allied Conference at Genoa (the highest degree of international
jurisdiction at that time) a letter of protest in which, recalling the moral
obligations towards the nation of his charge, he protested in the name of the
people of Georgia, deprived of their rights, against the foreign occupation and
demanded the intervention of civilized humanity to oppose the iniquity
committed against Georgia. He was arrested in February 1923 with Archbishop
Nasaire and all the members of his Council. Their trial, which took place under
conditions of semi-liberty, greatly stirred up the country.
“There were three accusations: 1) the 1922 letter to the Genoa Conference, 2)
the concealment of the historic treasures of the Church in order to preserve
them from passing into the hands of the State and 3) the prohibition imposed
[by the] Governmental Commission for Religion against the redemption of
precious objects in favour of the starving. Archbishop Nasaire was assassinated
during the trial [on September 1, 1924], most probably in order to impress the
others accused. All the members of his Council showed their solidarity with the
Catholicos Ambrose, who conducted himself heroically, assuming the entire
responsibility for his acts, which he declared to have been in conformity with his
obligations and with the tradition of the Church of Georgia in similar cases. He
was condemned to eight years imprisonment. Two members of his Council
were given five and two years respectively. The Catholicos was liberated before
the term of his imprisonment was over. He died on March 29, 1927.
“In August 1924, a general insurrection broke out, organized by all the active
forces of the nation – the higher ranks of the army, the political parties, the
university, the ecclesiastics, the population as a whole. But the uprising was
doomed to fail, for the plot had been betrayed. The repression created
thousands of victims. Groups of partisans still operated for some time…”440
4. Mongolia. Revel writes: “While Georgia was the first country forcibly
annexed by the Soviet Union, Outer Mongolia had the honor, also in 1921, of
becoming the first Soviet satellite, again thanks to a method so well designed
from the start that it has been used unchanged many times since, most recently

439Kontorer, op. cit.
440Melia, "The Orthodox Church of Georgia", A Sign of God: Orthodoxy 1964,
Athens: Zoe, 1964, pp. 112-113. According to Slava Katamidze, the number of
victims was “enormous”, but “the real figure has never been published” (Loyal
Comrades, Ruthless Killers, Staplehurst: Spellmount, 2003, p. 39).
253
in Nicaragua. In 1921, according to the 1931 Soviet Encyclopedia, there were 164
Communists in Outer Mongolia and 99 members of the Young Communist
League. Not very many, in truth. Enough, however, to allow the Communist
Party to propose to other parties, representing the peasantry, the formation of a
national-front government (here we go!) to oppose ‘Chinese domination’. As
soon as the front was formed and became a provisional government, the
Communists grasped the levers of power, as they would later in Hungary and,
more recently, in Nicaragua. Their allies, unmasked as counterrevolutionaries
and bedecked with the exquisitely Mongolian epithet of ‘feudal-theocratic
elements’ – an ingenious phrase, and one to bear in mind – were eliminated. All
that remained after that was for an improvised ‘national liberation’ army to
appeal for ‘fraternal assistance’ from the Red Army, which never needs coaxing
to do its fraternal duty. On June 13, 1924, a Mongolian People’s Republic was
proclaimed and rapidly attached to the Soviet Union by a web of ‘friendship’
treaties, mutual assistance treaties, cultural, economic and military treaties and
heaven knows how many others…”441

441 Revel, op. cit. pp. 61-62.
254
24. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH IN EXILE
Out of the chaos of the Russian Civil War there was formed the Russian
Orthodox Church in Exile, later known as the Russian Church Outside of Russia
(ROCOR). A.F. Traskovsky writes: “The part of the Russian Orthodox Church
which was abroad already had quite a long history before the formation of
ROCOR. In Western Europe Russian Orthodox churches had been built
beginning from the eighteenth century at Russian embassies and holy places
that were often visited by Russians on trips abroad. In the East, thanks to the
missionary activities of the Russian Orthodox Church missions were founded in
China and Japan that later became dioceses, as well as a mission in Jerusalem.
The spread of Orthodoxy in Alaska and North America also led to the creation
of a diocese. In the “Statute concerning the convening of an Emigration
Assembly of the Russian Churches”, mention was made that in 1921 there were
15 emigration regions which had Russian bishops and 14 districts where there
were Russian Orthodox parishes but no bishops. The regions included: North
America, Japan, China, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany,
France, Italy, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey and the Far East. The districts included:
Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, England, Switzerland,
Czechia, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Palestine, Greece and the city of Bizert in
Tunisia. All the emigration missions, parishes and dioceses were in canonical
submission to the higher ecclesiastical authorities in Russia – the Holy Ruling
Synod until the restoration of the patriarchate in 1917, and his Holiness the
Patriarch after 1917. But then after the revolution there began the Civil War and
anarchy. The Bolsheviks began to persecute the Church. The majority of
emigration missions and dioceses found themselves either deprived of the
possibility of normal relations with the higher ecclesiastical authorities of
Russia, or such relations were exceptionally difficult. Moreover, in Russia itself
many dioceses were cut off by the front from his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon
(Bellavin)’s leadership. After the defeat of the White army, a huge flood of
émigrés flooded abroad, amongst whom were not a few representatives of the
clergy, including bishops and metropolitans. On the shoulders of the clerics
who were abroad and the clergy who had emigrated lay the burden of care for
the spiritual nourishment of the huge Russian diaspora. That was the situation
in which the part of the Russian Church that was abroad found itself on the eve
of the formation of the Church Abroad.
“What was the prehistory of the Russian Church Abroad? Her beginnings
went back to 1919, in Russia. In Stavropol in May, 1919 there took place the
South Russian Church Council headed by the oldest hierarch in the South of
Russia, Archbishop Agathodorus of Stavropol. There took part in the Council all
the bishops who were on the territory of the Voluntary army, the members of
the All-Russian Ecclesiastical Council and four people from each diocesan
council. At the Council there was formed the Higher Church Administration of
the South of Russia (HCA of the South of Russia), which consisted of: President
– Archbishop Metrophanes of Novocherkassk, Assistant to the President –
Archbishop Demetrius of Tauris, Protopresbyter G. Shavelsky, Protopriest A.P.
255
Rozhdestvensky, Count V.V. Musin-Pushkin and Professor of theology P.V.
Verkhovsky. In November, 1919 the Higher Church Administration was headed
by Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev and Galich, who had arrived
from Kiev.442
“The aim of the creation of the HCA was the organization of the leadership of
church life on the territory of the Volunteer army in view of the difficulties
Patriarch Tikhon was experiencing in administering the dioceses on the other
side of the front line. A little earlier, in November, 1918, an analogous
Temporary Higher Church Administration had been created in Siberia headed
by Archbishop Sylvester of Omsk. Later, a part of the clergy that submitted to
this HCA emigrated after the defeat of Kolchak’s army and entered the
composition of the Chinese dioceses of the Russian Orthodox Church. The HCA
of the South of Russia, like the Siberian HCA, was, in spite of its self-
government, nevertheless in canonical submission to his Holiness Patriarch
Tikhon, and in this way Church unity was maintained.
“After the defeat of the armies of Denikin, in the spring of 1920 the head of
the HCA of the South of Russia, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), was
evacuated from Novorossiysk to Constantinople443, and was then for a time in a
monastery on Mount Athos. However, in September, 1920, at the invitation of
General Wrangel, he returned to Russia, to the Crimea, where he continued his
work. The final evacuation of the HCA of the South of Russia took place in
November, 1920, together with the remains of Wrangel’s army. On the steamer
‘Alexander Mikhailovich’ there set out from the Crimea to Constantinople the
leaders of the HCA and a large number of simple priests.
“On arriving in Constantinople, as Archbishop Nicon (Rklitsky) indicates in

his Biography of Metropolitan Anthony, Metropolitan Anthony ‘first considered
that from now on all the activities of the Russian Higher Church Administration
should be brought to an end and all the care for the spiritual welfare of the
Russian Orthodox people should be taken upon herself by the Church of
Constantinople and the Local Orthodox Churches in whose bounds the Russian
Orthodox people found themselves.’ However, as soon became clear, the
realization of this variant became extremely problematic in view of the fact that
huge masses of Russian refugees did not know the language and customs of
those countries to which they had come, and the nourishment of such a large

442 For more details on this Council, see Andrej Alexandrovich Kostriukov,
“Stavropol’skij Sobor 1919 g. i nachalo nezavisimoj tserkovnoj organizatsii na iuge

Rossii” (The Stavropol Council of 1919 and the beginning of independent church
organization in the south of Russia), Ural’skij istoricheskij vestnik, 2008, N 4 (21),
pp. 71-75; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, N 5 (685), May, 2009, pp. 1-11. (V.M.)
443 Before being evacuated, while still in Yekaterinodar, Metropolitan Anthony
came out of the cathedral, accompanied by all the clergy, and addressed the
thousands of faithful, asking them – for one knows, he said, that “the voice of the
people is the voice of God” - whether they should leave with the White Army or
stay in Russia and suffer for the faith. The crowd replied that they should leave
(Monk Anthony (Chernov), Archvêque Theophane de Poltava (Archbishop Theophan
of Poltava), Lavardac: Monastère de St. Michael, 1988, p. 73) (V.M.).
256
flock by priests speaking other languages (for example Greeks) presented very
many problems. Moreover, the numerous émigré Russian clergy, who were
fully able to deal with these problems, would not be involved. Therefore it was
decided to continue the activities of the Higher Church Administration.
“In order to work out a plan of further action, the first session of the HCA
outside the borders of Russia took place on November 19, 1920… 444
Metropolitan Dorotheus [the locum tenens of the patriarchal throne of
Constantinople] gave his agreement [to the HCA’s decisions] and the HCA of
the South of Russia was transformed into the Higher Church Administration
Abroad.
“Literally the day after the above-mentioned session, on November 20, 1920,
an event took place in Moscow that had an exceptional significance for the
Russian Church Abroad – his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon passed decree N 362
concerning the self-governance of church dioceses in the case of a break of
communications between this or that diocese and his Holiness the Patriarch for
external reasons over which they had no control (what they had in mind was
war or repression by the authorities). This is the decree’s main content:
“’1. With the blessing of his Holiness the Patriarch, the Holy Synod and the
Higher Church Council, in a joint session, judged concerning the necessity of…
giving the diocesan Hierarch… instructions in case of a disconnection with the
higher church administration or the cessation of the activity of the latter…
“’2. If dioceses, as a result of the movement of the front, changes of state

boundaries, etc., find themselves unable to communicate with the higher church
administration or the higher church administration itself together with his
Holiness the Patriarch for some reason ceases its activity, the diocesan hierarch
will immediately enter into relations with the hierarchs of neighbouring
dioceses in order to organize a higher instance of church authority for several
dioceses in the same conditions (in the form of a temporary higher church
government or metropolitan region, or something similar).

444 On that day more than 125 ships arrived in Constantinople with about 150,000
people on board (Protopriest Benjamin Zhukov, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ na

Rodine i za Rubezhom (The Russian Orthodox Church in the Homeland and Abroad),
Paris, 2005, p. 67). The session of the HCA took place on board the steamer Great
Prince Alexander Mikhailovich. In it took part Metropolitan Anthony of Kiev,
Metropolitan Plato of Odessa, Archbishop Theophan of Poltava and Bishop
Benjamin of Sebastopol. It was decided to continue the prerogatives of the
members of the HCA, discussing all aspects of the Church life of the refugees and
soldiers in all states having relations with the Ecumenical Patriarch (Monk
Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 47-48). (V.M.)
At the second session, on November 22, it was decided to include Archbishop
Anastasy of Kishinev, who was already living in Constantinople, in the HCA
(Zhukov, op. cit., p. 69)
257
“’3. The care for the organization of the higher church authority for the whole
group who are in the situation indicated in point 2 is the obligatory duty of the
eldest ranked hierarch in the indicated group…’
“This wise decree of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon, which was passed in
conditions of anti-church terror, was given to the foreign bishops a year after its
passing with the help of Bishop Meletius of Nerchensk. It served as the
canonical basis for the formation of the Russian Church Abroad, since the
émigré clergy were in the situation indicated in points 2 and 3.
“Meanwhile the HCA in Constantinople continued to work out a plan for

further action. At the sessions of April 19-21, 1921, it was decided to convene a
‘Congress of the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad to
unite, regulate and revive church activity abroad’, which was later renamed the
‘Russian Church Council Abroad’, also known in the literature as the Karlovtsy
Council. Soon, at the invitation of Patriarch Demetrius of Serbia, the HCA led by
Metropolitan Anthony moved to Sremskie Karlovtsy in Serbia – a fraternal
country which in the course of many years proved to be a safe haven for the
leadership of the Church Abroad.”445
Sremskie Karlovtsy was a significant centre for the Russian Church in Exile
for historical reasons. In 1691 37,000 Serbian families had fled there from
Turkish-ruled Serbia with the blessing of Patriarch Arsenius III, forming an
autonomous metropolitanate in 1712. Just as the Serbs fled there from the Turks,
so the Russians now fled there from the Bolsheviks.
ROCOR found greater sympathy among the Serbs than among the Greeks.
“Serbia repaid mercy [Tsar Nicholas II’s decision to declare war in 1914 in
defence of Serbia] with mercy. Alexander I never identified Russia with her new
communist government. Being a deeply believing Orthodox man, King
Alexander could not contemplate the destiny of Russia and the Russian
Orthodox Church without pain… During the Civil war, by command of the
Monarch of Yugoslavia, a Serbian corps of volunteers was formed in the South
of Russia to fight against the Bolsheviks. When the civil war was lost and the
remains of the Volunteer Army, thanks to the efforts of General Wrangel, were
saved and left their homeland, Alexander I magnanimously stretched out his
hand of help and received those who were without a homeland, the Russian
refugees who were needed by nobody, and gave them the opportunity to set
themselves up, work and live in this country. The young Kingdom of the Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes needed cultural and intellectual forces. It well understood
this, but it did not give refuge to Russian people out of avaricious motives – it
strove to repay good with good, to repay the joyful hospitality it received from
Russia when it was a political émigré, and for help in the war.”446

445 Traskovsky, "Istoria Russkoj Zarubezhnoj Tserkvi, 1921-1939 gg." (A History of
the Russian Church Abroad, 1921-1939), Pravoslavnij Put' (The Orthodox Way),
Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1995, pp. 20-24.
446 Victor Salni and Svetlana Avlasovich, “Net bol’she toj liubvi, kak esli kto
polozhit dushu svoiu za drugi svoia” (There is no greater love than that a man
258
Meanwhile, at the end of 1920, 200,000 Russian refugees with the retreating
remnants of the White armies in Siberia crossed from Siberia into China. Among
them were six bishops and many priests. This large colony of Russians
recognized the authority of the HCA in Serbia.
The canonical status of ROCOR was unique in the history of the Orthodox
Church. She always called herself a part of the Local Russian Church - that part
which was situated outside Russia and had jurisdiction exclusively outside
Russia (point 1 of the Polozhenie or Statute of ROCOR). And yet she had
dioceses and parishes on all six continents of Europe, North and South America,
Asia, Africa and Australia, and was in canonical submission to none of the Local
Orthodox Churches already existing in those places. Moreover, at the beginning
of the 1990s, when she returned to Russia, she claimed jurisdiction in Russia as
well! And so ROCOR was, in effect, a world-wide jurisdiction claiming to have
jurisdiction in every part of the globe, but which claimed to be only a part of one
Local Church, the Russian!
This clearly anomalous situation was justified on a temporary basis, - until

the fall of communism in Russia, according to the Polozhenie. It was supported
also by what came to be called the Catacomb Church in Russia and, at least for a
time, such established Local Churches as Serbia and Jerusalem. The situation
was seen as justified on the grounds, first, of the extraordinarily difficult
situation of the three million or so Russian Orthodox scattered around the world,
whose spiritual and physical needs had to be met by Russian-speaking pastors;
and secondly, of the critical situation in the Orthodox Church as a whole, when
even the leaders of Orthodoxy were falling into heresy.
The First All-Emigration Council opened in Sremskie Karlovtsy on

November 21, 1921. Eleven Russian and two Serbian bishops took part; twenty-
four Russian bishops who could not attend the Council sent telegrams
recognizing its authority. Clergy, monastics and laity also took part in the
Council – 163 people in all. Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) was the
president of the Council, and Patriarch Demetrius of Serbia its honorary
president. However, when the Bulgarian Metropolitan Stefan of Sophia arrived,
bringing a greeting from the Bulgarian Holy Synod, this upset the Patriarch of
Serbia, whose relations with the Bulgarians were not good. So he did not come,
while Metropolitan Stefan immediately returned to Bulgaria.
Bishop Seraphim (Sobolev), who was in charge of the Russian communities

in Bulgaria, reported to the Council about the great difficulty of their position in
Bulgaria because of the Bulgarian schism from the Greek Church (dating back to
1872) and the impossibility of concelebrating with the Bulgarian clergy. The

should lay down his life for his friend),
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=print_page*pid=966 .
259
hierarchs discussed this matter from all sides and declared that they would like
to restore communion with the Bulgarian Church, but could not exceed their
canonical prerogatives without the participation of the other Local Churches,
and in particular of the Church of Constantinople. In spite of that, continuing
the practice of the Russian Church and basing themselves on the canons (71, 81,
88 and 122 of Carthage), the delegates allowed the Russian priests and deacons
to serve all kinds of Divine services and sacraments with the bishops and clergy
of the Bulgarian Church, and they also allowed the Russian bishops to serve
with the Bulgarian clergy. Between bishops only joint serving of molebens,
pannikhidas, etc. was allowed, but “in no way the celebration of the Divine
Liturgy and other holy sacraments of the Orthodox Church”.447
The Council called on the Genoa conference to refuse recognition to the

Bolshevik regime and help the Russian people to overthrow it. And it declared:
“May [God] return to the All-Russian throne his Anointed One, strong in the
love of the people, a lawful tsar from the House of the Romanovs”. However,
Archbishop Eulogius of Paris and Bishop Benjamin of Sebastopol voted against
the Epistle, considering it to be an inadmissible invasion of politics into church
life. Ironically, both later joined the Moscow Patriarchate, which allowed an
unprecedented domination of Bolshevik politics over church life… 448
Archbishop Anastasy of Kishinev also voted against, but for different reasons:
he was not anti-monarchist, but did not want the Romanovs to be designated as
the only possible monarchs. The hierarchs were split in two, two-thirds of the
clergy abstained, and the Epistle was issued only thanks to the votes of the laity.
The strongly monarchist tone of the Karlovtsy Council marks an important

step in the spiritual recovery of the Russian Church. As we have seen, the Holy
Synod in February, 1917 had done little, if anything, to protect the monarchy,
and the Councils that took place during the Civil War shied clear of any
commitment to monarchism. But from now on monarchism became part of the
credo of the Russian Church Abroad.
This was in contrast to earlier councils. As A.A. Kostriukov writes: “Both the
Stavropol Council and the HTCA created by it tried to adopt a restrained
political position. While speaking out against the Bolshevik dictatorship, the
leadership of the Church in the south of Russia distanced itself from the
monarchy and tried to stand on democratic principles. So as not to destroy the
fragile peace between the representatives of various parties represented in the
White armies. Recalling this period, Protopriest Vladimir Vostokov wrote in
1922: ‘In May, 1919 the South Russian Council in Stavropol under the
presidency of Archbishop Metrophanes, and through the exceptional

447 Ivan Snegarov, Otnosheniata mezhdu B’lgarskata ts’rkva i drugite pravoslavni ts’rkvi
sled prov’zglasiavaneto na skhizmata (Relations between the Bulgarian Church and

other Orthodox Churches following the declaration of the schism) (in Bulgarian);
Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 61.
448 Protodeacon German Ivanov-Trinadtsaty, “Aktual’nost’ Pervogo
Vsezarubezhnogo Sobora” (The Contemporary Relevance of the First All-Abroad
Council), Nasha Strana (Our Country), N 2929, December 3, 2011.
260
participation of Protopriest [George] Shavelsky, who at that time was working
in agreement with the chief of staff General Romanovsky, did not allow those
members to speak who tried to express themselves definitively in relation to
‘socialism’ and ‘the internationalist executioners’. And the word ‘Tsar’ was
feared at the Council like fire.’
“According to the witness of Protopriest Vladimir Vostokov, even the open

condemnation of regicide and the appeal to the people to repent of this sin dates
to the period when the HTCA of the South-East of Russia was already in the
Crimea. However, ‘not even the Crimean Church administration resolved on
appealing’ for the reestablishment of the monarchy’…”449
However, final defeat in the Civil War and the experience of exile gave the
Karlovtsy Council the spiritual freedom to speak openly for the restoration of
the monarchy. And the Russian Church in Exile continued to preserve the
traditions of monarchism.
This position was, however, intensely feared by the Bolsheviks, for whom the
threat of the restoration of the monarchy remained real. And so they put
pressure on Patriarch Tikhon, who resolved: “To close the Council, and to
recognise the resolutions of the Karlovtsy Council as having no canonical
significance in view of its invasion into the political sphere which does not
belong to it. To demand the materials of the Council abroad, so as to judge on
the degree of guilt of the participants in the Council.” The Holy Synod added:
“To enter into discussion of the activity of those responsible for the Council, and
to give them over to ecclesiastical trial after the establishment of the normal life
of the Russian Synod.”450
In defence of the Karlovtsy Council’s position, Metropolitan Anthony

(Khrapovitsky) said: “If by politics one understands all that touches upon the
life of the people, beginning with the rightful position of the Church within the
realm, then the ecclesiastical authorities and Church councils must participate in
political life, and from this point of view definite demands are made upon it.
Thus, the holy hierarch Hermogenes laid his life on the line by first demanding
that the people be loyal to Tsar Basil Shuisky, and when the Poles imprisoned
him he demanded the election of Tsar Michael Romanov. At the present time,
the paths of the political life of the people are diverging in various directions in
a far more definite way: some, in a positive sense, for the Faith and the Church,
others in an inimical sense; some in support of the army and against socialism
and communism, others exactly the opposite. Thus the Karlovtsy Council not
only had the right, but was obliged to bless the army for the struggle against the
Bolsheviks, and also, following the Great Council of Moscow of 1917-1918, to
condemn socialism and communism.”451

449Kostriukov, op. cit., pp. 9-10.
450Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 60-61.
451 Metropolitan Anthony, in Archbishop Nikon (Rklitsky), Zhizneopisanie
Blazhennejshago Antonia, Mitropolita Kievskago i Galitskago (A Life of his Beatitude
Anthony, Metropolitan of Kiev and Galich), New York, 1960, vol. VI, p. 36.
261
The position of the Karlovtsy Council was supported, as we have seen, by the
Zemsky Sobor which took place in Vladivostok from July 23 to August 10, 1922.
As Anton Ter-Grigorian writes, “it recognized the cause of the revolution to be
the sins of the Russian people and called for repentance, proclaiming the only
path of salvation for Russia to be the restoration of a lawful Orthodox monarchy.
The Council resolved that ‘the right to establish Supreme power in Russia
belongs to the dynasty of the House of Romanov’. That is, the Council
recognized the Romanov Dynasty to be still reigning in spite of the troubles, and
for a short time re-established the Fundamental laws of the Russian empire in
the Amur district (until the final conquest of the region by the Reds).
“Accordingly it was decided that the Amur State formation free from the
Bolsheviks should be headed by a representative of the Dynasty. For the
transitional period General Michael Konstantinovich Diterichs was elected as
Ruler. Patriarch Tikhon, who was in Moscow, was unanimously elected as the
honourable president of the Council. The widowed Empress Maria Fyodorovna
wrote a welcoming telegram to the Sobor in reply.
“In order no. 1 dated August 8, 1922 Lieutenant-General Diterichs wrote: ‘For
our sins against the Anointed of God, Emperor Nicholas II, who was martyred
with the whole of his Family by Soviet power, a terrible time of troubles has
struck the Russian people and Holy Rus’ has been subjected to the greatest
destruction, pillaging, torment and slavery by atheist Russians and thieves and
robbers of other races, led by infidels of Jewish race who have even renounced
their own Jewish faith…
“’Here, at the edge of the Russian land, in the Amur region, the Lord has
placed a single thought and faith into the hearts and minds of everyone
gathered at the Zemsky Sobor: there can be no Great Russia without a Sovereign,
without an Anointed of God of inherited succession. And here in the Amur
region, as we, the last people of the Russian land, are gathered in a small body,
but one strong in faith and national spirit, we are set the task and the duty and
the good intention of directing all our service to preparing the way for him – our
future God-seer.’
“And here are the words of the last order of General Diterichs of October 17,
1922 before his departure from Russia under the pressure of the Reds: ‘I believe
that Russia will return to the Russia of Christ, the Russia of the Anointed of God,
but I believe that we were unworthy of this mercy from the Supreme
Creator…’”452

452 Ter-Grigorian, “Priamurskij zemskij sobor (kontsa 1922-ogo goda)”,
http://anton-tg.livejournal.com/307585.html, July 24, 2006. See also Demetrius
Anakshin, “Poslednij zemskij sobor”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, N 21 (1594), November
1/14, 1997, pp. 10-11, 15, and Danilushkin, op. cit., chapter 6.
262
25. FROM THE VOLGA FAMINE TO THE “LIVING CHURCH”
It was the Volga famine of 1921-22, in which about 25 million people were
starving, 15 million more were under threat, but – thanks to the American Red
Cross – not many more than one million actually died453, that provided the
Bolsheviks with their first opportunity to create a major schism in the Church.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes: “At the end of the civil war, and as its natural
consequence, an unprecedented famine developed in the Volga area… V.G.
Korolenko, in his Letters to Lunacharsky explains to us Russia’s total, epidemic
descent into famine and destitution. It was the result of productivity having
become reduced to zero (the working hands were all carrying guns) and the
result, also, of the peasants’ utter lack of trust and hope that even the smallest
part of the harvest might be left to them…
“There was a direct, immediate chain of cause and effect. The Volga peasants
had to eat their children because we were so impatient about putting up with
the Constituent Assembly.
“But political genius lies in extracting success even from the people’s ruin. A
brilliant idea was born: after all, three billiard balls can be pocketed with one
shot. So now let the priests feed the Volga region! They are Christians. They are
generous!
“1. If they refuse, we will blame the whole famine on them and destroy the
Church.
“2. If they agree, we will clean out the churches.
“In either case, we will replenish our stocks of foreign exchange and precious
metals.
“Yes, and the action was probably inspired by the actions of the Church itself.
As Patriarch Tikhon himself had testified, back in August, 1921, at the beginning
of the famine, the Church had created diocesan and all-Russian committees for
aid to the starving and had begun to collect funds. But to have permitted any
direct help to go straight from the Church into the mouths of those who were
starving would have undermined the dictatorship of the proletariat. The
committees were banned, and the funds they had collected were confiscated and
turned over to the state and to the treasury. The Patriarch had also appealed to
the Pope in Rome and the Archbishop of Canterbury for assistance – but he was
rebuked for this, too, on the grounds that only the Soviet authorities had the
right to enter into discussions with foreigners. Yes, indeed. And what was there

453 N.N. Pokrovsky, S.G. Petrov, Arkhivy Kremlia: Politburo i Tserkov’ 1922-1925gg.
(The Kremlin Archives: the Politburo and the Church, 1922-1925), Moscow:
Rosspen, 1997, vol. 1, p. 7.
263
to be alarmed about? The newspapers wrote that the government itself had all
the necessary means to cope with the famine.
“Meanwhile, in the Volga region they were eating grass, the soles of shoes
and gnawing at door jambs. And, finally, in December [27], 1921, Pomgol – the
State Commission for Famine Relief – proposed that the churches help the
starving by donating church valuables – not all, but those not required for
liturgical rites. The Patriarch agreed. Pomgol issued a directive: all gifts must be
strictly voluntary! On February 19, 1922, the Patriarch issued a pastoral letter
permitting the parish councils to make gifts of objects that did not have
liturgical and ritual significance.
“And in this way matter could again have simply degenerated into a
compromise that would have frustrated the will of the proletariat, just as it once
had been by the Constituent Assembly, and still was in all the chatterbox
European parliaments.
“The thought came in a stroke of lightning! The thought came – and a decree
followed! A decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on February
26: all valuables were to be requisitioned from the churches – for the
starving!”454
This decree annihilated the voluntary character of the offerings, and put the
clergy in the position of accessories to sacrilege. And so on February 28, in order
to resolve the perplexities of the faithful, the Patriarch decreed: “… In view of
the exceptionally difficult circumstances, we have admitted the possibility of
offering church objects that have not been consecrated and are not used in
Divine services. Now again we call on the faithful children of the Church to
make such offerings, desiring only that these offerings should be the response of
a loving heart to the needs of his neighbour, if only they can provide some real
help to our suffering brothers. But we cannot approve of the requisitioning from
the churches, even as a voluntary offering, of consecrated objects, whose use for
purposes other than Divine services is forbidden by the canons of the
Ecumenical Church and is punished by Her as sacrilege – laymen by
excommunication from Her, and clergy by defrocking (Apostolic Canon 73;
Canon 10 of the First-Second Council).”455
This compromise decree represented the first major concession made by the
Church to Soviet power. Thus no less an authority than the holy Elder Nektary
of Optina said: “You see now, the patriarch gave the order to give up all
valuables from the churches, but they belonged to the Church!”456
On March 13, the Politburo (Lenin, Molotov, Kamenev and Stalin) accepted
Trotsky’s suggestion to form a “completely secret” commission to mastermind

454 Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, London: Fontana, vol. 1, pp. 342-344.
455 M.E. Gubonin, Akty Sviateishago Patriarkha Tikhona, Moscow, 1994, p. 190.
456 Matushka Evgenia Grigorievna Rymarenko, "Remembrances of Optina Staretz
Hieroschemamonk Nektary", Orthodox Life, vol. 36, N 3, May-June, 1986, p. 39.
264
the requisitioning. “Moreover,” writes Gregory Ravich, “the commission was
ordered ‘to act with maximal cruelty, not stopping at anything, including
executions on the spot (that is, without trial and investigation), in cases of
necessity summoning special (for which read: punitive) units of the Red Army,
dispersing and firing on demonstrations, interrogations with the use of torture’
and so on. The commission’s members were, besides Trotsky, Sapronov,
Unschlicht, Medved and Samoilov-Zemliachka. It literally rushed like a
hurricane through Russia, sweeping away… everything in its path.”457
Soon clashes with believers who resisted the confiscation of church valuables
took place. 1414 such clashes were reported in the official press. The first took
place in the town of Shuye on March 15. Five Christians were killed and fifteen
wounded, as a result of which two priests and a layman were condemned and
executed. In 1921-23, 2,691 married priests, 1,962 monks, 3,447 nuns and an
unknown number of laymen were killed on the pretext of resistance to the
seizure of church valuables in the country as a whole.458
On March 19, Lenin sent a long letter to the Politburo marked “Top Secret.
No Copies to be Made”: “It is precisely now and only now, when there is
cannibalism in the famine-stricken areas and hundreds if not thousands of
corpses are lying along the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the
confiscation of valuables with fanatical and merciless energy and not hesitate to
suppress any form of resistance… It is precisely now and only now that the vast
majority of the peasant masses will either support us or at least will be unable to
give any decisive support to those… who might and would want to try to resist
the Soviet decree. We must confiscate in the shortest possible time as much as
possible to create for ourselves a fund of several hundred million roubles…
Without this fund, government work.. and the defence of our positions in Genoa
are absolutely unthinkable… Now our victory over the reactionary clergy is
guaranteed… It is precisely now that we must wage a decisive and merciless
war with the black-hundreds clergy and crush their opposition with such
cruelty that they will not forget it for many decades… The more members of the
reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to shoot the better.”459
Concerning the Patriarch, however, Lenin said: “I think it is expedient for us

not to touch Patriarch Tikhon himself, although he is undoubtedly heading this

457 Ravich, "Ograblennij Khristos, ili brillianty dlia diktatury proletariata" (Christ
Robbed, or Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat), Chas-Pik (Rush

Hour), N 18, pp. 24-25.
458 Ravich, op. cit., p. 26. According to another estimate, up to 10,000 believers
were killed (V. Petrenko, “Sv. Patriarkh Vserossijskij Tikhon” (His Holiness
Patriarch Tikhon of All Russia), Vestnik I.P.Ts. (Herald of the True Orthodox
Church), Odessa, N 1 (11), 1998, p. 27). Donald Rayfield writes that in the parishes
some 2,700 priests and 5,000 monks and nuns perished (Stalin and his Hangmen,
London: Viking, 2004, p. 122).
459 Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij (Complete Works), vol. 45, p. 666, cited in
Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (The Herald of the Russian Christian

Movement), N 94, pp. 54-60; Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin, New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 134.
265
entire rebellion of slave-owners.” As leader of the campaign, Lenin wanted
Trotsky - “but he should at no time and under no circumstances speak out [on
this matter] in the press or before the public in any other manner”. This was
probably, as Richard Pipes suggests, “in order not to feed rumors that the
campaign was a Jewish plot against Christianity.”460For Trotsky was a Jew, and
the high proportion of Jews in the Bolshevik party had aroused the people’s
wrath against them.
At a Politburo session the next day Trotsky himself insisted: “The agitation
must not be linked with the struggle against religion and the Church, but must
be wholly directed towards helping the starving” (point 5); “we must take a
decisive initiative in creating a schism among the clergy”, taking the priests who
speak in support of the measures undertaken by Soviet power “under the
protection of state power” (point 6); “our agitation and the agitation of priests
loyal to us must in no case be mixed up”, but the communists must refer to “the
significant part of the clergy” which is speaking against the inhumanity and
greed “of the princes of the Church” (point 7); spying is necessary “to guarantee
complete knowledge of everything that is happening in various groups of clergy,
believers, etc.” (point 8); the question must be formulated correctly: “it is best to
begin with some church led by a loyal priest, and if such a church does not exist,
then with the most significant church after careful preparation” (point 9);
“representatives of the loyal clergy must be allowed to be registered in the
provinces and in the centre, after the population is well informed that they will
have every opportunity to check that not one article of the church heritage goes
anywhere else than to help the starving” (point 13). In actual fact, according to a
secret instruction all church valuables taken from “the enemies of Soviet power”
were to be handed over, not to Pomgol or the starving, but to the Economic
administration of the OGPU.461
In addition to being the head of the requisitioning commission, Trotsky also

headed the commission for their monetary realization. And in a submission to
this commission he wrote on March 23: “For us it is more important to obtain 50
million in 1922-23 for a certain mass of valuables than to hope for 75 million in
1923-24. The advance of the proletarian revolution in just one of the large
countries of Europe will put a stop to the market in valuables… Conclusion: we
must proceed as fast as possible…”462

460 Pipes, The Unknown Lenin, p. 155; Rayfield, op. cit., pp. 121-122.
461 N.A., "Ne bo vragom Tvoim tajnu poviem..." (I will not give Thy Mystery to
Thine enemies),Vestnik Germanskoj Eparkhii Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi za Granitsej
(Herald of the German Diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad), 1992, N
1, p. 17.
462 "Mucheniki Shuiskiye", Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the
Russian Christian Movement), N 170, III-1994, p. 190.
266
However, the Bolsheviks failed to get the money they wanted – the sale of
church valuables fetched only about $1.5 million, or between $4 and $10 million
according to another estimate.463
If the Bolsheviks’ primary motive in the requisitioning campaign was in fact

to destroy the Church, then they failed – the Church emerged even stronger
spiritually from her fiery ordeal. The blood of the martyrs was already starting
to bring forth fruit as thousands of previously lukewarm Christians returned to
the Church.
The struggle between the patriarchate and the Bolsheviks over church
valuables gave the renovationists their chance to seize power. It began in
Petrograd, a stronghold of renovationism as it had been of Bolshevism. The
initiative here came from the Petrograd party chief, Zinoviev, who suggested to
Archpriest Alexander Vvedensky that his group would be the appropriate one
for an eventual concordat between the State and the Church. Vvedensky then
joined Archpriest Vladimir Krasnitsky and Bishop Antonin Granovsky in
plotting to overthrow the Patriarch.
The leader of the Patriarchal Church in Petrograd was Metropolitan

Benjamin, who had actually come to an agreement with the local authorities
concerning the voluntary handing over of church valuables. These authorities
evidently did not yet understand that the real purpose of the Soviet decree was
not to help the starving but to destroy the Church. Having conferred with the
central authorities in Moscow, however, they reneged on their agreement. Then,
on March 24, a letter signed by the future renovationist leaders Krasnitsky,
Vvedensky, Belkov, Boyarsky and others, appeared in Petrogradskaia Pravda. It
defended the measures undertaken by the Soviet government and distanced the
authors from the rest of the clergy. The latter reacted strongly against this letter
at a clergy meeting, during which Vvedensky gave a brazen and threatening
speech. However, the metropolitan succeeded in calming passions sufficiently
so that it was decided to enter into fresh negotiations with the authorities, the
conduct of these negotiations being entrusted to Vvedensky and Boyarsky. They
proceeded to win an agreement according to which other articles or money were
allowed to be substituted for the church valuables…
On March 22-23 Trotsky wrote: “The arrest of the Synod and the Patriarch is
necessary, but not now, but in about 10-15 days… In the course of this week we
must arrange a trial of priests for stealing church valuables (there are quite a

463 Pipes, op. cit., p. 355. According to Rayfield, “barely four million gold roubles
were realized of which one million was spent on famine relief” (op. cit., pp. 120-
121). For another estimate, see Volkogonov, op. cit., p. 381. Rukh (N 34, November
4, 1996) reports that the Bolsheviks received a “profit” of 2.5 million gold rubles.
At the same time, Bukharin admitted to having spent nearly $14 million on
propaganda during the famine (Richard Joseph Cooke, Religion in Russia and the
Soviets, p. 149). But the Bolsheviks already had the Russian crown jewels, worth
one billion gold roubles, and jewels from the Kremlin museum, worth 300 million
gold roubles – far more than the market price of the church valuables (Pipes, op.
cit., p. 355).
267
few facts)… The press must adopted a frenzied tone, giving [evidence of] a heap
of priestly attempts in Smolensk, Petrograd, etc.”464
On April 1 the Patriarch was placed under house arrest. Then he was called
as a witness for the defence in the trial of 54 Moscow Christians, which began on
April 26. In an effort to save the accused, he took the whole responsibility upon
himself. And in one of the exchanges the essence of the relationship between the
Church and the State was expressed.
The Presiding Judge: “Do you consider the state’s laws obligatory or not?”
The Patriarch: “Yes, I recognize them, to the extent that they do not contradict the
rules of piety.”
Solzhenitsyn comments: “Oh, if only everyone had answered just that way!
Our whole history would have been different.”465
And yet the Patriarch’s words constituted a distinct weakening of his

position vis-à-vis Soviet power when compared with the absolutely
irreconcilable position he and the Council had adopted in 1917-18; for they
implied that Soviet power was legitimate, the power of Caesar rather than that
of the Antichrist… The first instinct of the Russian Church in the face of Soviet
power, as manifested in the 1917-18 Council, has never been extinguished
among Russian Christians. It continued to manifest itself both at home and
abroad (for example, in the First All-Emigration Council of the Russian Church
Abroad in 1921), both in the early and the later decades of Soviet power (for
example, among the "passportless" Christians of the Catacomb Church).
However, it was very soon tempered by the realisation that such outright
rejection of Soviet power on a large scale could be sustained only by war - and
after the defeat of the White Armies in the Civil War there were no armies left to
carry on the fight against the Bolsheviks.
Therefore from the early 1920s a new attitude towards Soviet power began to
evolve among the Tikhonite Christians: loyalty towards it as a political
institution ("for all power is from God"), and acceptance of such of its laws as
could be interpreted in favour of the Church (for example, the law on the
separation of Church and State), combined with rejection of its atheistic world-
view (large parts of which the renovationists, by contrast, accepted). In essence,
this new attitude involved accepting that the Soviet State was not Antichrist, as
the Local Council of 1917-18 and the Russian Church Abroad had in effect
declared, but Caesar, no worse in principle than the Caesars of Ancient Rome, to
whom the things belonging to Caesar were due. This attitude involved the
assertion that it was possible, in the Soviet Union as in Ancient Rome, to draw a
clear line between politics and religion.

464 Monk Benjamin (Gomareteli), Letopis’ tserkovnykh sobytij Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi
nachinaia s 1917 goda (Chronicle of Church Events, beginning from 1917),

www.zlatoust.ws/letopis.htm, p. 67.
465 Gubonin, op. cit., p. 198; Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 348.
268
But in practice, even more than in theory, this line proved very hard to draw.
For to the early Bolsheviks there was no such dividing line; for them, everything
was ideological, everything had to be in accord with their ideology, there could
be no room for disagreement, no private spheres into which the state did not
pry. Bolshevism demanded the totality of human life; they were true
totalitarians. Thus unlike most of the Roman emperors, who allowed the
Christians to order their own lives so long as they showed loyalty to the state
(which the Christians were eager to do), the Bolsheviks insisted in imposing
their own ways upon the Christians in every sphere: in family life (civil
marriage only, divorce on demand, children spying on parents), in education
(compulsory Marxism), in economics (dekulakization, collectivization), in
military service (the oath of allegiance to Lenin), in science (Lysenkoism), in art
(socialist realism), and in religion (the requisitioning of valuables, registration,
commemoration of the authorities at the Liturgy, reporting of confessions by the
priests). Resistance to any one of these demands was counted as "anti-Soviet
behaviour", i.e. political disloyalty. Therefore it was no use protesting one's
political loyalty to the regime if one refused to accept just one of these demands.
According to the Soviet interpretation of the word: "Whoever keeps the whole
law but fails in one has become guilty of all of it" (James 2.10), such a person
was an enemy of the people.
In view of this, it is not surprising that many Christians came to the

conclusion that there was no gain, and from a moral point of view much to be
lost, in accepting a regime that made such impossible demands, since the
penalty would be the same whether one asserted one's loyalty to it or not. And
if this meant living as an outlaw, so be it… Nevertheless, the path of total
rejection of the Soviet state required enormous courage, strength and self-
sacrifice, not only for oneself but also (which was more difficult) for one's family
or flock. It is therefore not surprising that, already during the Civil War, the
Church began to soften her anti-Soviet rhetoric and try once more to draw the
line between politics and religion. This is what Patriarch Tikhon tried to do in
the later years of his patriarchate - with, it must be said, only mixed results.
Thus his decision to allow some, but not all of the Church's valuables to be
requisitioned by the Bolsheviks in 1922 not only did not bring help to the
starving of the Volga, as was the intention, but led to many clashes between
believers and the authorities and many deaths of believers.
The decision to negotiate and compromise with the Bolsheviks only brought
confusion and division to the Church. Thus on the right wing of the Church
there were those, like Archbishop Theodore of Volokolamsk, who thought that
the patriarch had already gone too far; while on the left wing there were those,
like Archbishop Hilarion of Verey, who wanted to go further. The basic problem
was that the compromises were always one-sided; the Bolsheviks always took
and never gave; their aim was not peaceful co-existence, but the complete
conquest of the Church. And so, as a "Letter from Russia" put it many years
later: "It's no use our manoeuvring: there's nothing for us to preserve except the
things that are God's. For the things that are Caesar's (if one should really
269
consider it to be Caesar and not Pharaoh) are always associated with the
quenching of the Spirit..."466
However, the Patriarchal Church remained Orthodox under Patriarch Tikhon

and his successor, Metropolitan Peter, for two major reasons: first, because the
leaders of the Church did not sacrifice the lives of their fellow Christians for the
sake of their own security or the security of the Church organisation; and
secondly, because, while the Soviet regime was recognised to be, in effect,
Caesar rather than Pharaoh, no further concessions were made with regard to
the communist ideology.
Early in May, the Patriarch was placed under house arrest. According to his
will, the temporary administration of the Church should now have passed to
Metropolitan Cyril of Kazan. But since he was in prison, the next hierarch
according to the will, Metropolitan Agathangel of Yaroslavl, should have taken
over.
On May 12, accompanied by two chekists, the renovationist priests

Vvedensky, Belkov and Kalinovsky (who, as the Patriarch pointed out, had but
a short time before renounced holy orders), visited the Patriarch at the Troitsky
podvorye, where he was confined, and told him that they had obtained
permission for the convening of a Council, but on condition that he resigned
from the patriarchal throne.
The Patriarch replied that the patriarchy weighed on him like a cross. “I
would joyfully accept it if the coming Council removed the patriarchy from me,
but now I am handing power to one of the oldest hierarchs and will renounce
the administration of the Church.” The Patriarch rejected the candidacies of
some modernist bishops and appointed Metropolitan Agathangel as his
deputy.467
“However,” writes Krivova, “the authorities did not allow Metropolitan

Agathangel to leave for Moscow. Already on May 5, 1922 V.D. Krasnitsky had
arrived at the Tolga monastery where the metropolitan was living, and
demanded that he sign the appeal of the so-called ‘Initiative Group of Clergy’.
The metropolitan refused to sign the appeal. Then, two days later, his signature
declaring that he would not leave was taken from him, and a guard was placed
outside his cell and a search was carried out.
“After Agathangel there remained in Moscow only three of the members of

the Holy Synod and HCA, but they were not empowered to take any kind of
decision that would be obligatory for the whole Church. Thus the path to the
seizure of Church power by the renovationists was open. Using Tikhon’s
temporary concession and the impossibility of Metropolitan Agathangel’s
taking the place of the Patriarch, the renovationists declared that Tikhon had

466 Russkaia Mysl' (Russian Thought), N 3143, March 17, 1977.
270
been removed and in an arbitrary manner seized power. Arriving on May 15,
1922 at a reception with M.I. Kalinin, they understood that Metropolitan
Agathangel’s departure to Moscow was hardly possible. The next day the
renovationists sent a letter to M.I. Kalinin, in which they declared that ‘in view
of Patriarch Tikhon’s removal of himself from power, a Higher Church
Administration is formed, which from May 2 (15) has taken upon itself the
conducting of Church affairs in Russia.”468
On May 18 the renovationists again presented the Patriarch with a written

statement complaining that in consequence of the existing circumstances,
Church business remained unattended to. They demanded that he entrust his
chancery to them until Metropolitan Agathangel’s arrival in Moscow, in order
that they might properly classify the correspondence received. The Patriarch
yielded, and inscribed their petition with the following resolution: “The
undersigned persons are ordered to take over and transmit to the Right
Reverend Metropolitan Agathangel, upon his arrival in Moscow, all the
Synodical business with the assistance of secretary Numerov.”469
The next day, the Patriarch was transferred to the Donskoj monastery, and
the renovationists took over his residence in the Troitsky podvorye.
However, the renovationists and communists still had to neutralize the threat
posed by Metropolitan Agathangel. So Krasnitsky was sent to Yaroslavl and
placed a number of conditions before the Patriarch’s lawful deputy that
amounted to his placing himself in complete dependence on the renovationists.
When the metropolitan rejected these conditions, the renovationists spread the
rumour that he “was not hurrying” to fulfil the Patriarch’s command.
On June 5/18, “Metropolitan Agathangel unexpectedly addressed the

Russian Church with an appeal, which was printed by some underground
printing-press and very quickly distributed in Moscow and the other cities…
“E.A. Tuchkov was taken completely by surprise. The HCA was also shocked.
Metropolitan Agathangel was immediately arrested and sent into exile, to the
Narymsk region. However, the appearance of this appeal showed that the
unprincipled line of V.D. Krasnitsky was meeting with a sharp rejection in
ecclesiastical circles…”470
Agathangel was arrested for writing that the renovationists had “declared
their intention to revise the dogmas and moral teaching of our Orthodox Faith,
the sacred canons of the Holy Ecumenical Councils and the Orthodox Typicon
of Divine services given by the great ascetics of Christian piety”, and gave the

468 N.A. Krivova, Vlast’ i Tserkov’ v 1922-1925gg. (The Authorities and the Church in
1922-1925), Moscow, 1997.

469 J.S. Curtiss, The Russian Church and the Soviet State, Boston: Little, Brown, 1953,
pp. 159-160; Gubonin, op. cit., p. 290.

470 Levitin, A. and Shavrov, V. in Gubonin, op. cit., p. 813.
271
bishops the right to administer their dioceses independently until the
restoration of a canonical Higher Church Authority.471
The metropolitan’s reference to the renovationists’ revising the dogmas and

moral teachings of the Faith, as well as the canons and services, was correct.
Thus in its “Reform Programme”, the renovationists called for “the re-
establishment of the evangelical teaching of the first Christians, with a
deliberate development of the teaching concerning the human nature of Christ
the Saviour and a struggle with the scholastic corruption of Christianity.” And
one of the subsections of the programme bore the title: “The terrible judgement,
paradise and hell as moral concepts”.472
Fr. Basil Redechkin writes that the renovationists “united the leaders of
various rationalist tendencies. Therefore various voices were heard: some
denied the Holy Icons, others – the sign of the Cross, others – the Holy Relics,
others denied all the sacraments except baptism, while yet others tried to
overthrow the veneration of our Most Holy Lady the Mother of God and even
the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. They said about the All-holy Virgin Mary:
‘She is a simple woman, just like all women, and her son was, of course, only a
man, and not God!’ And the ‘livers’ created a completely atheist ‘symbol of faith’
to please the God-fighting, antichristian authorities. It was published in the
journal Zhivaia Tserkov’ in 1925, and was composed of thirty articles. This
‘symbol’ began with the words: ‘1. I believe in one power that created the world,
the heavens and the earth, the visible and invisible worlds. 2. In one catholic
humanity and in it (in the man) Jesus Christ.’
“And it is completely understandable that after this they should declare that
the Canonical rules by which the Holy Church has been guided for two
thousand years: the rules of the Holy Apostles, of the Ecumenical and Local
Councils and of the Holy Fathers – ‘have become infinitely outdated’ and
have ’repealed’ themselves… So the ‘liver-renovationists’, wanting to walk ‘in
step with the times’,… introduced a married episcopate, allowed widowed
priests to marry a second and even a third time, and took other liberties.”473
The focus now shifts back to Petrograd. On May 25 Vvedensky appeared

before Metropolitan Benjamin with a document signed by the renovationist
Bishop Leonid, which said that he, “in accordance with the resolution of
Patriarch Tikhon, is a member of the HCA and is sent to Petrograd and other
cities on Church business”. The metropolitan, not seeing the signature of the
Patriarch, refused to accept it.
The next day, at the Sunday Liturgy, an Epistle from the metropolitan was
read in all the churches of Petrograd, in which he anathematised the rebellious

471 Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 219-221.
472 Zhivaia Tserkov’, N 10, October 1, 1922; Zhukov, op. cit., p. 30.
473 Redechkin, “Pojmi vremia: Iskazhenie Pravoslavnogo Uchenia Moskovskoj
Patriarkhii” (Understand the Time: The Distortion of Orthodox Teaching by the

Moscow Patriarchate), Moscow, 1992, samizdat, p. 5.
272
priest Alexander Vvedensky and Eugene Belkov and also those with them.
“According to the teaching of the Church,” it said in the Epistle, “a diocese that
is for some reason deprived of the possibility of receiving instructions from its
Patriarch, is ruled by its bishops, who remains in spiritual union with the
Patriarch… The bishop of Petrograd is the Metropolitan of Petrograd. By
obeying him, you will be in union with him and will be in the Church.”
The next day chekists arrived at the residence of the metropolitan and
arrested him. Meanwhile, Vvedensky took over the chancellery. Without
turning a hair, he went up to the hierarch for a blessing. “Fr. Alexander,” said
the metropolitan peacefully, “you and I are not in the Garden of Gethsemane”.
And without blessing the schismatic, he calmly listened to the statement about
his arrest.474
On May 29, the administration of the diocese passed to his vicar, Bishop
Alexis (Simansky) of Yamburg, the future false-patriarch.
On the same day, Metropolitan Benjamin was brought to trial together with
86 others. They were accused of entering into negotiations with Soviet power
with the aim of annulling or softening the decree on the requisitioning of church
valuables, and that they were “in a plot with the worldwide bourgeoisie and the
Russian emigration”. He was given many chances to save himself in a
dishonourable manner. Thus even before the trial Vvedensky and the Petrograd
commandant Bakaiev had come to him and given him the choice: either revoke
the anathema against Vvedensky or face trial. But the metropolitan refused to
revoke the anathema. (His deputy, Bishop Alexis, having recognised the HCA to
be lawful, did revoke the anathema, on June 4. According to A. Levitin and V.
Shavrov, he did this because the chekists threatened him that if he disobeyed
Metropolitan Benjamin would be shot.475) Again, during the trial, the judges
hinted that he save himself by naming “the authors” of the proposition he had
sent to Pomgol. The metropolitan again refused, saying: “I alone did it – I
thought everything over; I formulated, wrote and sent the proposition myself. I
did not allow anybody else to participate in deciding matters entrusted to me as
archpastor.”
The renovationists Krasnitsky and Vvedensky testified against Metropolitan

Benjamin during the trial, which was staged in what had been the Club of the
Nobility. Three witnesses came forward to defend the metropolitan. They were
immediately arrested, so no-one else came forward. on July 5, the metropolitan
was convicted of “organizing a counter-revolutionary group having set himself
the aim of struggling with Soviet power”. Ten people were condemned to be
shot; the others were given prison sentences of varying lengths. The
metropolitan himself was shot on the night of August 12 to 13, 1922.

474 Protopriest Vladislav Tsypin, Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi, 1917-1918, chapter 2; Monk
Benjamin, op. cit., p. 76.

475 Levitin and Shavrov, op. cit.; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 77.
273
In a letter written from prison, the metropolitan expressed the essence of
what was to become the position of the Catacomb Church a few years later:
“The reasonings of some, perhaps outstanding pastors are strange… – ‘we must
preserve the living forces’, that is, for their sake, we must abandon everything!
Then what is Christ for? It is not the Platonovs, the Chuprins, the Benjamins and
their like who save the Church, but Christ. That point on which they are trying
to stand is destruction for the Church; it is not right to sacrifice the Church for
oneself…”
The renovationist schismatics continued to gain ground throughout 1922. On

June 16, three important hierarchs joined them, declaring: “We, Metropolitan
Sergius [Stragorodsky] of Vladimir and Shuya, Archbishop Eudocimus of
Nizhegorod and Arzamas and Archbishop Seraphim of Kostroma and Galich,
having studied the platform of the Temporary Church Administration and the
canonical lawfulness of its administration, consider it the only lawful, canonical,
higher church authority, and all the instructions issuing from it we consider to
be completely lawful and obligatory. We call on all true pastors and believing
sons of the Church, both those entrusted to us and those belonging to other
dioceses, to follow our example.”476
Metropolitan John (Snychev) wrote: “We do not have the right to hide from
history those sad and staggering apostasies from the unity of the Russian
Church which took place on a mass scale after the publication in the journal
‘Living Church’ of the epistle-appeals of the three well-known hierarchs. Many
of the hierarchs and clergy reasoned naively. Thus: ‘If the wise Sergius has
recognized the possibility of submitting to the Higher Church Administration,
then it is clear that we, too, must follow his example.’”477
The GPU gave valuable aid to the renovationists, arresting and sending into
exile all the clergy who remained faithful to the Patriarch. Also, they handed
over to them nearly two-thirds of the functioning churches in the Russian
republic and Central Asia, as well as many thousands in the Ukraine, Belorussia
and Siberia. However, these figures exaggerated the true strength of the
renovationists, in that their churches were almost empty while the patriarchal
churches were filled to overflowing.
In April, the government announced that the Patriarch was about to go on

trial on charges arising from the trials of the 54 in Moscow and of Metropolitan
Benjamin in Petrograd the previous year. At about this time, international
opinion began to make itself felt in support of Patriarch Tikhon. On April 10,
1923 G.V. Chicherin reported to Stalin that the Anglo-Saxons were as interested
in Orthodoxy as they were in Catholicism, and that the execution of the

Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 218-219.
476
Snychev, “Mitropolit Sergij i Obnovlencheskij Raskol” (Metropolitan Sergius

477
and the Renovationist Schism), in M.B. Danilushkin, Istoria Russkoj Pravoslavnoj

Tserkvi (A History of the Russian Orthodox Church), vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1997, p.
182.
274
Patriarch would be disadvantageous in all respects.478 On April 21, Dzerzhinsky
proposed to the Politburo that the Tikhon’s trial be postponed. The Politburo
agreed and backed down.479 The trial was postponed to June 17. On May 8, the
British foreign minister Lord Curzon issued an ultimatum to the Soviets,
demanding, among other things, a cessation of religious persecution and the
liberation of Patriarch Tikhon, otherwise there would be a new intervention
against the USSR. This was supported by an outcry in the British and American
press. The conflict was resolved by the end of June, when the Patriarch was
released from prison.480
One of the reasons why the Soviets postponed the trial of the Patriarch was
their desire that the renovationists condemn him first. They were not
disappointed… At their second All-Russian council, which met in Moscow on
April 29, 1923, the renovationists first heaped praises on the revolution, which
they called a “Christian creation”, on the Soviet government, which they said
was the first government in the world that strove to realize “the ideal of the
Kingdom of God”. And they were no less generous to Lenin: “First of all, we
must turn with words of deep gratitude to the government of our state, which,
in spite of the slanders of foreign informers, does not persecute the Church…
The word of gratitude and welcome must be expressed by us to the only state in
the world which performs, without believing, that work of love which we,
believers, do not fulfil, and also to the leader of Soviet Russia, V.I. Lenin, who
must be dear also to church people…”
Patriarch Tikhon was tried in absentia, and deprived both of his orders and
of his monasticism, being called thenceforth “layman Basil Bellavin”. Then the
restoration of the patriarchate was called a counter-revolutionary act; so it was
abolished and replaced by a synod. The council proceeded to decree: “Church
people must not see in Soviet power the power of the Antichrist. On the
contrary, the Council draws their attention to the fact that Soviet power, alone in
the whole world, is able by state methods to realize the ideals of the Kingdom of
God. Therefore every believing churchman must not only be an honourable
citizen, but also must struggle in every way, together with Soviet power, for the
realization on earth of the ideals of the Kingdom of God.”481
Some further resolutions were adopted allowing white clergy to become

bishops and priests to remarry, and introducing the Gregorian calendar.
When the decisions of the council were taken to the Patriarch for his
signature, he calmly wrote: “Read. The council did not summon me, I do not

478 “G. Chicherin and L. Trotsky told the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets: ‘Do
nothing and say nothing that could close the path to a peaceful resolution of the
conflict with England’” (S. Bychkov, Moskovskij Komsomolets (Muscovite
Komsomolian), May 16, 1990).
481 Zhukov, op. cit., p. 34.
275
know its competence and for that reason cannot consider its decision lawful.”482
Forty-six “bishops” (out of the seventy-three who attended the council) signed
the decree condemning the Patriarch. One of them, Joasaph (Shishkovsky), told
Fr. Basil Vinogradov how this happened. “The leaders of the council Krasnitsky
and Vvedensky gathered all those present at the ‘council’ of bishops for this
meeting. When several direct and indirect objections to these leaders’ proposal
to defrock the Patriarch began to be expressed, Krasnitsky quite openly declared
to all present: ‘He who does not immediately sign this resolution will only leave
this room straight for the prison.’ The terrorized bishops (including Joasaph
himself) did not find the courage to resist in the face of the threat of a new
prison sentence and forced labour in a concentration camp and… signed,
although almost all were against the resolution. None of the church people had
any doubt that the ‘council’s’ sentence was the direct work of Soviet power and
that now a criminal trial and bloody reprisal against the Patriarch was to be
expected at any time.”483
However, already at this 1923 council the renovationist movement was

beginning to fall apart. The 560 deputies were divided into four groups: the
supporters of Krasnitsky (the Living Church), of Vvedensky (the Ancient-
Apostolic Church), of Antonin (Church Regeneration) and of Patriarch Tikhon.
When Krasnitsky tried to take control of the council and reject any coalition
between his group and the other renovationists, a schism amidst the schismatics
was avoided only by strong behind-the-scenes pressure on his supporters from
the communists, who succeeded in regrouping them under a “Holy Synod” led
by Metropolitan Eudocimus.484
At the beginning of June, the Patriarch fell ill, and was transferred from the
Donskoy monastery to the Taganka prison. There he was able to receive only
official Soviet newspaper accounts of the Church struggle, which greatly
exaggerated the successes of the renovationists. But the newspapers said
otherwise – and the Patriarch was deceived. As he said: “Reading the
newspapers in prison, with each passing day I was more and more horrified
that the renovationists were taking the Church into their hands. If I had known
that their successes were so meagre and that the people was not following them,
I would never have come out of prison.”
Feeling that his presence at the helm of the Church was absolutely necessary,
and that of his two enemies, the renovationists and the communists, the former
were the more dangerous, the Patriarch decided to make concessions to the
government in order to be released. Thus on June 16 and again on July 1 he

483 Cited in Archbishop Nikon (Rklitsky), Zhizneopisanie Blazhenneishago Antonia,
mitropolita Kievskago i Galitskogo, vol. VI, p. 114. The council also consecrated the
married Protopriest John (Kedrovsky) as Metropolitan of the Aleutian Islands and
North America. On returning to America, he conducted a stubborn struggle against
Metropolitan Plato, drawing 115 churches to his side (Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p.
96).
484 Savelev, op. cit., p. 195.
276
issued his famous “confession”, in which he repented of all his anti-Soviet acts
(including the anathema against the Bolsheviks), and “finally and decisively”
set himself apart “from both the foreign and the internal monarchist White-
guard counter-revolutionaries”.485
The Patriarch’s position was extremely difficult. Nevertheless, his

“repentance” was undoubtedly a blow to the Church. Thus in a report dated
December 12, 1923 to his superior, T.D. Deribas, Tuchkov wrote: “The second
significant moment in the work of the Section was the accomplishment of the
‘repentance of Tikhon’, which as you are probably aware, made an extremely
unfavourable impression on the Russian monarchists and the right-leaning
elements in general, who had seen in Tikhon, up to this time, an adamant anti-
Soviet figure.”486
We see a striking parallel between the destinies and decisions of Patriarch

Tikhon and Tsar Nicholas here. Both were peacemakers, ready to lay down their
own lives for the sake of their flock. Both, in the interests of saving lives, made
fateful decisions which they came bitterly to regret – the Tsar his decision to
abdicate the throne, and the Patriarch his decision to “repent” of his anti-Soviet

485 Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 280, 286. There is some evidence that Patriarch Tikhon's
release from prison was linked with the fact that in June, 1923 the Bolsheviks
finally accepted that Lenin was too ill to return to politics. A. Rykov took over
from Lenin as president of the Sovnarkom, and on entering office immediately
received the Patriarch and promised to reduce the pressure on religious
organizations, reduce the taxes on the clergy and churches and release some
hierarchs from prison - a promise that he kept. See Latyshev, op. cit.
486 Archpriest Alexander Lebedev, “[paradosis] Who is Really Behind the Schisms?”
orthodox-tradition@yahoogroups.com, March 2, 2006. The second achievement

Tuchkov claimed for himself as director of the 6 t h Section of the Secret Department
of the OGPU was the splitting up of the Church and a decline in faith among the
young. Here he exaggerates, failing to take into account the strengthening of the
patriarchate’s position vis-á-vis the other groups since July: “The goal which had
been placed before the Section at the end of 1922 to move the Orthodox Church
from its moribund and anti-Soviet position and to deprive it of that strength which
it had held prior to that time, has been completely accomplished by the Seciton.
The Orthodox Church as a single apparatus does not exist any more at the present
time; it has been broken into several separate groups which have their separate
hierarchies, and which are found in constant enmity to one another and which are
disposed to be completely irreconcilable to one another.
“At the present time there are four such groups that are fully formed and which
have their own ecclesiastical apparatus, namely the Tikhonites, the Renovationists,
the Renascenists, and the Working Church. All of these groups have been placed in
such a state, that willingly or unwillingly they are bound to constantly be at war
with one another and to curry favour from the organs of civil authority. The
enmity between these groups deepens from time to time and more and more, and
concurrently the authority of the servers of the cult is being lost, and from this,
among the faithful, and especially among the youth, is created an extremely
passive, and at time inimical attitude even to the Church itself, on the grounds of
which there begins to develop the growth of atheism.
“The splitting up of the Orthodox Church into the above-indicated groups is
the fulfilment of only one part of the work which was completed regarding the
Orthodox churchmen in 1923.”
277
behaviour. But in spite of these mistakes, both were granted the crown of life
from the Lord, Who looks on the heart and intentions of men, forgiving them
their unintended consequences…
Some have seen a less flattering parallel between Patriarch Tikhon and his
successor, Metropolitan Sergius. We shall discuss Sergius in detail later. Suffice
it to say at this point that, whatever compromises Patriarch Tikhon made, he
never made them them to spare himself, but only others, and he never betrayed
his colleagues to death by calling them “counter-revolutionaries”…
Moreover, the Patriarch managed to write to Metropolitan Anthony

(Khrapovitsky), as it were replying to the perplexities elicited by his words on
“walling himself off” from the “counter-revolution” of the Church Abroad: “I
wrote this for the authorities, but you sit and work”.487 In other words, the
Church was not to take his words seriously…488

487Izvestia, June 12, 1924; Lebedev, Velikorossia, p. 577.
488Cf. also the words of Archbishop Nicon (Rklitsky), who points out: “1) it did not
annul the anathema in the name of the Russian Orthodox Church on Soviet power,
2) he did not declare himself a friend of Soviet power and its co-worker, 3) it did
not invoke God’s blessing on it, 4) it did not call on the Russian people to obey
this power as God-established, 5) it did not condemn the movement for the re-
establishment of the monarchy in Russia, and 6) it did not condemn the Whites’
struggle to overthrow Soviet power. By his declaration Patriarch Tikhon only
pointed to the way of acting which he had chosen for the further defence and
preservation of the Russian Orthodox Church. How expedient this way of acting
was is another question,… but in any case Patriarch Tikhon did not cross that
boundary which had to separate him, as head of the Russian Orthodox Church,
from the godless power.” (op. cit., pp. 151-152).
278
26. GREEK ECCLESIASTICAL IMPERIALISM
A new epoch in the life of the Greek Church began with the election of
Meletius Metaxakis as Patriarch of Constantinople in 1921. Bishop Photius of
Triaditsa writes: “Political circles around Venizelos and the Anglican Church
had been involved in Meletius’ election as Patriarch. Metropolitan Germanus
(Karavangelis) of the Holy Synod of Constantinople wrote of these events, ‘My
election in 1921 to the Ecumenical Throne was unquestioned. Of the seventeen
votes cast, sixteen were in my favour. Then one of my lay friends offered me
10,000 lira if I would forfeit my election in favour of Meletius Metaxakis.
Naturally I refused his offer, displeased and disgusted. At the same time, one
night a delegation of three men unexpectedly visited me from the “National
Defence League” and began to earnestly entreat me to forfeit my candidacy in
favour of Meletius Metaxakis. The delegates said that Meletius could bring in
$100,000 for the Patriarchate and, since he had very friendly relations with
Protestant bishops in England and America, could be useful in international
causes. Therefore, international interests demanded that Meletius Metaxakis be
elected Patriarch. Such was also the will of Eleutherios Venizelos. I thought over
this proposal all night. Economic chaos reigned at the Patriarchate. The
government in Athens had stopped sending subsidies, and there were no other
sources of income. Regular salaries had not been paid for nine months. The
charitable organizations of the Patriarchate were in a critical economic state. For
these reasons and for the good of the people [or so thought the deceived
hierarch] I accepted the offer…’ Thus, to everyone’s amazement, the next day,
November 25 [December 8 new style], 1921, Meletius Metaxakis became the
Patriarch of Constantinople.
“The uncanonical nature of his election became evident when, two days
before the election, November 23 [December 6], there was a proposal made by
the Synod of Constantinople to postpone the election on canonical grounds. The
majority of the members voted to accept this proposal. At the same time, on the
very day of the election, the bishops who had voted to postpone the election
were replaced by other bishops. This move allowed the election of Meletius as
Patriarch. Consequently, the majority of bishops of the Patriarchate of
Constantinople who had been circumvented met in Thessalonica. [This Council
included seven out of the twelve members of the Constantinopolitan Holy
Synod and about 60 patriarchal bishops from the New Regions of Greece under
the presidency of Metropolitan Constantine of Cyzicus.] They announced that,
‘the election of Meletius Metaxakis was done in open violation of the holy
canons,’ and proposed to undertake ‘a valid and canonical election for Patriarch
of Constantinople.’ In spite of this, Meletius was confirmed on the Patriarchal
Throne.”489
Two members of the Synod then went to Athens to report to the council of
ministers. On December 12, 1921 they declared the election null and void. One

489 Bishop Photius, "The 70th Anniversary of the Pan-Orthodox Congress in
Constantinople", Orthodox Life, N 1, 1994, pp. 41-42.
279
of the prominent hierarchs who refused to accept this election was Metropolitan
Chrysostom (Kavourides) of Florina, the future leader of the True Orthodox
Church. The Sublime Porte also refused to recognize the election, first because
Meletius was not an Ottoman citizen and therefore not eligible for the
patriarchate according to the Ottoman charter of 1856, and secondly because
Meletius declared that he did not consider any such charters as binding insofar
as they had been imposed by the Muslim conquerors.490
On December 29, 1921, the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece under the
presidency of Metropolitan Germanus of Demetrias, another future leader of the
True Orthodox Church, deposed Metaxakis for a series of canonical
transgressions and for creating a schism, declared both Metaxakis and
Rodostolos Alexandros to be schismatics and threatened to declare all those
who followed them to be similarly schismatic. However, in spite of this second
condemnation, Meletius sailed into Constantinople under the Byzantine flag
and was enthroned as patriarch on January 22, 1922. And as a result of intense
political pressure his deposition was uncanonically lifted on September 24,
1922! 491 Thus there arrived at the peak of power one of the men whom
Metropolitan Chrysostom (Kavourides) called “these two Luthers of the
Orthodox Church”. The other one, Archbishop Chrysostom (Papadopoulos) of
Athens, would come to power very shortly…
The insecurity of Meletius’ position did not prevent him from trumpeting his
nationalist-ecumenist plans in his enthronement speech: “I give myself to the
service of the Church, so as from her first throne to assist in the development, as
far as this is possible, of closer friendly relations with the heterodox Christian
Churches of the East and West, to push forward the work of unification between
them and others.” Then, on August 3, his Synod recognised the validity of
Anglican orders. In 1923 Cyprus and Jerusalem followed suit, showing how
quickly Ecumenism could spread once it had taken hold in Constantinople.492
Within the next few years, Meletius and his successor, Gregory VII,
undertook the wholesale annexation of vast territories belonging to the
jurisdiction of the Serbian and Russian Patriarchates. Basing his actions on a
false interpretation of the 28th canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which
supposedly gives all the “barbarian lands” into the jurisdiction of
Constantinople, he and his successor created the following uncanonical
autonomous and autocephalous Churches:-
1. Western Europe. On April 5, 1922, Meletius named an exarch for the whole
of Western and Central Europe, Metropolitan Germanus of Thyateira and Great
Britain. In 1923 he suggested to Metropolitan Eulogius of Paris and his flock that

490 Alexandris, op. cit., pp. 75-76.
491 “To imerologiakon skhism apo istorikis kai kanonikis apopseos exetazomenon"
(The Calendar Schism from an historical and canonical point of view), Agios
Agathangelos Esphigmenites (St. Agathangelos of Esphigmenou), N 131, May-June,
1992, p. 17; Bishop Photius, op. cit., p. 41.
492 Stavrides, op. cit., p. 45.
280
he submit to Metropolitan Germanus. In a letter dated March 28, 1923,
Metropolitan Eulogius declined. 493 By the time of Gregory VII’s death in
November, 1924, there was an exarchate of Central Europe under Metropolitan
Germanus of Berlin, an exarchate of Great Britain and Western Europe under
Metropolitan Germanus of Thyateira, and a diocese of Bishop Gregory of Paris.
In the late 1920s the Ecumenical Patriarch received into his jurisdiction
Metropolitan Eulogius, who had just created a schism in the Russian Church
Abroad, and who sheltered a number of influential heretics, such as Nicholas
Berdiaev and Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, in the theological institute of St. Sergius in
Paris.494
2. Finland. In February, 1921 Patriarch Tikhon granted the Finnish Church,

led by Archbishop Seraphim (Lukyanov), autonomy within the Russian Church.
In 1922, Meletius offered to Seraphim to ordain the renovationist priest Herman
(Aava) as his vicar-bishop, and receive autocephaly from the Ecumenical
Patriarchate. The excuse given here was that Patriarch Tikhon was no longer
free, “therefore he could do as he pleased” (Metropolitan Anthony
(Khrapovitsky)). Seraphim refused, declaring his loyalty to Patriarch Tikhon
and the Russian Church Abroad. In spite of this, and under the strong pressure
of the Finnish authorities, Herman was consecrated Bishop of Sortavala in
Constantinople. This undermined the efforts of the Orthodox to maintain their
position vis-à-vis the Lutherans. Then, for refusing to learn the Finnish language
in three months, Archbishop Seraphim was imprisoned on the island of
Konevets by the Finnish government, while Patriarch Gregory VII raised Bishop
Herman to the rank of metropolitan. Despite the protests of Patriarch Tikhon,
the new metropolitan, under pressure from the government, annulled the right
of the monasteries to celebrate Pascha according to the Julian calendar. Then
began the persecution of the confessors of the Old Calendar in the monastery of
Valaam (see below).
“Even more iniquitous and cruel,” writes Metropolitan Anthony

(Khrapovitsky), “was the relationship of the late Patriarch Gregory and his
synod towards the diocese and the person of the Archbishop of Finland. The
Ecumenical Patriarch consecrated a vicar bishop for Finland, the priest Aava,
who was not only not tonsured, but not even a rasophore. Moreover, this was
done not only without the agreement of the Archbishop of Finland, but in spite
of his protest. By these actions the late Patriarch of Constantinople violated a
fundamental canon of the Church – the sixth canon of the First Ecumenical
Council [and many others], which states, ‘If anyone is consecrated bishop
without the consent of his metropolitan, the Great Council declares him not to
be a bishop.’ According to the twenty-eighth canon of the Fourth Ecumenical
Council, the patriarch cannot even place a bishop in his diocese without the
approval of the local metropolitan. Based on precisely this same canon, the
predecessors of Gregory vainly attempted to realize his pretensions and legalize
their claims to control. This uncanonical ‘bishop’ Aava, once consecrated as

494 A History of the Russian Church Abroad, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1972, p. 51.
281
bishop, placed a monastic klobuk on his own head, and thus costumed, he
appeared in the foreign diocese of Finland. There he instigated the Lutheran
government to persecute the canonical Archbishop of Finland, Seraphim, who
was respected by the people. The Finnish government previously had requested
the Ecumenical Patriarch to confirm the most illegal of laws, namely that the
secular government of Finland would have the right to retire the Archbishop.
The government in fact followed through with the retirement, falsely claiming
that Archbishop Seraphim had not learned enough Finnish in the allotted time.
Heaven and earth were horrified at this illegal, tyrannical act of a non-Orthodox
government. Even more horrifying was that an Orthodox patriarch had
consented to such chicanery. To the scandal of the Orthodox and the evil delight
of the heterodox, the highly dubious Bishop Germanus (the former Fr. Aava)
strolled the streets of Finland in secular clothes, clean-shaven and hair cut short,
while the most worthy of bishops, Seraphim, crudely betrayed by his false
brother, languished in exile for the remainder of his life in a tiny hut of a
monastery on a stormy isle on Lake Ladoga.”495
On November 14/27, 1923, Patriarch Tikhon and the Russian Holy Synod,
after listening to a report by Archbishop Seraphim decreed that “since his
Holiness Patriarch Tikhon has entered upon the administration of the Russian
Orthodox Church, the reason for which the Patriarch of Constantinople
considered it necessary temporarily to submit the Finnish Church to his
jurisdiction has now fallen away, and the Finnish eparchy must return under
the rule of the All-Russian Patriarch.”496 However, the Finns did not return to
the Russian Church, and the Finnish Church remains to this day the most
modernist of all the Orthodox Churches, being the only Church that has
adopted the Western paschalion.
3. Estonia. In February, 1919, after the martyrdom of Bishop Plato of Revel,

Bishop Alexander (Paulus) of Porkhov was transferred to his see. Patriarch
Tikhon then granted a broad measure of autonomy to the parts of the former
Pskov and Revel dioceses that entered into the boundaries of the newly formed
Estonian state. On September 23, 1922, the Estonian Church under Archbishop
Alexander petitioned to be received under the Ecumenical Patriarchate and to
be granted autocephaly. On March 10, 1940, in a letter to Metropolitan Sergius
(Stragorodsky), Metropolitan Alexander wrote that this decision was taken
under strong political pressure from the State authorities at a time when news
was constantly coming from Soviet Russia about the very difficult position of
Patriarch Tikhon and the Russian Church, and in reply to an appeal from Patriarch
Meletius IV.497

495 Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), in Monk Gorazd, "Quo Vadis,
Konstantinopol'skaia Patriarkhia?" (Where are you going, Constantinopolitan
Patriarchate?), Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox Russia), N 2 (1455), January 15/28,
1992, p. 9.
282
4. Latvia. In June, 1921 Patriarch Tikhon granted the Latvian Church
autonomy under Archbishop John of Riga, who was burned to death by the
communists in 1934. In March, 1936, the Ecumenical Patriarch accepted the
Church of Latvia within his own jurisdiction. On March 29 Metropolitan
Germanus of Thyateira and Great Britain headed the consecration of the
garrison priest Augustine (Peterson) as Metropolitan of Riga and All Latvia.498
4. Poland. The Orthodox Church in Poland numbered about three million,

mainly Ukrainians and Belorussians. They were persecuted by the Poles, who,
lready on October 22, 1919 had ordered 497 Orthodox churches and chapels,
which had supposedly been seized from the Catholics in the past, to be returned
to the Catholic Church. 499 In 1921 Patriarch Tikhon appointed Archbishop
Seraphim (Chichagov) to the see of Warsaw, but the Poles, whose armies had
defeated the Red Army in 1920, did not grant him entry into the country. So on
September 27 the Patriarch was forced to accept the Poles’ candidate,
Archbishop George (Yaroshevsky) of Minsk. However, he appointed him his
exarch in Poland, not metropolitan of Warsaw (that title remained with
Archbishop Seraphim). Moreover, he refused Archbishop George’s request for
autocephaly on the grounds that very few members of the Polish Church were
Poles and the Polish dioceses were historically indivisible parts of the Russian
Church. Instead, he granted the Polish Church autonomy within the Russian
Church.
On January 24, 1922 Archbishop George convened a Council in Warsaw

which included Archbishops Dionysius (Valedinsky) and Panteleimon
(Rozhnovsky). Under pressure from the authorities, Bishop Vladimir also joined
them. Pekarsky, an official of the ministry of religious confessions, tried to make
the Russian hierarchs sign the so-called “Temporary Rules”, which had been
drawn up in the ministry and which envisaged far-reaching government control
over the life of the Orthodox Church in Poland. On January 30 the “Temporary
Rules” were signed by Archbishops George and Dionysius, but not by
Archbishop Panteleimon and Bishop Vladimir. On the same day Patriarch
Tikhon issued a decree transferring Archbishop George to the see of Warsaw
and raising him to the rank of metropolitan, insofar as it had become evident
that it would be impossible to obtain the Polish authorities’ permission for the
entrance into Warsaw of Metropolitan Seraphim (Chichagov), who had the
reputation of being an extreme rightist. However, the titular promotion of
Archbishop George by no means signified that the patriarch supported his
intentions, for in the decrees there is no mention of ecclesiastical autocephaly,
nor of exarchal rights. Consequently, as was confirmed by the patriarch in 1925,
he was simply one of the diocesan bishops in Poland, and not metropolitan “of
all Poland”.500

498 Monk Benjamin, http://www.zlatoust.ws/letopis2.htm, p. 56.
499 See Danilushkin, op. cit., p. 586.
283
Liudmilla Koeller writes: “In 1922 a council was convoked in Pochaev which
was to have declared autocephaly, but as the result of a protest by Bishop
Eleutherios [Bogoyavlensky] and Bishop Vladimir (Tikhonitsky), this decision
was not made. But at the next council of bishops, which gathered in Warsaw in
June, 1922, the majority voted for autocephaly, with only Bishops Eleutherios
and Vladimir voting against. A council convoked in September of the same year
‘deprived Bishops Eleutherios and Vladimir of their sees. In December, 1922,
Bishop Eleutherios was arrested and imprisoned’.”501
Bishop Eleutherios was exiled to Lithuania. Two other Russian bishops,

Panteleimon (Rozhnovsky) and Sergius (Korolev), were also deprived of their
sees. The three dissident bishops were then expelled from Poland.
In November, 1923, Metropolitan George was killed by an opponent of his

church politics, Archimandrite Smaragd (Laytshenko), and was succeeded by
Metropolitan Dionysius “with the agreement of the Polish government and the
confirmation and blessing of his Holiness Meletius IV [Metaxakis]”. Patriarch
Tikhon rejected this act as uncanonical.502 On November 13, 1924 Patriarch
Gregory VII signed a Tomos “on the recognition of the Orthodox Church in
Poland as autocephalous”. The Tomos significantly declared: “The first
separation from our see of the Kievan Metropolia and from the Orthodox
Metropolias of Latvia and Poland, which depended on it, and also their union to
the holy Moscow Church, took place by no means in accordance with the
prescription of the holy canons, nor was everything observed that had been
established with regard to the complete ecclesiastical autonomy of the Kievan
metropolitan who bears the title of exarch of the Ecumenical Throne”. Hereby
the patriarch indirectly laid claim to Ukraine as his canonical territory, in spite
of the fact that it had been under Russian rule for two-and-a-half centuries. And
yet, in contradiction with that, he affirmed as the basis of his grant of
autocephaly to the Polish Church the fact that “the order of ecclesiastical affairs
must follow political and social forms”, basing this affirmation on the 17th
Canon of the Fourth Ecumenical Council and the 38th canon of the Sixth
Ecumenical Council.503

501 Koeller, "Kommentarii k pis'mu Arkhiepiskopa Rizhskago i Latvijskago Ioanna
Arkhiepiskopu Vilyenskomu i Litovskomu Elevferiu ot 2 noiabria 1927 g."

(Commentary on the Letter of Archbishop John of Riga and Latvia to Archbishop
Eleutherios of Vilnius and Lithuania), Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), NN 3-4,
May-June-July-August, 1992, pp. 56-57; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 87.
503 K. Svitich, Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ v Pol’she i ee autokefalia (The Orthodox Church
in Poland and its autocephaly); Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 133. For a more
detailed account of the Polish autocephaly, see M. Zyzykin, “Avtokefalia i
printsipy eia primenenia” (Autocephaly and the principles of its application),
Pravoslavnij Put’ (The Orthodox Way), 2004, pp. 101-133. For a translation of the
whole Tomos see:
http://www.ukrainianorthodoxchurchinexile.org/1924_tomos_of_autocephaly.ht
ml.
284
5. Hungary and Czechoslovakia. According to the old Hungarian law of
1868, and confirmed by the government of the new Czechoslovak republic in
1918 and 1920, all Orthodox Christians living in the territory of the former
Hungarian kingdom came within the jurisdiction of the Serbian Patriarchate.
That meant that they were served by Bishops Gorazd of Moravia and Dositheus
of Carpatho-Russia (Gorazd was consecrated on September 25, 1921 in Belgrade
by Patriarch Demetrius of Serbia, Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev
and two Serbian bishops).504
However, on September 3, 1921, the Orthodox parish in Prague elected

Archimandrite Sabbatius to be their bishop. When the Serbian Synod refused to
consecrate Sabbatius, he, without the knowledge of his community, set off for
Constantinople, where on March 4, 1923, he was consecrated “archbishop” of
the newly created Czechoslovakian branch of the Ecumenical Patriarchate,
which included Carpatho-Russia. Then, on April 15, 1924, the Ecumenical
Patriarch established a metropolia of Hungary and All Central Europe with its
see in Budapest (although there was already a Serbian bishop there).
“The scandal caused by this confusion,” writes Z.G. Ashkenazy, “is easy to
imagine. Bishop Sabbatius insisted on his rights in Carpatho-Russia,
enthusiastically recruiting sympathizers from the Carpatho-Russian clergy and
ordaining candidates indiscriminately. His followers requested that the
authorities take administrative measures against priests not agreeing to submit
to him. Bishop Dositheus placed a rebellious monk under ban – Bishop
Sabbatius elevated him to igumen; Bishop Dositheus gathered the clergy in
Husta and organized an Ecclesiastical Consistory – Bishop Sabbatius enticed
priests to Bushtin and formed an Episcopal Council. Chaos reigned in church
affairs. Malice and hatred spread among the clergy, who organized into
‘Sabbatiites’ and ‘Dositheiites’.
“A wonderful spiritual flowering which gave birth to so many martyrs for

Orthodoxy degenerated into a shameful struggle for power, for a more lucrative
parish and extra income. The Uniate press was gleeful, while bitterness settled
in among the Orthodox people against their clergy, who were not able to
maintain that high standard of Orthodoxy which had been initiated by inspired
simple folk.”505
6. Turkey. While creating uncanonical new Churches on the territory of other

Local Orthodox Churches (he also invited the Russians in America to come
under his omophorion, but they refused), Meletius contrived to support a
schism on his own canonical territory. Thus in the autumn of 1922, Metropolitan
Procopius of Konium, to whom all the churches of Anatolia were subject, with
two titular bishops and two priests separated from the patriarchate and created

504 Meanwhile, on August 9, Archimandrite Alexis (Kabaliuk) convened a Council
of the Carpatho-Russian Church to which 400 delegates came. Because of the
persecution of the faith in Russia, the Council decided to remain within the
jurisdiction of the Serbian Church (Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 57).
505Monk Gorazd, op. cit.
285
his own Synod of the “Turkish Orthodox Church”. Since the new Church was
strongly supported by the government of Ataturk, Meletius considered it
inappropriate to ban it. Instead, he suggested the creation of an autonomous
Turkish Church subject to the patriarchate, and he promised to introduce the
Turkish language into the Divine services. At that time there lived about 50,000
Turkish-speaking Orthodox in Anatolia. This movement lost all support after
the great exodus of the Orthodox from Turkey in 1922-1923.506
In 1938 Bishop John (Maximovich) of Shanghai reported to ROCOR’s All-

Diaspora Council: “Increasing without limit their desires to submit to
themselves parts of Russia, the Patriarchs of Constantinople have even begun to
declare the uncanonicity of the annexation of Kiev to the Moscow Patriarchate,
and to declare that the previously existing southern Russian Metropolia of Kiev
should be subject to the Throne of Constantinople. Such a point of view is not
only clearly expressed in the Tomos of November 13, 1924, in connection with
the separation of the Polish Church, but is also quite thoroughly promoted by
the Patriarchs. Thus, the Vicar of Metropolitan Eulogius in Paris, who was
consecrated with the permission of the Ecumenical Patriarch, has assumed the
title of Chersonese; that is to say, Chersonese, which is now in the territory of
Russia, is subject to the Ecumenical Patriarch. The next logical step for the
Ecumenical Patriarchate would be to declare the whole of Russia as being under
the jurisdiction of Constantinople…
“In sum, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, in theory embracing almost the whole
universe, and in fact extending its authority only over several dioceses, and in
other places having only a superficial supervision and receiving certain
revenues for this; persecuted by the government at home and not supported by
any governmental authority abroad; having lost its significance as a pillar of
truth and having itself become a source of division, and at the same time being
possessed by an exorbitant love of power – represents a pitiful spectacle which
recalls the worst periods in the history of the See of Constantinople.”507

Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 84.
506
Archbishop John, "The Decline of the Patriarchate of Constantinople", The

507
Orthodox Word, vol. 8, N 4 (45), July-August, 1972, p. 175.
286
27. THE INTRODUCTION OF THE NEW CALENDAR
Throughout the Orthodox world, the new political rulers after the First
World War wanted to introduce the new, Gregorian calendar to replace the old,
Julian one sanctioned by the holy canons and many centuries of usage. Why? In
the Balkans and Constantinople, the motive appears to have been purely
political: to obtain the support of the Masonic-led western powers. In Russia the
motive was more subtle: as Yaroslavsky explained: “[The Patriarch’s] agreement
with even one of these reforms (he has agreed to recognise the new, Gregorian
calendar) will make him a ‘heretic’ – an innovator in the eyes of the True
Orthodox.” 508 However, God had pre-armed the Orthodox against the
innovation. In 1583, 1587 and 1593, the Eastern Patriarchs had anathematized
the new calendar; in 1904 all of the Local Churches had condemned it; and in
February, 1918 the Local Council of the Russian Church in Moscow had again
condemned it.
But the pressure from the Bolsheviks continued, and on January 21, 1919
Patriarch Tikhon wrote to the patriarch of Constantinople suggesting various
options with regard to the calendar.509 When the renovationists adopted the new
calendar, the pressure was increased. Thus on June 11, 1923, Yaroslavsky wrote
to the Politburo and Stalin: “Tikhon must be informed that the penalty meted
out to him may be commuted if… he expresses his agreement with some reforms in
the ecclesiastical sphere (for example, the new style [i.e. the introduction of the new
calendar]).” On September 18 the Antireligious Commission decreed: “To
recognize as appropriate that Tikhon and co. should in the first instance bring
forward the new style into the church, disband the parish councils and
introduce the second marriages of the clergy…”510
On September 24, 1923 Patriarch Tikhon convened a Council of bishops

which took the decision to introduce the new calendar on October 2/15. The
Patriarch explained his decision as follows: “This demand was repeated many
times, and was reinforced by the promise of a more benevolent attitude on the
part of the Government towards the Orthodox Church and Her institutions in
the case of our agreement and the threat of a deterioration in these relations in
the case of our refusal”.511 He also pointed to considerations of unity with the
other Orthodox Churches; for he had been falsely informed by Tuchkov that all
the other Churches had adopted the new style, whereas in fact all the Churches
except Constantinople, Greece and Romania had objected to the change. Also, in
a letter to Abbot Paulinus of Valaam dated October 6 he justified the
introduction of the new style on the grounds that it introduced no innovation in
faith, and the Orthodox Paschalion remained in force.512

508 Pokrovsky and Petrov, op. cit., pp. 282-284.
510 Pokrovsky and Petrov, op. cit., p. 531; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 113.
511 Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 299-300, 335.
287
The decree on the introduction of the new style was read out in the Moscow
Pokrov monastery on October 1/14. But it was sent out only to the deans of
Moscow, while the diocesan bishops did not receive it, since Archbishop
Hilarion had obtained permission from Tuchkov not to send it to the provinces
as long as the patriarchal epistle explaining the change had not been printed. So
the new style was only introduced in Moscow and in Valaam, where it was
rejected by many of the monks.
However, on November 8, when the Patriarch learned from Archbishop

Anastasy in Constantinople that the patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch,
Jerusalem and Serbia, as well as ROCOR, were against the change, and when he
saw that the Russian people were also strongly opposed to his decree, he
reversed his decision “temporarily”, making use of the fact that his epistle on
the calendar change had not been published.513 In spite of this, agents of the
government posted up notices of the now annulled decree on the introduction
of the new calendar. But the people saw in this the clear interference of the State,
and so no attention was paid to the decree.514
After the Patriarch recovered from his mistake, he and the Russian Church as
a whole set themselves firmly against the new calendar…
It was a different story in Constantinople and Greece… After the new

revolutionary government took power in Greece, all the hierarchs who had
condemned the election of Meletius Metaxakis as patriarch changed their minds,
and, as Stavros Karamitsos writes, “quickly hastened, one after the other, to
recognize Meletius, except for two bishops, Sophronius of Eleutheropolis and
our famous Chrysostom,… [who wrote in his Apology]: ‘I was then summoned,
through the bishop of Kavala Chrysostom, to appear before the Minister, who
urged me with threats to recognize Meletius. I took no account of his threats and
refused to knuckle under. Then, to avoid a second exile to the Holy Mountain, I
departed to Alexandria to see my relatives and to recover from my
distress. ’While in Alexandria, I received a summons from the Ecumenical
Patriarchate to appear before the Holy Synod and explain why I did not
recognize the election of Meletius as Ecumenical Patriarch. But..., being unable
to appear in person before the Synod, I sent a letter justifying my refusal to
recognize Meletius as the canonical Patriarch on the basis of the divine and
sacred Canons. And while he was preparing to condemn and defrock me in my
absence, he was driven from his throne by the Turks for scandalously mixing his
spiritual mission with anti-Turkish politics…’”515
However, the mood in Constantinople had begun to turn against Meletius

during August-September, 1922, when the terrified Greeks began to leave at the

513Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 300, 335; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 118.
514Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 332-338; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 115-117, 130-131.
515 Karamitsos, O Synkhronos Omologitis tis Orthodoxias (The Contemporary
Confessor of Orthodoxy), Athens, 1990, p. 25.
288
rate of 3000 a day. One of those who left at this time was Hierodeacon Basil
Apostolides. As Fr. Jerome of Aegina, he was to become one of the great figures
of the True Orthodox Church. He gave as reason for his departure his fear that
the Turks would force the clergy to take off their cassocks – a prophecy that was
fulfilled twelve years later.516
“The second fall of Constantinople” took place for the same reason as the first
fall in 1453 – the attempt of the Church to achieve union with the western
heretics. The first concrete step towards that union was to be the adoption of the
new, papist calendar… Already at the beginning of 1923, a Commission had
been set up on the initiative of the government to see whether the Greek Church
could accept the new calendar. The Commission reported: “Although the
Church of Greece, like the other Autocephalous Orthodox Churches, is
inherently independent, they are firmly united and bound to each other through
the principle of the spiritual unity of the Church, composing one and one only
Church, the Orthodox Church. Consequently none of them can separate itself
from the others and accept the new calendar without becoming schismatic in
relation to them.”
On the basis of this report a royal mandate was issued decreeing, among
other things, that “the Julian Calendar is to remain in force as regards the
Church and religious feasts in general”, and that “the national festival of the 25th
of March and all the holidays laid down by the laws are to be regulated
according to the Julian Calendar.”517
On February 3, Meletius Metaxakis wrote to the Church of Greece, arguing

for the change of calendar at his forthcoming Pan-Orthodox Council “so as to
further the cause, in this part of the Pan-Christian unity, of the celebration of the
Nativity and Resurrection of Christ on the same day by all those who are called
by the name of the Lord.”518 The revolutionary government of Greece under
Colonel Plastiras then removed Metropolitan Theocletus I of Athens from office.
Shortly afterwards, on February 25, Archimandrite Chrysostom Papadopoulos,
was elected Metropolitan of Athens by three out of a specially chosen Synod of
only five hierarchs – another ecclesiastical coup. During his enthronement
speech, Chrysostom said that for collaboration with the heterodox “it is not
necessary to have common ground or dogmatic union, for the union of
Christian love is sufficient”.519
As one of the members of the commission tht had rejected the new calendar,
Chrysostom might have been expected to resist Meletius’ call. But the two men

516 Peter Botsis, Gerontas Ieronymos o Isykhastes tis Aiginas (Elder Jerome the
Hesychast of Aegina), Athens, 1991, p. 76.

517 Goutzidis, Ekklesiologika Themata (Ecclesiological Themes), Athens, 1980, pp. 68-
70.
518 Goutzidis, op. cit., p. 76.
519 Cited in Bishop Photius, op. cit., p. 40. At about this time the Churches of
Cyprus, Jerusalem and Sinai all issued declarations recognizing Anglican orders
(Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 91, 92).
289
had more in common than the fact that they had both been expelled from the
Church of Jerusalem in their youth; and on March 6 Chrysostom and his Synod
accepted Meletius’ proposal and agreed to send a representative to the
forthcoming Council. Then, on April 16, he proposed to the Hierarchy that 13
days should be added to the calendar, “for reasons not only of convenience, but
also of ecclesiastical, scientifically ratified accuracy” - in spite of the fact that
only three months before he had signed the Commission’s report, which said
that any Church that accepted the new calendar would become schismatic!…
Five out of the thirty-two hierarch voted against the innovation. Two days later,
however, at the second meeting of the Hierarchy, it was announced that
Chrysostom’s proposal had been “unanimously” approved, but “with
absolutely no change to the Paschalion and Calendar of the Orthodox Church”.
Moreover, it was decided that the Greek Church would approve of any decision
regarding the celebration of Pascha made by the forthcoming Pan-Orthodox
Council, provided it was in accordance with the Canons…520
It was therefore knowing that the Greek Church would support his reforms
that Meletius convened a “Pan-Orthodox Council” in Constantinople from May
10 to June 8, 1923. The resolutions included the “correction” of the Julian
calendar, a fixed date for Pascha, the second marriage of clergy, and various
relaxations with regard to the clothing of clergy, the keeping of monastic vows,
impediments to marriage, the transfer of Saints’ feasts from the middle of the
week, and fasting. However, hardly more than ten people, and no official
representatives of the Patriarchates, turned up for the council, so discredited
was its convener.521
Even Archbishop Chrysostom (Papadopoulos) had to admit: “Unfortunately,

the Eastern Patriarchs who refused to take part in the Congress rejected all of its
resolutions in toto from the very outset. If the Congress had restricted itself only
to the issue of the calendar, perhaps it would not have encountered the kind of
reaction that it did.” 522 What made the changing of the calendar still less
acceptable was its raison d’être, viz., that it “would make a great moral
impression on the whole civilized world by bringing the two Christian worlds
of the East and West closer…”523
Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev called the calendar innovation

“this senseless and pointless concession to Masonry and Papism”. 524 And

520 Goutzidis, op. cit., pp. 74-78.
521 However, an Anglican hierarch, Charles Gore of Oxford, was allowed to attend
one of the sessions, sitting at the right hand of Meletius and taking part in the
work of the Congress.
522 “Oecumenical Patriarch Meletios (Metaxakis)”, Orthodox Tradition, vol. XVII, NN
2 & 3, 2000, p. 9.
523 Dionysius Battistatos, Praktika-Apophaseis tou en Kon/polei Panorthodoxou
Synedriou 1923 (The Acts and Decisions of the Pan-Orthodox Conference in
Constantinople in 1923), 1982, p. 57.
524 See Monk Gorazd, "Quo Vadis, Konstantinopol'skaia Patriarkhia?" (Where are
you going, Constantinopolitan Patriarchate?), Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox

Russia), N 2 (1455), January 15/28, 1992.
290
Archbishop Nicon wrote: “The most important decrees of the Congress were the
decisions to change to the new style [calendar] and to allow the clergy to marry
a second time. The Alexandrian, Antiochian and Jerusalem Churches did not
participate in the Congress, considering its convening untimely [and Meletius
an uncanonical usurper]. But its decrees were rejected by them as being,
according to the expression of the Alexandrian Patriarch, ‘contrary to the
practice, tradition and teaching of our most Holy Mother Church and presented
under the pretext of being slight modifications, which are probably elicited by
the demands of the new dogma of “Modernism”’ (epistle to the Antiochian
Patriarch, 23 June, 1923). The representatives of the Russian Church Abroad
[Archbishops Anastasy and Alexander], and after them the Council of Bishops,
reacted completely negatively to these reforms.”525
The false council caused rioting in the streets of Constantinople, and the
Orthodox population sacked the patriarchal apartments and physically beat
Meletius himself…
In fact, the position of the patriarchate was already so vulnerable, that during
the Lausanne conference (1922-23), which decided on the massive exchange of
populations between Greece and Turkey, the Turkish delegation officially
demanded the removal of the patriarchate from Constantinople in view of its
disloyalty to the Turkish government in the course of the past war. And the
Italian president of the exchange of populations subcommission, G.M.
Mantagna, even suggested that “the removal of the Patriarchate [from
Constantinople] would not be too high a price to pay for the conclusion of an
agreement.” However, the French delegation, supported by the Greeks,
suggested that the patriarchate remain in Constantinople but without its former
political power. And on January 10, 1923 the British Lord Curzon said that the
removal of the patriarchate from Constantinople would be a shock to the whole
civilised world.
The British, whose troops were still occupying Constantinople and probably
prevented a massacre there similar to that which had taken place in Smyrna,
suspected the hand of the Vatican in this proposal to remove the patriarchate.
For, as the advisor to the Archbishop of Canterbury on Near Eastern questions,
J.A. Douglas, said: “No one with the slightest knowledge of the Near East can
doubt that Rome is bitterly hostile to the Phanar, and reckons a disaster to it as
an institution to be a great thing.” 526
Venizelos then came up with a compromise proposal that the patriarchate

remain in Constantinople but that he would do all he could to remove his
nephew Metaxakis from it, a proposal that the Turks reluctantly agreed to.527
Meletius agreed to his resignation, but suggested its postponement until the
conclusion of the peace negotiations, in June, 1923. On July 10, harassed by both

525 Nicon (Rklitsky), op. cit., vol. 10, p. 38. See also A History, op. cit., pp. 53-55.
526 A. Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations,
1918-1974, Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1983, Alexandris, pp. 90, 91.
291
Venizelos and the Turkish government, and challenged for his see by the newly
formed “Turkish Orthodox Church” of Papa Euthymius, Meletius withdrew to
Mount Athos. On September 20, he resigned officially.
On December 6, a new patriarch, Gregory VII, was enthroned. On the very

next day, the “Turkish Orthodox” priest Papa Euthymius together with
Metropolitan Cyril of Rodopolis and his supporters burst into the Phanar, drove
out all the inhabitants and declared that they would not leave the Phanar until a
“lawful” patriarch was elected and Gregory renounced the throne. Two days
later, after an order came from Ankara, the Turkish police escorted them out,
and the Phanar was returned to Patriarch Gregory.528
The irony was that, only a few years earlier, the patriarchate had broken with
the Turkish authorities on the grounds of Greek nationalism. Now the
patriarchate owed its rescue from the hands of Turkish ecclesiastical nationalists
to – the Turkish authorities… Lausanne and the exchange of populations that
followed spelled the end of Greek nationalist dreams, and the beginning of the
end of Constantinople as a Greek city…
Metaxakis’s notorious career was not over yet. Platonov writes that after
“hiding with his Masonic protectors in England” for a few years, in 1926, on the
death of Patriarch Photius of Alexandria, “with the financial and organisational
support of the secret world powers-that-be, Meletius was put forward as second
candidate for the throne of Alexandria. The first claimant was Metropolitan
Nicholas of Nubia. According to established practice, the first candidate should
have been proclaimed patriarch. However, the Egyptian authorities under
pressure from the English confirmed the ‘election’ of Meletius. Using his power,
the new Alexandrian patriarch-mason introduced the Gregorian calendar [in
1926], causing a serious schism in the Alexandrian Church.”529
This had major repercussions on the relationship between Constantinople

and ROCOR. On March 30, 1924 the Ecumenical Patriarch appointed a
commission composed of three metropolitans which told Archbishop Anastasy
that in carrying out ordinations and divorces he was exceeding his prerogatives.
Nevertheless, no specific ordinations were discussed, but instead it was
demanded of Anastasy that (a) he should not speak out against Soviet power, (b)
he cease commemorating Patriarch Tikhon, and (c) recognize Soviet power.530
So the Ecumenical Patriarch by 1924 was what we should now call
renovationist-sergianist as well as ecumenist!

528 Oriente Moderno (The Contemporary East), January 15, 1924, p. 30; Monk
Benjamin, op. cit., p. 118.

529 Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow: Rodnik,
1998, p. 478. Moreover, he again tried to push many of the Greek Orthodox in
America into schism. See Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, A Reply to
Archbishop Athenagoras, Montreal, 1979, p. 19; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 150.
530 E. Kholmogorov, letter to Vertograd, 1999.
292
At the same time the patriarchate tried to detain Metropolitan Anthony on
Mount Athos… And “on 30 April 1924,” writes Andrei Psarev, “the Synod of
the Patriarchate of Constantinople adopted a decision: they suspended Russian
Archbishops Anastasy and Alexander, who were in Constantinople, and
directed that all Russian clerics serving in Turkey were to consider themselves
directly subordinate to the Patriarchate of Constantinople; and they informed
the Serbian Patriarch that the Russian bishops located within Serbian canonical
territory did not have the right to minister to Russian exiles.
“The Serbian Orthodox Church, however, had a different outlook on the

plight of Russian bishops. In the reply from the Council of Bishops of the
Serbian Church to the Patriarchate of Constantinople dated 9 December 1924
they stated: ’The Holy Council of Bishops, as the supreme authority of the
autocephalous united Serbian Church, gave its assent to a request from His
Eminence Anthony, Metropolitan of Kiev and Galich, during a council session
held on 18/31 August 1921… which authorized the creation of a higher church
authority of [Russian] bishops to manage church affairs for the Russian colony
and exiles living on the territory of our [Serbian] jurisdiction. In doing so, the
Serbian Council carried out its responsibilities in a spiritual manner that leaves
us satisfied that we have fulfilled our apostolic responsibilities. Thus, we have
accepted the Russian exiles, who because of circumstances have ended up in our
spiritual realm, under our patronage, with the permission of state authorities.
We have also willed that they be ministered to by their own priests and bishops
who know best their spiritual needs and blessed church traditions. Thus, on the
basis of canon law, they have the right to organize an autocephalous
[autonomous?] church authority by their own free will.’”531
It was the Freemason Archbishop Chrysostom Papadopoulos of Athens who

took the lead in introducing the new calendar in Greece. Or rather, it was the
revolutionary Greek government that took the lead, and Chrysostom
immediately followed. Thus on December 14, 1923 the government decided to
suspend the old Constitutional Law in accordance with which the Greek Church
had been administered for the previous 70 years. According to the new Law, the
Hierarchy would meet only once a year, and between sessions would be
represented by the Archbishop of Athens alone. Metropolitans would have to
retire at 65, which conveniently neutralized the influence of the older and more
conservative hierarchs. Invested now with almost dictatorial powers,
Archbishop Chrysostom convened a meeting of the Hierarchy, which, on
December 24, voted to thank the government for emancipating it from the
previous administrative system (!), and, on December 27, decided to introduce
the new calendar with the agreement of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (but no
other Orthodox Church).

531 Psarev, op. cit., pp. 1-2.
293
It is striking how similar were the programs of the renovationists in Greece
and Russia at this time. Both proposed a complete reformation of the Church
with a very similar agenda. And both were pushed from behind by the political
revolution… Thus the decision to change the calendar in Greece was imposed
on the Church by the revolutionary government. At a meeting on December 24,
Nicholas Plastiras, the President of the government, said to the hierarchs: “The
Revolution requests you, then, my respected Hierarchs, to leave all personal
preference to one side and proceed to purge the Church… The Revolution hopes
that a useful work for the new generation will result from your labours, and that
it will reckon itself happy to see the rebirth of the Church being set in motion…
Consequently, it wishes you not to limit yourselves to the ancestral Canons, but
to proceed to radical measures.”532
On January 4, 1924, Chrysostom wrote to the Ecumenical Patriarch asking for

his agreement to the calendar change. He said that it was “sad” that the other
Orthodox Churches had not agreed to this, but did not suggest that this might
be an impediment. The Patriarch replied on February 14 in a much more
sycophantic tone, suggesting that the change should take place on March 10
(henceforth March 23), but asking that he be informed of the agreement of the
other Orthodox Churches. Chrysostom immediately telegraphed his agreement
to this date, and asked the Patriarch to inform his metropolitans in the New
Territories about it.
His haste was probably elicited by the Alexandrian Patriarch Photius’

message to the Ecumenical Patriarch on January 15: “Your announcement that,
without any real cause or dogmatic or canonical reasons, the brotherly advice
and entreaties of the four Apostolic Thrones has been rejected, and the ‘reform
of the calendar’ has taken place, caused us great grief and surprise. You are in
danger of alienating all the Orthodox peoples of the Church. Therefore I suggest
the convening of a council to examine the question. Taking into consideration
the letters from the Churches of Romania and Serbia, we abide in these things
which have been dogmatized in former Synodal Congresses, and we reject
every addition or any change of the calendar before the convocation of an
Ecumenical Council, which alone is capable of discussing this question,
concerning which Ecumenical Council we propose a speedy convocation.”
On February 16 Chrysostom telegraphed Photius, saying that an Ecumenical

Council could not be convened immediately, and that the calendar change was
an urgent necessity “for the sake of millions of Orthodox people”. After asking
him to change the calendar on March 10, he added, rather craftily, that there
would be no change in the Paschalion, for such a change would have to be
referred to an Ecumenical Council (as if the addition of 13 days to the calendar
was a much less important change that did not require a conciliar decision). But
Photius was not persuaded…

532 Archimandrite Theocletus A. Strangas, Ekklesias Hellados Historia, ek pegon
apseudon, 1817-1967 (A History of the Church of Greece from Unlying Sources,

1817-1967), vol. 2, Athens, 1970, p. 1181; translated by Kitskikis, op. cit., p. 18.
294
The other patriarchs spoke out strongly against the reforms. Thus Patriarch
Damian of Jerusalem and his Synod wrote: “The most holy Mother of the
Churches is unable to accept the change at present because of the
disadvantageous position in which, as is well known, she finds herself in
relation to the Latins in the holy places, and because of the dangers of
proselytism.” And Patriarch Gregory of Antioch and his Synod wrote: “Political
factors produced the change of the calendar even though the whole of the
Eastern Church keeps to the Julian calendar. The tendency to change the canons
represents a great danger in our eyes.” And Patriarch Demetrius of Serbia
wrote: “We have indicated the necessity of postponing for the time being the
council that has been convened in order that the question be examined before an
Ecumenical Council so as to decide on a single calendar for all the Orthodox
Churches.”533
On March 3, Chrysostom told all the Hierarchs of the Church of Greece that
“in accordance with the decision of the Holy Synod the Church of Greece has
accepted the correction of the Julian calendar defined by the Ecumenical
Patriarch, according to which March 10 is to be considered and called March
23…” On March 4, he asked the Foreign Ministry to “send urgent telegrams to
the Blessed Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Serbia, and the
Archbishops of Romania and Cyprus, informing them that the Church of Greece
has accepted the decision of the Ecumenical Patriarchate concerning the
convergence of the ecclesiastical and political calendar, calling March 10 March
23, and to inform the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople that the Church of
Greece had put his decision into effect.”534
As we have seen, the Ecumenical Patriarch accepted the change, albeit with
the proviso that it be agreed by all the Orthodox Churches. This acquiescence is
explained by the very weak position of the patriarchate in the wake of the Asia
Minor catastrophe, being economically dependent on the Greek Church. In fact,
Patriarch Gregory VII was personally opposed to the change. But he accepted it
because, as he told the Holy Synod: “Unfortunately, the change in the calendar
was imposed by the Greek government.”535
For as the tomos of November 13, 1924 declared: “The conduct of Church
affairs must be compatible with the political and social forms”!…
On Sunday, March 10, 1924 (March 23, according to the new calendar) the
State Church of Greece and the Patriarchate of Constantinople adopted the new
calendar. On that day, the future hierarch-confessor of the True Orthodox
Church, Archimandrite Germanus (Varykopoulos) was serving the Divine

533 Abraham Tsimirikas, Eis Ipakoin Pisteos (In Obedience to the Faith), 1977, pp. 28-
30.
534 Tsimirakis, op. cit., pp. 85-98.
535 Demetrius Mavropoulos, Patriarkhikai selides: To Oikoumenikon Patriarkheion apo
1878-1949 (Patriarchal Pages: The Ecumenical Patriarchate from 1878 to 1949),

Athens, 1960; translated by Kitsikis, op. cit., p. 19.
295
Liturgy in his church of St. Alexander in Palaion Faliron. Having come to the
end of the Liturgy, he commemorated “the holy 13 days whose memory we
celebrate!”536
On March 25, 1924 (new calendar), two important events took place
simultaneously in Athens. The great feast of the Annunciation was celebrated
according to the new calendar by Archbishop Chrysostom (Papadopoulos). And
the Greek monarchy was abrogated (without a vote) by the revolutionary
government.
As Nicholas Kraniotakis wrote: “Under strict orders, and to the sound of

trumpets, the soldiers detached the Crown from the Cross and threw it to the
ground! And Greek democracy was born!...”537
This is another indication of the close spiritual link between events in Greece
and in Russia. In both, political anti-monarchism was joined to religious
renovationism. In Greece since 1917 the anti-monarchists and renovationists had
been led by Venizelos in the State and Metaxakis in the Church.538 Moreover,
Meletius had been helped by the fact that in Russia the so-called “Living Church”
had come to power in 1922 with a very similar programme of modernistic
reforms to his own. And on the occasion of his election as Patriarch of
Alexandria, the synod of the “Living Church” wrote to him: “The Holy Synod
recalls with sincere best wishes the moral support which Your Beatitude
showed us while you were yet Patriarch of Constantinople by entering into
communion with us as the only rightfully ruling organ of the Russian Orthodox
Church.”539
On April 6, 1924, a vast crowd gathered in the courtyard outside the

Annunciation cathedral. The next day the newspaper Vradini(Evening News)
reported: “The priests have been forbidden, under pain of defrocking, to
liturgise or chant the troparia of the Annunciation today. Also forbidden is the
ringing of the bells of the Russian cathedral (in Phillelinon Street), and today’s
celebration of the Liturgy at the metochion of the Holy Sepulchre, although the
Patriarchate of Jerusalem has not accepted the new calendar.

536 Metropolitan Calliopius of Pentapolis, Deinopathimata G.O.X. (The Sufferings of
the True Orthodox Christians), vol. 1, Piraeus, 1990, p. 30.

537 Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit., p. 15.
538 From The New York Times, June 7, 1917, p. 22: “A miniature civil war between
Venizelists and the supporters of King Constantine of Greece was fought in the
basement of the St. Constantine’s Greek Orthodox Church at 64 Schermerhorn
Street, Brooklyn, last night when the Constantine faction sought to expel the
pastor of the church for omitting the usual custom of saying ‘long live the King’ in
every Sunday prayer.
“Police were called in to untangle the difficulties, and while the king’s men
were at the Adams Street police station making complaints about the religious,
political and military zeal of the Venizelists, the supporters of the pro-Allies ex-
Premier elected a Board of Trustees and informed the pastor of the church, the
Rev. Stephano Papamacaronis, that he could omit to pray for the King.”
539 Cited in Bishop Photius, op. cit., p. 42.
296
“In spite of all the measures taken, multitudes of the faithful inundated the
metropolitan cathedral from afternoon to late at night, and at their persistent
entreaty one priest was found who chanted a paraklesis, being ‘obedient,’ as he
said, ‘to the threats of the people’. The wardens wanted to close the church, but
in view of the fanaticism of the worshippers the cathedral remained open into
the night. Three miracles took place at the metropolitan cathedral… Seven-year-
old Stasinopoulos, a deaf-mute and paralytic since birth, was brought by his
mother to the icon of the Mother of God, convulsed by spasms. A little while
later he arose amidst general compunction, pronounced the words “mama-
granny-papa” and began to walk.
“A little later a seventeen-year-old paralytic was healed, and… a hard-

working deaf-mute. The latter spoke yesterday for the first time in thirty years,
declaring that he would not go to work today. Although the cathedral wardens
know the names of these two, they refuse to publish them, affirming that no
miracle has taken place, although the contrary is confessed by the whole
congregation.”
Another newspaper, Skrip, reported on the same day: “Movement inside the
cathedral was impossible. The faithful listened to the vespers, and after the
dismissal anxiously discussed the change in the worshipping calendar and the
transfer of the feast of the Annunciation. “Two thousand pious Christians,
together with women and children, unanimously proclaimed their adherence to
the holy dogmas of religion, which the democrats have come to change, and one
voice was heard: ‘We will not become Franks! We are Orthodox Christians, and
we will remain Orthodox Christians!’”
Similar scenes, and similar miracles, took place in other regional centres, such
as Nauplion, Tripolis, Thessalonica and Corinth. The secular authorities
everywhere supported the new ecclesiastical regime. But the faithful Christians,
obeying the teachings of the holy Fathers and imitating the Christians of old
who in similar situations broke communion with the innovators, themselves
broke off all ecclesiastical communion with the innovating Church of Greece.
They prayed at home or in country chapels, served by a very small number of
priests, including some from Mount Athos, who were continually persecuted by
the police at the instigation of Chrysostom Papadopoulos.
The Romanian Church had already been tempted by the new calendar in
1864, when Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza “convoked a Church Synod at which
he recommended that the Romanian Orthodox Church change from the Julian
Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. Also present at this Synod was Saint
Calinic of Cernica (1787-1868), one of the most dauntless strugglers for the
triumph of the truth and for the preservation of the True Faith. He was
categorically opposed to the calendar innovation and exclaimed as he was
leaving the hall in which the Synod was meeting: ‘I will not be reckoned with
297
transgressors!’ Thus, the Prince did not succeed in implementing this
recommendation, which had been imposed on him by Freemasons.”540
However, Cuza succeeded in getting some leading hierarchs sent to foreign

heterodox institutions for training. Among them was Metropolitan Miron
(Cristea), a former uniate, who on December 17, 1923, as head of the Romanian
Orthodox Church, wrote to the Patriarch of Constantinople that the Romanian
Church accepted the decision of the “Pan-Orthodox Council” on the change of
calendar, and that it would be applied in 1924.541
And so in Romania, the new calendar was introduced in the same year as in
Greece, October 1, 1924 becoming October 14.
In reward for this, on February 4, 1925, the Romanian Church was

proclaimed a patriarchate by Constantinople, and on November 1 Metropolitan
Miron was enthroned as patriarch of Romania. Then, in 1926 and again in 1929,
he changed the date of Pascha to bring it into conformity with the western
Paschalion.
The new calendar innovation was pushed through by Alexandru Lapedatu,

the Minister of Cults. Nicolae Iorga, the future President of the Council of
Ministers writes that it “did not bring about the expected results. People were
beaten even in front of altars, and on the following day, after these desperate
measures, the congregations were mostly empty, and the few people who were
present – mainly clergy – were content to listen to proceedings of the driest
imperial tradition.”542
“These,” as Constantin Bujor writes, “were reports written in advance, in

which the Faithful ‘begged’ for the use of the Gregorian Calendar in the Church,
just as the peasants of Romania later ‘begged’ to enter en masse the collective
agricultural cooperatives patterned after Soviet collective farms, according to
the Congress of the Romanian Workers’ Party of February 18-20/March 3-5,
1949. Iorga continues: ‘Nevertheless, this decision to adopt the Western
Calendar was taken too lightly and without recognition of the complex,
conservative, and mystical psychology of the people, and it provoked a schism
that still continues not only in Basarabia but also in the mountainous regions of
old Moldavia.’ The population living in the extensive mountain regions
remained steadfast in the ancestral Orthodox Tradition, from one generation to
the next, from great-grandparents to grandparents, parents, children, and
grandchildren, and so on, by recounting stories about the sacrifices made in the
past, in the hope that such sufferings would leave memories and kindle the
flame of the traditional Orthodox Faith everywhere. The press of this period

540 Metropolitan Vlasie, preface to Constantin Bujor, Resisting unto Blood: Sixty-Five
Years of Persecution of the True (Old Calendar) Orthodox Church of Romania (October
1924 – December 1989), Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2003,
p. 10.
542 Iorga, The History of the Romanian Church; cited in Bujor, op. cit., p. 26.
298
mentions an eloquent declaration in this regard from some of the Faithful living
in the vicinity of Cluj: ‘We, the whole village, will not abandon the Tradition
and Faith into which we were born. It is up to the Priests to decide which
religion they wish to join; we will have no part in this. But if we find that any of
them want to introduce innovations here, such a one will no longer be our
Priest.’”543
In fact, only one hierarch rejected the calendar innovation - Metropolitan

Visarion (Puiu) of Bucovina, who went into exile and died in Paris in 1964.544
Resistance to the reform was particularly strong in Bessarabia, where, as we

have seen, there had already been strong resistance to the union with Romania
and the removal of Church Slavonic from the churches.
“The patriotically minded Bessarabian population,” writes Glazkov, “who

took a very cautious attitude to any attempt by the Bessarabian authorities to
liquidate the national particularities of the Moldavian people, met the reform
with protests. ‘The Union of Orthodox Christians’ immediately condemned
Metropolitan Gurias, who carried out the decision of the Synod, and began an
active campaign against the new calendar style by publishing apologetic
literature and conducting popular meetings and processions. Some of the
Bessarabian priests who considered the reform of the calendar to be uncanonical
supported the protests of the laity and rejected the Gregorian calendar. Around
the churches where the Church Slavonic language and the Julian calendar were
preserved (for example, the church of the Alexander Nevsky brotherhood),
there gathered priests and laity. Thus in April, 1926 thousands of believers
gathered at the church of St. Panteleimon in Kishinev for a pannikhida for Tsar-
Martyr Nicholas II. Some priests openly celebrated all the feasts according to the
old style in front of a large number of believers, which was defined by the
authorities as rebellion, for many lay Old Calendarists were subjected to direct
humiliations by the new style clergy. There was an attempt to build, in Kishinev,
a church in direct submission to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, who had remained
faithful to the old style. According to the police, the majority of the population
resisted the ecclesiastical reform, only individual parishes passed over to the
Gregorian calendar. It is noteworthy that if, at the beginning, the civil
authorities were quite conciliatory towards the Old Calendarists, allowing them
to celebrate Pascha and other Church feasts according to the old and new styles,
the official Romanian Church authorities took upon themselves police-fiscal
functions in exposing and repressing them…”545
In Bessarabia, the leadership of the movement against the new style had been
taken up by the white clergy and the city intelligentsia. In other parts of

543 Bujor, op. cit., pp. 26-27.
544 Bujor, op. cit., p. 11.
545 K.V. Glazkov, “Istoricheskie prichiny nekotorykh sobytij v istorii Rumynskoj
Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi do II mirovoj vojny” (Historical Reasons for Certain Events

in the History of the Romanian Orthodox Church up to the Second World War),
Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), NN 3-4, May-August, 2000, pp. 48-49).
299
Romania, however, the leaders were the monks; out of the 14,000 parish priests,
almost none stood up against the calendar reform. The only exception to this, as
Metropolitan Blaise writes, was “Archimandrite Galaction (Cordun), who at that
time was serving as parish priest in the metropolitan cathedral in Bucharest and
who used to preach there when there was no bishop.
“… Fr. Galaction, who later became our first metropolitan, fought against the
reform, but was unable to do anything, since he was only an archimandrite. He
was very capable, and had studied in Petersburg with the future Patriarchs
Alexis of Moscow and Cyril of Bulgaria, graduating with the degree of doctor of
theology. Later, in 1935, he was consecrated to the episcopate – they thought he
had changed his views. Three bishops who had been consecrated before the
change of calendar participated in the consecration, so [apostolic] succession
was not broken…
“This is what happened, for example, in Neamţ monastery, where St. Paisius
Velichkovsky was once the abbot. When the reform took place there were about
200 monks in the monastery, 80 of whom were clergy. This was the biggest
monastery in Romania. It was here that the strongest movement against the new
style arose. Two months before the reform the abbot warned the brotherhood:
be careful, reforms are coming, do not accept them. This was as it were a
prophecy. But out of the 80 hieromonks only 30 (not counting the monks) were
against the reform; and of these 30 only 6 stood out openly in opposition – the
rest did not separate for material reasons. By a decree of the metropolitan of
Moldavia all the clergy who did not accept the new style were threatened with
deposition, exile from the monastery and confiscation of their property – the
man would be outlawed. Then a small group of monks with the most devoted
and zealous priests left the monastery, and it is from this group that our Church
begins its history. Neamţ monastery as a whole accepted the new style, later
they also renounced St. Paisius’ rule, for the keeping of which the monastery
was renowned. Our monastery of Slatioara, which is not far from Neamţ,
inherited this rule and tradition.
“Here are the names of the (clerical) inhabitants of the monastery who
resisted all their lives: Hieromonk Fr. Glycerius (later metropolitan) 546 ,
Hierodeacon David (the first abbot of the monastery at Slatioara), Hieromonk
Pambo, Fr. Baruch, Fr. Gimnasius, Fr. Zosima, Fr. Gamaliel, Fr. Damascene, who
died in the woods near the monastery. We also know the names of other monks
of Neamţ who resisted the new style. There were also nuns: Mother Macaria,
who was the helper of the abbess of the biggest women’s monastery in the
country, Agapia, which became new calendarist (it now has 450 nuns), and who
with her nuns founded the first women’s monastery in our Church.

546 Fr. Glycerie (Tanas) was superior of the Protection skete. When Abbot
Nicodemus (Muntianu) of Neamts monastery offered to put him in charge of

another skete if he changed calendar, Fr. Glycerie refused, and with Deacon David
(Bidascu) left the skete (Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 132). (V.M.)
300
“The small groups of clergy and monastics of these men’s and women’s
monasteries – the purest, who had God in their hearts and not their property --
rejected the reforms and were driven out of the monasteries, being forced to live
in the world. The pious laity who supported them became like bees constructing
hives, the churches, while these clerics were like queen-bees. That was how our
Church came into being.”547
“Two months before the calendar change,” writes Metropolitan Blaise,

“something very momentous happened in the great Church of the Neamţ
Monastery. It was on the Eve of the Dormition of the Mother of God. The
Ecclesiarch went to the Church to prepare all that was needed and to light the
candles and kandelia for the Midnight Service. The weather was calm, with
clear skies and numerous stars; no cloud was in sight. Suddenly, a great bolt of
lightning came down from the heavens and, passing through a window in the
dome of the Church, struck in front of the Miracle-working Icon of the Mother
of God. It hit the stone floor, and a section of stone collapsed; from the impact,
the candlestand that was affixed to this slab in front of the Icon was knocked
over. [Cf. the words of the Lord in Revelation (2.5): “Repent and do the first
works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its
place”]. When the Fathers and Brothers came to Church, the Priest who was
serving told them what had happened; seeing the damage done by the lightning
strike, they all concluded that it was a Divine sign.
“Here is another incident. When Father Glycherie reached the Coroi Ravine,
a spiritual uneasiness overcame him. One night, after lengthy prayer, he was
beset by heavy thoughts. ‘How is it possible,’ he said, ‘that in our country many
Priests with advanced theological training, together with a large number of
intellectuals, are leaving the Old Calendar, as it was bequeathed to the people
by the Holy Fathers of the Orthodox Church, who have honoured it from times
of old? Should I not abandon the Old Calendar and be one of these? Am I
making a mistake before God by not changing?’ Late in the night, he had a
beautiful vision: from the West, a dark cloud appeared; it tried to cover the
whole world and was moving furiously towards the East, howling like a
monster. In front of the cloud, a powerful storm formed, adorned with a chain
as black as tar, on which black Crosses appeared. Everyone was frightened. But
looking towards the East, he saw a snow-white cloud, glittering like gold; before
it was a chain of gold, from which there were hanging Crosses of gold.
“A choir of Hierarchs also appeared – all with golden vestments, - walking

towards the black cloud. In a designated place, the two clouds collided and the
dark cloud fell; and in its place, a sea of water appeared, engulfing the
earth…”548

547 Metropolitan Blaise, in Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), N 2 (1479), 15/28
January, 1993, pp. 6-7.

548 Metropolitan Blaise, The Life of the Holy Hierarch and Confessor Glicherie of
Romania, Etna, Ca.: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1999, pp. 24-25.
301
In 1926, two shepherds, Ioan and Mihail Urzică found Hieromonk Pamvu
and Monks Galaction and Veniamin hiding in the Coroi Ravine. They then led
them to Fr. Glycherie and Fr. David. The Old Calendarist monks were received
with rejoicing by the faithful of Vānători, and it was decided to build a church.
When it was built, Fr. Glycherie appointed Hieromonk Pamvu and his Monks
Galaction and Veniamin to look after it.549 In this way a beginning was made to
the Old Calendarist movement in Romania. In spite of continual persecution by
the police and the new calendarists, it flourished. By 1936 Fr. Glycherie had built
about forty large churches, most of them in Moldavia.
Metropolitan Cyprian writes: “The Romanian Patriarchate, both in 1926 and

1929, celebrated Pascha with the Latins, constituting an infringement of the
Orthodox tradition of centuries. Indeed, on the second occasion that this was
done, Patriarch Miron, having the undivided support of the Uniate (Greek-
Catholic) prime minister, Julius Maniu, and several others among the clergy,
compelled all of the Romanian Metropolises to proceed with the common
celebration of Pascha with the Papists, a fact which evoked great commotion in
the ranks of the Romanian Church. Metropolitan Gurias of Bessarabia openly
criticized Miron and, ignoring the Patriarchal decree, ordered his churches to
celebrate with the other autocephalous Orthodox Churches (i.e. with the entire
Orthodox world, with the exception of the innovative Church of Finland).
Patriarch Miron’s action also scandalized these other Orthodox Churches, many
of which reacted in protest. As well, the White Russian clergy of Bucharest took
a particularly strong position during those trying days, ignoring the Patriarchal
order and celebrating Pascha in accordance with the traditional canonical
decrees.”550
The Romanian monks on Mount Athos fully supported their co-religionists in

the homeland. Two hieromonks returned from the Holy Mountain to support
their co-religionists in the homeland. However, the new calendarists prepared
counter-measures. Thus in 1930, “there arrived in the Moldavian skete [of the
Forerunner] from Romania one of the skete’s hieromonks, Simeon, a fifty-year-
old who had been sent by Patriarch Miron to propagandise the new style on
Athos. He brought with him a lot of money… from Romania. He also brought
with him from Romania a lawyer, who was armed with an agreement obtained
in Athens to conduct negotiations over the return of the metochion on the island
of Thasos. The skete-dwellers received him with honour. They promised to
gather the brotherhood and speak to them in the church about accepting the
new style. But they prepared a trap for him. They summoned him to the hall,
cut off his beard and pigtail, took the money sent for propaganda, put a jacket
and hat on him and drove him out… He appealed to the police in Karyes for
help, but they replied that this did not come within the compass of their
responsibilities. This was the end of the propaganda for the new style on Athos.
This was already the Romanians’ second piece of trickery. The first time they

Buzor, op. cit., pp. 52-53.
549
Metropolitan Cyprian of Oropos, "The True Orthodox Christians of Romania",

550
The Orthodox Word, January-February, 1982, vol. 18, N 1 (102), pp. 6-7.
302
had received a letter from the patriarch suggesting that they change to the new
style. The skete-dwellers, on receiving this letter, served a triumphant all-night
vigil, and, on the next day, a liturgy with a moleben, after which they
pronounced an anathema on the patriarch, composing an official document
which they sent on to him.”551
In the 1920s and 1930s many Romanians fled from the new calendarists in
Romania and Bessarabia. They constituted the majority of the new postulants in
the Russian monasteries of the Holy Land.552 Among these was the famous
priest-hermit Fr. John the Romanian (+1960), who never concelebrated with the
new calendarists and whose relics are still incorrupt…
The adoption of the new calendar by the Churches of Greece and Romania in
1924 came at a very vulnerable time for the Orthodox Church as a whole. The
outward position of the Church had changed radically in the previous ten years.
The Russian empire was gone, and the Ecumenical and the Moscow
patriarchates, to which the vast majority of Orthodox Christians belonged, were
fighting both external foes (the Bolsheviks and the Turks) and internal schism
(“the Living Church” and “the Turkish Orthodox Church”). Neither the
remaining Eastern patriarchates, on the one hand, nor the Serbian patriarchate
and the Russian Church Abroad, on the other, could take the place occupied by
the Russian empire and the Ecumenical patriarchate in the preceding centuries.
It followed that if, as was (temporarily) the case, none of the hierarchs of the
Greek Church would reject the calendar change and break communion with the
Archbishop of Athens, there was only one force remaining that could take up
the banner of truth – the people.
The position of the laity in the Orthodox Church has often been
misunderstood. In Orthodoxy, the laypeople are neither the inert, impotent,
blindly obedient mass of the Roman Catholics, nor the all-powerful,
revolutionary horde of the Protestants. There are two vital functions which can
only be performed by canonically consecrated clergy: the administration of the
sacraments, including the ordination of bishops and priests, and the definition
of the faith, including the position of the Church in relation to heretics and
schismatics. But while the laity cannot take the leading role in these two
functions, they do have an important confirmatory role in them. Thus strictly
speaking a bishop or priest cannot celebrate the Divine Liturgy without the
presence of at least one layman. Likewise a bishop cannot ordain a priest
without the consent of the people (expressed by shouting “axios!” or “he is
worthy!”). And a definition of the faith that is rejected by the people will remain
a dead letter.

Letter to Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky), in Glazkov, op. cit., p. 54.
551
“The Convent of the Ascension on the Holy Mount of Olives, 1906-2006”,

552
Orthodox Life, September-October, 2006, p. 21.
303
Thus we read in the Apostolic Constitutions: “I shall judge the bishop and the
layperson. The sheep are rational and not irrational, so that no layman may ever
say: ‘I am a sheep, and not a shepherd, and I give no account of myself, but the
shepherd shall see to it, and he alone shall pay the penalty for me.’ For even as
the sheep that follows not the good shepherd shall fall to the wolves unto its
own destruction, so too it is evident that the sheep that follows the evil
shepherd shall acquire death; for he shall utterly devour it. Therefore it is
required that we flee from destructive shepherds.”553
When the new calendar was introduced by the Pope in 1582 in order to create
divisions among the Orthodox, it was synodically condemned no less than eight
times: in 1583, 1587, 1593, 1722, 1827, 1848, 1895 and 1904. Towards the end of
this period ecumenist tendencies began to increase in the Orthodox Churches,
but opposition to the new calendar remained strong.
However, already in their encyclical of 1848, the Eastern Patriarchs had

indicated the people’s role: “With us neither Patriarchs nor Councils could ever
introduce anything new, because the defender of religion is the very body of the
Church, or the people itself, who wanted their religion to remain forever
unchanged and in accord with the religion of their Fathers.”
The question that arose in 1924, therefore, was: did the people (and a handful
of clergy) have the right to separate from all the innovating bishops and, in the
absence of any Orthodox hierarchs, declare themselves to be the truly Orthodox
Church? The answer supplied by the Holy Tradition of the Church was a clear:
yes. While certain functions that can only be performed by bishops, such as the
ordination of priests, are temporarily suspended in such a situation, the Church
does not cease to exist, and remains there, and only there, where the True Faith
is confessed. For “where two or three are gathered together in My name, there
am I in the midst of them”, said the Bishop of bishops, the Lord Jesus Christ
(Matthew 18.20).
Moreover, the 15th canon of the First-and-Second Council of Constantinople

praises those who break with a heretical bishop even before his synodical
condemnation. Indeed, there are several cases in the Church’s history of holy
men either breaking immediately with heretical bishops – St. Hypatius in the
fifth century, for example; or dying out of communion with all the bishops of
the Church and yet being praised and glorified by succeeding generations – St.
Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century, for example, and St. Arsenius of
Paros in the nineteenth. Since the Churches of Constantinople, Greece, Romania,
Finland, the Baltic States and Poland adopted the new calendar in 1924554, there

553Apostolic Constitutions, 10:19, P.G. 1, 633.
554In Poland, the Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian press was full of protests
against the innovation. However, the government strongly supported it, and there
were some bloody confrontations with the police (Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 121).
The Church of Alexandria did not immediately accept the new calendar, but only
in 1928 when Meletius Metaxakis became patriarch. Antioch followed after the
304
was no way the laity in these Churches could remain in communion with the
other Churches keeping the old calendar unless they broke communion with
their innovating hierarchs.
“But why such a fuss,” say the new calendarists, “over a mere ‘thirteen days’
difference?” Because the Apostle Paul said: "Hold the traditions" (II
Thessalonians 2.15). And the tradition of the "old" Orthodox calendar was
sealed by the fathers of the First Ecumenical Council and sanctified by many
centuries of usage. To change the calendar, therefore, would be to break
communion, not only with our brethren who keep the old calendar on earth, but
also with all the saints who worship together with us in heaven.
It is in this rupture of communion that the major crime consists; for, as St.
John Chrysostom says, "exactness in the keeping of times is not as important as
the crime of division and schism". 555 “To tear asunder the Church means
nothing less than to fall into heresy. The Church is the house of the Heavenly
Father, One Body and One Spirit".556
The supreme aim of our life in Christ is unity in heaven and on earth, in time
and in eternity - "that they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in
Thee, that they also may be one in us" (John 17.21); and anything which disrupts
that unity is anathema to us. According to the Holy Fathers, schism is no less
abhorrent and deadly a sin than heresy. Even martyrdom, writes St. Cyprian of
Carthage, followed by St. John Chrysostom557, cannot wipe out the sin of him
who divides the Body of Christ. For as Christ is one, so is His Church one;
indeed, the one Christ cannot be separated from the one Church in that “the full
and perfect Christ”, in St. Augustine’s phrase, “is Head and Body” together.558
“Since the Church,” writes Fr. Justin Popovich, “is catholically one and a
unique theanthropic organism for all worlds, she cannot be divided. Any
division would signify her death… According to the united position of the
Fathers and the Councils, the Church is not only one but unique, because the
one unique God-man, her Head, cannot have many bodies. The Church is one
and unique because she is the body of the one unique Christ. A division in the
Church is ontologically impossible, for which reason there has never been a
division in the Church, only a division from the Church. According to the word
of the Lord, the Vine is not divided; but only those branches which voluntarily
refuse to bring forth fruit fall away from the ever-living Vine and are dried up
(John 15.1-6). At various times heretics and schismatics have been separated and
cut off from the one undivided Church of Christ; they have subsequently ceased

war, and in 1968 – Bulgaria. The other Slavic Churches and Jerusalem continue to
follow the Julian calendar to this day.
555 Quoted by Liudmila Perepelkina, "Iulianskij kalendar' - 1000-letnaia ikona
vremeni na Rusi" (The Julian Calendar – a thousand-year icon of time in Russia),

Pravoslavnij Put’ (The Orthodox Way), 1988, p. 122.
556 St. Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians.
557 St. Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians, 4.4.
558 St. Augustine, Discourse on Psalm 37, 4.
305
to be members of the Church and united with her theanthropic body. Such were,
first of all, the Gnostics, then the Arians and Spirit-fighters, then the
Monophysites and Iconoclasts, and finally the Roman Catholics and Protestants
and Uniates and all the rest of the heretical and schismatic legion.”559
The Athonite Elder Augustine writes: “It is a dogma of the Faith that the
Church is not only Holy, Catholic and Apostolic, but also One, so that even
though the Churches are seen to be many, one and one only is the Church
composed of the many that are seen in different places. This is the teaching of
the Holy Creed, this is the message of the Divine Scriptures, the Apostolic
Tradition, the Sacred councils and the God-bearing Fathers. From this we
conclude that the union of the Church is a most important dogma of the Faith.
“We have seen… that St. Constantine and the Fathers of the First Ecumenical
Council re-established both the inner and the outer unity of the Church, which
is why the joyful autocrat cried out: ‘I have reaped a double victory, I have both
re-established inner peace through the common confession of the Faith and
brought the separation which existed before into the unity of the Church
through the common celebration of Pascha.’
“This, then, is unity, as we are assured by the Acts of the First Council, an
inner unity and an outer unity, and neither can the first be a true unity without
the second, nor can the second exist without the first. The relationship between
them is like that of faith to works and works to faith. The one without the other
is dead. Thus inner unity without outer unity is dead, and outer unity without
inner unity is dead. And the first is defined by the common confession of the
Faith, and the second by the visible harmony in accordance with the laws and
institutions of the Church, both constituting the one and only true unity, the
essential unity of the Church.”560
In 1968 Abbot Philotheus Zervakos of Paros wrote to the new calendar

bishop Augustine of Florina: “Since the old calendar is a written tradition, and
since the new one is an innovation of papist and masonic origin, whoever
despises the old calendar and follows the new is subject to anathema. Every
excuse and justification is unjustified and ‘excuses in sins’…
“Last Sunday I had to go to the peak of All Saints and the Prophet Elijah…
and as I was kneeling in front of their venerable icon I tearfully besought them
to reveal to me which calendar I the wretched one should follow together with
my brethren, my spiritual children and all the Orthodox Christians. Before I had
finished my humble and pitiful petition, I heard a voice inside me saying: ‘you

559 Popovich, Orthodoxos Ekklesia kai Oikoumenismos (The Orthodox Church and
Ecumenism), Thessaloniki, 1974, pp. 80-82.

560 Phoni ex Agiou Orous (A Voice from the Holy Mountain), op. cit., pp. 57-58. St.
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain writes, in his commentary on the 31st Apostolic
Canon: "Even as the ecclesiastical traditions have need of the Faith, so also is the
Faith in need of the ecclesiastical traditions; and these two cannot be separated
one from another".
306
must follow the old calendar which the God-bearing Fathers who brought
together the seven holy Ecumenical Councils and supported the Orthodox Faith
handed down to you, and not the new calendar of the popes of the West, who
have divided the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church and despised the
Apostolic and patristic traditions’!!!
“At that moment I felt such emotion, such joy, such hope, such courage and
greatness of soul as I have hardly ever felt in the hour of prayer in the whole of
my life…
“Do not suppose that following the papist calendar is a small thing. It [The
Orthodox Julian calendar] is a tradition and as such we must guard it or we
shall be subject to anathema. ‘If anyone violates any tradition, written or
unwritten, let him be anathema’, declares the Seventh Ecumenical Council…
This is not the time to continue to be silent… don’t delay, hurry.”561
And he added that Chrysostom Papadopoulos had told him during a

meeting: “If only I hadn’t gone through with it, if only I hadn’t gone through
with it. This perverse Metaxakis has got me by the throat”!562
On August 7, 1930 Metaxakis headed a delegation from the Churches of

Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Greece, Cyprus and
Poland to the Lambeth conference of Anglican bishops. There they officially, on
the basis of a report by the Anglicans recognising the priesthood to be a
sacrament, declared that the Anglicans had Apostolic Succession.563
But Metaxakis did not escape retribution. In 1935, on the death of Patriarch
Damian of Jerusalem, he tried to acquire that see, too, but failed. It is said that
he then went out of his mind, and six days later, grinding his teeth and
wringing his hands, he died, groaning: “Alas, I have divided the Church, I have
destroyed Orthodoxy.”564 He lied to the end; for he destroyed only himself,
while the True Church will prevail over the gates of hell…

561 Hieromonk Theodoritus (Mavros), Palaion kai Neon: i Orthodoxia kai Airesis? (Old
and New: Orthodoxy and Heresy?), Athens, 1991, pp. 24-25.

562 Hieromonk Theodoritus, op. cit., p. 25.
563 The Christian East, Autumn, 1930. In 1934 two Ugandan Anglicans applied to
Metaxakis to receive them into Orthodoxy. He replied that the union of the
Churches was not far off, so it would be better for them to stay where they were!
(Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 2, p. 45)
564 Monk Paul, op. cit. p. 82.
307
28. THE FALL OF RENOVATIONISM
Patriarch Tikhon was released on June 27, 1923, and his appearance in public
– he had aged terribly in prison – was enough to send the Living Church into a
sharp and irreversible decline.565 They remained dangerous as long as they
retained the favour of the authorities; but by 1926 the authorities were already
turning to others (the Gregorians, then Metropolitan Sergius) as better suited for
the task of destroying the Church. And by the end of the Second World War the
last remaining renovationists had been absorbed into the neo-renovationist
Soviet Moscow Patriarchate.
The decline of the renovationists after the Patriarch’s coming out of prison
has led some to suppose that the price of that release, his “repentance” for his
anti-Sovietism, was a price worth paying. However, the Patriarch bitterly
repented of his “repentance”; he said that if he had known how weak the Living
Church really was, he would not have signed the “confession” and would have
stayed in prison.566 And when he was asked why he had said that he was no
longer an enemy of the Soviet government, he replied: “But I did not say that I
was its friend...”567
On the next day the Patriarch wrote: “I am, of course, not such a venerator of
Soviet power as the Church renovationists, headed by the Higher Church
Council, declare themselves to be, but on the other hand I am not such an
enemy of it as people present me to be. If in the first year of the existence of
Soviet power I sometimes permitted sharp attacks against it, I did this in
consequence of my education and the orientation that prevailed in the Council
at that time. But with time much began to change and become clear, and now,
for example, it is necessary to ask Soviet power to intercede in the defence of the
offended Russian Orthodox in Poland and in Grodno region, where the Poles
have closed Orthodox churches. However, already at the beginning of 1919 I
tried to wall the Church off from Tsarism and intervention, and in September of
the same year I appealed to the archpastors and pastors not to intervene in
politics…”568

565 Pospielovsky writes: "If by the end of 1922 the patriarchal Church in Moscow
had only 4 churches against the 400 or so of the renovationists, in Petrograd after
the exile of Bishop Nicholas almost all the churches had been seized by the
renovationists, and throughout the country about 66% of the functioning churches
were in the hands of the renovationists, then by November, 1924 the renovationists
had about 14,000 churches, not more than 30%" ("Obnovlenchestvo:
Pereosmyslenie techenia v svete arkhivnykh dokumentov" (Renovationism: A
Rethinking of the Tendency in the Light of Archival Documents), Vestnik Russkogo
Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian Christian Movement), N 168, II-III,
1993, p. 217).
566 Swan, op. cit., p. 83.
567 Quoted in Protopriest Lev Lebedev, “Dialogue between the ROCA and the MP:
Why and How?”, report to be given to the Sobor of Bishops of the Russian Church
Outside Russia, Great Lent, 1998.
308
In spite of the Patriarch’s “repentance”, the Bolsheviks continued to back the
renovationists, and on December 8, 1923 forbade the commemoration of the
“former” Patriarch in that such an act would be seen “as having the character of
a clearly political demonstration against the Worker-Peasants’ authorities.”569
Moreover, the Patriarch was still seen, as Lebedev writes, “as a criminal whose
accusation had not been removed… For violating this ban, according to the circular
of Narkomiust N 254 of December 8, 1923, those guilty (that is, those who
would continue to consider the Patriarch the head of the Church and
commemorate him during the Divine services) were subjected to the punishment
appointed for criminals – three years in the camps! But in spite of everything the
people, the priests and deacons continued to commemorate him!”570
On July 15, the Patriarch anathematised the Living Church, declaring: “They
have separated themselves from the body of the Ecumenical Church and
deprived themselves of God’s favour, which resides only in the Church of
Christ. Consequently, all arrangements made during our absence by those
ruling the Church, since they had neither legal right nor canonical authority, are
invalid and void, and all actions and sacraments performed by bishops and
clergymen who have forsaken the Church are devoid of God’s grace and power;
the faithful taking part in such prayers and sacraments shall receive no
sanctification thereby, and are subject to condemnation for participating in their
sin…”571
This was the signal for the fall of renovationism. Large numbers of parishes,
especially in such important urban centres as Petrograd and Voronezh,
renounced it. And influential renovationist hierarchs such as Metropolitan
Sergius hastened (and yet not that quickly, as Hieromartyr Bishop Damascene of
Glukhov pointed out 572 ) to make public confession to the Patriarch.
Renovationism never fully recovered…
In receiving Sergius, the Patriarch explained that it was his Christian duty to
forgive him, but that since his guilt was great before the people also, he had to
repent before them, too. Then he would receive him with joy and love. And so
he stood through the liturgy in simple monastic garments without his Episcopal
mantia, klobuk, panagia, and cross. At the end of the liturgy he was led by the
Patriarch out onto the amvon where he bowed to the people three times, after
which the Patriarch restored to him them his panagia with cross, white klobuk,
mantia, and staff.573

569 M.E. Danilushkin (ed.), Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi ot Vosstanovlenia Patriarshestva do
nashikh dnej (A History of the Russian Church from the Reestablishment of the
Patriarchate to our Days), ol. I, St. Petersburg, 1997, p. 192.
570 Lebedev, Velikorossia, p. 577.
571 Regelson, op, cit., p. 347; Gubonin, op. cit., p. 291.
572 E.L. Episkopy-Ispovedniki, San Francisco, 1971, p. 68, note.
573 Parayev, “Istinnoe Pravoslavie i Sergianstvo”, Suzdal’skie Eparkhialnie
Vedomosti, September, 1997,
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=page&pid=544.
309
Some sergianists have tried to show that Sergius did not really share the
renovationist position. However, Sergius’ published statements, especially his
epistle of June 16, 1922, contradict this view. Moreover, the renowned Elder
Nectarius of Optina prophetically said that, even after his repentance, the
poison of renovationism was in him still.574
“Honour and glory to the late patriarch,” wrote Metropolitan Anthony

(Khrapovitsky) in 1925, “that, with all his good-natured condescension towards
people, with all his yearning for peace, he never gave an inch of ground to this
barren ‘living church’, but received penitents from her according to the rite for
the reception of heretics and schismatics, and re-consecrated churches which
were returned from them to their lawful pastors as churches ‘defiled by
heretics’.”575
On April 18, 1924 the Russian renovationists tried a new tack in their
continuing assault on the True Church: they voted to ease the difficult situation
of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Ataturk’s Turkey by offering him to settle freely
in one of the cities of Russia in exchange for his accepting all the decrees of their
1923 council. On May 6, Patriarch Gregory duly obliged, “removed” Patriarch
Tikhon from administering the Russian Church, called on him to retire, and
decided to send a delegation to Moscow to investigate and “to bring peace and
end the present anomaly”. He also demanded “that the Russian Metropolitan
Anthony and Archbishop Anastasius, who were residing in Constantinople at
the time, cease their activities against the Soviet regime and stop
commemorating Patriarch Tikhon. Receiving no compliance from them,
Patriarch Gregory organized an investigation and suspended the two bishops
from serving. He asked Patriarch Demetrius [of Serbia] to close down the
Russian Council of Bishops in Sremsky-Karlovtsy, but Demetrius refused…”576
“The initiative of Constantinople with regard to this question,” writes

Gubonin, “had been elicited by the provocative and lying ‘information’ from the
renovationist Synod concerning a supposed ‘Tikhonite schism’ in the Russian
Orthodox Church (that is, among them – the renovationists) and the supposedly
universal desire among the clerical leaders (that is, of the renovationist-
synodalists) to bring peace into the difficult situation that had been created with
the cooperation of the lofty authority of the Ecumenical Vladyka (since, they
said, all means had already been exhausted and they had no other hope!).

574 I.M. Kontsevich, Optina pustyn' i ee vremia (Optina Desert and its Time),
Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery Press, 1971, p. 546. The elder also said of
the renovationist “church”: “There is no Grace there. By rebelling against the
lawful Patriarch, Tikhon, the bishops and priests of the Living Church have
deprived themselves of Grace and have lost, according to canonical ruling, their
hierarchical office. Because of this, the liturgy performed by them is a
blasphemy…” (Kontsevich, Elder Nektary of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of
Alaska Brotherhood, 1998, p. 209)
575 Metropolitan Anthony, in Orthodox Life, vol. 25, March-April, 1975.
576 Monk Gorazd, op. cit.; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., p. 122.
310
“Taking into account the complete isolation of the Russian Church from
communion with the external world at that time, the falsely informed Patriarch
Gregory VII fell into this renovationist trap, but was stopped in time by the
sobering epistle of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon.”577
Gregory abandoned his plans to send a mission to Russia, but relations

between the two Churches continued to be frosty. When Metropolitan Peter
came to power in Russia in April, 1925, he was presented with a letter from
Patriarch Basil III which called on the “Old Churchmen” to unite with the
renovationists. His comment was: “We still have to check whether this Patriarch
is Orthodox…” Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) was also sceptical; he
reacted to Constantinople’s recognition of the renovationists as follows: “Let
them recognize them; the renovationists have not become Orthodox from this,
only the Patriarchs have become renovationists!”578
The Greeks continued to hedge their bets between the Russian Churches.
Thus on July 10, 1927, Patriarch Damian of Jerusalem wrote to the renovationist
synod recognizing it as “the only lawful bearer of Higher Ecclesiastical
Authority on the territory of the USSR”.579However, his successor, Patriarch
Basil III broke communion with the Living Church in 1929 – only to enter into
communion with the by now neo-renovationist Metropolitan Sergius! Nor did
the reception into the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Metropolitan Eulogius of Paris,
a rebel from ROCOR and a supporter of the heresy of sophianism, improve
matters…
If the Moscow Council of 1917-18 established the basic position of the Church
vis-à-vis the State, the renovationist council of 1923 revealed the basic modes of
attack employed by the State against the Church, and thus provided the Church
with valuable experience for the still fiercer struggles ahead. These basic modes
of attack were:-
1. Control of the Central Church Administration. Like the State, the Church
in Her post-revolutionary structure was a highly centralized organism. The
astonishing success of the Living Church in its early stages was partly the result
of its usurpation of the central administration and the confusion this
engendered in the faithful. The Patriarch was in prison, and some reports said
that he had resigned, others – that he had been killed. Although Metropolitan
Agathangel, circulated a secret order directing the bishops to rule their dioceses
independently in accordance with the Patriarch’s ukaz no. 362 of November
7/20, 1920, the habit of looking to the centre for all major directives was difficult
to break. This habit was broken, for some, only after the still greater shock of the
events of 1927, when another unscrupulous hierarch, Metropolitan Sergius
(Stragorodsky), took control of the central administration of the Church.

578 Sokurova, O.B. Nekolebimij Kamen’ Tserkvi (Unshakeable Rock of the Church), St.
Petersburg: “Nauka”, 1998, p. 32.
311
2. The Façade of Canonical Orthodoxy. At first the renovationists put on a
mask of canonical Orthodoxy, claiming to have received power by legal transfer
from the Patriarch. But soon they – mistakenly - threw off this mask; and, as we
have seen, the crudity of their attacks on the Faith and monasticism repelled the
people. In future, the GPU would take care that their candidate for the
leadership of the Russian Church would have at least the appearance of
canonical and dogmatic Orthodoxy.
3. The Lure of State Legalization. In spite of the Patriarch’s “confession”, the

Patriarchal Church never received legalization by the State during his lifetime.
This meant that the Church was always as it were in the wilderness, without the
favour and security enjoyed by the renovationists. The depths to which the
renovationists were prepared to go in order to win this security is shown by the
pannikhida they celebrated for Lenin after his death, in which they described
his soul as “essentially Christian”! In the same vein was Vvedensky’s speech to
the 1923 council, in which he said: “We must turn to the government with
words of deeply felt gratitude. The Church is not persecuted, whatever the
calumnies of the foreign propagandists may say. Everyone in Russia can voice
his conviction. We must direct this message of thanks to the only Government in
the world, which, though it does not believe in God, yet acts in accordance with
love, which is more than we, who believe, can claim for ourselves.”580
Ironically, therefore, as Fr. Aidan Nichols writes, the renovationists came “to
resemble the pre-Revolutionary establishment in their spirit of subordination to
the State.”581 The Patriarchal Church, however, gained in spiritual authority. For,
already in the early 1920s, the view was current that the faithful were living, in
the Patriarch’s words, “in the years of the triumph of Satan and of the power of
the Antichrist”. So the “Living Church”, in coming to terms with Soviet power,
was, as the Patriarch said, “an institution of the Antichrist”.582 The Patriarchal
Church, on the other hand, was like the woman fleeing into the wilderness from
the red dragon (Revelation 12). And it was still to her that the faithful children
of the Church clung…
However, in absolute terms the number of Russian Orthodox Christians was

still falling, especially in the countryside. “When the Bolsheviks had fulfilled
their promise about land after the revolution, most of the peasants in Central
Russia were completely satisfied, and were ready to acknowledge their ideology,
becoming cooler and cooler towards the Church. Although in the 1920s the
Bolsheviks were still afraid to persecute the Church in the villages, the number
of those who attended Church services was reduced to one third of that before
the revolution.”583

580 Cited in Arfed Gustavson, The Catacomb Church, Jordanville, 1960.
581 Nichols, Theology in the Russian Diaspora, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p.
53.
582 Regelson, op. cit., p. 313.
583 Benevich, op. cit.
312
Shortly before his death, the Patriarch confided to his personal
physician and friend, Michael Zhizhilenko, that he felt that the
unceasing pressure of the government would one day force the
leadership of the Church to concede more than was right, and that the
true Church would then have to descend into the catacombs like the
Roman Christians of old if it was to remain faithful to Christ and
retain the Grace of the Holy Spirit. And he counselled his friend, who
was a widower, that when that time came, he should seek the monastic
tonsure and episcopal consecration. 584 That time came in 1927 with the
notorious pro-Soviet declaration of Metropolitan Sergius, the founder
of the present-day Moscow Patriarchate; and Michael Zhizhilenko,
following the advice of the holy patriarch, then became the first man
to be consecrated as an underground bishop, taking the name of
Maximus. He was shot on Solovki in 1931…
Following his example and in accordance with the holy patriarch’s

will, the best hierarchs of the Russian Church descended into the
catacombs. There by their sufferings and death they deposited the
seed for the eventual resurrection of Holy Rus’… 585
The idea that the Russian Church might have to descend into the
catacombs, in imitation of the Christians in early Rome, had been
suggested as early as 1909 by the future head of that Catacomb Church
and one of her greatest martyrs, Metropolitan Joseph (Petrovykh) of
Petrograd (+1937): “Now many are complaining about the hard times
for the Church… Remembering the words of the Saviour with
complete accuracy, we must expect still worse times for the Church…
Without any exaggeration, she must truly live through a condition
close to complete destruction and her being overcome by the gates of
hell. Perhaps with us, exactly as in the land of freedom, America, they
will drive the Name of Christ out of the schools. They will adapt
prayer assemblies into ordinary meetings permitted by the police, as
in that other land of freedom, France, and will convert the heritage of
the Church, together with the very right of faith, into the property of
the state. Perhaps the faith of Christ will again hide in the woods, the
deserts, the catacombs, and the confession of the faith will be only in
secret, while immoral and blasphemous presentations will come out
into the open. All this may happen! The struggle against Christ will be
waged with desperation, with the exertion of the last drop of human
and hellish energy, and only then, perhaps, will it be given to hell and
to mankind to assure us with complete obviousness of the unfailing
power and might of the priceless promise of Christ: ‘I will build My

584 I.M. Andreyev, Russia's Catacomb Saints, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman Brotherhood
Press, 1982, p. 56.

585 V. Moss, The Russian Golgotha, Alberta, Canada: Monastery Press, 2006.
313
Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against her’ (Matthew
16.18).” 586
On March 25 / April 7, 1925, the feast of the Annunciation,

Patriarch Tikhon died. It is almost certain that he was poisoned.
According to his cell-attendant, Constantine Pashkovich, his next to
last words, uttered with an unusual severity, were: “Now I shall go to
sleep deeply and for a long time. The night will be long, and very
dark…” 587

586 Archimandrite Joseph, Kormchij, 23 May, 1909; quoted in Sergius and Tamara
Fomin, Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming),
Moscow: Rodnik, 1994, vol. I, p. 413.
587 Quoted in M.B. Danilushkin (ed.), Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi ot Vosstanovlenia
Patriarshestva do nashikh dnej (A History of the Russian Church from the

Reestablishment of the Patriarchate to our Days), vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1997, p.
201.
314
29. GERMAN HYPERINFLATION
The Great War changed the face of politics as no other before it. It
was not only the numbers of those killed by war or disease: there was
hardly anyone who survived who was not deeply affected in one way
or another. There were huge numbers of bereaved and injured. Even
men who survived unscathed (relatively) from the battlefield returned
home to find that they could not simply slip back into their old jobs:
they might find themselves unemployed, or their old jobs had been
taken by women, whose influence in political, social and economic life
had increased hugely as the big state had been born in the need to
increase and coordinate wartime production on a national scale,
directing all the resources of the nation towards a single end. “During
the war,” writes Tombs, “public expenditure [in Britain] was around a
quarter of GDP (double that in 1913), and for the first time social
services became by far the largest item.” 588 The increased power of the
State was something that united the Communist East and the
Capitalist West. The “only” difference is that in the East it was
achieved by force and rapine on a vast scale, while in the East
increased taxation was at least voted for by the electorate.
Above all, the optimistic mood of the pre-war Edwardian world

had changed: there was a deep cynicism about politics and politicians;
the title of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West reflected the
general feeling that the old world was dying or dead – and that it
deserved to die. The victors’ jubilation was short-lived, succeeded by
depression; the defeated were angry…
As Tombs writes, there was “a belief across Europe that Western

civilization was nearing collapse: moral, social, political and above all
economic. As Sidney and Beatrice Webb put it with grim relish in their
Decay of Western Civilization (1923), ‘Capitalism need not hope to die
quietly in its bad; it will die by violence, and civilization will perish
with it.’ Their book, wrote the editor of the New Statesman, shaped the
beliefs of British socialists for twenty years. For some on the left, any
form of radicalism was welcome. The prominent playwright George
Bernard Shaw, a celebrity socialist gadfly of sometimes surpassing
silliness, thought both Communism and Fascism showed the way to
the future. ‘Who can blame Signor Mussolini,’ he asked a BBC
audience in 1929, ‘for describing [democracy] as a putrefying corpse?’
Lenin and Stalin (‘a good Fabian’) had begun a ‘great Communist
experiment’ which would prevent the ‘collapse and failure’ of world
civilization; while ‘the Nazi movement is in many respects one which
has my warmest sympathy’.” 589

588 Tombs, op. cit., p. 663.
589 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 671-672.
315
*
Economics ruled politics as never before in world history – and all

the warring nations, with the significant exception of the United
States, were significantly poorer at the end of the war than at the
beginning. For France, the problem at the beginning of 1923 was
essentially the same as it had been four years earlier. Having suffered
most in the world war, France needed either war reparations from
Germany, or a cancellation of inter-Allied war debts, if she – and
Europe as a whole – was to pull out of an economic black hole. The
Americans held the world’s purse-strings, but would not consider
cancellation or any significant “haircut”. And then the Germans
defaulted on their reparations debt…
A possible solution to the reparations problem was some kind of

Franco-German or even West European economic or even political
union. As Tony Judt writes, the idea, “in one form or another, was not
new. The nineteenth century had seen a variety of more or less
unsuccessful customs unions in central and western Europe and even
before World War One there had been occasional idealistic talk,
drawing on the idea that Europe’s future lay in a coming together of
its disparate parts.” 590
Conan Fischer writes: “The pre-First World War French prime

minister, Joseph Cailloux, shared his contemporaries’ fears of German
militarism but, rather than confront Germany, he sought to improve
relations through mutually beneficial economic collaboration. Klaus
Wilsberg has demonstrated that far-reaching commercial links
between the French and German business sectors offered Cailloux the
means to achieve his objectives. Unfortunately for the cause of peace,
his ministry fell in January 1912 and his successor, Raymond Poincaré,
looked to France’s military alliances to guarantee national security.
“French diplomacy revisited Cailloux’s strategy immediately after

the Great War. A secret delegation sounded out Berlin in January 1919
about plans for a Franco-German partnership to reorganize the
European economy and, although the initiative failed, two further
approaches followed in 1921 and 1922. The 1921 Wiesbaden
Agreement envisaged German reparations payments to France being
replaced by massive German direct investment in the devastated war
zones of northern France, but British obstruction effectively derailed
this initiative. The 1922 Steinnes-Lubersac Agreement, concluded
between German and French business magnates and parliamentarians,
sought to revive the Wiesbaden Agreement, but failed to win Poincaré,
who had returned to office in January.

590 Judt, Post-War, London: Pimlico, 2007, pp. 153-154.
316
“By this time, Germany had suspended the payment of reparations
in cash as its domestic finances imploded, bringing Poincaré to favour
coercion over consensus. In January 1923 a French-led expeditionary
force [with 60,000 French soldiers] invaded the Ruhr, Germany’s
industrial heartland, ostensibly to collect unpaid reparations, 591 but in
fact, as recent research reveals, to precipitate the territorial
fragmentation of the Reich.” 592
“Paris calculated’” writes Adam Tooze, “that the cost of sending

the French Army into the Ruhr, the heartland of West German
industry, would be as little as 125 million francs. The return from the
exploitation of the Ruhr’s coal mines could be as much as 850 million
gold francs per annum. As it turned out, the military occupation of
western Germany did offer France a substantial return. But it also
provoked a crisis that pushed the German nation state to the brink of
collapse” 593 through the hyperinflation crisis that ensued.
Who were to blame – the Germans for defaulting, the French for
invading, or the Americans for withdrawing? Let us first consider the
German position. Thus Piers Brendon writes: “It now seems clear that
German governments were themselves, at least in part, responsible for
the ‘flight from the mark’. As the entrepreneur Hugo Stinnes said,
they had to spend beyond their means in the terrible aftermath of the
war in order to sustain life and to find work for returning soldiers.
Otherwise ‘Bolshevism would have seized Germany’. But the German
authorities also aimed to avoid paying reparations. They deliberately
engineered currency depreciation in order to promote cheap exports
and to exert ‘economic pressure on the Allies’.” 594
Again, Niall Ferguson writes: “When the total indemnity was fixed
in 1921, the Germans found themselves saddled with a huge new
external debt with a nominal capital value of 132 billion ‘gold marks’
(pre-war marks), equivalent to more than three times national income.
Although not all this new debt was immediately interest-bearing, the
scheduled reparations payments accounted for more than a third of all
Reich expenditure in 1921 and 1922. No investor who contemplated
Germany’s position in the summer of 1921 could have felt optimistic,
and such foreign capital as did flow into the country after the war was
speculative or ‘hot’ money, which soon departed when the going got
tough.

591 The ostensible aim, as Lloyd George put it, was “to dig out the Ruhr’s coal with
bayonets” (in Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, London:
Pimlico, 2001, p. 27).
592 Fischer, “The Limits of Nationhood”, History Today, June, 2017, pp. 12-13.
593 Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order,
London: Penguin, 2015, p. 440.

317
“Yet it would be wrong to see the hyperinflation of 1923 as a
simple consequence of the Versailles Treaty. That was how the
Germans liked to see it, of course. Their claim throughout the post-
war period was that the reparations burden created an unsustainable
current account deficit; that there was no alternative but to print yet
more paper marks in order to finance it; that the inflation was a direct
consequence of the resulting depreciation of the mark. All of this was
to overlook the domestic political roots of the monetary crisis. The
Weimar tax system was feeble, not least because the new regime
lacked legitimacy among higher income groups who declined to pay
the taxes imposed on them. At the same time, public money was spent
recklessly, particularly on generous wage settlements for public sector
unions. The combination of insufficient taxation and excessive
spending created enormous deficits in 1919 and 1920 (in excess of 10
per cent of net national product), before the victors had even
presented their reparations bill. The deficit in 1923, when Germany
had suspended reparations payments, was even larger. Moreover,
those in charge of Weimar economic policy in the early 1920s felt they
had little incentive to stabilize German fiscal and monetary policy,
even when an opportunity presented itself in the middle of 1920. A
common calculation among Germany’s financial elites was that
runaway currency depreciation would force the Allied powers into
revising the reparations settlement, since the effect would be to
cheapen German exports relative to American, British and French
manufacturers. It was true, as far as it went, that the downward slide
of the mark boosted German exports. What the Germans overlooked
was that the inflation-induced boom of 1920-22, at a time when the US
and UK economies were in the depths of a post-war recession, caused
an even bigger surge in imports, thus negating the economic pressure
they had hoped to exert. At the heart of the German hyperinflation
was a miscalculation. When the French cottoned on to the insincerity
of official German pledges to fulfill their reparations commitments,
they drew the conclusion that reparations would have to be collected
by force and invaded the industrial Ruhr region. The Germans reacted
by proclaiming a general strike (‘passive resistance’), which they
financed with yet more paper money. The hyperinflationary endgame
had now arrived…” 595
“Life was transformed,” writes Brendon, “into a bizarre

paperchase. Patrons of restaurants found their meals becoming more
expensive as they ate. Factory workers saw their wages shrinking in
value as they queued to collect them. However fast they ran to the
shops, prices outstripped them. Shopkeepers, indeed, looked on their
customers almost as thieves for taking goods which could only be
replaced at prohibitive expense. Peasants refused to sell their produce
for paper money, saying: ‘We don’t want any Jew-confetti from

595 Ferguson, The Ascent of Money, New York: The Penguin Press, 2008, pp. 102-104.
318
Berlin.’ Beggars rejected anything less than a million marks. New
notes appeared, issued by municipalities and acceptable locally.
Forgeries added to the confusion. Some people paid in kind: theatre
seats were sold for a couple of eggs; prostitutes offered their services
for cigarettes. Interest rates rose to 20 per cent a day and loans were
made in rye or coal or even electric kilowatts. Bureaucrats in the
Finance Ministry took part of their salaries in potatoes.
“Those who possessed foreign currency were impossibly rich, for

no one had enough marks to change anything but the smallest
denominations. Ten dollars would purchase a large modern house.
Foreign profiteers took advantage of the situation to make a killing,
while American tourists lit their cigarettes with million-mark notes
and pasted larger denominations on their suitcases, further
exacerbating German chauvinism. In the words of one contemporary,
‘Germany was a rapidly decomposing corpse, on which the birds of
prey were swooping down from all directions.’ At the height of the
inflation, according to a familiar story, a woman who left a basket of
marks on the pavement came back to find the basket stolen and the
marks in the gutter. Currency notes were used as lavatory paper.
Germans talked of the death of money. Stephan Zweig minted a
compelling metaphor for that awesome demise in his story of a blind
man whose family had secretly sold his cherished collection of
drawings in order to keep alive, replacing them in his portfolio with
blank sheets of paper. In the same vein, Hitler dismissed the Treaty of
Versailles as a scrap of paper.
“Not everyone suffered. Landowners actually benefited, often

paying off their mortgages in depreciated marks. So did industrialists,
especially if they sold abroad. Trade-unionists had a measure of
protection. But at a time when a pound of ersatz butter could cost a
labourer’s daily wage and it might take five months’ earnings to buy a
suit of clothes, the working class was sucked into a maelstrom of
misery. Even worse off were pensioners and those living on fixed
incomes. Their savings vanished and they faced not only indigence but
starvation. Here was a revolution as sweeping as that of the
Bolsheviks. At a stroke property was destroyed and ‘the bourgeoisie
was proletarianised’. Middle-class values were turned upside down:
debtors were virtuous while thrift was a vice; wealth was no longer
the index of worth. As one contemporary said, ‘Inflation finished the
process of moral decay which the war had started.’
“Crime spread: so many potato fields were raided that police had
to guard them in order to preserve the seed crop. There was an
increase in suicide, malnutrition, illness and emigration. Infant
mortality rates rose. Economic paralysis set in, unemployment grew,
strikes and disturbances spread, shops were ransacked and towns
looted. Corruption and anti-Semitism flourished – the Jews were
319
accused of exploiting the tragedy. Germany’s physical and psychic
health decayed together. Life became ‘madness, nightmare,
desperation, chaos’. Observing that the inflation had revived
Germany’s ‘old, bristling, savage spirit’, D.H. Lawrence said: ‘Money
becomes insane, and people with it.’ Sexual decadence seemed to be a
by-product of the bankruptcy of traditional values. A foreigner
exclaimed, ‘Nothing brought you so much face to face with the
pathological distortion of Germany’s postwar mentality as the weird
night life of Berlin.’ Describing the way in which inflation infected
everything, one historian has written that was a ‘revolutionary
influence much more powerful than the war itself’.
“Inevitably this crisis threatened Germany’s fragile democracy.

Since the State was unable to protect its citizens they were bound to
look elsewhere, especially when, in September 1923, the impotent
government surrendered to French coercion in the Ruhr. Many
workers turned to the Communists; Saxony and Thuringia were
menaced by Red revolution. Many of the dispossessed middle class
were seduced by right-wing movements. None was more rabid than
the National Socialist Party, which promised to restore a strong,
unified Reich that was both anti-capitalist and anti-Bolshevist. And no
one articulated petty-bourgeois bitterness more vehemently than its
leader, Adolf Hitler, who larded his speeches with hideous invective
against money-grubbing Jews. As Otto Strasser said, ‘His words go
like an arrow to their target, he touches each private wound on the
raw, liberating the unconscious, exposing its innermost aspirations,
telling it what it most wants to hear.’ Damning Weimar as a ‘robber’s
state’, Hitler declared that people starving on billions must withdraw
allegiance from a Republic ‘built on the swindling idea of the
majority’. They must embrace instead dictatorship. To financial
problems Hitler had only political solutions. He aimed to smash the
State which had encompassed Germany’s defeat and ruin, and build
one which enshrined racial purity and national greatness – with
himself at its head. The shackles of the past could only be broken by
his indomitable will. ‘For liberation something more is necessary than
an economic policy,’ he declared, ‘something more than industry: if a
people is to be become free, it needs pride and will-power, defiance,
hate, hate and once again hate’. Noting that Germans needed to
humiliate others in order to compensate for their own sense of mass
worthlessness during the ‘witches’ Sabbath of devaluation’, Elias
Canetti thought that without it the Führer could not have induced
them to participate in the destruction of the Jews.” 596
The French, alarmed by the chaos they had caused, eventually,

after some years, withdrew from the Ruhr. From a legal point of view,
they had acted within their rights, acting as the policemen of the

320
Versailles Treaty when no other power was prepared to enforce it. But
world policemen then, as now, are never popular, and the French
realized that they needed the friendship of the Anglo-Saxons even
more than their money – and the Anglo-Saxons disapproved of
France’s tactics.
Let us now look at the Anglo-Saxon position. The USA, as A.N.

Wilson writes, “did well out of the war. Every country in Europe
emerged from the war financially ruined. The United States, however,
was immeasurably enriched, not least by European debts, owing to
various US institutions, to the tune of £2000 million.
“Europe was to begin its new life of peace and democracy deeply in
debt, and the fact was inevitably going to be muddled with the
contentious matter of German reparations. By 1922, Arthur Balfour,
Lord President of the Council, was delegated to send a polite note
reminding the European allies of their debts – in all some £1,300
million to Britain from Russia and France, and £1,450 million owing
from Germany in reparations. There was no hope of recovering this
debt, of course, even though Britain was forced to honour its £850
million debt to the United States. When Balfour gingerly suggested
cancelling all these debts in ‘one great transaction’, he received an
abrupt response from the new president, Calvin Coolidge – ‘They
hired the money, didn’t they?’” 597
The general poverty of the state had a negative impact on relations

between capital and labour: on the one hand, revolutionary sentiment
was running high among the workers, and on the other hand
employers felt they could not make concessions to the workers. The
situation was not helped by major misjudgements by the government.
Thus when, in 1925, Winston Churchill ignored the advice of John
Maynard Keynes and put Britain back on the Gold Standard, the result
was, not a return to pre-war prosperity (when the Gold Standard had
suited Britain), but a devaluation of the currency and the loss in
competitiveness of important exports such as coal. So when the miners
went on strike in 1926, the employers, backed by the government,
were in no mood to increase wages and crushed the strike.
It was a striking contrast with the Dockers’ Strike of 1889, when the
strikers were successful because the employers could still afford
(however reluctantly) to make concessions. It was not until 1945 that
the balance of power, on the back of a national shift in sentiment,
swung to Labour…
“As the years tolled forward to 1929, and the Wall Street Crash, the
uneasy and unsatisfactory relationship [between America and Europe]

597 Wilson, After the Victorians, London: Hutchinson, 2005, p. 202.
321
became a habit. European anti-Americanism and American
unilateralism were in unholy alliance. But much as both wished to
establish the difference between America and the rest of the world, the
war had made the link. The debts were real. They hired the
money…” 598
Once the French had abjured the use of force, the Americans
became more constructive. Under the Dawes-Young Plan, brokered by
two American bankers and agreed by France, “Germany was to pay
reparations at a moderate rate until 1929, then at 2,500 million
Reichsmarks per annum. An Allied loan of 800 million RM was to
facilitate the next instalment. But even this proved impossible. In 1929,
under the Young Plan, Germany was told to pay 34,500 million RM
annually over 58 years, i.e. to 1988, as a mortgage secured against the
German state railways. In 1932, at the Lausanne Conference, Germany
was invited to make one final payment of 3,000 million RM – which
was not achieved. By that time the whole business had become
irrelevant…” 599
It was irrelevant because the Hyperinflation Crisis and the ensuing

crisis of democracy had propelled Hitler to the fore, just as the chaos
and crisis of Russian democracy in 1917 propelled Lenin to the fore…
On November 8, 1923 Hitler made an abortive attempt to overthrow

the government. “The Beer Hall Putsch has often been dismissed as a
fiasco worthy of its name, a storm in a stein. It is true that the Nazis
were dispersed by a whiff of carbine shot. But at the time the British
Ambassador thought the coup ‘looked very much like the beginning of
civil war’. Moreover the putsch brought Hitler to national prominence,
so much so that he regarded it as ‘perhaps the greatest stroke of luck
in my life’. The subsequent trial allowed Hitler to present himself as
much more than a local rabble rouser – now he was the leader of a
serious political party. He and his co-defendants were treated with the
utmost indulgence and Hitler was permitted to speechify from the
dock. He claimed sole responsibility for the putsch, upstaged
Ludendorff and turned the court into a theatre of propaganda. ‘The
man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled, he wills,’ Hitler
said, ‘he is not driven forward, he drives himself forward.’ His
sentence for high treason – five years’ imprisonment – was so lenient
as to imply that the authorities themselves had been found guilty.
Hitler was now frequently acclaimed as ‘Der Führer’ and even his
gaolers adopted the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting.

598 Wilson, op. cit., p. 202.
599 Norman Davies, Europe: A History, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 943.
322
“By then the mark had been stabilized. The new Currency
Commissioner, Hjalmar Schacht, had introduced the Rentenmark, soon
to become the Reichsmark. This was valued at a trillion old marks (of
which the Reichsbank now had supplies enough to fill 300 ten-ton
railway trucks) and was nominally secured on all land in Germany.
The economy remained exceedingly fragile, in part because inflation
had reduced funds available for investment. But high interest rates
attracted foreign capital and under the Dawes Plan American
subventions helped to achieve a patchy revival in Weimar fortunes.
Indeed, between 1924 and 1930 Germany received more in loans from
abroad than it paid in reparations. However, the country’s
dependency on alien investment was a sign of domestic weakness:
when American credit was to be withdrawn as a result of boom and
bust on Wall Street, Germany would suffer accordingly. In the
meantime recovery boded ill for the Nazis and, as a British diplomat
noted, ‘Hitler’s greatest enemy is the Rentenmark’. The Führer would
have to change his tactics and hope that he could climb to power over
the ruins of a new economic catastrophe. That catastrophe, when it
came, was made worse because the hyper-inflation of 1923 had
traumatised not just Germany but the world. In 1929 governments
were so determined to protect their currencies and balance their
budgets that they resisted the temptation to spend their way out of the
crisis. So the Slump turned into the Depression…” 600

600 Brendon, op. cit., p. 32-33.
323
30. THE RISE OF STALIN
“By the end of 1922,” writes Niall Ferguson, “a new Russian Socialist Federal
Republic extended from the Baltic to the Bering Straits. It, along with the far
smaller Byelorussian, Transcaucasian and Far Eastern republics, made up the
new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Apart from a westward strip running
from Helsinki down to Kishinev, remarkably little of the old Tsarist edifice had
been lost – an astonishing outcome given the weakness of the Bolshevik position
in the initial phase of the Revolution, and testament to the effectiveness of their
ruthless tactics in the civil war... The 1926 census revealed that slightly less that
53 per cent of the citizens of the Soviet Union regarded themselves as of Russian
nationality, though nearly 58 per cent gave Russian as the language they knew
best or most often used.
“Some cynics added that the political system had not changed much either;
for what was Lenin if not a Red Tsar, wielding absolute power through the
Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (which, crucially, maintained direct
control over the parties in the other republics)? Yet that was to miss the vast
change of ethos that separated the new empire from the old. Though there had
been ‘terrible’ Tsars in Russia’s past, the empire established by Lenin and his
confederates was the first to be based on terror itself since the short-lived
tyranny of the Jacobins in revolutionary France. At the same time, for all the
Bolsheviks’ obsession with Western revolutionary models, theirs was a
revolution that looked east more than it looked west. Asked to characterize the
Russian empire as it re-emerged under Lenin, most Western commentators
would not have hesitated to use the word ‘Asiatic’. That was also Trotsky’s view:
‘Our Red Army,’ he argued, ‘constitutes an incomparably more powerful force
in the Asiatic terrain of world politics that in European terrain.’ Significantly,
‘Asiatic’ was precisely the word Lenin had used to describe Stalin…”601
Like Roman Catholicism, the religion of Leninism logically leads to the

worship of one man as the infallible incarnation of the one truth. The truth is
History, the vanguard of History is the Party, and the leader of the Party is the
one true interpreter of its Will, the incarnation of History and its infallible vector
or arrow. All those who oppose him are deviants who miss the mark, being
consigned, in Trotsky’s phrase, “to the dustbin of History”. Although this
teaching had always been implicit in Leninism, and although the Tenth
Congress in 1921 had gone a long way, through its banning of all factionalism,
to prepare the way for its universal acceptance, it required the five-year period
following the departure of Lenin from centre stage in 1922-23 to the rise of Stalin
as dictator in 1927-28 to impress it upon the hearts as well as the minds of the
Bolshevik faithful. For before that time Lenin was the undisputed vozhd’, but it
was not clear whether there could be Leninism without Lenin. After it, the
answer was clear: just as there can be no Catholicism without the Pope, so there
can be no Leninism without Lenin. And the new Lenin is – Stalin. For, as Pravda

601 Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 158-159.
324
wrote in January, 1934: Now when we speak of Lenin, / It means we are speaking of
Stalin.602
The rise to power of Stalin over the whole of Russia and over all his fellow-
Bolsheviks is one of the mysteries of Soviet history. In particular, historians have
been surprised why it should have been Stalin, and not the more striking
Trotsky, who conquered in their famous struggle for power in the 1920s. The
question could be put – misleadingly, as we shall see – as follows: how did
Stalin, the most undistinguished of the leading Bolsheviks from an intellectual
point of view, the uncharismatic bureaucratic plodder (an early nickname was
“Comrade Filing-Cabinet”603) with little hold (in a personal sense) over his
fellow Bolsheviks, the non-Russian, non-Slav, non-European ex-seminarian and
bank robber, acquire, within ten years of the revolution, such ascendancy within
the party and the nation that he could expel from both the party and the nation
– Trotsky, the hero of 1905 and October and the Civil War, the brilliant writer
and demagogue and courageous man of action, the dynamic, cultivated and
popular European internationalist?
As a provisional hypothesis to explain this fact we may apply to the Soviet

situation the words of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides in his History of
the Peloponnesian War: “Inferior minds were as a rule more successful; aware of
their own defects and of the intelligence of their opponents, to whom they felt
themselves inferior in debate, and by whose versatility of intrigue they were
afraid of being surprised, they struck boldly and at once. Their enemies
despised them, were confident of detecting their plots, and thought it needless
to effect by violence what they could achieve by their brains, and so were taken
off their guard and destroyed.”
In agreement with this hypothesis, there is plenty of evidence that Trotsky

grossly underestimated Stalin, “the outstanding mediocrity of our Party”, as he
said to Sklyansky. Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s secretary during the mid-twenties,
confirms Isaac Deutscher’s opinion that “Trotsky felt it beneath his dignity to
cross swords with a man as intellectually undistinguished and personally
contemptible as Stalin”604. Trotsky also felt it beneath his dignity to indulge in
the kind of political skulduggery that Stalin excelled in, especially the tactic of
“divide and conquer”. Stalin’s very obscurity, the stealthy but steady way in
which he acquired power, lulled his opponents into inactivity. Trotsky was like
a hare, opening up a large lead very quickly but then sitting back and preening
his whiskers, while Stalin the tortoise crept past him to the finishing-line. And
indeed, we know that he was vain and arrogant, “treasuring his historic role”, in
Lunacharsky’s words, in the looking-glass of his imagination. Stalin, too, was
vain, but he hid this fault more carefully…

602 Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, London, 1991, p. 413.
603 Richard Overy, The Dictators, London: Penguin Books, 2005, p. 9.
604 Bazhanov, “Stalin Closely Observed”, in G. Urban (ed.), Stalinism, Maurice
Temple Smith, 1982; Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929-1940, Oxford
University Press, 1963.
325
In any case, Stalin was far more talented than Trotsky supposed. He was a
skilled and tenacious guerrilla fighter, bank-robber and organizer in the pre-
revolutionary period; and during his numerous exiles and escapes from exile he
acquired endurance, prudence and ingenuity. The Western leaders and
diplomats who met him in the Second World War admired his toughness,
realism and cleverness – sometimes even his supposed moral qualities!605 And
he outmanoeuvred them time and again… He was a good judge of character,
and could be attractive, strange as it may seem, to women, without ever being
controlled by them. He knew several languages, had a fine voice, was thought
to be a considerable poet, liked to instruct people in Shakespeare and art and
music, and read voraciously in many subjects.606
He could not match Trotsky in oratory, and yet this, too, he turned to his
advantage, since it marked him out as a genuine proletarian, which Trotsky
certainly was not: in the eyes of rough Bolsheviks from the provinces, writes
Sebastian Sebag Montefiore, “his flat quiet public speaking was an asset, a great
improvement on Trotsky’s oratorical wizardry. His very faults, the chip on the
shoulder, the brutality and fits of irrational temper, were the Party’s faults. ‘He
was not trusted but he was the man the Party trusted,’ admitted Bukharin. ‘He’s
like the symbol of the Party, the lower strata trust him.’ But above all, reflected
the future secret police chief, Beria, he was ‘supremely intelligent’, a political
‘genius’. However rude or charming he was, ‘he dominated his entourage with
his intelligence’.”607
In fact, Trotsky was more impressed by Stalin than he liked to admit, and
foresaw his triumph earlier than most. As Norman Davies writes, “Trotsky saw
it coming: in 1924 he was correctly predicting that ‘the gravedigger of the Party
of the Revolution’ would take over: ‘The dialectics of history have already
hooked him and will raise him up. He is needed by all of them, by the tired
radicals, by the bureaucrats, by the nepmen, by the kulaks [!], by the upstarts, by
all the sneaks that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the revolution… He
speaks their language, and knows how to lead them. Stalin will become the
dictator of the USSR.”608
Montefiore writes: “Stalin impressed Trotsky, whose description reveals why

he lost their struggle for power. ‘Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes,’ he
wrote. ‘He did have the knack of convincing the average run of leaders,
especially the provincials.’ He ‘wasn’t regarded as the official leader of the
Party,’ says Sagirashvili, another Georgian Menshevik in Petrograd throughout
1917, but ‘everyone listened to what he had to say, including Lenin – he was a
representative of the rank and file, one who expressed its real views and moods’,
which were unknown to émigrés like Trotsky. Soso [Stalin] was the

605 Jonathan Fenby, Alliance, London: Pocket Books, 2006, p. 16.
606 According to Overy, “in the 1930s his library counted 40,000 volumes. He wrote
extensively both before 1917 and in the 1920s, works and speeches that ran to
thirteen volumes when they were published” (op. cit., p. 9).
607 Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, London: Phoenix, 2004, p. 50.
608 Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 960.
326
‘unquestioned leader’ of the Caucasians. Lenin, says Sagirashvili, ‘felt that
behind him stood countless leaders from the provinces’. While Trotsky was
prancing on the stage at the Circus, Stalin was finding new allies such as the
young man he had unceremoniously kicked off the Bureau, Molotov.”609
There was another aspect to Trotsky’s vanity that placed him at a

disadvantage in relation to Stalin. As Edmund Wilson has shown, he was a
deeply committed believer in History, and in the ultimate triumph of
international Socialism under History’s aegis.610 But it was self-evident to him
that such a great movement must have great leaders – educated, internationally
minded men who had absorbed all the riches of bourgeois culture, decisive men
of action who would jump to the forefront of the masses and be immediately
accepted by them. Lenin fitted this role, which is why Trotsky, from 1917
onward, accepted his leadership unquestioningly. But Stalin, the uncouth
Asiatic, did not fit this role. Trotsky could not see how History could anoint him,
of all people, to be the leader of the revolutionary movement. Perhaps this
betrayed a certain lack of culture and historical knowledge on Trotsky’s part.
After all, the ultimate victor in the great French revolution was the provincial,
boorish Napoleon. Stalin, too, was a provincial – and he had studied
Napoleon…
Trotsky’s fanatical faith in History was indeed a major bonus at those

moments when History seemed to be at her most active – in 1905 and 1917-21.611
At such times fiery ardour, disregard of obstacles and the infirmities of men,
firm faith in the goal and hope in its attainment, are at a premium. And these
were the times when the plodding, cautious Stalin did not shine – although he
did not lose ground, either.
But in the ebb of revolutionary fervour, when History seemed to have hidden
her face from her devotees, different qualities were required – patience above all.
This was a quality possessed by Stalin, and these were the years – 1906-16 and
1921-27 – when he advanced most rapidly up the ladder of power. Moreover, he
continued to show faith in his goddess even in the most difficult times, as
during his Siberian exile during the First World War. “Even this fanatical
Marxist,” writes Montefiore, “convinced that the progress of history would
bring about revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, must have sometimes
doubted if he would ever return. Even Lenin doubted the Revolution, asking
Krupskaya, ‘Will we ever live to see it?’ Yet Stalin never seems to have lost faith.
‘The Russian Revolution is as inevitable as the rising of the sun,’ he had written
back in 1905 and he had not changed his view. ‘Can you prevent the sun from
rising?’”612
From 1922, when Lenin and Kamenev engineered Stalin’s appointment to the
powerful post of General Secretary, Trotsky frittered away the enormous

609 Montefiore, Young Stalin, London: Phoenix, 2007, pp. 333-334.
610 Wilson, To the Finland Station, London: Fontana, 1940.
611 Bertram Wolff, Three Who Made a Revolution.
612 Montefiore, Young Stalin, p. 305.
327
advantage given him by his reputation as a war-leader by refusing to build up a
political power-base, or appeal to the mass of the party against the growing
centralization of power in the Politburo, or in any way to pander to the vanities
and jealous susceptibilities of his colleagues. Thus he elicited their contempt by
pointedly reading French novels while the Politburo was in session. Through his
arrogance and lack of political circumspection, Trotsky made enemies easily –
and one of the first was Stalin. Thus when, at the London Congress of 1907,
Trotsky attacked the bank robberies that Stalin had organized on Lenin’s behalf,
Stalin was hurt, later talking about Trotsky’s “beautiful uselessness”. Trotsky
again embittered Stalin by attacking his conduct at Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad)
during the Civil War. Unfortunately for Trotsky, Stalin’s nature was not such as
could shrug off personal insults. He was a bully; but, as Robert Service puts it,
“he was an extremely sensitive bully”.613
And that gave him the defining trait of his nature: vengefulness. Thus “at a
boozy dinner, Kamenev asked everyone round the table to declare their greatest
pleasure in life. Some cited women, others earnestly replied that it was the
progress of dialectical materialism towards the workers’ paradise. Then Stalin
answered: ‘My greatest pleasure is to choose one’s victim, prepared one’s plans
minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There’s nothing
sweeter in the world.’…”614
This vengefulness is the critical element in Stalin’s character, the element that
truly distinguishes him from his colleagues. Not that vengefulness was not
characteristic of the whole revolutionary movement. But Stalin possessed it to a
quite exceptional degree.
It appeared early in his life. Thus Vershak writes: “Stalin’s comrades in the
seminary circle say that soon after his expulsion [from Tiflis seminary], they
were in turn expelled as the result of a denunciation by Stalin to the rector. He
did not deny the accusation, but justified the deed by saying that the expelled
students, having lost their right to become priests, would become good
revolutionaries…”
Again, in 1930 the Georgian Menshevik newspaper, Brdzolis Khhma, made an

accusation that was first levelled against him by Martov in 1918: “From the
earliest days of his activity among the workers, Djugashvili [Stalin] attracted
attention by his intrigues against the outstanding Social Democratic leader,
Sylvester Jibladze. He was warned but took no notice, continuing to spread
slanders with the intention of discrediting the recognized representative of the
local organization. Brought before a party tribunal, he was found guilty of
unjust slander, and was unanimously excluded from the Tiflis organization.”
Again, Iremashvili relates what Stalin said to him on the death of his first
wife, Ekaterina: “This creature softened my stony heart. She is dead, and with

613 Service, Stalin, London: Pan, p. 247.
614 Montefiore, Young Stalin, p. 309.
328
her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings.” Iremashvili
comments: “From the day he buried his wife, he indeed lost the last vestige of
human feelings. His heart filled with the unutterably malicious hatred which his
cruel father had already begun to engender in him while he was still a child.
Ruthless with himself, he became ruthless with all people.”
It would be unwise to discount the importance attached here to the death of

Stalin’s first wife. There is a striking historical parallel: it was after the death of
Tsar Ivan IV’s first wife, Anastasia Romanova, that he became “the Terrible”,
cruel and rapacious. Ivan’s decimation of the boyars through his oprichnina in
the 16th century bears a striking resemblance to Stalin’s of the Communist Party
through the NKVD in the 1930s; and Stalin showed great interest in the Terrible
Ivan.
In the period 1923-26 the rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky became more
intense, and for these years we have the invaluable testimony of Bazhanov. He
says that Stalin’s sole concern during this period “was to outwit his colleagues
and lay his hands on the reins of unrestricted power”. He accused Stalin of
murdering Frunze and Sklyansky. And he says: “It was clear to me already in
those early years that Stalin was a vindictive Asiatic, with fear, suspicion and
revenge deeply embedded in his soul. I could tell from everything he said and
left unsaid, his tastes, preferences and demeanour, that he would recoil from
nothing, drive every issue to its absurd extreme and send men to their deaths
without hesitation if they stood in his way.”
Bazhanov considers Trotsky to have been potentially as ruthless as Stalin. But

there was an important difference between the two kinds of ruthlessness.
Trotsky’s was not a personally directed emotion but a kind of impersonal
passion stemming directly from his faith in the revolution. As Deutscher said
(perhaps over-generously): “His judgement remained unclouded by any
personal emotion against Stalin, and severely objective.” Stalin, on the other
hand, had the great advantage of really hating his opponent.
David Deutscher suggests that Stalin must have had “better qualities and
emotions, such as intellectual ambition and a degree of sympathy with the
oppressed, without which no young man would ever join a persecuted
revolutionary party”615. But he produces no evidence in support of this dubious
statement. And even he had to admit that Stalin’s betrayal of the Warsaw rising
in 1944 could have been motivated, not by political expediency, but by nothing
else than “that unscrupulous rancour and insensible spite of which he had given
so much proof in the great purges”.616
But hatred and ambition, without intelligence, accomplishes little. And here
we must revise the simplistic notion that Trotsky was intelligent and Stalin

Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, p. 455.
615
Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Oxford University Press, 1949, p. 524.

616
This spite may have been linked with the defeat that the Poles inflicted on the Red
Army near Warsaw in 1920, for which Stalin bore some responsibility.
329
stupid. Lenin, for one, did not share this opinion, considering Stalin to be
second only to Trotsky in ability among the members of the Politburo. Trotsky
was a brilliant intellectual, one of the most acute judges of the national and
international scene. Not for nothing did Deutscher call him a “prophet”. But he
had his weaknesses apart from the vanity that we have already mentioned.
Bazhanov says that he was naïve with the naïveté that comes from fanaticism.
Lunacharsky said that he was a bad organizer. These two faults were linked to a
third which may be called a kind of stupidity: his blindly optimistic faith in the
infallibility of the party. As he wrote to Zinoviev: “The party in the last analysis
is always right, because the party is the single historic instrument given to the
proletariat for the solution of its fundamental problems… I know that one must
not be right against the party.”
It was because of this faith in the party – and in Lenin – that Trotsky accepted
the ban on factionalism at the Tenth Party Congress in 1921. And yet he
understood better than anybody what this “egocentralist” restriction of free
speech within the party would lead to. As he had declared several years earlier:
“The organization of the party takes the place of the party itself; the Central
Committee takes the place of the organization; and finally the dictator takes the
place of the Central Committee.”
Why, then, did he not protest when he saw Stalin attaining supreme power
by precisely these means, using his position as General Secretary to fill the party
with men loyal to himself alone? Partly because, as we have seen, he
underestimated Stalin. And partly because, after Lenin’s death in 1924, he did
not want to appear to be stepping too eagerly into Lenin’s shoes. But mainly
because he simply trusted in the party to get it right in the long run.
This attitude of Trotsky’s persisted for a long time, even after he had been
expelled from the country and the horrors of the First Five-Year-Plan had
revealed the extent of Stalin’s “bureaucratic collectivist” heresy. As late as
October, 1932, Trotsky refused to support a “Remove Stalin!” slogan because it
might encourage counter-revolution. Instead, he proposed the formation of a
Fourth International opposed to the Stalin-controlled Comintern – but only after
Hitler (aided by the Comintern’s refusal to form a Popular Front with the other
left-wing parties) had come to power in Germany. Even then he said that this
new International should have jurisdiction only up to, but not beyond, the
frontiers of the USSR. And it was only in October, 1933 that he declared that the
Opposition should constitute a new party against the Bolshevik party within the
country.
It was not until the later 1930s that Trotsky began, in a letter to Angelica
Balabanov, to rebel both against the Party and History herself: “History has to
be taken as she is; but when she allows herself such extraordinary and filthy
outrages [Stalin’s show-trials], one must fight back at her with one’s fists…”
Stalin had no such ideological scruples, no agonies of a revolutionary

conscience. He had the great good fortune – or good judgement – to become a
330
follower of Lenin as early as 1903 and to stick to him, in spite of some
disagreements, right up to the revolution. Not that he loved Lenin – he was
delighted at the news of Lenin’s death, according to Bazhanov, whereas Trotsky
fainted for two hours, according to Krupskaya. Nor was he a consistent Leninist
thereafter, for all his propaganda to the contrary – Stalin’s career covers the
most extraordinary range between extreme communism to near-convergence
with capitalism, from strident Russian nationalism to the purest
internationalism. What mattered to him was not ideological purity, but power;
and while he did not underestimate the importance of ideology in the
attainment and maintenance of power – in this respect Lenin trained him well, -
he never mistook the means for the end.
Thus he paid attention to organization – he was an excellent administrator –

and to the shifting patterns of alliances within the party. He did not wear his
heart on his sleeve, and was capable of the most studied hypocrisy in the
manner of Shakespeare’s Richard III. In October, 1917 Trotsky had impetuously
condemned Zinoviev and Kamenev “to the dustbin of history” for their refusal
to back Lenin’s call for an immediate putsch; but Stalin held his fire. Thus he
was able to use Zinoviev and Kamenev against Trotsky, and then, when his own
power base had been established, destroy all three of them. This combination of
hatred with prudence, cunning with caution, made him a formidable politician.
Other objective aspects of the political situation in the mid-twenties favoured

Stalin against Trotsky. As Deutscher points out, Trotsky’ doctrine of permanent
revolution, while critical to the success of the October revolution, offended the
self-confident complacency of the party. On the other hand, Stalin’s discovery
(with Bukharin) of the slogan “Socialism in One Country” answered to the
country’s pride in itself, its weariness with the failure of European revolution
and its longing for stability. The fact that Stalin later stole so many pages out of
Trotsky’s book – his emphasis on rapid industrialization, on militarization of the
unions and on discipline within the party – does not contradict this thesis. In the
early twenties, when Trotsky proposed these policies, the time was not yet ripe
for their implementation; whereas in the late twenties and early thirties, when
the New Economic Policy had run into the sands and political power was
concentrated exclusively in Stalin’s hands, they could be embarked upon with
some prospect of success – according to Stalin’s criteria, that is.
Have we then succeeded in explaining why Stalin triumphed over Trotsky?

Can we say that Stalin’s greater hatred, cunning, prudence and organizational
ability, on the one hand, and Trotsky’s vanity, naiveté, on the other, were bound
to lead to Stalin’s triumph in the conditions of war weariness, ideological
cooling-off and party sclerosis that prevailed in the Soviet Union of the mid-
1920s? In the present writer’s opinion we cannot say this, because the factors
mentioned above do not help us to understand the extraordinary drama that
took place over Lenin’s will in the critical years 1922-24, when Stalin was very
331
nearly catapulted from power, and in which it is difficult not to see another,
metaphysical factor entering into the situation…
In April, 1922 Stalin became General Secretary, the critical platform for his
rise to supreme power. In May, 1922 Lenin suffered his first stroke, thereby
removing the main obstacle to Stalin’s exploiting the secretariat in his personal
bid for power. Then, during the autumn of that year, while he was slowly
recovering from his stroke, Lenin fell out for the first time with the man whom,
in 1913, he had called “the wonderful Georgian”. The quarrel seems to have
been over Georgia, which the Second Army, on instructions from Stalin, had
invaded the previous year. Dzerzhinsky reported that Stalin’s underling,
Ordzhonikidze, had committed brutalities there, and complaints also reached
Lenin against Stalin. Lenin wanted Stalin to pay more attention to Georgian
national sensitivities. But Stalin, who had been the Party’s expert on
Nationalities for years, believed his countrymen should be kept on a close rein.
But then, in December, 1922, came Lenin’s second stroke. Recovering

somewhat, Lenin began to draw up a will, in which, while commenting on each
member of the Politburo, he wrote: “Comrade Stalin, having become General
Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure
that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution.” He also
hinted at the possibility of a split between Trotsky and Stalin, which the party
should act to avoid. Five days later, on December 30, he wrote: “I think that the
hastiness and administrative clumsiness of Stalin played a fatal role here [in
Georgia], and also his spite against the notorious ‘social chauvinism’. Spite in
general plays the worst possible role in politics…”
Fairly mild criticism, perhaps. But a quarrel between Stalin and Krupskaya
led to a significant hardening in Lenin’s attitude in the few months remaining to
him.617 Thus on January 4, 1923, in a postscript to his will, he wrote (if it was he,
and not Krupskaya, that wrote it): “Stalin is too rude, and this fault… becomes
unbearable in the office of General Secretary. Therefore I propose to the
comrades to find a way to remove Stalin from that position and appoint to it
another man more patient, more loyal, more polite and more attentive to
comrades, less capricious, etc.”

617 It appears that the Politburo had banned Lenin from working more than ten
minutes a day, which led to the quarrel with Krupskaya and then with Lenin
himself. “Stalin’s row with Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, outraged Lenin’s bourgeois
sentiments. But Stalin thought it was entirely consistent with Party culture. ‘Why
should I stand on my hindlegs for her? To sleep with Lenin does not mean you
understand Marxism-Leninism. Just because she used the same toilet as Lenin…‘
This led to some classic Stalin jokes, in which he warned Krupskaya that if she did
not obey, the Central Committee would appoint someone else as Lenin’s wife. That
is a very Bolshevik concept. His disrespect for Krupskaya was probably not helped
by her complaints about Lenin’s flirtations with his assistants, including Yelena
Stasova, the one whom Stalin threatened to promote to ‘wife’” (Montefiore, Stalin,
p. 37).
332
Then, on March 4, there appeared in Pravda a blistering attack by Lenin on
Stalin’s work as Commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate.
Deutscher wrote: “This was Lenin’s first, publicly delivered blow. Behind the
scenes he prepared for a final attack at the twelfth party congress, convened for
April; and he agreed with Trotsky on joint action. On 5 March, the day after
Pravda had at last published his criticisms of Stalin’s Commissariat, he had a
sharp exchange with Stalin. He then dictated a brief letter to Stalin, telling him
that he ‘broke off’ all personal relations with him. The next day, 6 March, he
wired a message to the leaders of the Georgian opposition, promising to take up
their case at the congress: ‘I am with you in this matter with all my heart. I am
outraged by the arrogance of Ordzhonikidze and the connivance of Stalin and
Dzerzhinsky.’ He again communicated with Trotsky about their joint tactics in
the Georgian business; and he briefed Kamenev who was to depart for Tiflis
with a special commission of inquiry. Just in the middle of all these moves, on 9
March, he suffered the third attack of his illness, from which he was not to
recover…”618
There can be little doubt that if Lenin had survived, Stalin would have been
sacked. Nor can we doubt that if he had died that March, and not ten months
later, Stalin would still have been sacked. For then the will would have been
opened at the twelfth congress in April. But Krupskaya scrupulously observed
the instructions on Lenin’s will: “Open only after my death”. So the contents
were not made known until shortly before the fourteenth congress in May, 1924.
By that time, however, Stalin had worked hard to create a bloc with Zinoviev
and Kamenev against Trotsky. So when the matter came up before the Central
Committee, Zinoviev and Kamenev spoke in favour of Stalin and against the
publication of the will. Trotsky was silent, the vote was taken – and Stalin was
saved. Three years later, Stalin was stronger than all three. In November, 1927
Trotsky and Zinoviev were expelled from the party, and in December the
Fifteenth Party Congress confirmed the decision…
Bazhanov writes: “Trotsky’s position in 1923-4 was strong. If he had used the
cards history had dealt him, Stalin could have been stopped. Of course Stalin
was an accomplished schemer, but with the support Lenin had given him
Trotsky could have lined up the party behind him if his temperament had not
stood in the way. But he failed to understand the nature of the Party machine,
Stalin’s use of it, and the full significance Stalin’s position as General Secretary
had acquired by the time of the 13th Congress.”
And yet there was more to it than that. The vital factor was the timing of
Lenin’s strokes, and above all the fact that the last stroke incapacitated him
without immediately killing him. Was this a product of blind Chance? Or
History’s choice of Stalin? Or God’s judgement on apostate Russia?

618 Deutscher, Stalin, pp. 252-253.
333
For a believer in the true God there was only one possible answer to this
question. God acted now as He had acted in seventh-century Byzantium when
He allowed the cruel tyrant Phocas to murder the good Emperor Maurice and
ascend the throne. “One contemporary,” writes Alexander Dvorkin, “cites the
story of a certain man who cried out to God: ‘Why did You send Your people
such a blood-thirsty wolf?’ And the Lord replied to him: ‘I tried to find someone
worse than Phocas, so as to punish the people for its self-will, but was unable.
But from now on don’t you question the judgements of God…’”619

619 Dvorkin, Ocherki po Istorii Vselenskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (Sketches on the
History of the Universal Orthodox Church), Nizhni-Novgorod, 2006, p. 439.
334
31. THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS
“Outside Europe,” writes Tombs, “the British Empire emerged from the war
more powerful – certainly bigger, with 500 million people – than ever. It had
acquired major tracts of Africa and much of the Middle East under League of
Nations ‘mandates’: theoretically, the League was placing former German or
Turkish possessions under the care of benevolent British administration. Its
main global rivals, Germany and Russia, had been eliminated. A simplified
‘Basic English’ was created to be the new world language. Many foreign
observers regarded the empire as by far the greatest world power. In terms of
population and resources, it clearly was. But those resources were controlled by
a complexity of governments and peoples. In war, they might cooperate. In
peace, they did not. The war effort, furthermore, created expectations of reward.
The Dominions themselves took German colonies - South Africa took German
South-West Africa, Australia took part of New Guinea. White settlers in African
colonies were constantly insubordinate. The Statute of Westminster (1931)
formally recognized the legal independence of the Dominions within a
‘Commonwealth’ in which they were as independent as they chose to be. When
new global dangers appeared, the Dominions proved even more inclined to
isolation, cost-cutting, appeasement and wishful thinking than Britain, and the
need to defend them was an extra burden.
“Following the solidarity displayed during the war, the empire commanded
general approval in Britain. There were practically no absolute anti-imperialists
within the Labour Party. The public considered it a beneficent and largely
willing association, notwithstanding widespread unrest. The empire could only
justified in England by the belief that it was a ‘family’ based on loyalty – a vision
that the monarchy did much to support – and was bringing general progress.
The term ‘Commonwealth’ became popular well before it was officially
adopted. This view of empire required considerable wishful thinking, but it was
not wholly false. There were now some subsidized development projects, and
with the onset of the Great Depression imperial trading preference became a
reality. As new dangers arose from states motivated by totalitarian and racist
expansionism, the empire provided some protection for its more exposed
elements.
“But the barbarism of the war had shaken the psychological bondage of the
empire’s subjects. European superiority was no longer intellectually or
physically unchallengeable. The economic shockwaves of the war and a postwar
slump affected the colonized peoples. There was unrest in Nyasaland, Ceylon,
Somaliland, Sudan, Egypt, Iraq and the West Indies. India was in a state of
sporadic rebellion, in which regional and religious tensions were accompanied
335
by rising political support for the nationalist Congress Party. Palestine saw
increasing friction between Jewish settlers and the native population. The
Russian Revolution and conflict in Ireland created apprehension of ‘a world
movement’, as Balfour put it, ‘plainly discernable on every continent … We are
only at the beginning of our troubles.’ A senior general warned of being ‘spread
all over the world, strong nowhere, weak everywhere’.”620
Let us look at two small regions of British rule where the concept of the
Commonwealth being a loving “family” was particularly hard to sustain –
Palestine and Ireland.
In 1917, after the issuing of the Balfour Declaration in November, the British,
who were still a war with the Ottoman empire, changed their military
commander in the region, which had an immediate positive effect. The new
commander, General Allenby, swiftly regained the initiative against the Turkish,
German and Austrian troops that opposed him and advanced on Jerusalem.
Desperate to retain the support of his Arab allies under Prince Faisal, he
suppressed news of the Declaration.621 But he allowed the Jewish legion under
Zhabotinsky to force the passage of the Jordan…622
The last Turk left Jerusalem on December 7, the first day of the Jewish feast of
Hannukah, which celebrated the Maccabean liberation of Jerusalem in the
second century BC. On December 11 Allenby, accompanied by Lawrence of
Arabia, entered the city (on foot, as a sign of respect). “We thought we were
witnessing the triumph of the last Crusade,” said the American Colonist Bertha
Spafford. “A Christian nation had conquered Palestine!” 623 Shortly after
Allenby’s conquest of Palestine, Weizmann arrived in Jerusalem as head of a
Zionist Commission, determined to put the Balfour Declaration into effect. He
was surprised, writes Mansfield, “by how ‘non-Jewish’ Jerusalem and Palestine
had become”…624
On September 19, 1918 Allenby defeated the Turks at the Battle of Megiddo,
and on October 1 the British and Arabs conquered Damascus. By the end of the
month the Ottoman Empire had surrendered to the British on a Dreadnought on
the Aegean island of Lesbos… At the Versailles peace conference in 1919,
Palestine was made a British mandate territory, and in 1920 A Franco-British
Convention amended the Sykes-Picot Agreement to make the Jewish National
Home comprise the whole of Palestine. The British were now the masters in the
Holy Land, and were in a position to put the highly ambiguous provisions of
the Balfour Declaration into effect…

620 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 658-660.
621 Wilson, op. cit, p. 141.
622 “Jewish Legion”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Legion.
624 Mansfield, op. cit., p. 164.
336
That Declaration, writes Tombs, “had paid lip service to the interest of both
Jews and Arabs, but by encouraging Jewish immigration and land purchase, it
inevitably fuelled conflict. By the late 1920s the governor had concluded that the
Jews were ungrateful, the Arabs impertinent, and the Balfour Declaration a
‘colossal blunder’. Arab uprisings in the 1930s were treated with harsh but
ineffective repression combined with a promise to limit Jewish immigration and
create an independent two-state Palestine, which satisfied neither side.”625
At first, the British favoured the Jews. As Lord Balfour himself said a year
after the end of the war, “The four great powers are committed to Zionism and
Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in
present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and
prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”626 However,
as Jewish immigration increased towards the end of the 1920s, Arab resentment
increased. After the secret Sykes-Picot agreement was published by the
Bolsheviks, the Arabs felt, not without reason, that they had been betrayed –
King Hussein was never reconciled with the British, and a major riot of
Palestinian Arabs took place in 1929. And as Jewish immigration rocketed, the
British were forced to reconsider their Zionist policies and adopt a more
balanced approach… For each year, writes Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “there were
more than 30,000 arrivals, and in 1935 the number grew to 62,000. In response,
in April 1936 a major Arab uprising took place. On 7 July 1937 a commission
headed by Lord Peel recommended that Jewish immigration be reduced to
12,000 a year, and restrictions were placed on land purchases. In addition a
three-way partition was suggested: the coastal strip, Galilee and the Jezreel
valley should be formed into a Jewish state, whereas the Judaean hills, the
Negev and Ephraim should be the Arab state. The plan was rejected by the
Arabs, and another revolt took place in 1937. In the following year, the Pan-
Arab Conference in Cairo adopted a policy whereby all Arab communities
pledged that they would take action to prevent further Zionist expansion.
“After the failure of the tripartite plan in London in 1939 the British
abandoned the policy of partition. In May 1939 a new White Paper was
published stating that only 75,000 more Jews could be admitted over five years,
and thereafter none except with Arab agreement…”627
The White Paper also, as Vital writes, “pointed to the ambiguity in the
expression ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ as the fundamental cause of
unrest and hostility between Arabs and Jews. Affirming the 1922 interpretation
given by Colonial Secretary Churchill that the government ‘at no time
contemplated the subordination of the Arabic population, language, or culture
in Palestine,’ this White Paper declared ‘it was not part of their policy that
Palestine should become a Jewish state… This would be contrary to their

625 Tombs, op. cit., p. 661.
626 Balfour, in Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, London: Penguin, 2003, pp. 164-165.
627 Cohn-Sherbok, Atlas of Jewish History, London: Routledge, 1996, p. 188.
337
obligations under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been
given to the Arab people in the pact that the Arab population of Palestine
should not be made the subjects of a Jewish state against their will.’ The goal
was described as an independent Palestine within ten years, in which ‘Arabs
and Jews could share in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of
each are safeguarded.’ In such a Palestinian state, it was envisioned that ‘Jews
and Arabs would be as Palestinian as English and Scottish in Britain are
British…’”628
If the conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine was a relatively new one,
that between British and Irish in Ireland was, of course, ancient, although the
cause was similar in both cases: the British encouragement of new settlers in the
land without thinking about the interests of the native inhabitants. In 1798, in
the middle of a major continental war, the Irish nationalists had sought
Napoleon’s assistance against the British, but were defeated. They did
something similar now, only the Kaiser was the ally they invoked, and again
they were defeated – but only temporarily…
In April 1916, writes Tombs, “there were an uprising in Dublin and small
disturbances in Wexford and Cork. Home Rule [that Irish self-government]
within the United Kingdom had been voted by the Commons in May 1914, but
subsequently suspended until the peace. The moderate nationalist John
Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, supported the war effort,
hoping that a common patriotic struggle would unite Catholics and Protestants.
The Irish Times extolled ‘the spectacle of Irish Unionists and Nationalists
fighting side by side in Flanders… little more than a year ago they were
preparing to kill one another. Today many of them have died for one another.’
This policy was widely supported, including by volunteering for the army,
supporting the Red Cross, and sheltering Belgian refugees. But it was utterly
rejected by radical nationalists, who feared that they were losing ground to the
moderates. ‘Home Rule was in the air. The overwhelming majority of the people
supported Redmond… There were reports of the success of recruiting [for] the
British Army… Our dream castles toppled about us with a crash… The Irish
people had recognized themselves as part of England.’ To disrupt this, radicals
sought German assistance for an insurrection: a glorious revolt which, even if
defeated, would inflame nationalism, and reap its reward when Germany won
the war. On 24 April, Easter Monday, some 1,500 insurgents seized the General
Post Office and other buildings in the centre of Dublin. In the ensuing conflict,
116 soldiers, 16 policemen and over 60 rebels were killed, as were a considerable
number of civilians. Some 400 rebels were imprisoned in England and released
after a few months; but 15 of the leaders were court-martialled and shot.
Comparable punishment – and probably with greater severity – would have
been inflicted in any of the belligerent countries. Yet it was a political disaster,
tipping much Irish opinion towards sympathy with the rebels. Nevertheless,

628 Vital, op. cit., p. 33.
338
Irishmen, including Catholic Dubliners, continued to volunteer for the British
army throughout the war; and no Irish regiment ever mutinied. The well-
received visit of the Irish Canadian Rangers (a predominantly Catholic regiment
recruited in Quebec) to Dublin, Belfast and other Irish cities in January 1917
demonstrated that many Irish Catholics still supported the war effort eight
months after the execution of the rebel leaders. However, the war polarized
opinion. Sinn Fein [the Irish nationalist party] began to win by-elections at the
expense of Redmond moderate nationalists, exploiting fears (never realized, but
seemingly imminent during the crisis of the great German offensive of 1918)
that the military conscription recently adopted in Britain might be extended to
Ireland.”629
Amidst much low-level conflict, Sinn Fein set up its own symbolic parliament
in January 1919. “Westminster legislated in 1920 for two Irish parliaments, in
Dublin and Belfast, with a joint Council of Ireland. Sinn Fein rejected this
‘partition’, denied Westminster’s right to legislate for Ireland, and began killing
policemen and miscellaneous others, seemingly to prevent compromise by
provoking conflict. Conflict duly came with retaliatory killings of Sinn Feiners
and anti-Catholic violence in Ulster. The British government, trying to extricate
itself from Ireland, and lacking the resources, the will and the wisdom to defuse
the conflict, tried to snuff out the violence by interning activists. The weakened
and demoralised Royal Irish Constabulary, mostly Catholic, was reinforced by
auxiliary police, including the 10,000 ‘Black and Tans’, mostly British former
soldiers. Nationalist killings were met with a semi-official policy of reprisals,
including shooting to kill and burning houses. Death squads operated on both
sides. The most notorious single incident was ‘Bloody Sunday’, 11 November
1920, when fourteen supposed British intelligence officers were assassinated
and vengeful ‘Black and Tans’ shot fourteen dead at a Gaelic football match in
Dublin – ‘Dublin’s Amritsar’ [in 1919 a British officer massacred a crowd of
Indians in Amritsar]. In May 1921 the two Irish parliaments were elected, one
dominated by Sinn Fein, the other by Ulster Unionists. A conference in London
sought a solution based on an independent Ireland, with autonomy for Ulster,
membership of the Commonwealth and safeguards for Britain’s security. On 6
December 1921 a treaty established an ‘Irish Free State’ within the
Commonwealth. But worsening political and sectarian murders in both Ulster
and the Free State, and a refusal by many nationalists to accept the treaty, led to
a three-way civil war in the summer of 1922 when Dublin government forces
raided Ulster and also attacked anti-treaty rebels of the Irish Republican Army
(IRA) in Dublin. The Dublin government sent more rebels to firing squads than
the British had in 1916, and the civil war petered out in 1923. It had cost some
2,000 lives – relatively few compared, for example, with the 36,000 killed in the
simultaneous civil war in Finland, or the large number of Irishmen killed in the
Great War. The outcome was a grudging compromise: the Irish Free State
attained independence and remained nominally a member of the
Commonwealth and ‘six counties’ centred on Protestant Ulster became a self-
governing province of the United Kingdom; but hopes of a gradual reunification

629 Tombs, op. cit., p. 623.
339
of north and south and friendly relations with Britain had evaporated. It took
until 1998 to return to the outcome available in 1920.”630
Paradoxically, this period was one of great Irish cultural efflorescence. Sean
O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce were among the great Irish
authors of the period (writing in English, of course). The great poet W.B. Yeats
was both a Protestant, an Irish nationalist and even briefly a member of the Irish
blue-shirt movement. But in general he shrank in horror from the internecine
violence that is characteristic of all revolutionary nationalist movements .
Already in 1919 he wrote hauntingly and prophetically of the apocalyptic era

that was now beginning in his poem “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
“In India,” writes Tombs, “a capital worthy not merely of a global but of a
galactic empire had been in preparation since 1911, aiming ‘to rival Paris and
Washington’. It was to be a garden city in a hybrid neoclassical cum Mughal
style, with as its centrepiece Sir Edwin Lutyens’s stunning viceregal palace. But
in the far south there was sectarian violence and in the north rioting was met
with massacre. In April 1919, at Amritsar, some 400 people were coldly shot
down in what Churchill called a ‘monstrous’ and ‘sinister’ ‘terrorism’ and ‘racial
humiliation’. The Government of India Act (1919) conceded some provincial
self-government and a wider franchise, and in 1929 the Viceroy, the moderate
Tory Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax), offered talks to Indian nationalists with a
view to India attaining future ‘Dominion status’, like Canada, Australia, New
Zealand and South Africa. Although Churchill insisted in 1930 that Indian
independence could not happen in ‘any period which we can even remotely
foresee’ – the usual reasons being that India was too big, too diverse, too
backward, too divided and too turbulent to exist without a firm but fair British
umpire – in fact rapid steps towards self-government were being taken, under
unrelenting political, moral and economic pressure from the embarrassingly
peaceful Mohandas Gandhi, a hero to many in England, and whose popular

630 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 660-661.
340
campaigns undermined the deference to British authority on which imperial
rule depended.”631
Mahatma K. Gandhi, as Jon Wilson writes, was born in India in

1860, studied in London, “and became involved in politics while
working as a lawyer in South Africa. Campaigning against the
discrimination Indians suffered in the then British colony, Gandhi
found that the most effective way to oppose the British government
was through peaceful protest. The imperial state was founded on the
use of force, and Gandhi argued that violent protest would lead to
overwhelming retaliation, creating cycles of violence that would
ultimately fuel the regime’s power. The alternative was to treat the
enemy as a moral being. The protester would then offer their own
suffering in an appeal to the enemy’s conscience and, in doing so,
limit the use of violence on each side.
“As the scholar Karuna Mantena argues, Gandhi was not an

idealistic saint trapped in a world of violence and venal passion.
Rather, he was an arch-political realist who developed tactics for
opposing imperial rule that more or less worked. He believed that
British rule in India could survive only with Indian support, urging
his compatriots to recognize that ‘one hundred thousand Englishmen
need not frighten three hundred million human beings’, and
concluding that British control seemed proof of some kind of Indian
collaboration. If Indians withdraw from this relationship to create
their own institutions and way of life, he suggested, British rule
would collapse. And, eventually, it did. The British didn’t choose to
leave India in 1947. They had no choice but to go – because by then so
few Indians acquiesced in their power.” 632
“The Baldwin government,” continues Tombs, “passed the Government of

India Act (1935), against the impassioned opposition of backbench imperialists
led by Churchill. It established relatively democratic self-government at
provincial level, in the hope of maintaining imperial control of the whole – a
doomed compromise.
“The empire seemed to insiders ‘a brontosaurus with huge, vulnerable limbs

which the central nervous system had little capacity to protect, direct or control.
Postwar economic problems made it even more than usually short of resources.
Little more than a decade after its great victory, it would face the most
dangerous predators in its history…”633

631 Tombs, op. cit., p. 661.
632 Wilson, “A History of Non-Violence”, World Histories, vol. 8, February/March, 2018, p. 7.
633 Tombs, op. cit., p. 662.
341
32. THE RISE OF CHINA
As we have seen, the Comintern was founded in 1919 with the aim of
spreading communism throughout the world. However, after their defeat at the
hands of the Poles in 1920, the Bolsheviks’ hopes of conquest were redirected
beyond Europe towards Asia – and especially towards China. At first sight,
China would seem to have been firmly within the western orbit, since her
government, weak though it was, was democratic and recognized by the
western powers, which still had a stranglehold over the country’s economy. But
the Chinese had reason to be aggrieved at the way they had been treated at
Versailles. For in clear violation of the principles of national self-determination,
Japan was awarded German rights in Shantung (promised to her in 1917 by
Britain and France), as well as many formerly German Pacific islands and a
permanent seat on the Council of the League of Nations.
The result was the “May 4th Movement” of 1919, a nation-wide student
protest that led, as J.M. Roberts writes, “to embrace others than students and to
manifest itself in strikes and a boycott of Japanese goods. A movement which
had begun with intellectuals and their pupils spread to include other city-
dwellers, notably industrial workers and the new Chinese capitalists who had
benefited from the war. It was the most important evidence yet seen of the
mounting rejection of Europe by Asia.
“For the first time, an industrial China entered the scene. China, like Japan,
had enjoyed an economic boom during the war. Though a decline in European
imports to China had been partly offset by increased Japanese and American
sales, Chinese entrepreneurs in the ports had found it profitable to invest in
production for the home market. The first important industrial areas outside
Manchuria began to appear. They belonged to progressive capitalists who
sympathized with revolutionary ideas all the more when the return of peace
brought renewed western competition and evidence that China had not earned
her liberation from tutelage to the foreigner. The workers, too, felt this
resentment: their jobs were threatened. Many of them were first-generation
town-dwellers, drawn into the new industrial areas from the countryside by the
promise of employment. An uprooting from the tenacious soil of peasant
tradition was even more important in China than in Europe a century before.
Family and village ties were specially strong in China. The migrant to the town
broke with patriarchal authority and the reciprocal obligations of the
independent producing unit, the household: this was a further great weakening
of the age-old structure which had survived the revolution and still tied China
to the past. New material was thus made available for new ideological
deployments.
“The May 4th Movement first showed what could be made of such forces as
these by creating the first broadly-based Chinese revolutionary coalition.
Progressive western liberalism had not been enough; implicit in the movement’s
success was the disappointment of the hopes of many of the cultural reformers.
342
Capitalist western democracy had been shown up by the Chinese government’s
helplessness in the face of Japan. Now, that government had another
humiliation from its own subjects: the boycott and demonstration forced it to
release the arrested students and dismiss its pro-Japanese ministers. But this
was not the only important consequence of May 4th Movement. For all their
limited political influence, reformers had for the first time, thanks to the
students, broken through into the world of social action. This aroused enormous
optimism and greater popular awareness than ever before. This is the case for
saying that contemporary Chinese history begins positively in 1919 rather than
1911…
“… Russia was very popular among Chinese students. It seemed the

successors of the Tsar had driven out the old imperialist Adam, for one of the
first acts of the Soviet government had been a formal renunciation of all extra-
territorial rights and jurisdictions enjoyed by the Tsarist state. In the eyes of the
nationalists, Russia, therefore, had clean hands. Moreover, her revolution – a
revolution in a great peasant society – claimed to be built upon a doctrine whose
applicability in China seemed especially plausible in the wake of the
industrialization provoked by the war.”634
Of course, the Soviets had made the concessions to China in a moment of

weakness: in 1924, feeling stronger, they reasserted Russian rights over the
Manchurian railway system. Nevertheless, before that, in November, 1922 the
Comintern at its Fourth Congress had made an important change of policy: the
foreign Communist Parties were to pursue the strategy of revolutionary defence,
not striving to overthrow governments – at any rate immediately, but to
cooperate with the most promising elements. In China’s case this meant the
nationalists. “The central point of the new Comintern line,” writes Adam Tooze,
“was the need to draw the great mass of the rural population into national
liberation struggles. The role of the Communist Party was to pressure the
bourgeois-nationalist parties into adopting a revolutionary agrarian programme
to appeal to the landless rural population. Crucially, on 12 January 1923 the
Comintern directed the Chinese Communist Party that ‘The only serious
national revolutionary group in China at present is the Kuomingtang.’ With
these words the Comintern for better or worse made the choice that none of the
other foreign power had been willing to make. It opted not just to acknowledge
the significance of the Kuomingtang, but to assist it in making a full-scale
national revolution. This was affirmed by official Soviet diplomacy only a few
weeks later when the Soviet ambassador to China, Adolphe Joffe, abandoned
Beijing to meet with Sun Yat-Sen in Shanghai, from where they issued a
manifesto on future collaboration. In May this was followed by specific
instructions designating the peasant problem as the central issue of the Chinese
revolution. Along with their role in the cities, the Chinese comrades were
enjoined to foment an agrarian revolt. This strategy was not to the taste of the
founding members of the Chinese Communist Party, who were urban
intellectuals fixated on the modern, industrial working class. But it brought to

634 Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon, 1992, pp. 734-735.
343
the fore a new cohort of organizers, include the young Mao Zedong, himself a
son of the peasantry…”635
If Mao differed from Lenin in his reliance on the peasants rather than the
workers, his basic philosophy was just as nihilist as his teacher’s. His
biographers, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, write: “In the winter of 1917-18, still
a student as he turned twenty-four, he wrote extensive commentaries on a book
called A System of Ethics, by a minor late nineteenth-century German
philosopher, Friedrich Paulsen. In these notes, Mao expressed the central
elements in his own character, which stayed consistent for the remaining six
decades of his life and defined his rule.
“Mao’s attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, ‘I’, above
everything else: ‘I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of
one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in
relation to others… People like me want to… satisfy our hearts to the full, and in
so doing we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there
are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.’
“Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. ‘People like me only
have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.’ ‘I am responsible
only for the reality that I know,’ he wrote, ‘and absolutely not responsible for
anything else. I don’t know about the past, I don’t know about the future. They
have nothing to do with the reality of my own self.’ He explicitly rejected any
responsibility towards future generations. ‘Some say one has a responsibility for
history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself… I have
my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one.’
“Mao did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally.
A good name after death, he said, ‘cannot bring me any joy, because it belongs
to the future and not to my own reality.’ ‘People like me are not building
achievements to leave for future generations.’ Mao did not care what he left
behind.
“He argued that conscience could go to hell if it was in conflict with his
impulses:
“‘These two should be one and the same. All our actions… are driven by
impulse, and the conscience that is wise goes along with this in every instance.
Sometimes… conscience restrains impulses such as over-eating or over-
indulgence in sex. But conscience is only there to restrain, not oppose. And the
restraint is for better completion of the impulse.’
“As conscience always implies some concern for other people, and is not a
corollary of hedonism, Mao was rejecting the concept. His view was: ‘I do not
think these [commands like “do not kill”, “do not steal”, and “do not slander]

344
have anything to do with conscience. I think they are only out of self-interest for
self-preservation.’ All considerations must ‘be purely calculation for oneself,
and absolutely not for obeying external ethical codes, or for so-called feelings of
responsibility…’
“Absolute selfishness and irresponsibility lay at the heart of Mao’s outlook.
“These attributes he held to be reserved for ‘Great Heroes’ – a group to which

he appointed himself. For this elite, he said:
“‘Everything outside their nature, such as restrictions and constraints, must

be swept away by the great strength in their nature… When Great Heroes give
full play to their impulses, they are magnificently powerful, stormy and
invincible. Their power is like a hurricane arising from a deep gorge, and like a
sex-maniac on heat and prowling for a lover… there is no way to stop them.’
“The other central element in his character which Mao spelt out now was the
joy he took in upheaval and destruction. ‘Giant wars,’ he wrote, ‘will last as long
as heaven and earth and will never become extinct… The ideal of a world of
Great Equality and Harmony [da tong, Confucian ideal society] is mistaken.’
This was not just the prediction that a pessimist might make; it was Mao’s
desideratum, which he asserted was what the population at large wished.
‘Long-lasting peace,’ he claimed, ‘is unendurable to human beings, and tidal
waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace… When we look at
history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another…
which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace
and prosperity, we are bored… Human nature loves sudden swift changes.’
“Mao simply collapsed the distinction between reading about stirring events
and actually living through cataclysm. He ignored the fact that, for the
overwhelming majority, war meant misery.
“He even articulated a cavalier attitude towards death:
“‘Human beings are endowed with the sense of curiosity. Why should we
treat death differently? Don’t we want to experience strange things? Death is the
strangest thing, which you will never experience if you go on living… Some are
afraid of it because the change comes too drastically. But I think this is the most
wonderful thing: where else in this world can we find such a fantastic and
drastic change?’
“Using a very royal ‘we’, Mao went on: ‘We love sailing on a sea of
upheavals. To go from life to death is to experience the greatest upheaval. Isn’t it
magnificent!’ This might at first seem surreal, but when later tens of millions of
Chinese were starved to death under his rule, Mao told his inner ruling circle it
did not matter if people died – and even that death was to be celebrated. As so
often, he applied his attitude only to other people, not to himself. Throughout
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his own life he was obsessed with finding ways to thwart death, doing
everything he could to perfect his security and enhance his medical care.
“When he came to the question ‘How do we change?’, Mao laid the utmost
emphasis on destruction: ‘the country must be… destroyed and then re-formed.’
He extended this line not just to China but to the whole world – and even the
universe: ‘This applies to the country, to the nation, and to mankind… The
destruction of the universe is the same… People like me long for its destruction,
because when the old universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed.
Isn’t that better!’”636
For the time being, however, Mao’s dreams of destruction would have to
wait… In 1923 the Kuomintang under Sun Yat-Sen established itself in Canton.
Their aim was to crush the warlords, throw out the foreign imperialist exploiters
and unite the country. Sun was no communist, but he was prepared to work
with the communists, and they were prepared to work with him, because his
philosophy was collectivist and anti-western – “on no account,” he wrote, “must
we give more liberty to the individual; let us secure liberty instead for the
nation”. Moreover, he needed Moscow’s help in reorganizing his party on the
Soviet model and in building up an army. And so in the summer of 1923, Sun
sent his young brother-in-law, Chiang Kai-Shek, a soldier trained in Japan, to
Moscow for further training. On his return Chiang organized an army of 85,000
men with 6000 officers trained at an academy in Canton.637 Sun died in 1925, but
in July, 1926 the new leader, Chiang, was able to lead his army in a successful
campaign against the northern warlords. By early 1927 the entire Yangtze valley
– Britain’s sphere of influence - had been conquered, and, as Roberts writes, “a
semblance of unity had been restored to the country under the leadership of the
KMT. Anti-imperialist feeling supported a successful boycott of British goods,
which led the British government, alarmed by the evidence of growing Russian
influence in China, to surrender its concessions at Hankow and Kiukiang. It had
already promised to return Wei-hai-wei to China (1922), and the United States
had renounced its share of the Boxer indemnity. Such successes added to signs
that China was on the move at last…”638

636 Chang and Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, London: JonathanCape, 2005, pp.
13-15.
637 Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, Cambridge University Press,
1996, p. 633.
638 Roberts, op. cit., p. 738.
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33. THE RE-LAUNCH OF ECUMENISM
The post-1914 world was a time of the shaking of foundations, and not only
in politics. In physics Einstein’s relativity theory and Planck’s quantum theory
shook people’s beliefs in the nature of matter and space-time; in music, the
atonalism of Schoenberg changed their ideas of what could be termed beautiful;
while cubism, abstractionism and other movements had the same effect in the
visual arts. However, the most profound and disastrous effects were in
religion…
Atheism, as we have seen, had made considerable inroads into European

culture in the period up to 1914 – a factor that must be considered one of the
main causes of the First World War. However, in the period that followed,
atheism’s march appears to have slowed. Thus in 1916, writes Alistair McGrath,
"active scientists were asked whether they believed in God - specifically, a God
who actively communicates with humanity, and to whom one may pray 'in
expectation of receiving an answer'. Deists don't believe in God, by this
definition. The results are well-known: roughly 40 per cent did believe in this
kind of God, 40 per cent did not, and 20 per cent were not sure. The survey was
repeated in 1997, using precisely the same question, and found pretty much the
same pattern, with a slight increase in those who did not (up to 45 per cent). The
number of those who did believe in such a God remained stable at about 40 per
cent.
"James Leuba, who conducted the original survey in 1916, predicted that the
number of scientists disbelieving in God would rise significantly over time, as a
result of general improvements in education. There is a small increase in the
number of those who disbelieve, and a corresponding diminution in those who
are agnostic - but no significant reduction in those who believe."639
However, if atheism was checked during the war, it would of course grow
enormously in Russia after the revolution. In the West, the curse was rather
Ecumenism, whose origins in Roman paganism and Apelleanism, and rebirth in
eighteenth-century Masonry, we have already traced. Ecumenism is the heresy
that there is no such thing as heresy as the Apostles and Fathers of the Church
understand that term – that is, a false teaching on the Faith. Ecumenism is the
heresy that there is no single Faith, whether Orthodox, Papist or Protestant,
whether Christian or non-Christian, which expresses the fullness of the truth,
and that all existing faiths (except Ecumenism itself) are more or less in error. It
implies that the One, Undivided Church of Christ has foundered on the reef of
sectarian strife, and that She has to be re-founded on the sands of doctrinal
compromise and indifference to the truth. It is the tower of Babel rebuilt, a
babble of conflicting tongues united only in their insistence that they all speak
the same language…640

639 McGrath, The Dawkins Delusion?, London: SPCK, 2007, pp. 20, 21.
640 V. Moss, “The Truth is One”, in The Imperishable Word, Old Woking: Gresham Books, 1980.

347
If British power n the political sphere was waning in the inter-war period, it
was rising in the religious sphere, as Anglican (and American Episcopalian)
bishops were ubiquitous in spreading the false gospel of ecumenism. As we
have seen, the first ecumenist Church was the Anglican, which from the time of
Queen Elizabeth I was essentially a compromise between Catholicism and
Protestantism. Later developments in Anglicanism, such as the Oxford
movement of the 1840s, introduced the idea of “the Branch theory of the
Church”. According to the Oxford theologians E.B. Pusey and William Palmer,
the Church consisted of three branches – Orthodoxy, Catholicism and
Anglicanism - preferably in the “High Church” variety they espoused.
However, “Low Church” Anglicanism also made its contribution to
Ecumenism. Thus Archbishop Vitaly (Ustinov) of Canada saw the forerunners
of Ecumenism in the “Low Church” Anglicanism of the Victorian era and in the
semi-Christian ideologies of the YMCA, YWCA and the Boy Scouts with their
belief in the basic goodness of human nature, light-minded attitude to sin,
emphasis on charity as the handing out of earthly goods not in the name of
Christ, the cult of the flesh under the cover of concern for heath and hygiene,
carnal emotionalism, interconfessionalism and condescending attitude towards
dogmatic Christianity.
Especially important in the construction of this Tower of Babel, he says, “is

the complete spiritual disintegration of the Protestant heresy. But if we say,
together with Tertullian: ‘the human soul is naturally Christian’ – by which this
western teacher of the Church undoubtedly meant: ‘naturally Orthodox’ – then
we can affirm that every heresy by its very nature is contrary to the human soul
and must sooner or later be rejected and cast out by it. And so we are present at
the overthrow of the Protestant heresy, but insofar as the spiritual world, like
nature, abhors a vacuum, the place of this heresy is being occupied by
Ecumenism. For Ecumenism seeks to re-establish the dogma of the One Church
that Protestantism with its innumerable sects and ever-multiplying divisions
has destroyed.”641Archbishop Vitaly later defined ecumenism as “the heresy of
heresies” and was a member of the Synod of the Russian Church Abroad that
anathematized it in 1983.
A further major impulse to Ecumenism was provided by the Romantic

movement and its philosophical mirror, Hegelian idealist historicism, which
emphasized the inevitability of historical change in all things, even – God! For
God for the romantics was a dynamic, evolving being indistinguishable from
nature and the temporal process, always overcoming contradictions and rising
to ever higher unities. It followed that the notion of a perfectly revealed religion,
a final, unalterable truth, was anathema to them. “Christians must not be ‘vain
and foolish’, Friedrich Schleiermacher warned, for their religion is not the only

641 Archbishop Vitaly, report read to the Hierarchical Council of the Russian Church Abroad at
Machopac in 1967, reprinted in Moskva (Moscow), 1991, N 9, p. 146.
348
‘revealed religion’. All religions are revealed from God. Christianity is the center
around which all others gather. The disunity of religions is an evil and ‘only in
the totality of all such possible forms can there be given the true religion,’
Schleiermacher added.”642
A Romantic scheme of history and the evolution of religion was given by

Friedrich Schelling in his Berlin lectures of 1841-1842 (many of which were
attended by leading Russian intellectuals). “In the Twenty-Sixth Lecture,” writes
Fr. Michael Azkoul, “Schelling discoursed on the three ages of history – the age
of the Father, the age of the Son, and the age of the Holy Spirit which
correspond to the events of creation, redemption and consummation. Schelling
believed that Christianity was now passing through ‘the second age’ which
Christ ‘incarnated’ almost two millennia ago.
“In the vocabulary of the Romantics, Christ brought ‘the Idea of Christianity’
with Him. An ‘Idea’ is the invisible, unchangeable, and eternal aspect of each
thing. (Plato was probably the first to teach ‘Idealism’.) Phenomena are visible,
changeable, and temporary. Put another way, the Idea of Christianity (‘one
Church’) is what the historical institution will become when it finishes growing,
or, as Schelling would say, when God becomes fully God. One may compare its
Idea to wheat and historical Christianity (the Idea) to what Protestantism,
Roman Catholicism and Eastern Christianity will become. When the multiplicity
of churches grows into the ecumenical Church, then, the Idea of Christianity, of
‘one church’, will have been actualised in space and time. It will be actualised in
the coming of ‘the third age’, ‘the age of the Spirit’, ‘the age of
consummation’.”643
A third major impulse to ecumenism, especially in its more recent, “super-

ecumenist” (that is, inter-religious) manifestations, came from the Pentecostal
movement. At precisely 7 p.m. on New Year’s Eve of the year 1900 “the age of
the Spirit” and “the new Pentecost” is supposed to have dawned. For it is to that
moment that the modern Pentecostal movement dates its origin.
“For some time before that moment,” writes Hieromonk Seraphim Rose, “a
Methodist minister in Topeka, Kansas, Charles Parham, as an answer to the
confessed feebleness of his Christian ministry, had been concentratedly
studying the New Testament with a group of his students with the aim of
discovering the secret of the power of Apostolic Christianity. The students finally
deduced that this secret lay in the ‘speaking in tongues’ which, they thought,
always accompanied the reception of the Holy Spirit by preaching that there is
no one truth, and therefore no one Church which it can be the pillar of. It

642 Azkoul, Anti-Christianity: The New Atheism, Montreal: Monastery Press, 1984, p. 34.
643 Azkoul, op cit., pp. 77-78.
349
maintains that all Churches – and in its more extreme, contemporary forms, all
religions – contain partial or relative truths which, on being reduced to their
lowest common denominator, will form the dogmatic basis of a new Church or
universal religion of a new, enlightened mankind.”644
A fourth impulse to ecumenism was spiritual pacifism. It is no accident that

ecumenism began after the end of the German Wars of Religion in the
seventeenth century, that it received another strong impulse after the First
World War, and that its first institutional expression – in the World Council of
Churches – appeared after the Second World War. When people are tired of
war, whether physical or spiritual, they settle for the path of least resistance: the
renunciation of all struggle for the truth.
The false pathos of both communism and ecumenism, the two great politico-
religious movements of the inter-war years, was unity – unity among workers of
all nations in the one, and among believers of all denominations in the other.
Christians who succumbed to this pathos were ready to surrender the Church’s
truth, freedom and dignity to the dominant forces in the contemporary world,
with the ultimate end, whether conscious or unconscious, of the complete
secularization of the human race. The heresies of communist and ecumenist
“Christianity” attempted to justify or “dogmatize” this apostasy – in the former
case, by claiming that only such apostasy can save the Church (from destruction
by communism), and in the case of ecumenism by claiming that only such
apostasy can recreate the Church (out of sectarian disintegration).
Essentially, therefore, ecumenism and communism were (and are) two

aspects of a single politico-ecclesiological heresy, for which the present writer
has coined the term “ecucommunism”645, a single assault on the existence and
the dogma of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church…

644 Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Monastery,
1983, pp. 148-149.

645 V. Moss, "Ecucommunism", Living Orthodoxy, September-October, 1989, N 5, pp. 13-18.
350

III. THE RISE OF THE DICTATORS (1925-1933)

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34. LIBERALISM, COMMUNISM AND FASCISM
Some political philosophies are of the head; others – of the heart. Liberalism is of
the first kind. It appeals to the rational (but false) idea that if governments are
formed through elections on the basis of universal suffrage, then they will act for
the benefit of all: “government by the people for the people”. “People” here means
“a multitude of voters, each voting rationally for his own interests”: it does not
mean a single unity having a single will (Rousseau’s concept of “the general will” is
a communistic, not a liberal idea). And once enough individuals see that they as
individuals are not benefiting from democracy, then they will seek salvation in a
philosophy with a more powerful, more unitary and more emotive definition of the
word “people”, where “people” means something closer to “nation”, not a chance
aggregate of unrelated individuals, each wanting something different and forming
unities only on the basis of fleeting and constantly shifting parliamentary majorities,
but a mystical organism with a single will and soul and heart.
After the Great War, western leaders such as Lloyd George proclaimed that it
had been fought for the sake of democracy against tyranny. True: the Kaiser’s
Germany had been aggressive and tyrannical, and the victory of the Allies did spell,
as we have seen, the demise of monarchy in many countries and the rendering of
lip-service to democracy throughout Europe. However, Lloyd George himself had
closed down cabinet government in Britain in December, 1916. And both the British
and the French fought less for democracy in the Versailles negotiations than for a
return to the status quo ante the war. The only country that genuinely fought first
of all for democracy was probably America. For, as Philip Bobbitt writes, “America
went to war in 1917 to create a system of nation-states whose legitimacy would be
based on democracy and self-determination. Within this system all states were to
be legally equal, because Wilson and [his friend and adviser, Colonel] House
believed that such a system would prevent future wars against the democracies.
This system would reflect American conceptions of the relationship between nation
and state and for that reason it could call upon an American commitment to
intervene if necessary to protect the system. The establishment of the League of
Nations came to be America’s principal war aim because it gave an institutional
structure to these ideas. A world order based on a German victory would not be
one that was ultimately safe for the American democracy, but neither would an
Allied victory that merely reinstated in Europe the state system that had collapsed
in the first place. As Lord Devlin, a Wilson biographer, shrewdly observed: ‘Indeed
[Wilson] never lost his distrust of Allied motives… The Allies did not, he believed,
genuinely care about democracy and the right to self-government.’
“And of course Wilson was right: the Allies, like the Central Powers they
opposed, shared a European conception of sovereignty, that held the State’s
authority to have come by descent from its predecessors, and not to arise directly
from the people. Even democratic states like Britain and France held sovereignty to
be distinct from elections; sovereignty was an attribute of the State. European states
were not limited sovereigns. Because their peoples had wholly delegated their
sovereignty to the State the nation could scarcely demand the creation of a new
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state by withholding sovereignty from that power that ruled them. Yet this was the
reason American entered the Long War [from 1914 to 1990]: to allow the democratic
form to fulfil its role in creating the proper relation between a State and its
nation…”646
But America’s war aim was not achieved, at least in the short run. The Versailles
Peace appears to have disillusioned everyone who took part in it (Wilson and
House never met thereafter). It certainly did not bring peace to Europe, although it
did cause a lot of chaos, fear and resentment. And the League of Nations, as we
shall see, failed as an arbiter of international conflict. It was the failure of the
Versailles peace that especially exposed the myth of freedom and equality in our
time; for very many individuals and nations in Europe felt, not more, but less free
and equal in 1919 than they had in 1914 – and still more after the anarchy, poverty
and violence of the early 1920s, followed by the Great Depression of 1929…
Italy was the first country that lost confidence in democracy. Mussolini’s march
on Rome in March, 1922 proved the government’s impotence. And in August he
declared: “Democracy has done its work. The century of democracy is over.
Democratic ideologies have been liquidated.”647
The next failed democracy was Germany’s Weimar Republic, which was
plagued by violence and, as the Reichmark plummeted in value, by widespread
poverty and despair. Even pious Germans, such as the Lutheran Paul Althaus,
began to doubt in its legitimacy: “Did Lutherans owe the Weimar Republic the
loyalty prescribed in Romans 13? Only in a heavily qualified way, since the
‘temporary structure’ of Weimar was ‘the expression and means of German
depradation and apathy’.” 648 Why? Because the Weimar republic was seen as
having been imposed on Germany by the Allied victor-nations, and therefore as
betraying the real interests of the German people in such questions as reparation
payments and the French occupation of the Ruhr. This gave extremist movements
on both the right and the left powerful ammunition, and several attempted coups,
including one by Hitler, were put down with difficulty. And so Germany became a
battlefield between three fairly equally matched ideologies: democracy, fascism and
communism.
From 1924 democracy appeared to recover, and, as we have seen, foreign

companies invested in Germany, leading to an economic recovery. But then in 1929
came the Great Depression, which hit Germany harder than any other country
precisely because it had become more dependent on foreign investment, which
now left the country. Democracy faltered again; the fascists and communists
recovered their confidence, while the liberals lost theirs.

646 Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles, London: Penguin, 2002, pp. 394-395.
647 Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes, London: Harper Perennial, 2007, p. 58.
648 Burleigh, op. cit., p. 19.
353
The significance of the 1930s lies above all in its exposure of the cracks in the
clay feet of liberalism and democracy. Some of these cracks were plastered over in
the revival of democracy that took place after the Second World War. But in essence
the cracks remain; liberal democracy is a deeply flawed ideology.
“At bottom,” writes Eric Hobsbawm, “liberal politics was vulnerable because its
characteristic form of government, representative democracy, was rarely a
convincing way of running states, and the conditions of the Age of Catastrophe
rarely guaranteed the conditions that made it viable, let alone effective.
“The first of these conditions was that is should enjoy general consent and
legitimacy. Democracy itself rests on this consent, but does not create it, except that
in well-established and stable democracies the very process of regular voting has
tended to give citizens – even those in the minority – a sense that the electoral
process legitimizes the governments it produces. But few of the inter-war
democracies were well-established. Indeed, until the early twentieth century
democracy had been rare outside the USA and France. Indeed, at least ten of
Europe’s states were either entirely new or so changed from their predecessors as
to have no special legitimacy for their inhabitants. Even fewer democracies were
stable. The politics of states in the Age of Catastrophe were, more often than not,
the politics of crisis.
“The second condition was a degree of compatibility between the various

components of ‘the people’, whose sovereign vote was to determine the common
government. The official theory of liberal bourgeois society did not recognize ‘the
people’ as a set of groups, communities and other collectivities with interests as
such, although anthropologists, sociologist and all practising politicians did.
Officially the people, a theoretical concept rather than a real body of human beings,
consisted of an assembly of self-contained individuals whose votes added up to
arithmetical majorities and minorities, which translated into elected assemblies to
majority governments and minority oppositions. Where democratic voting crossed
the lines between the divisions of the national population, or where it was possible
to conciliate or defuse conflicts between them, democracy was visible. However, in
an age of revolution and radical social tensions, class struggle translated into
politics rather than class peace was the rule. Ideological and class intransigence
could wreck democratic government. Moreover, the botched peace settlements
after 1918 multiplied what we, at the end of the twentieth century, know to be the
fatal virus of democracy, namely the division of the body of citizens exclusively
along ethnic-national or religious lines, as in ex-Yugoslavia and Northern Ireland.
Three ethnic-national communities voting as blocks, as in Bosnia; two irreconcilable
communities, as in Ulster; sixty-two political parties each representing a tribe or
clan, as in Somalia; cannot, as we know, provide the foundation for a democratic
political system, but – unless one of the contending groups or some outside
authority is strong enough to establish (non-democratic) dominance – only for
instability and civil war. The fall of the three multinational empires of Austria-
Hungary, Russia and Turkey replaced three supra-national states whose
governments were neutral as between the numerous nationalities over which they
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ruled, with a great many more multinational states, each identified with one, or at
most with two or three, of the ethnic communities within their borders.
“The third condition was that democratic governments did not have to do much
governing. Parliaments had come into existence not so much to govern as to control
the power of those who did, a function which is still obvious in the relations
between the US Congress and the US presidency… Bodies of independent,
permanently appointed public officials had become an essential deice for the
government of modern states. A parliamentary majority was essential only where
major and controversial executive decisions had to be taken, or approved, and
organizing or maintaining an adequate body of supporters was the major task of
government leaders, since (except in the Americas) the executive in parliamentary
regimes was usually not directly elected…
“The twentieth century multiplied the occasions when it became essential for
governments to govern. The kind of state which confined itself to providing the
ground rules for business and civil society, and the police, prisons and armed
forces to keep internal and external danger at bay, the ‘nightwatchman state’ of
political wits, became as obsolete as the ‘nightwatchmen’ who inspired the
metaphor.
“The fourth condition was wealth and prosperity. The democracies of the 1920s
broke under the tension of revolution and counter-revolution (Hungary, Italy,
Portugal) or of national conflict (Poland, Yugoslavia); those of the thirties, under
the tensions of the Slump. One has only to compare the political atmosphere of
Weimar Germany and 1920s Austria with that of Federal Germany and post-1945
Austria to be convinced. Even national conflicts were less unmanageable, so long as
each minority’s politicians could feed at the state’s common trough. That was the
strength of the Agrarian Party in east-central Europe’s only genuine democracy,
Czechoslovakia: it offered benefits across national lines. In the 1930s, even
Czechoslovakia could not longer hold together the Czechs, Slovaks, Germans,
Hungarians and Ukrainians.
“Under these circumstances democracy was, more likely than not, a mechanism
for formalizing divisions between irreconcilable groups. Very often even in the best
circumstances, it produced no stable basis for democratic government at all,
especially when the theory of democratic representation was applied in the most
rigorous versions of proportional representation. Where, in times of crisis, no
parliamentary majority was available, as in Germany (as distinct from Britain), the
temptation to look elsewhere was overwhelming. Even in stable democracies the
political divisions the system implies are seen by many citizens as costs rather than
benefits of the system. The very rhetoric of politics advertises candidates and party
as the representative of the national rather than the narrow party interest. In times
of crisis the costs of the system seemed unsustainable, its benefits uncertain.
“Under these circumstances it is easy to understand that parliamentary

democracy in the successor states to the old empires, as well as in most of the
Mediterranean and in Latin America, was a feeble plant growing in stony soil. The
355
strongest argument in its favour, that, bad as it is, it is better than any alternative
system, is itself half-hearted. Between the wars it only rarely sounded realistic and
convincing…”649
However, Fascism and Nazism were not simply reactions against Liberalism. Or
rather, anti-liberalism was a reason of the head, rather than of the heart. A deeper
reason was to be found by looking, not west, to the failure of President Wilson’s
democratic dream, but east – to the fulfilment of Lenin’s communistic nightmare.
Even before securing victory inside Russia, the Bolsheviks had founded the
Comintern, whose openly declared aim was to overthrow all the capitalist
governments of the world. Such a programme rightly repelled the majority of
Europeans, even those, like the British striking miners in 1926, who had only their
chains to lose.650 But for a significant minority in Germany the violence in the East
was a stimulant and a magnet, not a spectre. As D.H. Lawrence noted, “the great
leaning of the Germanic spirit is once more eastwards, towards Russia, towards
Tatary”.651
The secret treaty signed by Germany and the Soviet Union at Rapallo in April,
1922 was a sign of this drive to the East of the German spirit…
Fascism and Nazism, especially the latter, were also reactions

against communism, an instinctive defence of the sovereignty of the
nation-state against the internationalist destroyer of sovereignty. For,
as the Holy Martyr and Academician Ivan Popov (+1936) said in 1934:
“In vain do you believe in world revolution. Throughout the cultured
world you are sowing, not revolution, but Fascism – and with great
success. There was no Fascism before your revolution… All the other

649 Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London:
Pimlico, 1994, pp. 138-140.

650 This strike revealed the cruel face of Capitalism as nothing else. As A.N. Wilson writes, “The
union leaders did not want Britain to become communist. But for eight years since the end of the
war, the working classes had waited for some of the promises of politicians to be fulfilled. Where
was the Land Fit for Heroes to Live In which Lloyd George had promised? How did they live, in
their back-to-back houses, and their tenements? How did they wash How did they go to the
lavatory? What happened to them when they were ill? It [the stike] was a yelp of pain and anger,
not an organized political programme. The Conservatives could capitalize on all the fears which the
strike had aroused, by bringing in the Trade Unions Act of 1927. It greatly expanded the class of
‘illegal strikes’. It banned all strikes ‘designed or calculated to coerce the Government either directly
or by inflicting hardship on the community’. Workers who refused to accept changes in their
working conditions were now deemed in the eyes of the law to be on strike. Peaceful picketing was
banned. Civil servants were forbidden from joining a trade union. The comparative benignity of the
Employers and Workmen Act of 1875 was swept away. Trade unions were limited to the extent to
which they could fund political parties, so that the government was able, while limiting the power
of the union, to ruin, financially, the Labour party, since trade unions were the principal sources of
Labour party funding. Labour party membership fell from 3,388,000 in 1926 to a little over 1 million
in 1927” (After the Victorians, London: Hutchinson, 2005, pp. 258-259). Labour would get its revenge
in 1945…
651 Lawrence, “Letter from Germany”, in Burleigh, op. cit., p. 28.
356
countries by no means want to see among themselves what was and is
with us. And of course, they are learning to apply in time, as a
warning, what you used and are using – terror and violence… Yes,
under your indirect influence Fascism is gradually seizing the whole
of the cultured world with the exception of the powerful Anglo-Saxon
sector..."
It is the kinship in spirit between the two movements that is more striking,
especially in their exaltation of violence. Many joined the Communist Party as a
place where they could express their violent feelings. But others joined the no less
violent fledgling movements of Fascism and Nazism. In Germany and Italy, it was
especially the wandering bands of war veterans who filled their ranks. They felt
that the war had come to an end too early, that the nation had to be purged and
purified by yet more violence and hatred.
Thus, as Michael Burleigh writes: “In both Italy and Germany elite fighting units
(the Italian arditi) who had brought fanatical courage and tenacity to the wartime
battlefields, provided the prototypical ‘new man’ who, despite his self-professed
dehumanisation, was supposed to be the nation’s future redeemer. The brutality
that total war had engendered, and which in Armenia, Belgium, the Balkans,
northern France and East Prussia has spilled over into violence towards civilians,
became a permanent condition, in the sense that political opponents were regarded
as deadly enemies. In Italy people who revelled in violence for political purposes
acquired a political label earlier than elsewhere: that of Fascists, the very symbol –
of axes tightly bound in lictorial rods – conveying the closed community of the
exultantly thuggish better than the mystic iron octopus of the Nazi swastika.”652
First in Italy, and later in Germany, the Fascist idea gradually triumphed over
the Communist one. This was largely because its mystical concept of the nation
corresponded more closely to the psychology and history of the Italian and German
peoples. Of course, this concept was at least as old as the French revolution and had
been influential everywhere; but it had been particularly important in Germany
and Italy, whose hitherto disunited countries had been united at about the same
time in the late nineteenth century. The two countries were also united by the
feeling that they had been cheated in the aftermath of the war. The Germans felt
they had been “stabbed in the back” by the Jews, and betrayed by Wilson’s failure
to implement his Fourteen Points, while Italy, though a victor-nation, felt frustrated
by Wilson’s resistance to their demands for Slavic lands on the other side of the
Adriatic (not to speak of Albanian lands in Albania and Turkish lands in Turkey).
The German veterans felt they had not been defeated in the war, while the Italian
veterans felt that their losses of half a million men merited them a greater reward.
And so pre-war Italian nationalism, reared on the exploits of Mazzini and Garibaldi,
and on the music of Verdi, now re-emerged in a more violent, hard-edged form in
Fascism.

357
The differences between the three ideologies can be seen in two different ways.
Some have seen the more important cleavage as running between, on the one hand,
the rationalist Enlightenment ideologies of Liberalism and Communism, which go
back to the French constitutional monarchy of 1789-1792 and the Jacobin
dictatorship of 1792-94 respectively, and on the other hand, the anti-Enlightenment
anti-universalist ideology of nationalism, which could be said to go back to the
third, Napoleonic phase of the French revolution, but whose real origins are in the
German reaction against it. For others, however, the more fundamental cleavage
was between the totalitarian ideologies of Communism and Nazism, on the one
hand, and the anti-totalitarian ideology of Liberalism, on the other.
Both Liberalism and Communism trace their roots to the optimistic

Enlightenment faith that a materialistic utopia can be achieved on earth by
education, rationalism, science and the elimination of religious superstition. Both
emphasize the role of the State as the spearhead of progress; and if Liberalism also
tries to protect the “human rights” of the individual, it is nevertheless the State,
rather than the Church or any other organization that determines what those rights
are and how they are to be implemented. So if Liberalism gives greater protection
to the individual than does Communism, this is a difference in emphasis rather
than of principle, as the increasing convergence between the two systems after
World War II demonstrates.653
If there is a difference in principle between the two it consists in Liberalism’s

insistence that the dominance of the State should be limited by democratic elections,
preceded by genuinely free debate, that permit the removal of governments that
are perceived to have failed, whereas Communism posits the eternal rule of the
Communist Party and of the State ruled by it, and punishes any criticism of it.654
And yet even here the difference is not as radical as might at first appear. For, on
the one hand, Communism pays lip-service to the principle of democratic elections
(during which the existing leaders are usually, by a miracle, elected again with 99.9%
of the vote). And on the other hand, the choice offered to voters in a liberal
democracy becomes increasingly limited as real power is vested in two increasingly
similar political party machines.

653 George Orwell prophesied this convergence at the end of his post-war novel
Animal Farm, when the pigs (the communists) and the men (the capitalists) looked
indistinguishable to the impoverished animals (ordinary human beings).
654 Strictly speaking, Communism preaches the withering away of the State. But the
State had to expand to its maximum first. Thus Stalin declared at the Sixteenth
Party Congress in 1930: “We are for the withering away of the state. But at the
same time we stand for the strengthening of the proletarian dictatorship, which
constitutes the most powerful, the mightiest of all governing powers that have
ever existed. The highest development of governmental power for the purpose of
preparing the conditions for the withering away of governmental power, this is the
Marxist formula. Is this ‘contradictory’? Yes, it is ‘contradictory’. But this
contradiction is life, and it reflects completely the Marxist dialectic” (Alan Bullock,
Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, London, 1991, p. 467).
358
There is also a difference between the fallen passions these systems most pander
to. Liberalism panders especially to greed and lust. It moderates, without destroying,
these passions by recognizing that one individual’s greed and lust should be
satisfied only to the extent that it does not interfere with the satisfaction of
another’s greed and lust. These passions are given a more or less decent covering
by such slogans as “human rights” and “freedom, equality and fraternity”: we
supposedly have the “right” to indulge them; we must be free to indulge them, and
to an equal extent as everybody else. Not that there is not some genuine idealism
and altruism among many liberals: but the egoistic roots of “humanrightism” are
becoming increasingly obvious as their demands become more and more absurd…
Since Communism shares a common ancestry with Liberalism in the French

Revolution, it, too, uses the slogans of “human rights” and “freedom, equality and
fraternity”. But as heirs of the later Jacobin rather than the early liberal phase of the
revolution, Communism is based on the sharper passions of hatred – hatred of the
old society of kings and priests, businessmen, bankers and peasants – and love of
power. This hatred and love of power was demonstrated most clearly in the
Communist leaders, such as Lenin and Stalin, who, whatever their propaganda
might say, cared not at all for justice, freedom and equality for the masses: they
hated their fellow men and sought to dominate and exterminate them. By contrast,
many rank-and-file Communists, and especially those in Western countries, were
motivated by liberal ideals when they joined the Party; their Communism was
simply an extension of their Liberalism. But the conflict between the professed aims
of the Party and the satanic means employed to achieve them, soon corrupted and
destroyed all those who did not quickly repent.
Richard Pipes has argued that Communism and Fascism are two varieties of
“totalitarianism”. The fact that neither system achieved absolutely total control of
society does not lessen the usefulness of the term, which accurately points to the
main thrust of each. “’Totalitarian’,” writes Richard Overy, “does not mean that
they were ‘total’ parties, either all inclusive or wielding complete power; it means
that they were parties concerned with the ‘totality’ of the societies in which they
worked. In this narrower sense both movements did have totalitarian aspiration”
655 For both sought to control, not only the strictly political sphere, but also the
economic, cultural and religious spheres.
The term was first invented in 1923 “by an opponent of Mussolini, Giovanni
Amendola (later murdered by the Fascists), who, having observed Mussolini’s
systematic subversion of state institutions, concluded that his regime suffered
fundamentally from conventional dictatorships. In 1925, Mussolini adopted the
term and assigned it a positive meaning. He defined Fascism as ‘totalitarian’ in the
sense that it politicized everything ‘human’ as well as ‘spiritual’: ‘Everything
within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state’.”656

Overy, The Dictators, London: Penguin, 2005, p. 173.
655
Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, London: Fontana, 1995, p.
656
241.
359
In 1928, the Italian Education Minister Giovanni Gentile defined Fascism
primarily in terms of “the comprehensive, or as Fascists say, the ‘totalitarian’ scope
of its doctrine, which concerns itself not only with political organization and
political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and feeling of the nation.”
This remains the first defining characteristic, not only of Fascism, but of all other
totalitarian regimes, such as the Nazi and the Soviet. Unlike liberal regimes, which
make a distinction between public and private space, and accord the individual,
theoretically at any rate, a more or less wide area in which he can rule his life
independently of the State, totalitarian regimes try to encompass everything. “L’état,
c’est tout…
But if the Fascists first used the term, the reality was imbibed from Communist
Russia. As Pipes writes: “All the attributes of [Fascist] totalitarianism had
antecedents in Lenin’s Russia: an official, all-embracing ideology; a single party of
the elect headed by a ‘leader’ and dominating the state; police terror; the ruling
party’s control of the means of communication and the armed forces; central
command of the economy. Since these institutions and procedures were in place in
the Soviet Union in the 1920s when Mussolini founded his regime and Hitler his
party, and were to be found nowhere else, the burden of proving there was no
connection between ‘Fascism’ and Communism rests of those who hold this
opinion.
“No prominent European socialist before World War I resembled Lenin more
closely than Benito Mussolini. Like Lenin, he headed the antirevisionist wing of the
country’s Socialist Party; like him, he believed that the worker was not by nature a
revolutionary and had to be prodded to radical action byan intellectual elite.
However, working in an environment more favourable to his ideas, he did not need
to form a splinter party: whereas Lenin, leading a minority wing, had to break
away, Mussolini gained a majority in the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and ejected the
reformists. Had it not been for his reversal, in 1914, of his stand on the war, coming
out in favour of Italy’s entry on the Allied side, which resulted in his expulsion
from the PSI, he might well have turned into an Italian Lenin. Socialist historians,
embarrassed by these facts of Mussolini’s early biography, have either suppressed
them or described them as a passing flirtation with socialism by a man whose true
intellectual mentor was not Marx, but Nietzsche and Sorel. Such claims, however,
are difficult to reconcile with the fact that Italian socialists thought well enough of
the future leader of Fascism to name him in 1912 editor in chief of the Party’s organ,
Avanti! Far from having a fleeting romance with socialism, Mussolini was
fanatically committed to it: until November 1913, and in some respects until early
1920, his ideas on the nature of the working class, the structure and function of the
party, and the strategy of the socialist revolution, were remarkably like Lenin’s…
“Like Lenin, he saw in conflict the distinguishing quality of politics. The ‘class
struggle’ meant to him warfare in the literal sense of the word: it was bound to
assume violent forms because no ruling class ever peacefully surrendered its
wealth and power. He admired Marx, whom he called a ‘father and teacher’, not
for his economics and sociology, but for being the ‘grand philosopher of worker
violence’. He despised ‘lawyer socialists’ who pretended to advance the cause by
360
parliamentary manoeuvers. Nor did he have faith in trade unionism, which he
believed diverted labor from the class struggle. In 1912, in a passage that could
have come from the pen of Lenin, he wrote: ‘A worker who is merely organized
turns into a petty bourgeois who obeys only the voice of interest. Every appeal to
ideals leaves him deaf.’ He remained faithful to this view even after abandoning
socialism: in 1921, as Fascist leader, he would describe workers as ‘by nature…
piously and fundamentally pacifistic’. Thus, independently of Lenin, in both his
socialist and his Fascist incarnation he repudiated what Russian radicals called
‘spontaneity’: left to his own devices, the worker would not make a revolution but
strike a deal with the capitalist, which was the quintessence of Lenin’s social theory.
“These premises confronted Mussolini with the same problem that faced Lenin:
how to make a revolution with a class said to be inherently unrevolutionary. He
solved it, as did Lenin, by calling for the creation of an elite party to inject into labor
the spirit of revolutionary violence. Whereas Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party
came from the experience of the People’s Will, Mussolini’s was shaped by the
writings of Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, who in the 1890s and early 1900s
popularized the view of politics as contests for power among elite groups…”657
The only significant difference between Soviet Communism and Italian Fascism
was that Mussolini came to the conclusion that, for his revolutionary purposes,
“nationalism was more potent fare than socialism. In December 1914, he wrote:
‘The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that it was annihilated. Instead,
we see it rise, living, palpitating before us! And understandably so. The new reality
does not suppress the truth: class cannot destroy the nation. Class is a collectivity of
interests, but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture,
ancestry. You can insert the class into the nation. But they do not destroy each
other.’ From this it followed that the Socialist Party must lead not only the
proletariat, but the entire nation: it must create ‘un socialismo nationale’…”658
If we turn from the relationship between Communism and Fascism to that

between Communism and Nazism, we again find no fundamental contradictions.
There were many similarities between Russia and Germany after the First World
War. Both countries had suffered defeat; both were treated as pariahs by the
western powers; both bitterly resented this treatment, and therefore gravitated
towards each other. Secret military and trade links were established between them
at the secret Treaty of Rapallo in 1922. More significantly, there was also a trade in
ideology.
A Bolshevik who believed in the similarity between the two systems – and
thought that they would have to war against each other one day - was Nikolai
Bukharin. As Piers Brendon writes, “he was struck by the similarities between
Stalinism and Nazism. Both systems dehumanised their own people by
suppressing intellectual liberty through force and fraud. In the last article he wrote
for Izvestia, on 6 July 1936, Bukharin made the identification as explicit as he dared.

657 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 245-247.
658 Pipes, op. cit., pp. 249-250.
361
At a time when every utterance was combed for hidden meanings, it was
tantamount to a manifesto: ‘A complicated network of decorative deceit in words
and action is a highly essential characteristic of Fascist regimes of all stamps and
hues.’”659
Niall Ferguson asks: “Were not Stalin and his German counterpart in reality just
two grim faces of totalitarianism? Was there any real difference between Stalin’s
‘socialism in one country’ and Hitler’s National Socialism, except that one was put
into practice a few years before the other? We can now see just how many of the
things that were done in German concentration camps during the Second World
War were anticipated in the Gulag: the transportation in cattle trucks, the selection
into different categories of prisoner, the shaving of heads, the dehumanizing living
conditions, the humiliating clothing, the interminable roll-calling, the brutal and
arbitrary punishments, the differentiation between the determined and the doomed.
Yes, the regimes were very far from identical… But it is at least suggestive that
when the teenage zek Yuri Chirkov arrived at Solovetsky, the slogan that greeted
him was ‘Through Labour – Freedom!’ – a lie identical to the wrought-iron legend
Arbeit Macht Frei that would later welcome prisoners to Auschwitz…”660
There were indeed many close similarities between Nazism and

Socialism apart from their common hatred of the capitalist system.
Courtney Kirchoff highlights Hitler’s socialist policies on employment
for all, education and nationalized healthcare. Thus: “After that
depression, Hitler made a huge promise to his people: employment for
all. How did he do it?
“As Fuhrer, Hitler’s first priority was jobs, or the lack of them.
German unemployment had peaked at 6 million due to the Depression
devastating the economy. With innovative public works schemes such
as the building of autobahns, Hitler put every German back to work.
He also advocated schemes such as KdF – Strength Through Joy –
which gave workers increased benefits for increased levels of
production. This policy was popular and increasingly with the
proletariat who had seen their country decimated by the depression…
“By putting people back to work and making huge public spending,
inflation was bound to happen. However, Hitler kept this under
control by not allowing wages to rise with prices. This may have been
one unpopular aspect of Hitler’s economic policy but there were many
that the people supported.”
Again, “When the mothers had to go out into the work force, the
government immediately established child care centers. You could
take your children ages 4 weeks to school age and leave them there
around-the-clock, 7 days a week, under the total care of the

659 Brendon, The Dark Valley. A Panorama of the 1930s, London: Pimlico, 2001, p. 568.
660 Ferguson, The War of the World, London: Penguin, 2007, pp. 219-220.
362
government. The state raised a whole generation of children. There
were no motherly women to take care of the children, just people
highly trained in child psychology. By this time, no one talked about
equal rights. We knew we had been had…”
Again, under Hitler, “health care was socialized, free for everyone.
Doctors were salaried by the government. The problem was, since it
was free, the people were going to the doctors for everything. When
the good doctor arrived at his office at 8 a.m., 40 people were already
waiting and, at the same time, the hospitals were full. If you needed
elective surgery, you had to wait a year or two for your turn. There
was no money for research as it was poured into socialized medicine.
Research at the medical schools literally stopped, so the best doctors
left Austria and emigrated to other countries.
“As for healthcare, our tax rates went up to 80% of our income.
Newlyweds immediately received a $1,000 loan from the government
to establish a household. We had big programs for families. All day
care and education were free. High schools were taken over by the
government and college tuition was subsidized. Everyone was entitled
to free handouts, such as food stamps, clothing, and housing…”661
Again, the war correspondent and disillusioned communist Vasily Grossman, in

a novel entitled Life and Fate, which was completed in 1960 but published only
decades later, emphasizes the similarities between Soviet Communism and German
Nazism. In one revealing scene an SS officer is talking to his prisoner, an old
Bolshevik. “When we look at one another in the face, we’re neither of us just
looking at a face we hate – no, we are gazing into a mirror. That’s the tragedy of our
age. Do you really not recognise yourself in us; yourselves and the strength of your
will?... You may think you hate us, but what you really hate is yourselves in us…
Our victory will be your victory… And if you should conquer, then we shall perish
only to live in your victory.”662
But there was, of course, one important difference between the two. Nazism was
nationalist and anti-semitic: communism was neither. And yet even here there are
links that draw the two evil monsters together. Thus the leadership of the
communist movement, in Russia as elsewhere, was, as we have seen, mainly Jewish.
This fact was the primary cause of the rise in anti-semitism in the Russian Civil War,
which in turn increased the popularity of anti-semitic forgeries like The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion. But it was not only anti-Soviet Russians who were reading the
Protocols: those Germans who believed that Germany had been “stabbed in the back”
by the Jews eagerly read the same material. Thus in 1920 F.M. Vinberg, a White
Russian officer of German ancestry, published, together with a German anti-Semite,
the first translation of the Protocols, which made a profound influence on the Nazis,

661 Kirchoff, “Myth Busted: Actually, Yes, Hitler Was a Socialist Liberal”, January
28, 2016.
662 Grossmann, in Arkady Ostrovsky, “Flirting with Stalin”, Prospect, September,
2008, p. 33.
363
and especially on Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic German with a Russian passport, who
introduced the forgery to Hitler.
Pipes writes: “The Protocols made on the future Führer an overwhelming

impression. ‘I have read The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – it simply appalled me,’
he told Hermann Rauschning, an early associate, ‘the stealthiness of the enemy, and
his ubiquity! I saw at once that we must copy it – in our own way, of course.’
According to Rauschning, the Protocols served Hitler as a major source of political
inspiration. Hitler thus used a spurious manual of Jewish strategy for world
domination, not only to depict the Jews as the mortal enemy of Germany, but to
carry out his own quest for world domination employing its methods. He so
admired the alleged cunning of Jews in their drive to master the world that he
decided to adopt fully their ‘ideology’ and ‘program’.
“It was only after he had read the Protocols that Hitler turned anti-Communist:
‘Rosenberg left a permanent mark on Nazi ideology. The party was rabidly anti-
Semitic from the moment of its foundation in 1919, but it became obsessed with
Russian communism only in 1921-22; and this seems to have been largely
Rosenberg’s doing. He provided the link between Russian anti-Semitism of the
Black Hundred type and the anti-Semitism of the German racists; more precisely,
he took over Vinberg’s view of Bolshevism as a Jewish conspiracy and
reinterpreted it in völkisch-racist terms. The resulting fantasy, as expounded in
innumerable articles and pamphlets, became an obsessive theme in Hitler’s
thinking and in the outlook and propaganda of the Nazi party.’ It has been said
that Hitler had only two major political objectives: the destruction of Jewry and the
expansion into the East European Lebensraum (‘Living Space’), all other elements
of his program, capitalist as well as socialist, being only means to this end. The
right-wing Russian theory linking Jews with Communism allowed him to connect
these two objectives.
“Thus the ravings of extremist Russian monarchists, who sought and found a
scapegoat for the catastrophe that had befallen their country in the ‘hidden hand’ of
world Jewry, injected themselves into the political ideology of a party destined
before long to acquire total power in Germany. The rationale for the Nazi
extermination of Jews came from Russian right-wing circles: it was Vinberg and his
friends who first called publicly for the physical extermination of Jews. The Jewish
Holocaust thus turned out to be one of the many unanticipated and unintended
consequences of the Russian Revolution.”663
However, the Nazis borrowed even more from Russia. Even while trying to
destroying communism in Germany, Hitler acknowledged in private that “there is
more that binds us to Bolshevism that separates us from it”.664 In a speech delivered
on February 24, 1941 he stated bluntly that “basically National Socialism and

663 Pipes, op. cit., p. 258. See Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White
Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945, Cambridge University

Press, 2005; and the review of the book by Michael Hoffman, “The Russian Roots
of Nazism”, Revisionist History, N 39, January, 2006, pp. 1-5.
364
Marxism are the same”.665 And “in a conversation with Rauschning,” writes Pipes,
“he conceded his debt to socialism: ‘I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I
do not hesitate to admit. I don’t mean their tiresome social doctrine or the
materialist conception of history, or their absurd ‘marginal utility’ theories, and so
on. But I have learned from their methods. The difference between them and myself
is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have
timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it. Look at the workers’
sports clubs, the industrial cells, the mass demonstrations, the propaganda leaflets
written specially for the comprehension of the masses; all these new methods of
political struggle are essentially Marxist in origin. All I had to do was take over
these methods and adapt them to our purpose. I only had to develop logically what
Social Democracy repeatedly failed in because of its attempt to realize its evolution
within the framework of democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism might
have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic
order.”666
This last remark might seem strange at first in view of the fact that it was the
Bolsheviks who destroyed the democratic order of Russia, whereas Hitler came to
power through elections in a multi-party democratic system. But the paradox is
explained if we remember that the cult of the leader was developed much earlier in
Nazism, and occupied a much more critical place in its history. Both parties
despised and destroyed democracy; but Stalin had to preserve the fiction of
democracy for longer – as in the 1936 Constitution, which claimed to be supremely
democratic when democracy no longer existed in Russia. That is the main reason
why he felt the need to purge his party so thoroughly whereas Hitler did not. It is
also the main reason why western intellectuals have always been more generous to
Stalin than to Hitler. For it is thought, quite wrongly, that since Stalin was at least
striving to create a democracy (after all, that was the purpose of the Russian
revolution, wasn’t it?), he was better than Hitler, who, on the contrary, always
proclaimed his contempt for it.
Hitler, like Mussolini, began his political life on the left. As Stephen Kotkin
writes, “Film footage from 1918 shows Hitler marching in the funeral procession of
provincial Bavaria’s murdered leader, a Jewish Social Democrat; he is wearing two
armbands, one black (for mourning) and the other red. In April, 1919, after Social
Democrats and anarchists formed the Bavarian Soviet Republic, the Communists
quickly seized power. Hitler, who contemplated joining the Social Democrats,
served as a delegate from his battalion’s soviet (council). He had no profession to
speak of but appears to have taken part in leftist indoctrination of the troops. Ten
days before Hitler’s 30th birthday the Bavarian Soviet Republic was quickly crushed
by the so-called Freikorps…”667
The party Hitler eventually joined was distinctly proletarian; it was originally
called the German Labour Party, which “combined socialism, anticapitalism, and

665 Pipes, op. cit., p. 259, note.
666 Pipes, op. cit., p. 259.
667 Kotkin, “When Stalin Faced Hitler”, Foreign Affairs, November / December, 2017, p. 53.
365
anticlericalism with German nationalism. In 1918, it renamed itself the German
National Socialist Labour Party (DNSAP), adding anti-Semitism to its platform and
luring to its ranks demobilized war veterans, shopkeepers, and professional
personnel. (The word ‘Labour’ in its name was meant to include ‘all who work’, not
only industrial workers.) It was this organization that Hitler took over in 1919.
According to Bracher, the ideology of the party in its early years ‘contained a
thoroughly revolutionary kernel within an irrational, violence-oriented political
ideology. It was in no sense a mere expression of reactionary tendencies: it derived
from the world of workers and trade unionists.’ The Nazis appealed to the socialist
tradition of German labor, declaring the worker ‘a pillar of the community’, and the
‘bourgeois’ – along with the traditional aristocracy – a doomed class. Hitler, who
told associates that he was a ‘socialist’, had the party adopt the red flag and, on
coming to power, declared May 1 a national holiday; Nazi Party members were
ordered to address one another as ‘comrades’ (Genossen). His conception of the
party was, like Lenin’s, that of a militant organization, a Kampfbund or ‘Combat
League’… His ultimate aim was a society in which traditional classes would be
abolished, and status earned by personal heroism. In typically radical fashion, he
envisaged man re-creating himself: ‘Man is becoming god,’ he told Rauschning.
‘Man is god in the making.’”668
And just as man collectively was god in general, so the Führer or

Vozhd was a god in particular. According to the philosopher Ivan
Ilyin, “the greatest fascist error was the restoration of idolatrous
Caesarism. ‘Caesarism’ [i.e. Despotism] is the direct opposite of
monarchism. Caesarism is godless, irresponsible, and despotic; it
holds in contempt freedom, law, legitimacy, justice and the individual
rights of men. It is demagogic, terroristic and haughty; it lusts for
flattery, ‘glory’ and worship, and it sees in the people a mob and
stokes its passions. Caesarism is amoral, militaristic and callous. It
compromises the principle of authority and autocracy, for its rule does
not prosecute state or national interests, but personal ends.” 669
The worship of an infallible man-god served a similar

psychological need in Germany and Russia. According to Ida
Vermehren, “the most seductive factor [in Nazism] was Hitler’s
messianic image. For Germany found itself in an ideological and
ethical vacuum. We had lost our Emperor, our national identity had
been damaged. The majority of the population had no religious faith. I
think that for many, National Socialism was a substitute religion
which aroused a deep enthusiasm and provided a new source of
strength. People wanted to get stuck in and work for a better life.”
Much the same could be said of Russia, especially after the most educated and
religious people had been exterminated. The remainder found in the worship of

668Pipes, op. cit., p. 260.
669 Ilyin, “On Fascism”, http://souloftheeast.org/2013/12/27/ivan-ilyin-on-
fascism.
366
Stalin a substitute for their former faith in Orthodoxy and Tsarism which they had
lost. The religious nature of the two totalitarian ideologies was described in 1937 by
Winston Churchill, who said: “It is a strange thing that certain parts of the world
should now be wishing to revive the old religious wars. There are those non-God
religions Nazism and Communism… I repudiate both and will have nothing to do
with either… They are as alike as two peas. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were
violently contrasted compared with them. You leave out God and you substitute
the devil.”670

670 Churchill, in Burleigh, op. cit., p. 209.
367
35. TOTALITARIANISM AND RELIGION
This brings us to the question: what was the relationship of the three political
philosophies to traditional religion?
Communism and Fascism were hostile to the dominant, if dying, religion of

contemporary Europe - Christianity. But they came to power in countries imbued
with the old religion in the course of many centuries. Therefore, in order to spread
their own message more quickly and effectively, they tried to clothe the wolf of the
new religion in the sheep’s clothing of the old. Thus Michael Burleigh argues that
“the totalitarian movements [had] a more or less conscious mimetic relationship to
the Churches, not least the Bolsheviks in Russia…”671
Exploiting the religious sentiments of their subject populations, the Nazis, the
Fascists and the Communists united their essentially secular doctrines with
traditional religion. Let us look at each in turn, beginning with the Italian Fascists.
Thus Emilio Gentile writes: “Fascism is a religion, a new lay religion which
sanctifies the State and which Mussolini tried to insinuate into millions of Italians.
The same could be said about National Socialism…
“Fascism and Nazism confessed a conception of man and life that was contrary
to Christian doctrine and ethics. The complicating factor was that this did not
prevent their leaders from doing homage to Christianity and to the civilization that
came from it, to the extent of signing the concordats with the Holy See on February
11, 1929 for Italy and July 20, 1933 for Germany.”672
Moreover, the Fascists worshipped Mussolini. “He is like a god,” said one
Fascist. “Like a god? No, no,” said another, “He is a god.”673
There were close similarities between Roman Catholicism and Fascism. As Piers
Brendon writes, they were “legion. Both were autocracies [i.e. despotisms] ranged
against freemasonry, Communism and democracy. Both relied on ceremonial and
censorship, dogma and propaganda. Both opposed birth control and other modern
fashions. Both exalted their own martyrs and favoured the subordination of women.
Like the Pope, the Duce claimed infallibility. Many wearing black shirts and black
soutances believed that a rapprochement between the two faiths might be as
advantageous as the alliance familiar elsewhere between throne and altar. The
Fascist State would receive a pontifical blessing in return for lending the Church its
secular arm. The Pope would re-enter the life of the nation and reinvigorate its
spirit. But though both sides felt the attraction of the alliance, both knew that the
claims of God and the claims of Caesar were proverbially hard to reconcile. Now

672 Gentile, in Frédéric Valloire and Isabelle Schmitz, “Les totalitarismes contre
Dieu”, Histoire, N 8, June-July, 2013, pp. 17-18.
368
that the champions of Church and State were competing tyrants the difficulties
were compounded. Thus the stage was set, against a background of acute
Depression, for a clash of characters as well as creeds…”674
Pope Pius XI was certainly dictatorial. “His early encyclicals proclaimed the
theocratic authority of his office with a boldness which would have done credit to
Gregory VII or Innocent III. But his terminology was sometimes shockingly modern:
‘If a totalitarian regime exists – totalitarian in fact and by right – it is the regime of
the church’…”675 The Roman church in Italy was very powerful, and so it is not
surprising that Mussolini should have sought a Concordat with it in 1929. This
gave him power and prestige, while it gave the Pope a sovereign state in the
Vatican, a large indemnity and recognition of Catholicism as the state religion.
Moreover, as the philosopher Benedetto Croce noted, the Pope “had discovered in
Mussolini a pillar of the hierarchic principle in the state, a divine instrument called
upon to impose the dogmatic doctrine of absolute sovereignty on a people led
astray by the nefarious liberal revolution”.676
In 1931 there was a hiccup in the relationship when Mussolini disbanded

Catholic Action. The Pope furiously “suggested that Mussolini had signed the
Concordat in the hope of dominating the Church and not from any love of religion.
He proposed that Catholics swearing loyalty oaths to the Duce should make a
mental reservation that these took second place to the laws of God. Finally, he
damned the regime’s efforts to convert the young to ‘Statolatry’ – ‘a real pagan
worship of the state’.” Nevertheless, Mussolini and the Pope met in 1932 and were
reconciled. The Pope said that he saw nothing contrary to Catholicism in Fascist
ideology and that “Fascist totalitarianism” should cooperate with “Catholic
totalitarianism”…677
However, the concordat undoubtedly worked more in favour of Mussolini than

of the Church. This was clearly seen by the German Chancellor Brüning, a devout
Catholic and a leader of the German Catholic Centre Party, who tried in vain to
stop the Vatican from entering into a Concordat with the Nazis. “Reflecting on the
crisis between the Vatican and Mussolini’s government,” writes John Cornwell,
“Brüning told Pacelli that ‘it was obvious to all that the Fascist leadership laughed
at the feebleness of the Vatican’s denunciations in the face of constant
infringements of the Lateran Treaty’. He said that he ‘saw great dangers for the
Church in too close identification between the Vatican and Italian Fascism in the
long term’.”678
He was right. For, as Gentile writes, “in Italy a sort of fascist catechism inspired
by that of the Catholic Church no longer looked on the saints as witnesses of their
faith, but celebrated them as Italians, links in the great line begun by the Roman
wolverine and continuing up to Mussolini, and in which one never speaks of the

676 Croce, in Brendon, op. cit., p. 114.
677 Brendon, op, cit., pp. 125-126.
678 Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope, London: Penguin, 2000, p. 123.
369
Church but of the ‘religion of the fathers’. All this ends up by forging a ‘new man’.
With some success: ‘In Italy,’ points out Sturzo in 1938, ‘fascism is progressively
taking possession of the souls of the young, is increasing its political power in all
domains at the expense of the spiritual and religious power, is taking over minds
and enslaving wills: it is helping a slow asphyxiation, a gradual and continuous
poisoning.’ He concluded that no politics of compromise could ever ‘efface the
incompatibility between Christianity and the totalitarian State’.”679
For, as Mussolini himself put it in his The Doctrine of Fascism (1932), “the Fascist
conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values
can exist, much less have value”.
“The major difference between the fascist and the non-fascist Right,” writes Eric
Hobsbawm, “was that fascism existed by mobilizing masses from below. It
belonged essentially to the ear of democratic and popular politics which traditional
reactionaries deplored and which the champions of the ‘organic state’ tried to by-
pass. Fascism gloried in the mobilization of the masses, and maintained it
symbolically in the form of public theatre – the Nuremberg rallies, the masses on
the Piazza Venezia looking up to Mussolini’s gestures on his balcony – even when
it came to power; as also did Communist movements. Fascists were the
revolutionaries of counter-revolution: in their rhetoric, in their appeal to those who
considered themselves victims of society, in their call for a total transformation of
society, even in their deliberate adaptation of the symbols and names of the social
revolutionaries, which is so obvious in Hitler’s ‘National Socialist Workers’ Party’
with its (modified) red flag and its immediate institution of the Red’s First of May
as an official holiday in 1933.”680
Michael Burleigh writes: “Intelligent opponents of Fascism, such as the journalist

Giovanni Amendola, recognised that Fascism differed in intensity and ambition
from traditional political movements: ‘Fascism wants to own the private conscience
of every citizen, it wants the “conversion” of Italians… Fascism has pretensions to
being a religion… the overweening intransigence of a religious crusade. It does not
promise happiness to those who convert; it allows no escape to those who refuse
baptism.’ The Fascists gloried in the alleged intolerance of the medieval preaching
orders, notably the Dominican friars, turning public fanaticism into a Fascist virtue.
Notoriously, in 1926 Roberto Davanzati proudly announced: ‘When our opponents
tell us we are totalitarian, Dominicans, implacable, tyrannical, we don’t recoil from
these epithets in fright. Accept them with honour and pride… Don’t reject any of it!
Yes indeed, we are totalitarians! We want to be from morning to evening, without
distracting thoughts.’ The Church’s destruction of unrepentant heretics became the
model for Fascist treatment of political dissidence: ‘Fascism is a closed political
party, not politically but religiously. It can accept only those who believe in the

679 Gentile, op. cit., p. 20.
680 Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, London: Abacus, 1994, p. 117.
370
truth of its faith… As the Church has its own religious dogmas, so Fascism has its
own dogmas of national faith.’
“Alfredo Rocco made the totalitarian analogy between the Church and Fascism
explicit: ‘One of the basic innovations of the Fascist State is that in some respects,
like another centuries-old institution, the Catholic Church, it too has, parallel to the
normal organization of its public powers, another organization with an infinity of
institutions whose purpose is to bring the State nearer to the masses, to penetrate
them, organize them, to look after their economic and spiritual well-being at a more
intimate level, to be the channel and interpreter of their needs and aspirations.’
From here it was a relatively short step to lauding the more sanguinary episodes in
the history of the Catholic Church as they have settled in vulgar memory. Fascism
had learned ‘from those great and imperishable pillars of the Church, its great
saints, its pontiffs, bishops and missionaries: political and warrior spirits who
wielded both sword and cross, and used without distinction the stake and
excommunication, torture and poison – not of course in pursuit of temporal or
personal power, but on behalf of the Church’s power and glory.
“… The Fascist youth organisation would be modelled after the Society of Jesus,
with the operating credo ‘Believe, Obey, Fight’, while Fascism’s protean and
pretentious doctrine would be modernised into a simple catechism for
schoolchildren.
“Official statements of Fascist doctrine were routinely characterised by a

pretentiously woolly religiosity, whose opacity (in any language) faithfully
reflected the philosophical tone of the times. In 1932 Mussolini himself claimed that
‘Fascism is a religious conception in which man in his immanent relationship with
a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual
and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society.’ He was careful,
however, to eschew the vaulting ambitions of either the Jacobins or Bolsheviks:
‘The Fascist State does not create a “God” of its own, as Robespierre once, at the
height of the Convention’s foolishness, wished to do; nor does it vainly seek, like
Bolshevism, to expel religion from the minds of men; Fascism respects the God of
the ascetics, of the saints, of the heroes, and also God as seen and prayed to be the
simple and primitive heart of the people.’”681
“Most Nazi leaders,” writes Norman Davies, “were unbelievers;

Hitler himself was a lapsed Catholic. Their rituals owed more to the
parody of ancient German paganism than to any modern religion. So
they had a major problem in defining their relationship with a German
nation that was still predominantly Christian. As often as not, they
ignored the theoretical issues. But to pacify the Catholics, Hitler
signed a Concordat with the Vatican in July 1933, confirming the
autonomy of the German See in return for the hierarchy’s renunciation

681 Burleigh, op. cit., pp. 61-62.
371
of political involvement. The compromise encouraged some Catholic
prelates, such as Archbishop Innitzer of Vienna, to express sympathy
for Nazi aims. But it did not prevent the Vatican from ordering Mit
brennender Sorge (1937), which denounced Nazi ideology, to be read
in all Catholic churches in Germany. To manage the Protestants, Hitler
announced the creation in 1935 of a state-controlled Union of
Protestant Churches. There was also an attempt to found a new
movement for ‘German Christians’, where the swastika embraced the
cross, under Reichsbishop Dr. Müller. In November 1933 these
pseudo-Christian Nazi surrogates staged a demonstration in Berlin to
the honour of ‘Christ the Hero’. In the end, religion and irreligion had
to co-exist as best they could.”682
In 1931 a German Franciscan, Fr. Ingbert Naab, published a work

entitled “Is Hitler Christian?” “Relying on passages taken from his
works, from Mein Kampf, and from the Party journal, Völkishcher
Beobachter, he came to a negative conclusion. Besides [him], there
were also high-flying intellectuals such as Luigi Sturzo, a priest,
theologian and philosopher… What does he say? That fascism ‘is an
inversion of values whose roots go back to classical paganism’ and
which ends up with ‘a pantheist conception of the State’ in which the
community ‘personifies itself, idealizes itself, sees itself as a whole
and deifies itself. It does not know its limits: it enjoys an absolute
sovereignty’. Or Anton Hilckman, a Catholic philosopher who, from
July, 1932, develops an interpretation of National Socialism as a
phenomenon of the sanctification of politics and the deification of the
Nordic or German race, ‘a definitive and absolute unity’. He
proclaims: ‘The Church will become the principal centre of resistance
to the introduction of the new heresy of Neo-Wotanism which is called
the German national Church’.”683
When not trying to woo the Churches, the Nazis were hostile to Christianity.
Thus A. Rosenberg, the head of the ministry of the East, said that “the Church’s
Yahweh is now dead, as Wotan was dead 1500 years ago”.684 Hitler, while feigning
religious tolerance for political reasons, was “utterly irreligious”.685 Thus “you are
either a Christian or a German,” he said. “You cannot be both.”686 “The heaviest
blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is
Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in
religion was introduced into the world by Christianity. Bolshevism practises a lie of
the same nature, when it claims to bring liberty to men, only to enslave them."687 At
the same time he recognized that Christianity "can't be broken so simply. It must

682 Davies, Europe: A History, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 975.
683 Gentile, op. cit., p. 19.
684 Rosenberg, The Myth of the 20 t h Century. Cf. S. Bulgakov, Khristianstvo i Evrejskij
Vopros (Christianity and the Jewish Question), Paris: YMCA Press, 1991, p. 22.
685 Overy, Russia’s War, p. 162.
686 Cornwell, op. cit., p. 106.
687 Bullock, op. cit., p. 801.
372
rot and die off like a gangrened limb." "We must avoid having one solitary church
to satisfy the religious needs of large districts, and each village must be made into
an independent sect, worshipping God in its own fashion. If some villages as a
result wish to practise black magic, after the fashion of Negroes or Indians, we
should do nothing to hinder them. In short, our policy in the wide Russian spaces
should be to encourage any and every form of dissension and schism."688
The Nazis’ relationship to Hitler was idolatrous. “Many people really,” writes
Brendon, “did worship the Führer. Typically they confessed their creed in quite
straightforward terms: ‘My belief is that our Leader, Adolf Hitler, was given by fate
to the German nation as our Saviour, bringing light into darkness.’ Attending the
Passion Play at Oberammergau, the American Ambassador found that Hitler was
identified with Jesus and Rőhm [the SA leader whom Hitler murdered] with Judas
– the only character played by a Jew.”689
A special cult was invented by Himmler for the SS. “Sometimes its members
were known as the Nazi Jesuits. Certainly Himmler, who had been brought up a
Roman Catholic, though he was later to call for the Pope’s public execution,
admired the black-cassocked society’s discipline. The Führer went so far as to call
him ‘our Ignatius de Loyola’. But Himmler also drew inspiration, in fashioning his
élite, from the myths of King Arthur and the sagas of the Teutonic Knights. He
developed an SS code of honour, including rules for duelling and committing
suicide. As well as oath-taking ceremonies for initiates, he evolved a series of
pseudo-chivalric, neo-pagan rituals to be performed in his medieval castle at
Wewelsburg in the mountain forests of Westphalia. Here 12 senior SS paladins
would sit around Himmler’s massive oaken table in high-backed, pigskin-covered
chairs inscribed with their occupants’ names on silver plates and engage in
something like a secular séance. Himmler apparently believed that he had the
power to summon up the spirits of the dead and he seems at times to have
regarded himself as the reincarnation of one of them, the Dark Age German King,
Henry the Fowler.”690 Again, “children of the SS were supposed to undergo an
alternative form of baptism with SS standard bearers instead of clergy officiating,
and a portrait of Hitler rather than a font as the focal point of the ceremony”.691
“We are not a movement,” said Hitler, “rather we are a religion”. “The purpose
of his Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment was to communicate not
information, he remarked, ‘but holy conviction and unconditional faith’. Nazism
had its own prophet, the Führer; its own rituals of mass rallies and parades; even
its own ‘holy days’…
“Ordinary citizens found many ways to participate in the new religion. They
displayed Mein Kampf in their homes in the place of honor once reserved for the

688 W. Alexeyev and T. Stavrou, The Great Revival, Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing,
1979, pp. 60-61.

690 Brendon, op. cit., pp. 254-255. However, Henry the Fowler was an Orthodox
king…
691 Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 267.
373
Bible; they even addressed prayers to the Führer. The League of German Girls, for
example, developed its own version of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Adolf Hitler, you are our
great Leader. Thy name makes the enemy tremble. Thy Third Reich comes, thy will
alone is law upon earth’, and so on…”692
Niall Ferguson has noted the messianic nature of Nazism: “As an SA sergeant
explained: ‘Our opponents… committed a fundamental error when equating us as
a party with the Economic Party, the Democrats or the Marxist parties. All these
parties were only interest groups, they lacked soul, spiritual ties. Adolf Hitler
emerged as bearer of a new political religion.’ The Nazis developed a self-conscious
liturgy, with November 9 (the date of the 1918 Revolution and the failed 1923 Beer
Hall putsch) as a Day of Mourning, complete with fires, wreaths, altars, blood-
stained relics and even a Nazi book of martyrs. Initiates into the elite Schutzstaffel
(SS) had to incant a catechism with lines like ‘We believe in God, we believe in
Germany which He created… and in the Führer… whom He has sent us.’ It was not
just that Christ was more or less overtly supplanted by Hitler in the iconography
and liturgy of ‘the brown cult’. As the SS magazine Das Schwarze Korps argued,
the very ethical foundation of Christianity had to go too: ‘The abstruse doctrine of
Original Sin… indeed the whole notion of sin as set forth by the Church… is
something intolerable to Nordic man, since it is incompatible with the “heroic”
ideology of our blood.’
“The Nazis’ opponents also recognized the pseudo-religious character of the

movement. As the Catholic exile Eric Voegelin put it, Nazism was ‘an ideology akin
to Christian heresies of redemption in the here and now… fused with post-
Enlightenment doctrines of social transformation’. The journalist Konrad Heiden
called Hitler ‘a pure fragment of the modern mass soul’ whose speeches always
ended ‘in overjoyed redemption’. An anonymous Social Democrat called the Nazi
regime a ‘counter-church’. Two individuals as different as Eva Klemperer, wife of
the Jewish-born philologist Victor, and the East Prussian conservative Friedrich
Reck-Malleczewen could agree in likening Hitler to the sixteenth-century
Anabaptist Jan of Leyden: ‘As in our case, a misbegotten failure conceived, so to
speak, in the gutter, became the great prophet, and the opposition simply
disintegrated, while the rest of the world looked on in astonishment and
incomprehension. As with us… hysterical females, schoolmasters, renegade priests,
the dregs and outsiders from everywhere formed the main support of the regime…
A thin sauce of ideology covered lewdness, greed, sadism, and fathomless lust for
power… and whoever would not completely accept the new teaching was turned
over to the executioner.’
“Still, all this leaves one question unanswered: What had gone wrong with the
existing religions in Germany? For if National Socialism was a political religion, the
fragmentation of the old political parties cannot satisfactorily be presented as the
essential precondition for its success. Evidence of declining religious belief among
German Christians is in fact not hard to find: a substantial proportion of Germans
exercised the option to be registered as konfessionslos in the 1920s. There were

692 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, London: Virago, 1998, pp. 209, 210.
374
marked declines in church attendance, particularly in North German cities.
Significantly, unlike the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church had suffered very
heavy financial losses in the hyper-inflation. Morale among the Protestant clergy
was low; many were attracted to the Nazi notion of a new ‘Positive Christianity’.
All this may offer a clue as to why the former were more likely than the latter to
vote Nazi in the crucial elections of 1930-33 – … though here too there was
considerable regional variation and it would be quite wrong to infer from this
anything stronger than inertia in Catholic voting patterns. After all, Austrians were
scarcely less enthusiastic about National Socialism and they were virtually all
Catholics. And nearly all the fascist dictators were themselves raised as Catholics:
Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, to say nothing of wartime puppets like Ante Pavelić in
Croatia and Josef Tiso in Slovakia, who was himself a priest…”693

*
We can see the kinship between Catholicism and German Fascism by examining
how the 1933 Concordat between the papacy and Hitler took place.
The Vatican wanted a concordat with the German State, in spite of the fact that
the Catholics were only a minority in Germany, albeit a large and powerful
minority. This would lead to a still more shameful surrender of the Church before
the State than in Italy. Indeed, it can be argued that without the Vatican concordat
with Germany, Hitler might never have come to power…
An important figure in this drama was the leader of the Catholic Centre Party,
Heinrich Brüning, a “scholarly Catholic with the soul of a monk and a soldier”,
whom President Hindenburg, the former commander-in-chief of the Germany
Army in the Great War, had “appointed Chancellor with the admonition that in
forming his cabinet he should take no account of party allegiances”. 694 “Brüning,”
writes Golo Mann, “was the very curious case – anywhere, but particularly in
Weimar Germany – of a politician who represented no class, group or material
interests. He was patriotism, scholarship, self-control and selfless virtue incarnate.
Of course, pure virtue doe not exist in man, certainly not in political man, and the
psychologist whom we do not wish to emulate will speculate on the sympathies,
sorrows and longings hidden behind the irreproachable façade of the new
Chancellor. What soon became apparent was his weakness for anything military,
anything Prussian: matters fundamentally alien to him (for what connection was
there between the Westphalian middle class and ‘Prussia’?); particularly for the old
man in the presidential palace. Above all he wished to ‘serve’ Hindenburg, to
derive his authority from the President’s confidence; just as Bismarck’s position
had depended on the confidence of William I. The difference, however, was that
the year was no longer 1862 and that the return to a king-and-chancellor
relationship, long since refuted by history as a basis of authority, could not be a
genuine repetition. Hindenburg was a substitute monarch, his authority was based
on deep-rooted, supra-personal tradition. The king, as long as people believed in

693 Ferguson, The War of the World, pp. 243-245.
694 Golo Mann, The History of Germany since 1789, London: Pimlico, 1996, p. 388.
375
kingship, had no need to pretend to be more than he was. With Hindenburg it was
necessary to persuade people that he was something which the poor old man could
never be. Although the new king-and-chancellor loyalty lasted two years instead of
a quarter of a century there was something curious in this subconscious attempt in
a crisis to return to an antiquated form of German constitutional life…”695
Antiquated or not, kingship obviously answered to a deep need of the German

people. Moreover, Brüning was in the unfortunate position of having to serve two
masters – Hindenburg and the Pope. Brüning had warned the Pope that it was
impossible to make honourable deals with Hitler, but the Pope - and especially his
Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli - wanted it for two main reasons. First, the main
enemy of the Church was now seen to be Bolshevism, so it was deemed expedient
to support Hitler’s militant anti-communism. Pacelli felt particularly strongly about
the communists ever since he had personally faced them down in Munich in 1919.
He saw a “red triangle” of communist persecution of the Church stretching from
Russia to Spain to Mexico. Secondly, in 1917, under Pacelli’s supervision, the
Church had passed a new, highly centralized code of canon law, and the Vatican –
and Pacelli in particular - now wanted this applied in Germany, which meant
bringing the German bishops to heel and all local ecclesiastical initiatives in
Germany to an end. But securing such centralized control over the Catholic Church
in Germany required the agreement of the government (not to speak of the German
clergy and laity) through the delineation of separate ecclesiastical and political
spheres. The deal that Pacelli envisaged would have meant the German State
allowing the Vatican complete control over Church appointments and Church
education and youth movements in Germany, while obtaining strict non-
interference of the Church in all political matters.
But where did politics end and private or ecclesiastical spheres begin in a
totalitarian state? The answer was: nowhere, because totalitarianism of its nature
demanded total control of all spheres of life. This fact was being demonstrated most
forcibly in the contemporary Soviet Union, where Metropolitan Sergius had
surrendered all independent control of the Orthodox Church to the State. Moreover,
the Catholics should have known this better than anyone insofar as the Catholic
Church since at least the late eleventh century had been herself a totalitarian
organism allowing no clear boundary between Church and State. At that time Pope
Gregory VII had claimed the right to depose all monarchs who contradicted his
almighty, godlike will, and it was precisely in Germany under Emperor Henry IV
and his “Holy Roman” successors that the struggle to impose this totalitarian vision
(in the so-called “Investiture Conflict”) had been played out. Of course, times had
changed since the eleventh century, and the Vatican was too realistic to attempt to
impose its will on German leaders now, in the twentieth century. But Pacelli did
think that one could have two parallel totalitarianisms – one in the Church and the
other in the State – in a “symphonic” relationship on the same territory. However,
“symphony” was not Hitler had in mind…

695 Mann, op. cit., pp. 388-389.
376
The tragedy for the German Church was that until 1933 it had
waged a noble struggle against Nazism, openly condemning its
incompatibility with Christianity and forbidding Catholics to join the
party. So had the Catholic Centre Party, whose approximately 18% of
the vote was vital in preventing Hitler from coming to power through
the passing of an Enabling Act that would suspend parliamentary
democracy. But in 1932 Brüning fell from power, dismissed by his
master Hindenburg. In fact, Hindenburg “had no authority to dismiss
the Chancellor… But Brüning, who saw himself as serving Hindenburg
and depending on the will and mercy of this substitute monarch, was
so surprised and deeply hurt by the old man’s lack of loyalty that it
never occurred to him to think a return to the parliamentary system.
He was ‘dismissed’ because he felt himself to be dismissed; the ex-
lieutenant felt that he could not remain in command if the Field-
Marshal did not wish him to remain. He retired immediately and
refused with bitter pride any office or favour from the new rulers.” 696
Together with the Communists, there were still enough relatively

healthy forces in the centre and right of German politics to prevent
Hitler’s accession to power. But the country as a whole had descended
into a state of soporific passivity. And the chancellor, Papen, foolishly
thought he could use Hitler, and contain him even if he became
chancellor. And this is what he suggested to Hindenburg (while he,
Papen, would remains as vice-chancellor). The “king”, against his
better instincts, agreed…
But it was not over yet. The Catholic Centre Party still held the balance of power,
and in the end it was that party’s monarch, the Pope, who let Hitler in. For in
March, 1933, on the eve of the crucial vote, the Centre Party dissolved itself, enabling
Hitler to win the two-thirds majority he needed. This extraordinary act was made
possible through the Centre Party’s new leader, Ludwig Kaas, who, being a bishop
as well as a politician, connived with Pacelli to negotiate between Hitler above the
heads of the Party.
A party that calls itself “Catholic” but has no support from the Pope is
vulnerable to pressure from without and schisms from within, and the Centre Party
soon folded. Hitler came to power in March, the concordat was signed in July, and
immediately, as was to be expected, the public opposition of the German Catholics
to Nazism ceased. For the Vatican’s signing of the concordat implied a recognition
of the Nazis as a legitimate power, which was very useful to Hitler. Even when
persecution of Catholics began, protests from the Vatican were muted; for the Nazis
argued that the people they killed or imprisoned had been “dabbling in politics” –
and politics, according to the concordat, was exclusively the government’s domain.
Only in 1937 did the Pope issue his Mit brennender Sorge in criticism of the Nazis.
But that was followed, only five days later, by a still stronger condemnation of the
communists in Divini redemptoris – communism was still seen as the greater evil.

696 Mann, op. cit., p. 403.
377
Which it was… But by making a pact with the smaller devil in order to fight
against the bigger one the Vatican had suffered a serious dent in its spiritual
authority. In fact, the Papacy should be considered an appeaser of Nazism in the
1930s no less than the governments of France and Great Britain.
In any case, Pacelli’s idea of a “symphony” between the two totalitarianisms was
not as far-fetched as it might at first seem if we consider certain striking
resemblances between them. Thus Olga Chetverikova writes: “Hitler, Himmler,
Goebbels, Schellenberg and others were powerfully influenced by the Jesuits in
particular. V. Schellenberg, the head of the SS’s security service, pointed out in his
memoirs: ‘Himmler had the best and most extensive library of books on the Jesuit
order. For years he studied this extensive literature by night. Therefore he
constructed the organization of the SS on the principles of the Jesuit order. In that
he relied on the constitution of the order and the works of Ignatius Loyola: the
highest law was absolute obedience and the unquestioning fulfilment of every
command. Himmler himself as Reichsführer of the SS was general of the order. The
structure of his leadership resembled the hierarchical system of the Catholic
Church.’ It was no accident that Hitler used to say of Himmler: ‘I see in him our
Ignatius Loyola’. As for Franz von Papen, who called himself a zealous Catholic
and was a knight of the Maltese order, it is to him that belong the words: ‘The
Third Reich is the first state in the world that incarnates the principles of the
papacy’...”697
“German Protestantism,” writes Burleigh, “was subjected to three pressures

after 1933, which were designed to de-Judaise it, to heroise it and to unify it. These
came from within, although beyond the Churches there were clusters of neo-
pagans whose clamorous agitations encouraged Protestant Nazi sympathizers to
‘Nazify’ their own Churches before they were replaced by something wholly
unrelated to Christianity.
“The idea of fusing extreme racist nationalism with Christianity was not new; a
League for a German Church had been founded in 1921 precisely for that purpose.
Some 120 Protestant pastors belonged to the Party by 1930, eight having stood as
candidates in elections. Wilhelm Kube, the gauleiter of Brandenburg, was both
leader of the Nazi caucus in the Prussian parliament and an active member of the
synod of the diocese of Berlin. In late 1931 he suggested the formation of ‘Protestant
National Socialists’, a Church party not formally integrated with the NSDAP itself.
Hitler thought that ‘German Christians’ would be less contentious. From their
inception in 1932, the German Christians, a group of clergy and laity, sought to
impose an ecclesiology defined by race rather than grace, blending ‘traditional’
anti-Judaism with new-fangled scientific racism to establish a new ‘Church of

697 Chetverikova, Izmena v Vatikane, ili Zagovor pap protiv khristianstva (Betrayal in
the Vatican, or The Plot of the Popes against Christianity), Moscow: Algoritm,
2011, p. 17.
378
blood’. They wished to revivify Protestantism by incorporating those things that
had made Nazism itself such a potent force. Their banner consisted of a cross and
the initials DC with a swastika in the centre…
“Since the German Christians seemed to give empty churches a new lease of life
– albeit by introducing the lurid razzamatazz of Nazism into places of worship –
they were welcomed by some senior Protestant clergy as a way of restoring the
popularity of religion. Bishop Theophil Wurm of Württemberg was not alone in
imagining that Nazism might represent a revival of the fusion of nationalism and
religiosity that had last been seen in Germany during the Wars of Liberation…”698
Of course, there were German Protestants who refused to be duped by Nazism.

The most famous of them was Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, head of the “Confessing
Church”, which protested against the pro-Nazi stance of the “Evangelical Church
of the German nation”, which considered it its duty to proclaim to the world “a
German Christ of a de-Judaized Church”. He wrote from prison (where he was
hanged on April 9, 1945): “On close inspection it turns out that any powerful
strengthening of the external power (whether it be political or religious) strikes a
significant number of people with stupidity. The impression is created that this is a
strictly sociological and psychological law. The power of some needs the stupidity
of others… When talking to such a person, you simply feel that you are not
speaking with the man himself, and not with his personality, but with the slogans
and appeals that have taken control of him.”
*
Turning now to the Bolshevik mode of totalitarianism: By 1922, the Bolsheviks

had pacified the country and tamed most opposition to their regime. The politicians
and artists had been suppressed, the philosophers – expelled. Only the Orthodox
Church remained as a real threat to their ideological monopoly. Now in spite of the
fact that the Church had suffered terribly during the Civil War, some, like the anti-
religious organizer S. Krasikov, felt that she had been let off lightly.699 The problem
was: the Church had grown stronger under persecution; physical force had failed;
so a more subtle approach was required.

698Burleigh, op. cit., p. 202.
699He wrote: “In October we beat up and destroyed the old state machine. We
destroyed the old army, the old law-courts, the schools, the administrative and
other institutions. And we created and our creating our own, new ones. This
process is difficult… we are making mistakes. However, it turns out that, having
overthrown all this landowners’ gendarmerie, etc., we have not destroyed the
Church, which constitutes a part of this old state exploitatory machine. We have
only deprived it of its state content…we have not deprived it of its state power.
But still this chunk of the old state landowner-capitalist machine has been
preserved, tens of thousands of priests, as well as monks, metropolitans and
bishops still exist. Why has Soviet power acted with such undeserved caution to
this chunk of the old machine?” (Tserkov’ i Revoliutsia (The Church and
Revolution), 1919, N 1, p. 3)
379
The Bolsheviks believed that the roots of religion lay in poverty and ignorance,
so that the elimination of these evils would naturally lead to the withering away of
religion. This being the case, they could not believe that religious belief had any
deeper roots in the nature of things. Therefore, writes Edward E. Roslof, “the party
explicitly rejected ‘God-building’, an attempt by its own members to develop a
‘socialist religion of humanity’. Led by A.V. Lunacharskii, Leonid Krasin, and
Bogdanov (A.A. Malinovskii), Bolshevik God-builders maintained that the
proletariat would create a non-transcendent, earth-centered religion to complement
its formation of the ultimate human society. Only this group within the party
‘recognized that religion’s power lay in its response to people’s psychic needs and
argued that a revolutionary movement could not afford to ignore these’.”700
In May, 1921 Lenin supported a resolution calling for the replacement of the
religious world-view by “a harmonious communist scientific system embracing
and answering the questions to which the peasants’ and workers’ masses have
hitherto sought answers in religion.” At the same time he said that the Bolsheviks
must “definitely avoid offending religious sensibilities”. The result was the
suspension of the “dilettantist” anti-religious commissions (Lenin’s phrase) that
had existed thereto, and their replacement by a Commission on the Separation of
Church and State attached to the Politburo which lasted until 1929 under the Jew
Emelian Yaroslavsky and whose aim was clearly the extirpation of all religion. The
importance of this Commission in the Bolsheviks’ eyes was clearly indicated by the
extreme secrecy in which its protocols were shrouded and by the active
participation in it, at one time or another, of all the top party leaders. The strategy
of the Commission was directly defined, at the beginning by Lenin, and later – by
Stalin.701
An important aspect of the Commission’s strategy was “divide and rule”. For
while physical methods continued to be applied, the Bolsheviks recognized that the
Church could not be defeated by physical assault alone. They needed subtler
methods including the recruitment of agents among the clergy and the creation of
schisms among them. Thus already in December, 1920, T. Samsonov, head of a
secret department of the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB, wrote to Dzerzhinsky
that “communism and religion are mutually exclusive… No machinery can destroy
religion except that of the [Cheka]. In its plans to demoralize the church the Cheka
has recently focussed its attention on the rank and file of the priesthood. Only
through them, by long, intensive, and painstaking work, shall we succeed in
destroying and dismantling the church completely.”702
Samsonov was supported by Lunacharsky, who since the early 1900s had been
instrumental in developing a more subtle, less physically confrontational approach

700 Roslof, Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, p. 28.

701 S. Savelev, "Bog i komissary" (God and the Commissars), in Bessmertny A.R.
and Filatov, S.B., Religia i Demokratia (Religion and Democracy), Moscow: Progress,
1993, pp. 164-216.
702 Quoted in Edward Radzinsky, Stalin, New York: Doubleday, 1996.p. 244.
380
to the problem of eradicating religion.703 And at the beginning of the 1920s Trotsky
said: “Let those popes who are ready to cooperate with us become leaders in the
Church and carry out all our instructions, calling on the believers to serve Soviet
power”. 704 In a protocol of the secret section of the Cheka Trotsky discussed
recruiting clergy with money to report on themselves and others in the Church and
to prevent anti-Bolshevik agitation…705
The Bolsheviks were counting on a modernist or “renovationist” faction in the

Russian Church to provide them with their “loyal” clergy. Already in the
revolutionary years of 1905 and 1917, the renovationists-to-be had reared their
heads with a long list of demands for modernist reform of the Church. And in
March, 1918, Professor Titlinov, who was later to become one of the main
ideologists of renovationism, founded a newspaper in Petrograd which criticized
the Patriarch’s anathematization of Soviet power.706
Philip Walters writes: “In pre-revolutionary Russia, many groups of intellectuals,

philosophers and churchmen began voicing their concern over the plight of the
Orthodox Church in its enforced alliance with a reactionary State. It is possible to
discover many lines of continuity between the democratic and socialist aims of
these men and the aims of the men of the Living Church (also known as
Renovationists). There is also a certain amount of personal continuity: for example,
the so-called ‘Group of Thirty-Two’ reformist priests, who were active between
1905 and 1907, reappeared after the February Revolution of 1917 as the ‘League of
Democratic Orthodox Clergy and Laymen’, a group which stood against the
increasing conservatism of the Orthodox Church, and which included among its
members one or two men who later became prominent in the Living Church.
“B.V. Titlinov’s book, Novaia Tserkov’ (The New Church), written in 1922, contains
an apology for Renovationist ideology. Titlinov declares that the new movement is
not a revolution or a reformation, which would imply a definite break with the
historical Church, but a reform which remains true to the original spirit of
Orthodoxy. The basic task of the Living Church is to ‘do away with those accretions
which have been introduced into Orthodox worship during the period of union
between the Church and the [Tsarist] State’. Titlinov calls for ‘priestly creativity’ in
the liturgy and for its celebration as in the early Church amidst the congregation.
There must be ethical and moral reform in society, involving opposition to
capitalism. Bishops should be elected from the lower clergy and should be allowed
to marry. The Living Church, he claims, accepts the October Revolution as
consonant with the aims of Christian truth.

703 Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolsheviks, p. 338.
704 Protopriest Benjamin Zhukov, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ na Rodine i za
Rubezhom (The Russian Orthodox Church in the Homeland and Abroad), Paris,
2005, p. 33, footnote 19.
705 Bishop Gregory Grabbe, Russkaia Tserkov’ pered litsom gospodstvuiushchego zla
(The Russian Church in the Face of Dominant Evil), Jordanville, 1991, p. 42.
381
“There are three basic ideological strands in Renovationism: a political strand,
concerned with promoting loyalty to the Soviet regime; an organizational strand,
concerned with the rights of the lower clergy and with the administration of the
Church; and an ethical strand, concerned with making Church services more
accessible to the masses and with moral and social reform. The first strand was
characteristic of the Living Church movement as a whole…When the Living
Church movement split into various factions, the second ideological strand was
taken up chiefly by the followers of V.D. Krasnitsky, and the third by the groups
which followed Bishop Antonin Granovsky and A.I. Vvedensky.”707
As the future hieromartyr and Archbishop of Riga John (Pommer) said of the
Bolsheviks: “They have put Marx in the dust-jacket of the Gospel and think that the
people will accept it instead of the Gospel. They have dressed commissars in sacred
vestments and think the Orthodox will accept them as their pastors and follow
them. They have substituted the portrait of Lenin for the icon of Christ in the icon-
cases and expect the people to come up to kiss it. Ilyich is not at all like Christ. It is
impossible to put Marxism in the place of Christianity, whatever vestments the
preachers of Marxism put on. The blasphemous utterance of the name of Marx
from the church kathedra only emphasizes more vividly the irreconcilable
contradiction between Christ and Marx. Here is love incarnate, pouring out its
blood for its guilty brethren. There – satanic malice pouring out the blood of
brothers guilty of nothing like water.”
Although all three ideologies – liberalism, fascism and communism –

undermined traditional Christianity in their different ways, it was communism that
showed the most obsessive hatred of it. It was not only the slaughter of millions of
Orthodox Christians and the destruction of thousands of churches. The worst
aspect of Soviet rule, as Archimandrite Cyril (Zaitsev) pointed out, was its creation
of a Soviet church, a parody and inner corruption of “the one thing necessary” for
man’s salvation…

707 Walters, “The Living Church 1922-1946”, Religion in Communion Lands, vol. 6, N
4, Winter, 1978, pp. 235-236.
382
36. CHINESE NATIONALISTS AND COMMUNISTS
In Hunan province, the communists under Mao had been doing just as well in
their less conventional way as the nationalists with their regular army. Thus by
1927 “some ten million or so peasants and their families [had been] organized by
the communists. ‘In a few months,’ wrote Mao, ‘the peasants have accomplished
what Dr. Sun Yat-Sen wanted, but failed, to accomplish in the forty years he
devoted to the national revolution.’ Organization made possible the removal of
many of the ills which beset the peasants. Landlords were not dispossessed, but
their rents were often reduced. Usurious rates of interest were brought down to
reasonable levels. Rural revolution had eluded all previous progressive movements
in China and was identified by Mao as the failure of the 1911 revolution; the
communist success in reaching this goal was based on the discovery that it could be
brought about by using the revolutionary potential of the peasants themselves. This
had enormous significance for the future, for it implied new possibilities of
historical development through Asia. Mao grasped this and revalued urban
revolution accordingly. ‘If we allot ten points to the democratic revolution,’ he
wrote, ‘then the achievements of the urban dwellers and the military units rate only
three points, while the remaining seven points should go to the peasants in their
rural revolution.’…”708
The problem that now needed to be addressed was: what were to be the relations
between the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? In
public, Chiang said: “If Russia aids the Chinese revolution, does that mean that she
wants China to apply Communism? No, she wants us to carry out the national
revolution.” In private, however, he thought differently. As Christopher Andrew
and Vasily Mitrokhin write, “he believed the opposite, convinced that ‘What the
Russians call “Internationalism” and “World Revolution” are nothing but old-
fashioned imperialism.’ The Soviet leadership, however, believed that it could get
the better of Chiang. He should, said Stalin, ‘be squeezed like a lemon and then
thrown away’. In the event, it was the CCP which became the lemon. Having
gained control of Shanghai in April 1927 thanks to a Communist-led rising, Chiang
began a systematic massacre of the Communists who had captured it for him. The
CCP, on Stalin’s instructions, replied with a series of armed risings. All were
disastrous failures. Moscow’s humiliation was compounded by a police raid on the
Soviet consulate in Beijing which uncovered a mass of documents on Soviet
espionage.”709
“The central leadership of the CCP for some time continued to hope for urban
insurrection; in the provinces, none the less, individual communist leaders
continued to work along the lines indicated by Mao in Hunan. They dispossessed
absentee landlords and organized local soviets, a shrewd appreciation of the value
of the traditional peasant hostility to central government. By 1930 they had done
better than this, by organizing an army in Kiangsi, where a Chinese Soviet Republic

Roberts, op. cit., p. 739.
708
Andrew and Mitrokhin, The KGB and the World: The Mitrokhin Archive II, London:
709
Penguin, 2006, p. 2.
383
ruled fifty million people, or claimed to. In 1932 the CCP leadership abandoned
Shanghai to join Mao in this sanctuary. KMT efforts were directed towards
destroying this army, but always without success. This meant fighting on a second
front at a time when Japanese pressure [the Japanese had invaded Manchuria in
1931] was strongest. The last great KMT effort had a partial success, it is true, for it
drove the communists out of their sanctuary, thus forcing on them the ‘Long March’
to Shensi which began in 1934, the epic of the Chinese Revolution and an
inspiration ever since. Once there, the seven thousand survivors found local
communist support, but were still hardly safe; only the demands of resistance to
the Japanese prevented the KMT from doing more to harass them…”710
Chiang “had the advantages over his rivals,” writes Jacques Gernet, “of a solid
political organization (a one-party system based on the Soviet model), of a
somewhat better financial foundation, which he strove to consolidate by controlling
banking circles, and of the prestige lent to him by the official recognition of all
foreign countries. But for that very reason the Nanking regime differed from that of
the war-lords; it was much more closely tied than its predecessors had been to the
commercial middle class – which it was to exploit to its own advantage – and also
much more open, of necessity, to Western influences. Most of its officials and
agents had been in contact with foreigners or had been educated abroad. In spite of
its own intentions, it was an emanation of the Western middle classes of the open
ports, and this very fact explains why, in spite of its declared aim of encouraging
agriculture, it was to take practically no interest in the tragic fate of the peasantry.
“But the Nanking regime also owed its particular colouration to the
circumstances of its time; it came into existence at the period when the world war
was witnessing the upsurge of Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and
Japanese militarism, while the parliamentary democracies were hit by the great
American economic depression, and the U.S.S.R. was living under the bureaucratic
police system directed by Stalin. Violently hostile to revolutionary movements and
a great admirer of strong regimes, Chiang Kai-shek strove to imitate their methods
of propaganda and to disseminate a ‘Confucianism’ modified to suit modern taste.
This was the ‘New Life Movement’ (Hsin-sheng-huo yün-tung), a sort of moral order
bound up with the cult of Confucius and the exaltation of the founder of the
Chinese Republic. A political police, the ‘Blue Shirts’, was entrusted with the task of
hunting down liberals and revolutionaries.
“Created by business men linked first to the imperial government and later to
Yüan Shih-k’ai’s regime and to the governments dominated by the war-lords, the
Chinese banks had played a crucial part in financing military expenditure. For that
very reason they represented a sort of relatively independent power which had
acted in Chiang Kai-shek’s favour at the time of his coup d’état. At that time they
were in a period of rapid growth because of the drainage of capital from the
interior to the great economic centre of Shanghai, where bank deposits increased by
245 per cent between 1921 and 1932. The number of banks in the great metropolis
had risen from 20 in 1919 to 34 in 1923 and to 67 in 1927. It was to reach the figure

710 Roberts, op. cit., p. 742.
384
of 164 in 1937. But from the moment of its installation in Nanking the Kuo-min-
tang insisted on closer and closer collaboration from the banking sector, granting it,
in return for the support required to guarantee the government’s finances and
make good its deficit, big advantages and wider facilities for speculation. The result
was a kind of state capitalism which enabled the Nationalist government to be sure
of the support of business circles at all times and to control capitalists who showed
signs of acting too independently. The regime’s finances were soon dominated by a
few families who owned big banks closely tied to the Nanking government…
“Even if they suffered by the regime, as was the case mainly with the new
bourgeoisie that owned the banks and industrial enterprises, the propertied classes
as a whole were satisfied with an order of things that did not question their
privileges. In the countryside the Nanking government did not undertake any
fundamental reform of the rent or tax system. The impoverished peasantry thus
continued to be the victim of what, through a concatenation of causes and effects,
might seem like a sorty of inevitable curse. The excessive number of mouths to
feed, the extremely small plots into which the land was divided…, its poor yield in
spite of desperately hard work, and the burden of taxation ensured that the
smallest inequality of wealth became the means of exploitation thanks to usury and
rents. Everything helped to keep the majority of the population in abysmal
poverty…”711
Nevertheless, China now entered a period of growth that can only be compared
with the even more extraordinary growth of the present day. As Maria Hsia Chang
writes: “Between 1928 and 1936, the availability of roads and track doubled, with
domestic capital underwriting the construction of 7,995 kilometers of railway.
Between 1926 and 1936, China sustained a compounded industrial growth rate of
8.3 percent per annum – during a period when the major economies of the world
languished in Depression, with the general indices of production in the United
States, France, and Germany falling by about 50 percent. In the judgment of many
experts, the economy of Nationalist China was on the threshold of self-sustaining
‘takeoff’.”712

711 Genet, op. cit, pp. 634-636.
712 Chang, Return of the Dragon, Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 2001, pp. 79-80.
385
37. TURKS, ARABS, PERSIANS AND OIL
“The Middle East,” writes Robert Tombs, “was a great prize. British
paramountcy seemed assured following the disintegration of the
Ottoman Empire – an illusion soon dispelled. Friction ensued with
France, which demanded Syria and Lebanon under league mandate.
This forced Britain to reduce the territory it had offered to the leaders
of the Arab Revolt, the Sherif of Mecca and his sons Abdullah and
Faisal. Britain stood by when the French bombarded Damascus in 1920
and ejected Faisal. He was willing to accept British protection, and
Britain made him king of Iraq (important for its oil) and Abdullah
king of Transjordan, both under British supervision by league
mandate. In 1922 Britain found itself on the brink of an unwanted war
with Turkey…” 713
The fall of the Ottoman Empire had many long-term consequences:

apart from the establishment of the Zionist dream in Palestine and the
Greek Asia Minor tragedy, it also engendered the secularist republic
of Turkey and resurrection of the eighteenth-century extreme Islamic
cult of Wahhabism, which had been crushed by the Ottomans in 1818
but now came to life again.
As we have seen, Mustafa Kemal, otherwise known as Ataturk or

“Father of the Turks”, could well claim to have rescued his country
from the western powers and Greece in the early 1920s. But he was
now determined to secularize and westernize it: he abolished the
Sultanate in November, 1922, made Turkey a republic in October,
1923, and in March, 1924 abolished the Caliphate. As Peter Mansfield
writes, “A new legal code, based on a variety of European systems,
was substituted for the Islamic sharia. In 1928 the constitution became
officially secular with the deletion of the clause reading that ‘the
religion of the Turkish state is Islam’ and ‘laicism’ was established as
one of the six cardinal principles of the state. A Latin-based alphabet
replaced the Arabic script of Ottoman Turkish and finally, in 1935,
surnames on the European model were introduced…
“After the abolition of the sultanate and caliphate, Ataturk

organized the new republic as a secular parliamentary democracy. The
1924 constitution guaranteed equality before the law and freedom of
thought, speech, publication and association. In theory sovereignty lay
with the people and was exercised in their nameby the single-chamber
parliament – the Grand National Assembly – which elected the
president of the republic, who chose the prime minister. Ministers
were supposed to be responsible to parliament.

713 Tombs, The English and their History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, p. 661.
386
“Democracy remained severely restricted, however. Ataturk used
his immense prestige to override the constitution whenever he chose.
In 1924 he organized his supporters as the Republican People’s Party
(RPP). This dominated political life, as all members of the Assembly
belonged to it, and the RPP ruled Turkey for twenty-seven years. Yet,
despite his authoritarianism and arbitrary methods, Ataturk planted
the seeds of liberal constitutional government. The Assembly had real
powers, and Ataturk tried to have his way by persuasion rather than
by force…” 714
Women were emancipated, citizens were dressed in western

clothes, and in general, while most Turks remained Muslim, a decisive
westernizing reformation had taken place in accordance with
Ataturk’s belief that western civilization was better than the old
Ottoman civilization. As he said in 1935, “We shall attempt to raise
our national culture above the level of contemporary civilization.
Therefore, we think and shall continue to think not according to the
lethargic mentality of past centuries, but according to the concepts of
speed and action of our century.”
“Ataturk,” writes Simon Sebag Montefiore, “encouraged the study

of earlier civilizations connected with the heritage of the Turkish
nation. Art, sculpture, music, modern architecture, opera and ballet all
flourished. In every area of Turkish life, Ataturk pressed forward his
modernizing, nationalistic mission, and a new culture began to
emerge…” 715
The Treaty of Lausanne of July, 1923 determined the eastern

boundaries of the country. Thus the Armenians, who had suffered 1.5
million killed at the hands of the Turks in 1915, were divided: the
western Armenians entered into the Republic of Turkey, while the
eastern Armenians and the capital of Yerevan formed one of the
Bolshevik republics. As for the Kurds, who had been promised an
independent Kurdish state at the Treaty of Sèvres in August, 1920,
they were divided between the states of Turkey, Iran and Iraq.
After the Great War five new states were created under the tutelage
of Britain or France: Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq and Palestine.
The Hashemite kingdom under King Hussein, which had taken the
lead in the Arab Revolt and which believed it had the right to take
control of most of the Arabic Middle East, steadily declined in power.
And when King Hussein declared himself “Prince of the Faithful and
Successor of the Prophet”, the Wahhabist warriors of Arabia under the

714 Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, London: Penguin, 2003, pp. 172, 173.
715 Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercius, 2012, p. 479.
387
leadership of Abdulaziz, usually known in the West as Ibn Saud, were
enraged, the British withdrew their financial support, and the Ibn
Saud took control of the whole of the Arabian peninsula (except
Yemen). In 1925 he conquered the Hejaz, which included Jeddah and
the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina, and in 1932 he
proclaimed himself king of Saudi Arabia.
In 1929-30 Ibn Saud had to crush a rebellion of his Ikhwan

warriors. For him, writes the former MI6 agent Alastair Crooke, “the
simple verities of previous decades were eroding. Oil was being
discovered [from 1938] in the peninsula. Britain and America were
courting Abd-al Aziz, but still were inclined to support Sharif Husain
as the only legitimate ruler of Arabia. The Saudis needed to develop a
more sophisticated diplomatic posture…
“Paradoxically, it was a maverick British official, who helped

embed the gene [of Wahabism] into the new state. The British official
attached to Aziz, was one Harry St. John Philby (the father of the MI6
officer who spied for the Soviet KGB, Kim Philby). He was to become
King Abd al-Aziz's close adviser, having resigned as a British official,
and was until his death, a key member of the Ruler's Court. He, like
Lawrence of Arabia, was an Arabist. He was also a convert to Wahhabi
Islam and known as Sheikh Abdullah.
“St. John Philby was a man on the make: he had determined to

make his friend, Abd al-Aziz, the ruler of Arabia. Indeed, it is clear
that in furthering this ambition he was not acting on official
instructions. When, for example, he encouraged King Aziz to expand
in northern Nejd, he was ordered to desist. But (as American author,
Stephen Schwartz notes), Aziz was well aware that Britain had
pledged repeatedly that the defeat of the Ottomans would produce an
Arab state, and this no doubt, encouraged Philby and Aziz to aspire to
the latter becoming its new ruler.
“It is not clear exactly what passed between Philby and the Ruler
(the details seem somehow to have been suppressed), but it would
appear that Philby's vision was not confined to state-building in the
conventional way, but rather was one of transforming the wider
Islamic ummah (or community of believers) into a Wahhabist instrument
that would entrench the al-Saud as Arabia's leaders. And for this to
happen, Aziz needed to win British acquiescence (and much later,
American endorsement). ‘This was the gambit that Abd al-Aziz made
his own, with advice from Philby,’ notes Schwartz.
“In a sense, Philby may be said to be ‘godfather’ to this momentous

pact by which the Saudi leadership would use its clout to ‘manage’
Sunni Islam on behalf of western objectives (containing socialism,
Ba'athism, Nasserism, Soviet influence, Iran, etc.) - and in return, the
388
West would acquiesce to Saudi Arabia's soft-power Wahhabisation of
the Islamic ummah…” 716
In 1938 oil was found in commercial quantities in Saudi Arabia,

and in the 1950s this began to be exploited with the aid of western oil
companies, which led to the kingdom’s present position of great
political and religious power. The structure of that kingdom has been
described by Henry Kissinger as follows: “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
is a traditional Arab-Islamic realm: both a tribal monarchy and an Islamic
theocracy. Two leading families, united in mutual support since the eighteenth
century, form the core of its governance. The political hierarchy is headed by a
monarch of the Al Saud family, who serves as the head of a complex network of
tribal relationships based on ancient ties of mutual loyalty and foreign affairs.
The religious hierarchy is headed by the Grand Mufti and the Council of Senior
Scholars, drawn largely from the Aal al-Shaykh family. The King endeavours to
bridge the gap between these two branches of power by fulfilling the role of
‘Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques’ (Mecca and Medina), reminiscent of the
Holy Roman Emperor as ‘Fidei defensor’.
“Zeal and purity of religious expression are embedded in the Saudi

historical experience. Three times in as many centuries (in the 1740s,
the 1820s, and the early twentieth century) the Saudi state has been
founded or reunified by the same two leading families, in each case
affirming their commitment to govern Islam’s birthplace and holies
shrines by upholding the most austere interpretation of the religion’s
principles. In each case, Saudi armies fanned out to unify the deserts
and mountains of the peninsula in waves of conquest strikingly
similar to the original sacred exaltation and holy war that produced
the first Islamic state, and in the same territory. Religious absolutism,
military daring, and shrewd modern statesmanship have produced the
kingdom at the heart of the Muslim world and central to its fate.” 717
The future of the Middle East would depend to a large extent on

which model – Saudi Islamism or Turkish secularism – would
prevail…
Besides Saudi Islamis and Turkish secularism, there was a third

force to be reckoned with, although it was still weak in this period:

716 Crooke, “You Can't Understand ISIS If You Don't Know the History of
Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia”, Huffington Post, 27 August, 2014.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-
arabia_b_5717157.html, and “Middle East Time Bomb: The Real Aim of ISIS is to
Replace the Saudi Family as the New Emirs of Arabia”, Huffington Post, September
2, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-aim-saudi-
arabia_b_5748744.html.
717 Kissinger, World Order, London: Penguin, 2015, pp. 134-135.
389
Pan-Arab nationalism, whose origins may be traced to King Hussein of
the Hejaz. However, his Pan-Arabism, according to Mansfield, was
“haphazard and rudimentary and derived strongly from his personal
and family ambitions. His claim to be king of the Arabs was
recognized by no more than a few. In the exultant but brief period
when [his son] Amir Feisal was established as king of Syria, he
attempted to keep the pan-Arab alive. ‘We are one people,’ he said in
May 1919, ‘living in the region which is bounded by the sea to the
east, the south, and the west, and by the Taurus mountains to the
north.’ Most significantly, he was also fond of saying ‘We are Arabs
before being Muslims, and Muhammed is an Arab before being a
prophet.’ This was the germ of a secular Arab nationalism. But within
a year Feisal was expelled from Syria and, although the British
installed him in Iraq, the Arab peoples of whom he spoke were
divided by new national frontiers.
“In the years following the First World War, therefore, there were
two contrary trends among the eastern Arabs. One of these trends was
the development of territorial nationalism in the new nation-states as
they became involved in a struggle for full independence from Britain
and France. This required the creation of a national identity, and it
was sustained by the ambitions and rivalries of the national leaders.
The House of Saud was hostile and suspicious towards the
Hashemites, and there was rivalry between the Hashemites of Iraq and
Transjordan.
“The opposing trend was the aspiration towards Arab unity based
on the feeling, to which all Arabs subscribed to some extent, that they
had been artificially divided in order to weaken them and keep them
under Western tutelage. Unity was necessary for Arab self-protection
and renaissance. The growing awareness that the Zionists, with the
help of the West, aimed to seize as much of Arab Palestine as they
could was the strongest factor in mobilizing Arab opinion, which was
frustrated but not restrained by the fact that so little that was effective
could be done to help the Palestinian Arabs.
“Islam was and remains a uniquely potent element in Arab

nationalism. Muslim militants, such as the Muslim Brotherhood,
maintained that nationalism and Islam were incompatible since all
Muslims of all races from China to Morocco were members of the same
great Islamic nation or umma. Pan-Arab intellectuals attempted to
demonstrate to the contrary that Arabism and Islam are mutually
inclusive. As Abdul Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s first secretary-
general, said in a lecture in 1943, the ideals of Islam were the same as
those of modern Arab nationalism and of the Arab nation which aimed
to take its rightful place in the world and resume the mission which
Muhammad had inaugurated. But the debate was largely artificial…
The House of Saud, keepers of the holy places of Islam, have never
390
had any problem about reconciling their Arab and Islamic
aspirations…” 718
The Arab nation that stood out as something of an exception among

the others was Egypt, partly because there was no consensus that they
were in fact Arabs, partly because they had had a long and famous
history under the Pharaohs long before the Arabs burst out of the
Arabian desert, and partly because they had a significant Christian
minority (both Greek Orthodox and Monophysite Copts). Even when
Egypt’s constitutional monarchy under King Farouk acquired special
importance during the Second World War because of the hundreds of
thousands of Allied soldiers based there, the Egyptians themselves
were reluctant to see their country as the focus of Arab unity. Thus “in
December 1942 Nuri al-Said put forward a scheme for the unification
of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan with ‘semi-autonomy’ for
the Jews in Palestine, as a first step towards Arab unity. Egypt was not
included. Another scheme, which was proposed by King Ibn Saud’s
friend and adviser the British Arabist H. St. John Philby, was for the
Saudi monarch to head an Arab federation with an autonomous Jewish
state in Palestine. This found favour with the Gentile Zionist Winston
Churchill and the Zionist leadership. Again, Egypt was excluded.
However, despite Ibn Saud’s high prestige, which caused both
Churchill and Roosevelt to imagine him as ‘king of the Arabs’, all such
schemes were impractical because of the enmity between the Saudies
and the Hashemites – neither would ever accept the others’ leadership.
“However, the British Foreign Office was in favour of closer ties

between the Arab states, provided that Western interests could be
maintained. A major factor was the hope that it could be easier to
solve the Palestine problem within a broader Arab framework. From
May 1941 onwards, Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, made
repeated statements that Britain favoured any scheme that
commanded general approval among the Arabs for strengthening the
cultural, economic and political ties between the Arab states. Britain
now accepted that Egypt – the site of the Middle East Supply Centre
and focus of the Allied war effort in the region would make the best
headquarters for any Western-sponsored Arab federation. Moreover,
the Wafd government led by Nahas, in wartime alliance with Britain,
had begun to be attracted by the concept of an Egyptian-led Arab
union. King Farouk was equally determined that Egypt should not be
left out. Reluctantly Nuri al-Said and other Arab leaders came to
accept the inevitable: there was no alternative to Egypt. The last act of
the Wafd government before it was driven out of office in October
1944 was to sign the Protocol of Alexandria with the six other

718 Mansfield, op. cit., pp. 228-229, 230.
391
independent Arab states which led to the foundation of the Arab
League in the following year…” 719
If Egypt was important to Britain above all because of the Suez

Canal, Persia was even more important because of her possession of
that most important commodity of the twentieth century, oil, in which
Britain had a commanding stake through the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company. By 1930 Persia was the fourth-largest producer after the
United States, Russia and Venezuela. The question was: what kind of
government would emerge there – a secularist one that might be
expected to cooperate with the western powers and their commercial
interests, or a theocratic one led by Shiite mullahs that might be
expected to be less favourable to western interests?
Mansfield writes: “Because of public disillusion with the long

experience of corrupt and incompetent monarchy, there was
widespread support for a republic. The religious leaders, who feared
the consequences of Kemal Ataturk’s abolition of the caliphate and
institution of a secular republic, opposed such a change, however,
Reza Khan therefore decided to retain the monarchy and make himself
shah. On 31 October 1925, by a large majority, the Majlis [parliament]
declared the end of the Qajar dynasty. A new constituent assembly
then vested the crown in Reza Shah, with the right of succession to his
heirs. He took the name of Pahlavi for his dynasty. In 1935 he
officially changed the name of the country from Persia to Iran.
“Although it was the mullahs who had helped to make him shah,
he regarded most of them as backward and reactionary. In fact in
many respects he modelled his regime on that of Ataturk as he
embarked on a policy of westernization. He introduced a French
judicial system which challenged the competence of the religious
courts. Civil offices were opened for marriage, education was
reorganized on Western lines and literacy steadily increased. The
University of Teheran was established in 1935, with a number of
Europeans on the staff. In 1936 women were compelled to discard the
veil and European costume was made obligatory for both sexes. Reza
Shah pursued his policy of pacifying and unifying the country – a task
which had been beyond the competence of the Qajar shahs – by
subduing the semi-independent tribes. The Bakhtiaris and Kashgars
were placed under the rule of military officers.
“Improved communications were vital for the unification of the

empire’s extensive territories. The German Junkers company
organized an internal air service. Postal services and

719 Mansfield, op. cit., pp. 230-231.
392
telecommunications were vastly improved. American and European
engineers helped to build roads and railways. The construction of a
Trans-Iranian Railway from the Caspian Sea to the Gulf was a project
for which the shah aroused the enthusiasm of the whole nation.
“Progress meant industrialization, and a range of new textile, steel,

cement and other factories were established. Some of them were
profitable.
“Reza Shah’s firm rule and national assertiveness raised Iran’s

international standing and increased its bargaining power. He
denounced all treaties which conferred extraterritorial rights on the
subjects of foreign powers. In a dispute with the Soviet government
over the Caspian fisheries, he secured a compromise in the formation
of a Persian-Russian company to exploit the fisheries. To achieve his
aim of improving the meagre revenues from the Anglo-Persian Oil
Company, he was prepared to risk of cancelling the concession in
1932. Britain referred the matter to the League of Nations, and the
dispute ended in 1933 with a compromise under which Persia received
substantially better terms.” 720
Shocked by its defeat in the Great War, Islam was relatively

quiescent in this period. But underneath the surface, anti-western and
anti-Christian passions seethed… In 1937 the English Catholic writer
Hilaire Belloc wrote prophetically: “Millions of modern people . . . have
forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it.
They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a
foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most
formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and
may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has
been in the past.” 721

720Mansfield, op. cit., pp. 212-213.
721Belloc, “The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed”. See Maureen
Mullarkey, “80 Years Ago, Hilaire Belloc Predicted Radical Islam’s Re-Emergence
Because Of Secularization”, The Federalist, July 20, 2017,
http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/20/80-years-ago-hilaire-belloc-predicted-
radical-islams-re-emergence-cultural-relativism/
393
38. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH DECENTRALIZED
On April 12, Patriarch Tikhon’s will of January 7, 1925 was discovered and read
out. It said that in the event of the Patriarch’s death and the absence of the first two
candidates for the post of patriarchal locum tenens, Metropolitans Cyril of Kazan
and Agathangel of Yaroslavl, “our patriarchal rights and duties, until the lawful
election of a new patriarch,… pass to his Eminence Peter, metropolitan of Krutitsa.”
At the moment of the Patriarch’s death, Metropolitans Cyril and Agathangel were
in exile and unable to rule the Church. Therefore the 59 assembled hierarchs
decided that “Metropolitan Peter cannot decline from the obedience given him
and… must enter upon the duties of the patriarchal locum tenens.”722
Metropolitan Peter proved to be a strong rock against which the waves of the
atheists and renovationists beat in vain. In an epistle dated July 28, 1925, he
declared concerning the renovationists: “In the holy Church of God only that is
lawful which is approved by the God-ordained ecclesiastical government,
preserved by succession since the time of the Apostles. All arbitrary acts,
everything that has been done by the new-church party without the approval of the
most holy Patriarch now at rest with God, everything that is now done without our
approval – all this has no validity in accordance with the canons of the holy Church
(Apostolic canon 34; Council of Antioch, canon 9), for the true Church is one, and
the grace of the most Holy Spirit residing in her is one, for there can be no two
Churches or two graces. ‘There is one Body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in
one hope of your calling; one Lord, one Faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of
all’ (Ephesians. 4.4-6).”723
Meanwhile, Tuchkov initiated discussions with Peter with regard to “legalizing”

the Church. This “legalization” promised to relieve the Church’s rightless position,
but on the following conditions:
1) the issuing of a declaration of a pre-determined content;

2) the exclusion from the ranks of the bishops of those who were displeasing to
the authorities;
3) the condemnation of the émigré bishops; and
4) the participation of the government, in the person of Tuchkov, in the future
activities of the Church.724
However, Metropolitan Peter refused to accept these conditions or sign the text
of the declaration Tuchkov offered him. For, as he once said to Tuchkov: “You’re all
liars. You give nothing, except promises. And now please leave the room, we are
about to have a meeting.”

722 M.E. Gubonin, Akty Sviateishago Patriarkha Tikhona (The Acts of His Holiness
Patriarch Tikhon), Moscow, 1994, p. 413.

394
On December 12, Metropolitan Peter was imprisoned in the Lubyanka. The other
locum tenentes, Metropolitans Cyril and Agathangel, had already been exiled.
There followed a tussle for power between different Church parties claiming to be
the lawful deputies of Peter which was eventually won by Metropolitan Sergius
(Stragorodsky) of Nizhni-Novgorod, the former renovationist. The communists had
removed the last canonical leaders of the Russian Church, and they were ready
now to place their own candidate on the throne of all the Russias…
On June 7, 1926 a group of bishops imprisoned on Solovki issued an epistle that

squarely faced up to the problems of Church-State relations in the Soviet Union.
Although the Orthodox Church had cooperated with many kinds of regime in her
history, there were definite limits to such cooperation, the bishops said, with regard
to the communist state. “The Church recognizes spiritual principles of existence;
Communism rejects them. The Church believes in the living God, the Creator of the
world, the Leader of Her life and destinies; Communism denies His existence,
believing in the spontaneity of the world’s existence and in the absence of rational,
ultimate causes of its history. The Church assumes that the purpose of human life is
in the heavenly fatherland, even if She lives in conditions of the highest
development of material culture and general well-being; Communism refuses to
recognize any other purpose of mankind’s existence than terrestrial welfare. The
ideological differences between the Church and the State descend from the apex of
philosophical observations to the region of immediately practical significance, the
sphere of ethics, justice and law, which Communism considers the conditional
result of class struggle, assessing phenomena in the moral sphere exclusively in
terms of utility. The Church preaches love and mercy; Communism – camaraderie
and merciless struggle. The Church instils in believers humility, which elevates the
person; Communism debases man by pride. The Church preserves chastity of the
body and the sacredness of reproduction; Communism sees nothing else in marital
relations than the satisfaction of the instincts. The Church sees in religion a life-
bearing force which does not only guarantee for men his eternal, foreordained
destiny, but also serves as the source of all the greatness of man’s creativity, as the
basis of his earthly happiness, sanity and welfare; Communism sees religion as
opium, inebriating the people and relaxing their energies, as the source of their
suffering and poverty. The Church wants to see religion flourish; Communism
wants its death. Such a deep contradiction in the very basis of their
Weltanschauungen precludes any intrinsic approximation or reconciliation
between the Church and the State, as there cannot be any between affirmation and
negation, between yes and no, because the very soul of the Church, the condition of
Her existence and the sense of Her being, is that which is categorically denied by
Communism.
“The Church cannot attain such an approximation by any compromises or

concessions, by any partial changes in Her teaching or reinterpretation of it in the
spirit of Communism. Pitiful attempts of this kind were made by the renovationists:
one of them declared it his task to instil into the consciousness of believers the idea
that Communism is in its essence indistinguishable from Christianity, and that the
Communist State strives for the attainment of the same aims as the Gospel, but by
its own means, that is, not by the power of religious conviction, but by the path of
395
compulsion. Others recommended a review of Christian dogmatics in such a way
that its teaching about the relationship of God to the world would not remind one
of the relationship of a monarch to his subjects and would rather correspond to
republican conceptions. Yet others demanded the exclusion from the calendar of
saints ‘of bourgeois origin’ and their removal from church veneration. These
attempts, which were obviously insincere, produced a profound feeling of
indignation among believing people.
“The Orthodox Church will never stand upon this unworthy path and will never,
either in whole or in part, renounce her teaching of the Faith that has been
winnowed through the holiness of past centuries, for one of the eternally shifting
moods of society…”725
On June 10, Metropolitan Sergius issued an address to the archpastors, pastors

and flock of the Russian Church in the same spirit, noting that there were certain
irreconcilable differences between the Church and the State. At the same time,
however, he argued for the necessity of the Church being legalized by the State.
The question of legalization proved to be the Achilles’ heel through which the
communists took control of the official Church.
In December Sergius was arrested, so Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd took

over as Peter’s deputy, in accordance with the latter’s will of one year before.726 But
Joseph was prevented from leaving Yaroslavl by the authorities, so he handed the
leadership of the Church to his deputies: Archbishop Cornelius (Sobolev),
Archbishop Thaddeus (Uspensky) and Archbishop Seraphim (Samoilovich) of
Uglich. On December 29, Metropolitan Joseph was arrested, and on the same day
Archbishop Seraphim wrote that he was taking upon himself the duties of the
deputy of the patriarchal locum tenens.727
In the same month of December, 1926, Tuchkov proposed to Metropolitan Peter,

who was in prison in Suzdal, that he renounce his locum tenancy. Peter refused,
and then sent a message to everyone through a fellow prisoner that he would
“never under any circumstances leave his post and would remain faithful to the
Orthodox Church to death itself”.728
Then, on January 1, 1927, while he was in Perm on his way to exile on the island
of Khe in Siberia, Metropolitan Peter confirmed Sergius as his deputy, being
apparently unaware of the recent changes in the leadership of the Church. 729
Though he came to regret this decision, Metropolitan Peter was not able to revoke it

725 Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj Tserkvi 1917-1945 (The Tragedy of the Russian
Church, 1917-1945), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 417-20.

726 Gubonin, op. cit., p. 422. Peter’s choice of deputies was: Sergius of Nizhni-
Novgorod, Michael of the Ukraine, and Joseph of Rostov, in that order.

727 If Archbishop Seraphim was in prison, then Metropolitan Joseph decreed that
the bishops were to govern their dioceses independently.

396
officially from his remote exile. And Metropolitan Sergius now acted as if he did
not exist…
At the beginning of March, Archbishop Seraphim was summoned from Uglich

to Moscow and interrogated for three days by the GPU. He was offered a Synod,
and indicated who should be its members. Seraphim refused, and put forward his
own list of names, which included Metropolitan Cyril.
“But he’s in prison,” they said.
“Then free him,” said the archbishop.
The GPU then presented him with the familiar conditions for legalization.
Gustavson writes: “He refused outrightly without entering into discussions,

pointing out that he was not entitled to decide such questions without the advice of
his imprisoned superiors. When he was asked whom he would appoint as his
executive deputy he is said to have answered that he would turn over the Church
to the Lord Himself. The examining magistrate was said to have looked at him full
of wonder and to have replied:
“’All the others have appointed deputies…’
“To this Seraphim countered: ‘But I lay the Church in the hands of God, our
Lord. I am doing this, so that the whole world may know what freedom Orthodox
Christianity is enjoying in our free State.’”730
This was a decisive moment, for the central hierarch of the Church was
effectively declaring the Church’s decentralization. And not before time. For with
the imprisonment of the last of the three possible locum tenentes there was really
no canonical basis for establishing a central administration for the Church before
the convocation of a Local Council. But this was prevented by the communists. The
system of deputies of the deputy of the locum tenens had no basis in Canon Law or
precedent in the history of the Church. And if it was really the case that the Church
could not exist without a first hierarch and central administration, then the awful
possibility existed that with the fall of the first hierarch the whole Church would
fall, too…

730 Gustavson, The Catacomb Church, Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1960. See
also N.A., op. cit., p. 18, and a tape recorded conversation with Protopriest
Michael Ardov in 1983, Church News, vol. 13, N 11 (112), p. 6.
397
39. THE DECLARATION OF METROPOLITAN SERGIUS
On March 20, 1927 Metropolitan Sergius was released from prison and was
given back the reins of the Church by Archbishop Seraphim.731 On March 28
Metropolitan Cyril was given another term in exile – and it is clear from the court
records that the main reason was his secret election as patriarch by the confessing
bishops. 732 But why, then, was not Metropolitan Sergius not imprisoned, too?
Evidently, he had reached an agreement with the authorities, while Metropolitan
Cyril (together with Metropolitan Agathangel) had rejected any such agreement.
Indeed, the conversation between Tuchkov and Metropolitan Cyril concerning the
conditions of the latter’s leadership of the Church is reported to have gone
something like this:-
“If we have to remove some hierarch, will you help us in this?”
“Yes, if the hierarch appears to be guilty of some ecclesiastical transgression… In

the contrary case, I shall tell him directly, ‘The authorities are demanding this of me,
but I have nothing against you.’”
“No!” replied Tuchkov. “You must try to find an appropriate reason and remove
him as if on your own initiative.”
To this the hierarch replied: “Eugene Nikolayevich! You are not the cannon, and
I am not the shot, with which you want to blow up our Church from within!”733
But they found the shot – Metropolitan Sergius, who had played a leading role
in the first Church revolution in 1917 and in the second, renovationist one in 1922,
when he officially declared the renovationists’ Higher Church Authority to be “the
only canonical, lawful supreme ecclesiastical authority, and we consider all the
decrees issuing from it to be completely lawful and binding” 734 . In 1923
Metropolitan Sergius had supported the renovationists’ defrocking of Patriarch
Tikhon as “a traitor to Orthodoxy”. True, on August 27, 1923, he was forced to offer
public repentance for his betrayal of Orthodoxy in renovationism. But as
Hieromartyr Damascene later pointed out, he had not been in a hurry to offer
repentance… Moreover, as the Catholic writer Deinber points out, “the fact of the
liberation of Metropolitan Sergius at this moment, when the repressions against the
Church throughout Russia were all the time increasing, when his participation in
the affair of the election of Metropolitan Cyril, for which a whole series of bishops
had paid with exile, was undoubted, immediately aroused anxiety, which was

731 In later years, after Sergius’ betrayal of the Church, Archbishop Seraphim is
reported to have reasserted his rights as patriarchal locum tenens. See Michael
Khlebnikov, “O tserkovnoj situatsii v Kostrome v 20-30-e gody” (On the Church
Situation in Kostroma in the 20s and 30s), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life), 49,
N 5 (569), May, 1997, p. 19.
732 http://www.pstbi.ru/cgi-htm/db.exe/no_dbpath/docum/cnt/ans, “Kirill
(Smirnov Konstantin Ilarionovich)”.
734 The Living Church, NN 4-5, 14 July, 1922; Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 218-19.
398
strengthened when, on April 25 / May 8, a Synod was unexpectedly convoked in
Moscow. It became certain that between Metropolitan Sergius, during his
imprisonment, and the Soviet government, i.e. the GPU, some sort of agreement
had been established, which placed both him and the bishops close to him in a
quite exceptional position relative to the others. Metropolitan Sergius received the
right to live in Moscow, which right he had not enjoyed even before his arrest.
When the names of the bishops invited to join the Synod were made known, then
there could be no further doubts concerning the capitulation of Metropolitan
Sergius before Soviet power. The following joined the Synod: Archbishop Sylvester
(Bratanovsky) – a former renovationist; Archbishop Alexis Simansky – a former
renovationist, appointed to the Petrograd see by the Living Church after the
execution of Metropolitan Benjamin [Kazansky]; Archbishop Philip [Gumilevsky] –
a former beglopopovets, i.e. one who had left the Orthodox Church for the sect of
the beglopopovtsi; Metropolitan Seraphim [Alexandrov] of Tver, a man whose
connections with the OGPU were known to all Russia and whom no-one
trusted…”735
On May 20, the OGPU officially recognized this Synod, which suggested that
Metropolitan Sergius had agreed to the terms of legalization that Patriarch Tikhon
and Metropolitan Peter had rejected. One of Sergius’ closest supporters, Bishop
Metrophan of Aksaisk, had once declared that “the legalisation of the church
administration is a sign of heterodoxy”… In any case, Metropolitan Sergius and his
“Patriarchal Holy Synod” now wrote to the bishops enclosing the OGPU document
and telling them that their diocesan councils should now seek registration from the
local organs of Soviet power. Then, in June, Sergius wrote to Metropolitan Evlogy
of Paris directing him to sign a declaration of loyalty to the Soviet power. He
agreed… On July 14, in ukaz № 93, Sergius demanded that all clergy abroad should
sign a formal pledge to cease criticizing the Soviet government. It also stated that
any clergyman abroad who refused to sign such would no longer be considered to
be a part of the Moscow Patriarchate. This ukaz, which completely contradicted his
previous ukaz of September 12, 1926, which blessed the hierarchs abroad to form
their own independent administration, even included the actual text of the pledge
that was to be signed: “I, the undersigned, promise that because of my actual
dependence upon the Moscow Patriarchate, I will not permit myself in either my
social activities nor especially in my Church work, any expression that could in the
least way be considered as being disloyal with regard to the Soviet government.”736
The clergy abroad were given until October 15 to sign this pledge. The Council
of Bishops of the Russian Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), in their encyclical
dated August 26, 1927, refused this demand and declared: "The free portion of the
Church of Russia must terminate relations with the ecclesiastical administration in
Moscow [i.e., with Metropolitan Sergius and his synod], in view of the fact that
normal relations with it are impossible and because of its enslavement by the

Regelson, op. cit., p. 415; Gubonin, op. cit., p. 407.
735
Quoted in Protopriest Alexander Lebedeff, “Is the Moscow Patriarchate the

736
‘Mother Church’ of the ROCOR”, Orthodox@ListServ. Indiana.Edu, 24 December,

1997.
399
atheist regime, which is depriving it of freedom to act according to its own will and
of freedom to govern the Church in accordance with the canons."
However, Metropolitan Evlogy of Paris, agreed to sign, “but on condition that

the term ‘loyalty’ means for us the apoliticisation of the émigré Church, that is, we
are obliged not to make the ambon a political arena, if this will relieve the difficult
situation of our native Mother Church; but we cannot be ‘loyal’ to Soviet power: we
are not citizens of the USSR, and the USSR does not recognise us as such, and
therefore the political demand is from the canonical point of view non-obligatory
for us…”
On July 5, 1928, the Hierarchical Synod of ROCOR decreed: “The present ukaz
[of Sergius] introduces nothing new into the position of the Church Abroad. It
repeats the same notorious ukaz of his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon in 1922, which
was decisively rejected by the whole Church Abroad in its time.” In response to this
refusal, Metropolitan Sergius expelled the ROCOR hierarchs from membership of
the Moscow Patriarchate. On September 13, Metropolitan Eulogius wrote to Sergius
asking that he be given autonomy. On September 24 Sergius replied with a refusal.
So the first schism between the Russian Church inside and outside Russia took
place as a result of the purely political demands of Sergius’ Moscow Patriarchate.
The refusal of ROCOR was supported by the Solovki bishops: “The epistle
threatens those church-servers who have emigrated with exclusion from the
Moscow Patriarchate on the grounds of their political activity, that is, it lays an
ecclesiastical punishment upon them for political statements, which contradicts the
resolution of the All-Russian Council of 1917-18 of August 3/16, 1918, which made
clear the canonical impermissibility of such punishments, and rehabilitated all
those people who were deprived of their orders for political crimes in the past.”737
Meanwhile, ominous events were taking place in Georgia. “Between June 21 and
27, 1927,” writes Fr. Elijah Melia, “a Council elected as Catholicos Christopher
Tsitskichvili. On August 6 he wrote to the Ecumenical Patriarch Basil III who
replied addressing him as Catholicos. The new Catholicos entirely changed the
attitude of the ecclesiastical hierarchy towards the Soviet power, officially declared
militant atheist, in favour of submission and collaboration with the
Government.”738
During a synodal session under the presidency of the new Catholicos, it was
decided to introduce the new style into the Georgian Church. However, the reform
was rejected by the people and the majority of the priests. So it fell through and
was repealed within a few months. All this, according to Boris Sokolov, took place
under the influence of the head of the Georgian KGB, Laurence Pavlovich Beria,
who wrote in 1929: “By our lengthy labours we succeeded in creating an opposition
to Catholicos Ambrose and the then leading group in the Georgian Church, and…

Regelson, op. cit., p. 436.
737
Melia, "The Orthodox Church of Georgia", A Sign of God: Orthodoxy 1964,

738
Athens: Zoe, 1964, p. 113.
400
in January, 1927 we succeeded in completely wresting the reins of the government
of the Georgian Church from the hands of Ambrose, and in removing him and his
supporters from a leading role in the Georgian Church. In April, after the death of
Catholicos Ambrose, Metropolitan Christopher was elected Catholicos. He is
completely loyal to Soviet power, and already the Council that elected Christopher
has declared its loyalty to the power and has condemned the politics and activity of
Ambrose, and in particular, the Georgian emigration.”739 There followed, as Fr.
Samson Zateishvili writes, “the persecution of clergy and believers, the dissolution
of monasteries, the destruction of churches and their transformation into
warehouses and cattle-sheds… The situation of the Church in Georgia was,
perhaps, still more tragic and hopeless [than in the Russian Church], insofar as the
new trials were imposed on old, unhealed wounds which remained from previous
epochs.”740
In October, 1930, the future Archbishop Leontius of Chile noted: “I arrived in

Tbilisi in the evening,” he wrote in his Memoirs, and went straight with my letter to
the cathedral church of Sion… The clergy of the cathedral were so terrified of the
Bolsheviks that they were afraid to give me shelter in their houses and gave me a
place to sleep in the cathedral itself.”741
As if taking his cue from the Georgians, on July 16/29, Metropolitan Sergius
issued the infamous Declaration that has been the basis of the existence of the
Sovietized Moscow Patriarchate ever since, and which was to cause the greatest
and most destructive schism in the history of the Orthodox Church since the fall of
the Papacy in the eleventh century.
First he pretended that Patriarch Tikhon had always been aiming to have the
Church legalized by the State, but had been frustrated by the émigré hierarchs and
by his own death. There is a limited truth in this – but it was not the émigré
hierarchs that frustrated the patriarch, nor did he want the kind of legalization
Sergius wanted… Then he went on: “At my proposal and with permission from the
State, a blessed Patriarchal Synod has been formed by those whose signatures are
affixed to this document at its conclusion. Missing are the Metropolitan of
Novgorod, Arsenius, who has not arrived yet, and Archbishop Sebastian of
Kostroma, who is ill. Our application that this Synod be permitted to take up the
administration of the Orthodox All-Russian Church has been granted. Now our
Orthodox Church has not only a canonically legal central administration but a
central administration that is legal also according to the law of the State of the
Soviet Union. We hope that this legalization will be gradually extended to the
lower administrative units, to the dioceses and the districts. It is hardly necessary to
explain the significance and the consequences of this change for our Orthodox

739 Monk Benjamin (Gomarteli), Letopis’ Tserkovnykh Sobytij (1928-1938) (Chronicle
of Church Events (1928-1938), vol. 2, pp. 5-6.

740 Zateishvili, "Gruzinskaia Tserkov' i polnota pravoslavia" (The Georgian Church
and the Fullness of Orthodoxy), in Bessmertny.and Filatov, op. cit., p. 422.

741 A.B. Psarev, "Zhizneopisanie Arkhiepiskopa Leontia Chilijskogo (1904-1971
gg.)" (A Life of Archbishop Leontius of Chile (1904-1971), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn'

(Orthodox Life), N 3 (555), March, 1996, p. 20.
401
Church, her clergy and her ecclesiastical activity. Let us therefore thank the Lord,
Who has thus favoured our Church. Let us also give thanks before the whole
people to the Soviet Government for its understanding of the religious needs of the
Orthodox population. At the same time let us assure the Government that we will
not misuse the confidence it has shown us.
“In undertaking now, with the blessings of the Lord, the work of this Synod, we
clearly realize the greatness of our task and that of all the representatives of the
Church. We must show not only with words but with deeds, that not only people
indifferent to the Orthodox Faith or traitors to the Orthodox Church can be loyal
citizens of the Soviet Union and loyal subjects of the Soviet power, but also the
most zealous supporters of the Orthodox Church, to whom the Church with all her
dogmas and traditions, with all her laws and prescriptions, is as dear as Truth and
Life.
“We want to be Orthodox, and at the same time to see the Soviet Union as our
civil Fatherland, whose triumphs and successes are also our triumphs and
successes, whose failures are our failures. Every attack, boycott, public catastrophe
or an ordinary case of assassination, as the recent one in Warsaw, will be regarded
as an attack against ourselves…”
Lebedev comments on this: “This murder in Warsaw was the murder by B.

Koverdaya of the Bolshevik Voikoff (also known as Weiner), who was one of the
principal organizers of the murder of the Imperial Family, which fact was well
known then, in 1927. So Sergius let the Bolsheviks clearly understand that he and
his entourage were at one with them in all their evil deeds up to and including
regicide.” 742
Metropolitan Sergius continued: “Even if we remain Orthodox, we shall yet do

our duties as citizens of the Soviet Union ‘not only for wrath but also for
conscience’s sake’ (Romans 13.5), and we hope that with the help of God and
through working together and giving support to one another we shall be able to
fulfil this task.
“We can be hindered only by that which hindered the construction of Church
life on the bases of loyalty in the first years of Soviet power. This is an inadequate
consciousness of the whole seriousness of what has happened in our country. The
establishment of Soviet power has seemed to many like some kind of
misunderstanding, something coincidental and therefore not long lasting. People
have forgotten that there are no coincidences for the Christian and that in what has
happened with us, as in all places and at all times, the same right hand of God is
acting, that hand which inexorably leads every nation to the end predetermined for
it. To such people who do not want to understand ‘the signs of the times’, it may
also seem that it is wrong to break with the former regime and even with the
monarchy, without breaking with Orthodoxy… Only ivory-tower dreamers can

742 Lebedev, “Dialogue between the ROCA and the MP: How and Why?” Great
Lent, 1998.
402
think that such an enormous society as our Orthodox Church, with the whole of its
organisation, can have a peaceful existence in the State while hiding itself from the
authorities. Now, when our Patriarchate, fulfilling the will of the reposed Patriarch,
has decisively and without turning back stepped on the path of loyalty, the people
who think like this have to either break themselves and, leaving their political
sympathies at home, offer to the Church only their faith and work with us only in
the name of faith, or (if they cannot immediately break themselves) at least not
hinder us, and temporarily leave the scene. We are sure that they will again, and
very soon, return to work with us, being convinced that only the relationship to the
authorities has changed, while faith and Orthodox Christian life remain
unshaken… ”743
An article in Izvestia immediately noted the essence of the declaration – a return

to renovationism: “The far-sighted part of the clergy set out on this path already in
1922”. 744 So “sergianism”, as Sergius’ position came to be known, was “neo-
renovationism”, and therefore subject to the same condemnation as the earlier
renovationism of “the Living Church”. As recently as November, 2008 the True
Orthodox Church of Russia 745 has defined sergianism as “a neo-renovationist
schism”.
The radical error that lay at the root of this declaration lay in the last sentence
quoted, in the idea that, in an antichristian state whose aim was the extirpation of
all religion, it was possible to preserve loyalty to the State while “faith and
Orthodox Christian life remained unshaken”. This attitude presupposed that it was
possible, in the Soviet Union as in Ancient Rome, to draw a clear line between
politics and religion. But in practice, even more than in theory, this line proved
impossible to draw. For the Bolsheviks, there was no such dividing line; for them,
everything was ideological, everything had to be in accordance with their ideology,
there could be no room for disagreement, no private spheres into which the state
and its ideology did not pry. Unlike most of the Roman emperors, who allowed the
Christians to order their own lives in their own way so long as they showed loyalty
to the state, the Bolsheviks insisted in imposing their own ways upon the Christians
in every sphere: in family life (civil marriage only, divorce on demand, children
spying on parents), in education (compulsory Marxism), in economics
(dekulakization, collectivization), in military service (the oath of allegiance to
Lenin), in science (Darwinism, Lysenkoism), in art (socialist realism), and in
religion (the requisitioning of valuables, registration, commemoration of the
authorities at the Liturgy, reporting of confessions by the priests). Resistance to any
one of these demands was counted as "anti-Soviet behaviour", i.e. political disloyalty.
Therefore it was no use protesting one's political loyalty to the regime if one
refused to accept just one of these demands. According to the Soviet interpretation
of the word: "Whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one has become guilty of all
of it" (James 2.10), such a person was an enemy of the people. Metropolitan Sergius’
identification of his and his Church’s joys and sorrows with the joys and sorrows of

743 Regelson, op. cit., pp. 431-32.
744 Izvestia, in Zhukov, op. cit., p. 40.
745 At its Council in Odessa under the presidency of Archbishop Tikhon of Omsk
and Siberia.
403
Soviet communism placed the souls of the millions who followed him in the most
serious jeopardy.746
The publication of the Declaration was greeted with a storm of criticism. Its
opponents saw in it a more subtle version of renovationism. Even its supporters
and neutral commentators from the West have recognized that it marked a radical
change in the relationship of the Church to the State.747

746 St. John Cassian writes: “You should know that in the world to come also you
will be judged in the lot of those with whom in this life you have been affected by
sharing in their gains or losses, their joys or their sorrows…” (cited by S. Brakus,
[ROCElaity] FW: Communists and Spies in cassocks, January 8, 2007).
747 Thus Professor William Fletcher comments: “This was a profound and important
change in the position of the Russian Orthodox Church, one which evoked a storm
of protest.” (The Russian Orthodox Church Underground, 1917-1971, Oxford
University Press, 1971, p. 57) Again, according to the Soviet scholar Titov, “after
the Patriarchal church changed its relationship to the Soviet State, undertaking a
position of loyalty, in the eyes of the believers any substantial difference
whatsoever between the Orthodox Church and the renovationists disappeared.”
(Fletcher, op. cit., p. 59) Again, according to Archimandrite (later Metropolitan)
John (Snychev), quoting from a renovationist source, in some dioceses in the Urals
up to 90% of parishes sent back Sergius’ declaration as a sign of protest.” (in
Regelson, op. cit., p. 434) Again, Donald Rayfield writes: “In 1927… Metropolitan
Sergi formally surrendered the Orthodox Church to the Bolshevik party and state.”
(Stalin and his Hangmen, London: Viking, 2004, p. 123)
404
40. THE BIRTH OF THE CATACOMB CHURCH
As was said above, the Declaration of Metropolitan Sergius created the most
serious schism in Orthodox Church history since the schism of the Papacy in
1054.748 If only a few had followed the traitor, the damage would have been limited
to the loss of those few souls. But in fact the majority followed him; which brought
down the just retribution of God in the form of the greatest persecution of the
Church in history…
The persecution began in the winter of 1927-28, which was critical in other ways
in the history of the Russian revolution. In that winter Stalin came to supreme
power in the Soviet Union, having banished his main rival, Trotsky, from the Party.
Now, perhaps, he felt secure enough to turn to his other main rival, the Church.
Before this watershed, although the pre-revolutionary State had been destroyed,
the economy amputated and enormous damage inflicted on the Church, with huge
numbers of churches and monasteries destroyed, 117 bishops in prison or exile749,
and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Christians martyred, the foundations
of the building of Holy Rus’ still stood: the mass of the population, most of the
peasants and many workers and intelligenty, still held to the Orthodox faith and
the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, while the structure of daily life in
the countryside remained largely unchanged. Moreover, in some vital respects
Holy Rus’ was reviving. Thus the spiritual authority of the Church had never been
higher, church attendance was up, and church activities of all kinds were on the
increase. E. Lopeshanskaia writes: “The Church was becoming a state within the
state… The prestige and authority of the imprisoned and persecuted clergy was
immeasurably higher than that of the clergy under the tsars.”750
Five years later, everything had changed. The official church was a slave of
Soviet power; the True Church, after suffering still more thousands of martyrdoms,
had gone underground. The structure of country life had been destroyed, with
most of the local churches destroyed and the peasants either “dekulakized” – that is,
exiled to the taiga or the steppe, with no provision for their shelter or food – or
“collectivized” – that is, deprived of all their private property and herded into state
farms where life was on a subsistence level. The result of all this was hunger:
physical hunger on a vast scale, as fourteen million starved to death in the Ukraine,

748 Sergius Chechuga, “Deklaratsia”, ili Novij Velikij Raskol (The “Declaration”, or a
New Great Schism), St. Petersburg, 2006) compares it to the schism of the Old
Ritualists in the seventeenth century. There is indeed a resemblance, but the
schismatics in the seventeenth century were those who rejected the Orthodox State,
whereas the schismatics after 1927 were those who identified their interests with
the interests of the theomachist State.
749 F.A. Mackenzie, The Russian Crucifixion, London, p. 84.
750 E.L., Episkopy-Ispovedniki (Bishop-Confessors), San Francisco, 1971, p. 70. See
Vladimir Rusak, Svidetel'stvo Obvinenia (Witness for the Prosecution), Jordanville:

Holy Trinity Monastery, 1988, vol. II, pp. 167-191; D. Pospielovksy, "Podvig Very v
Ateisticheskom Gosudarstve" (The Exploit of Faith in the Atheist State), Grani
(Edges), N 147, 1988, pp. 227-265.
405
Kuban and Kazakhstan; and spiritual hunger, as the only true sources of spiritual
food were either destroyed or hidden underground.
Vladimir Rusak writes: “The Church was divided. The majority of clergy and
laymen, preserving the purity of ecclesiological consciousness, did not recognize
the Declaration… On this soil fresh arrests were made. All those who did not
recognize the Declaration were arrested and exiled to distant regions or confined in
prisons and camps. [In 1929] about 15 hierarchs who did not share the position of
Metropolitan Sergius were arrested. Metropolitan Cyril, the main ‘opponent’ of
Metropolitan Sergius, was exiled to Turukhansk in June-July. The arrest procedure
looked something like this: an agent of the GPU appeared before a bishop and put
him a direct question: what is your attitude to the Declaration of Metropolitan
Sergius? If the bishop replied that he did not recognize it, the agent drew the
conclusion: that means that you are a counter-revolutionary. The bishop was
arrested.”751
The first recorded verbal reaction of the anti-sergianists (or, as they now came to
be called, the “True Orthodox Christians”) came from the bishops imprisoned on
Solovki. On the initiative of Bishop Basil of Priluki, in a letter dated September
14/27, the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, they wrote: “The subjection of the
Church to the State’s decrees is expressed [in Sergius’ declaration] in such a
categorical and sweeping form that it could easily be understood in the sense of a
complete entanglement of Church and State… The Church cannot declare all the
triumphs and successes of the State to be Her own triumphs and successes. Every
government can occasionally make unwarranted, unjust and cruel decisions which
become obligatory to the Church by way of coercion, but which the Church cannot
rejoice in or approve of. One of the tasks of the present government is the
elimination of all religion. The government’s successes in this direction cannot be
recognized by the Church as Her own successes… The epistle renders to the
government ‘thanks before the whole people to the Soviet government for its
understanding of the religious needs of the Orthodox population’. An expression of
gratitude of such a kind on the lips of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church
cannot be sincere and therefore does not correspond to the dignity of the Church…
The epistle of the patriarchate sweepingly accepts the official version and lays all
the blame for the grievous clashes between the Church and the State on the
Church…
“In 1926 Metropolitan Sergius said that he saw himself only as a temporary
deputy of the patriarchal locum tenens and in this capacity as not empowered to
address pastoral messages to the entire Russian Church. If then he thought himself
empowered only to issue circular letters, why has he changed his mind now? The
pastoral message of Metropolitan Sergius and his Synod leads the Church into a
pact with the State. It was considered as such by its authors as well as by the
government. Sergius’ action resembles the political activities of the ‘Living Church’
and differs from them not in nature but only in form and scope…”752

751 Rusak, op. cit., p. 175; Gubonin, op. cit., p. 409.
406
Although over 20 bishops signed this epistle, the majority of them did not
consider Sergius’ declaration a reason for immediately breaking communion with
him. Metropolitan Cyril of Kazan wrote to an unknown person that the Solovki
bishops wanted to wait for the repentance of Sergius “until the convening of a
canonical Council… in the assurance that the Council could not fail to demand that
of him”.753
On October 21, Sergius directed all the clergy in Russia to commemorate the
Soviet authorities, and not the bishops who were in exile. The commemoration of
the authorities was seen by many as the boundary beyond which the Church would
fall away from Orthodoxy. And the refusal to commemorate the exiled hierarchs
implied that the hierarchs themselves were not Orthodox and constituted a break
with the tradition of commemorating exiled hierarchs that extended back to the
time of the Roman catacombs. Sergius was in effect cutting the faithful off from
their canonical hierarchs.
On October 25, Bishop Nicholas (Yarushevich) proclaimed in the cathedral of the

Resurrection of Christ in Petrograd the decision of the Provisional Synod, taken on
September 13, to transfer Metropolitan Joseph (Petrovykh) from Petrograd to
Odessa. This caused major disturbances in Petrograd, henceforth one of the major
centres of the True Orthodox Church. Joseph himself refused to obey Sergius,
regarding his transfer as “anti-canonical, ill-advised and pleasing to an evil intrigue
in which I will have no part”.754 He saw in it the hand of the OGPU. Certainly, the
fact that more than 40 bishops were transferred by Sergius in this period was one of
the main complaints of the confessing bishops against him.
On October 30 Joseph wrote to Sergius: “You made me metropolitan of

Leningrad without the slightest striving for it on my part. It was not without
disturbance and distress that I accepted this dangerous obedience, which others,
perhaps wisely (otherwise it would have been criminal) decisively declined…
Vladyko! Your firmness is yet able to correct everything and urgently put an end to
every disturbance and indeterminateness. It is true, I am not free and cannot now
serve my flock, but after all everybody understands this ‘secret’… Now anyone
who is to any degree firm and needed is unfree (and will hardly be free in the
future)… You say: this is what the authorities want; they are giving back their
freedom to exiled hierarchs on the condition that they change their former place of
serving and residence. But what sense or benefit can we derive from the leap-
frogging and shuffling of hierarchs that this has elicited, when according to the
spirit of the Church canons they are in an indissoluble union with their flock as
with a bride? Would it not be better to say: let it be, this false human mercy, which
is simply a mockery of our human dignity, which strives for a cheap effect, a
spectre of clemency. Let it be as it was before; it will be better like that. Somehow

753 Nicholas Balashov, “Esche raz o ‘deklaratsii’ i o ‘solidarnosti’ solovchan”
(Again on the ‘declaration’ and on ‘the solidarity of the Solovkians’), Vestnik

Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian Christian Movement), N
157, III-1989, pp. 197-198.
754 Gubonin, op. cit., pp. 516, 524.
407
we’ll get to the time when they finally understand that the eternal, universal Truth
cannot be conquered by exiles and vain torments… One compromise might be
permissible in the given case… Let them (the hierarchs) settle in other places as
temporarily governing them, but let them unfailingly retain their former title… I
cannot be reconciled in my conscience with any other scheme, I am absolutely
unable to recognize as correct my disgustingly tsarist-rasputinite transfer to the
Odessa diocese, which took place without any fault on my part or any agreement of
mine, and even without my knowledge. And I demand that my case be
immediately transferred from the competence of your Synod, in whose competence
I am not the only one to doubt, for discussion by a larger Council of bishops, to
which alone I consider myself bound to display my unquestioning obedience.”755
However, Metropolitan Sergius paid no attention to the disturbances in

Petrograd. Taking upon himself the administration of the diocese, he sent in his
place Bishop Alexis (Simansky), who was distrusted by the people because of his
role in the betrayal of Metropolitan Benjamin in 1922. So already, only three months
after the declaration, the new revolutionary cadres were being put in place… Then,
on October 31, Archimandrite Sergius (Zenkevich) was consecrated Bishop of
Detskoe Selo, although the canonical bishop, Gregory (Lebedev), was still alive but
languishing in a GPU prison. From that moment many parishioners stopped going
to churches where Metropolitan Sergius’ name was commemorated, and Bishop
Nicholas was not invited to serve.756
Meanwhile, antisergianist groups were forming in different parts of the country.

Thus between October 3 and 6 an antisergianist diocesan assembly took place in
Ufa, and on November 8 Archbishop Andrew of Ufa issued an encyclical from
Kzyl-Orda in which he said that “even if the lying Sergius repents, as he repented
three times before of renovationism, under no circumstances must he be received
into communion”. This encyclical quickly circulated throughout Eastern Russia and
Siberia.
In November, Bishop Victor of Glazov broke with Sergius. He had especially

noted the phrase in the declaration that “only ivory-tower dreamers can think that
such an enormous society as our Orthodox Church, with the whole of its
organisation, can have a peaceful existence in the State while hiding itself from the
authorities.” To Sergius himself Bishop Victor wrote: “The enemy has lured and
seduced you a second time with the idea of an organization of the Church. But if
this organization is bought for the price of the Church of Christ Herself no longer
remaining the house of Grace-giving salvation for men, and he who received the
organization ceases to be what he was – for it is written, ‘Let his habitation be made
desolate, and his bishopric let another take’ (Acts 1.20) – then it were better for us
never to have any kind of organization. What is the benefit if we, having become by
God’s Grace temples of the Holy Spirit, become ourselves suddenly worthless,
while at the same time receiving an organization for ourselves? No. Let the whole

Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 173-174.
755
V.V.Antonov, “Otvet na Deklaratsiu” (Reply to the Declaration), Russkij Pastyr’

756
(Russian Pastor), N 24, 1996, p. 73.
408
visible material world perish; let there be more important in our eyes the certain
perdition of the soul to which he who presents such pretexts for sin will be
subjected.” And he concluded that Sergius’ pact with the atheists was “not less than
any heresy or schism, but is rather incomparably greater, for it plunges a man
immediately into the abyss of destruction, according to the unlying word:
‘Whosoever shall deny Me before men…’ (Matthew 10.33).”757
At the same time antisergianism began to develop in the Ukraine with the
publication of the “Kievan appeal” by Schema-Archbishop Anthony (Abashidze),
Bishop Damascene of Glukhov and Fr. Anatolius Zhurakovsky. They wrote
concerning Sergius’ declaration: “Insofar as the deputy of the patriarchal locum
tenens makes declarations in the person of the whole Church and undertakes
responsible decisions without the agreement of the locum tenens and an array of
bishops, he is clearly going beyond the bounds of his prerogatives…” 758 In
December the Kievans were joined by two brother bishops – Archbishops Averky
and Pachomius (Kedrov).759
Typical of the attitude of True Orthodox Christians in the Ukraine was the letter
of the famous writer Sergius Alexandrovich Nilus to L.A. Orlov in February, 1928:
“As long as there is a church of God that is not of ‘the Church of the evildoers’, go
to it whenever you can; but if not, pray at home… They will say: ‘But where will
you receive communion? With whom? I reply: ‘The Lord will show you, or an
Angel will give you communion, for in ‘the Church of the evildoers’ there is not
and cannot be the Body and Blood of the Lord. Here in Chernigov, out of all the
churches only the church of the Trinity has remained faithful to Orthodoxy; but if it,
too, will commemorate the [sergianist] Exarch Michael, and, consequently, will
have communion in prayer with him, acting with the blessing of Sergius and his
Synod, then we shall break communion with it.”760
In Petrograd, probably the largest antisergianist group was being organized by

Bishop Demetrius of Gdov with the blessing of Metropolitan Joseph of Petrograd.
The “Josephites” were later to assume the leadership of the antisergianists in
Petrograd, Tver, Moscow, Voronezh and still further afield. On December 12, they
sent a delegation led by Bishop Demetrius and representing eight Petrograd
bishops, clergy and academics to Moscow to meet Sergius. Here the conversation
centred, not on Sergius’ canonical transgressions, but on the central issue of his
relationship to Soviet power. At one point Sergius said: “By my new church policy I
am saving the Church.” To which Archpriest Victorinus Dobronravov replied: “The

757 Cited in Andreyev, Russia's Catacomb Saints, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska
Press, 1982, pp. 141-143.

759 Archbishop Ambrose (von Sievers), “Katakombnaia Tserkov’: ‘Kochuiushchij’
Sobor 1928 g.” (The Catacomb Church: The ‘Nomadic’ Council of 1928), Russkoe
Pravoslavie (Russian Orthodoxy), N 3 (7), 1997, p. 3.
760 Sergius Nilus, “Pis’mo otnositel’no ‘sergianstva’”, Russkij Pastyr’, 28-29, II/III,
1997, pp. 180-189.
409
Church does not have need of salvation; the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
You, yourself, Vladyka, have need of salvation through the Church.”761
On December 15 Tuchkov, having received a secret report from Leningrad on

this meeting with Sergius, wrote the following in his own handwriting: “To
Comrade Polyansky. 1. Tell Leningrad that Sergius had a delegation with such-
and-such suggestions. 2. Suggest that the most active laymen be arrest under some
other pretenses. 3. Tell them that we will influence Sergius that he ban certain of the
oppositional bishops from serving, and let Erushevich then ban some of the
priests.”762
After further delegations and dialogues in this vein, Bishops Demetrius of Gdov
and Sergius of Narva separated from Sergius on December 26: “for the sake of the
peace of our conscience we reject the person and the works of our former leader
[predstoiatelia – Sergius was meant], who has unlawfully and beyond measure
exceeded his rights”. This was approved by Metropolitan Joseph (who had been
prevented from coming to Petrograd) on January 7.
In a letter to a Soviet archimandrite, Metropolitan Joseph rejected the charge of

being a schismatic and accused Sergius of being a schismatic. He went on: “The
defenders of Sergius say that the canons allow one to separate oneself from a
bishop only for heresy which has been condemned by a Council. Against this one
may reply that the deeds of Metropolitan Sergius may be sufficiently placed in this
category as well, if one has in mind such an open violation by him of the freedom
and dignity of the Church, One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. But beyond this, the
canons themselves could not foresee many things, and can one dispute that it is
even worse and more harmful than any heresy when one plunges a knife into the
Church’s very heart – Her freedom and dignity?… ‘Lest imperceptibly and little by
little we lose the freedom which our Lord Jesus Christ, the Liberator of all men, has
given us as a free gift by His Own Blood’ (8th Canon of the Third Ecumenical
Council)… Perhaps I do not dispute that ‘there are more of you at present than of
us’. And let it be said that ‘the great mass is not for me’, as you say. But I will never
consider myself a schismatic, even if I were to remain absolutely alone, as one of
the holy confessors once was. The matter is not at all one of quantity, do not forget
that for a minute: ‘The Son of God when He cometh shall He find faith on the
earth?’ (Luke 18.8). And perhaps the last ‘rebels’ against the betrayers of the
Church and the accomplices of Her ruin will be not only bishops and not
protopriests, but the simplest mortals, just as at the Cross of Christ His last gasp of
suffering was heard by a few simple souls who were close to Him…”763
It remained now to unite these scattered groups under a common leadership, or,
at any rate, under a common confession, through the convening of a Council of the
Catacomb Church… Now we can infer from a remark of Hieromartyr Maximus,
Bishop of Serpukhov, that there was some Catacomb Council in 1928 that

761 Andreyev, op. cit., p. 100.
763 Andreyev, op. cit., p. 100.
410
anathematized the Sergianists. 764 Another source has described a so-called
“Nomadic Council” attended at different times by over 70 bishops in 1928 which
likewise anathematized the Sergianists. But hard evidence for the existence of this
council has proved hard to obtain,765 and there are reasons for suspecting the
authenticity of the description of its proceedings…
Whether or not the Catacomb Church formally anathematized the Sergianists at

this time, Metropolitan Sergius considered her graceless. On August 6, 1929 his
synod declared: “The sacraments performed in separation from Church unity… by
the followers of the former Metropolitan Joseph (Petrovykh) of Leningrad, the
former Bishop Demetrius (Lyubimov) of Gdov, the former Bishop Alexis (Buj) of
Urazov, as also of those who are under ban, are also invalid, and those who are
converted from these schisms, if they have been baptized in schism, are to be
received through Holy Chrismation.”
Nicholas Werth writes: “The followers of Aleksei Bui, a bishop of Voronezh who
had been arrested in 1929 for his unflagging hostility to any compromise between
the church and the regime, set up their own autonomous church, the ‘True
Orthodox Church’, which had its own clergy of wandering priests who had been
expelled from the church headed by the patriarch. This ‘Desert Church’ had no
buildings of its own, the faithful would meet to pray in any number of places, such
as private homes, hermitages, or even caves. These ‘True Orthodox Christians’ as
they called themselves, were persecuted with particular severity; several thousand
of them were arrested and deported as ‘specially displaced’ or simply sent to
camps.”766

764 His words, as reported by Protopresbyter Michael Polsky (Novie Mucheniki
Rossijskie (The New Russian Martyrs), Jordanville, 1949-57, vol. II, p. 30), were:
“The secret, desert, Catacomb Church has anathematized the ‘Sergianists’ and all
those with them.”
765 Our information about this Council is based exclusively on Archbishop Ambrose
(von Sievers), “Katakombnaia Tserkov’: Kochuiushchij Sobor 1928 g.” (“The

Catacomb Church: The ‘Nomadic’ Council of 1928”), Russkoe Pravoslavie (Russian
Orthodoxy), N 3 (7), 1997, whose main source is claimed to be the archives of the
president of the Council, Bishop Mark (Novoselov), as researched by the
Andrewite Bishop Evagrius. Historians such as Osipova (“V otvet na statiu ‘Mif ob
“Istinnoj Tserkvi”’” (In Reply to the Article, “The Myth of ‘the True Church’”),
Russkoe Pravoslavie (Russian Orthodoxy), N 3 (7), 1997, pp. 18-19) and Danilushkin
(Istoria Rossijskoj Tserkvi, p. 534) appear to accept that this Council took place; but
it is difficult to find anything other than oblique supporting evidence for it, and
von Sievers has refused to allow the present writer to see the archives. A. Smirnov
(perhaps von Sivers himself) writes that the “non-commemorating” branch of the
Catacomb Church, whose leading priest was Fr. Sergius Mechev, had bishops who
“united in a constantly active Preconciliar Convention” and who were linked with
each other by special people called ‘svyazniki’” (“Ugasshie nepominaiushchie v
bege vremeni” (The Extinguished Non-Commemorators in the Passing of Time),
Simvol (Symbol), N 40, 1998, p. 174).
766 Werth, “A State Against its People: Violence, Repression, and Terror in the
Soviet Union”, in Stéphane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrezej

Packowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black Book of Communism,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 173.
411
The area occupied by the “Bujevtsy” in Tambov, Voronezh and Lipetsk
provinces had been the focus of a major peasant rebellion against Soviet power in
1921. It continued to be a major stronghold of True Orthodoxy for many decades to
come.767
Out of the approximately 150 Russian bishops in 1927, 80 declared themselves

definitely against the Sergius’ declaration, 17 separated from him but did not make
their position clear, and 9 at first separated but later changed their mind.768 These
figures probably do not take into account all the secret bishops consecrated by the
Ufa Autocephaly. In 1930 Sergius claimed he had 70% of the Orthodox bishops (not
including the renovationists and Gregorians), which implies that about 30% of the
Russian episcopate joined the Catacomb Church. 769 According to the Catholic
Bishop Michel D’Herbigny, once the Vatican’s representative in Russia, three
quarters of the episcopate separated from him, but this is probably an
exaggeration.770
So, whatever the exact figures, we can be certain that a large part of the Russian
episcopate went underground and formed the “Catacomb”, “Desert” or “True
Orthodox” Church. These “schismatic” hierarchs, as even the sergianist Bishop
Manuel (Lemeshevsky) admitted, were among the finest in the Russian Church: “It
is the best pastors who have fallen away and cut themselves off, those who by their
purity in the struggle with renovationism stood much higher than the others.”771
They stood much higher then, in the early 1920s, and they continued to stand much
higher after the Metropolitan Sergius’ declaration in 1927.
Wandering bishops and priests served the faithful in secret locations around the
country. Particular areas buzzed with underground activity. Thus Professor Ivan
Andreyevsky testified that during the war he personally knew some 200 places of
worship of the Catacomb Church in the Leningrad area alone. Popovsky writes that
the Catacomb Church “arose in our midst at the end of the 20s. First one, then
another priest disappeared from his parish, settled in a secret place and began the
dangerous life of exiles. In decrepit little houses on the outskirts of towns chapels
appeared. There they served the Liturgy, heard confessions, gave communion,
baptized, married and even ordained new priests. Believers from distant towns and

767 See A.I. Demianov, Istinno Pravoslavnoe Khristianstvo (True Orthodox
Christianity), 1977, Voronezh University Press; "New Information on the True
Orthodox Christians", Radio Liberty Research, March 15, 1978, pp. 1-4; Christel
Lane, Christian Religion in the Soviet Union, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978.
ch. 4; "Registered and unregistered churches in Voronezh region", Keston News
Service, 3 March, 1988, p. 8.
768 Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox Russia), N 14 (1587), July 15/28, 1997, p. 7.
769 Pospielovsky, "Mitropolit Sergij i raskoly sprava", op. cit., p. 70.
770 D’Erbigny and Alexandre Deubner, Evêques Russes en Exil – Douze ans d’Epreuves
1918-1930 (Russian Bishops in Exile – Twelve Years of Trials, 1918-1930),

Orientalia Christiana, vol. XXI, N 67.
771 M.V. Shkarovsky, “Iosiflianskoe Dvizhenie i Oppozitsia v SSSR (1927-1943)”
(The Josephite Movement and Opposition in the USSR (1927-1943)), Minuvshee (The
Past), N 15, 1994, p. 450.
412
regions poured there in secret, passing on to each other the agreed knock on the
door…”772
In the birth of the Catacomb Church in 1927-28 we can see the rebirth of the
spirit of the 1917-18 Council. In the previous decade, first under Patriarch Tikhon
and then under Metropolitan Peter, the original fierce tone of reproach and
rejection of the God-hating authorities, epitomized above all by the
anathematization of Soviet power, had gradually softened under the twin pressures
of the Bolsheviks from without and the renovationists from within. Although the
apocalyptic spirit of the Council remained alive in the masses, and prevented the
Church leaders from actually commemorating the antichristian power,
compromises continued to be made – compromises that were never repaid by
compromises on the part of the Bolsheviks.
However, these acts did not cross the line separating compromise from apostasy.
That line was passed by Metropolitan Sergius when he recognized the God-accursed
power to be God-established, and ordered it to be commemorated while banning the
commemoration of the confessing bishops. From this time Metropolitan Sergius’
church became a Sovietized institution. We see this already in the official church
calendar for 1928, which included among the feasts of the church: the memory of
the Leader of the Proletariat Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (on the 32nd Sunday after
Pentecost), the Overthrow of the Autocracy (in the Third Week of the Great Fast),
the memory of the Paris Commune (the same week), the Day of the Internationale
and the Day of the Proletarian Revolution.773
At this point the spirit of the Council flared up again in all its original strength.
For, as Protopresbyter Michael Polsky wrote: “The Orthodoxy that submits to the
Soviets and has become a weapon of the worldwide antichristian deception is not
Orthodoxy, but the deceptive heresy of antichristianity clothed in the torn raiment
of historical Orthodoxy…”774
As Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, second hierarch of the Russian Church

Abroad, wrote: “It is impossible to recognize the epistle of Metropolitan Sergius as
obligatory for ourselves. The just-completed Council of Bishops rejected this epistle.
It was necessary to act in this way on the basis of the teaching of the Holy Fathers
on what should be recognized as a canonical power to which Christians must
submit. St. Isidore of Pelusium, having pointed to the presence of the God-
established order of the submission of some to others everywhere in the life of
rational and irrational beings, draws the conclusion: ’Therefore we are right to say
that the thing in itself, I mean power, that is, authority and royal power, have been
established by God. But if a lawless evildoer seizes this power, we do not affirm
that he has been sent by God, but we say that he, like Pharaoh, has been permitted to

773 Pravoslavnoe obozrenie (Orthodox Review), St. Petersburg, N10 (23), 1999, p. 2.
774 Polsky, O Tserkvi v SSSR (On the Church in the USSR), New York – Montreal,
1993, p. 13.
413
spew out this cunning and thereby inflict extreme punishment on and bring to their
senses those for whom cruelty was necessary, just as the King of Babylon brought
the Jews to their senses.’ (Works, part II, letter 6). Bolshevik power in its essence is
an antichristian power and there is no way that it can be recognized as God-
established.”775

775 Archbishop Theophan, Pis’ma (Letters), Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville,
1976; translated in Selected Letters, Liberty, TN: St. John of Kronstadt Press, 1989.
414
41. STALIN’S WAR ON RUSSIA
The descent of the True Church of Russia into the catacombs coincided with an
important change in Soviet economic policy. The New Economic Policy, introduced
by Lenin, had ended requisitioning, legalized private trade, and abandoned the
semi-militarization of labour. However, the results had not satisfied Stalin.
So in 1927 “the first Five-Year Plan was introduced. This Plan proposed massive
state investment that, with increases in agricultural and industrial productivity,
was to bring about a rise in living standards.
But gains in productivity were slight, and workers and peasants were now
called upon to finance the state’s investment in heavy industry. As it became clear
that considerable coercion would be required, some in the Soviet leadership, led by
Bukharin, urged a revision of industrial goals. Stalin led the majority that insisted
on overcoming the resistance of the people and replacing the NEP. So
requisitioning was reinstituted. When this proved insufficient, the state imposed a
system of forced collectivization…776
The war began with a grain crisis in 1927-28. This threatened Stalin’s industrial
plans. It also showed that the private producers of grain, the peasants, still held
power. But the peasants were not going to sell their grain on the open market when
the Five-Year-Plan for industry offered them so few goods to buy in exchange.
Stalin announced that he would not allow industry to become “dependent on the
caprice of the kulaks”, the richer peasantry…
“Collectivization,” writes Oliver Figes, “was the great turning-point in Soviet

history. It destroyed a way of life that had developed over many centuries - a life
based on the family farm, the ancient peasant commune, the independent village
and its church and the rural market, all of which were seen by the Bolsheviks as
obstacles to socialist industrialization. Millions of people were uprooted from their
homes and dispersed across the Soviet Union: runaways from the collective farms;
victims of the famine that resulted from the over-requisitioning of kolkhoz grain;
orphaned children; ‘kulaks’ and their families. This nomadic population became
the main labour force of Stalin’s industrial revolution, filling the cities and
industrial building-sites, the labour camps and ‘special settlements’ of the Gulag
(Main Camp Administration). The First Five Year Plan, which set this pattern of
forced development, launched a new type of social revolution, a ‘revolution from
above’, that consolidated the Stalinist regime: old ties and loyalties were broken
down, morality dissolved, and new (‘Soviet’) values and identities were imposed,
as the whole population was subordinated to the state and forced to depend on it
for almost everything – housing, schooling, jobs and food – controlled by the
planned economy.
“The eradication of the peasant family farm was the starting-point of this
‘revolution from above’. The Bolsheviks had a fundamental mistrust of the

415
peasantry. In 1917, without influence in the countryside, they had been forced to
tolerate the peasant revolution on the land, which they had exploited to undermine
the old regime; but they had always made it clear that their long-term goal was to
sweep away the peasant smallholding system, replacing it with large-scale
mechanized collective farms in which the peasants would be transformed into a
‘rural proletariat’. Marxist ideology had taught the Bolsheviks to regard the
peasantry as a ‘petty-bourgeois’ relic of the old society that was ultimately
incompatible with the development of a Communist society. It was too closely tied
to the patriarchal customs and traditions of Old Russia, too imbued in the
principles and habits of free trade and private property and too given over to the
‘egotism’ of the family ever to be fully socialized.
“The Bolsheviks believed that the peasants were a potential threat to the
Revolution, as long as they controlled the main supply of food. As the Civil War
had shown, the peasantry could bring the Soviet regime to the verge of collapse by
keeping grain from the market. The grain crisis of 1927-8 renewed fears of a ‘kulak
strike’ in Stalinist circles. In response, Stalin reinstituted requisitioning of food
supplies and engineered an atmosphere of ‘civil war’ against the ‘kulak threat’ to
justify the policy. In January 1928, Stalin travelled to Siberia, a key grain-producing
area, and urged the local activists to show no mercy to ‘kulaks’ suspected of
withholding grain. His battle-cry was backed up by a series of Emergency
Measures instructing local organs to use the Criminal Code to arrest any peasants
and confiscate their property if they refused to give their grain to the requisitioning
brigades (a wild interpretation of the Code that met with some resistance in the
government). Hundreds of thousands of ‘malicious kulaks’… were arrested and
sent to labour camps, their property destroyed or confiscated, as the regime sought
to break the ‘kulak strike’ and transform its overcrowded prisons into a network of
labour camps (soon to become known as the Gulag).
“As the battle for grain intensified, Stalin and his supporters moved towards a
policy of mass collectivization in order to strengthen the state’s control of food
production and remove the ‘kulak threat’ once and for all. ‘We must devise a
procedure whereby the collective farms will over their entire marketable
production of grain to the state and co-operative organizations under the threat of
withdrawal of state subsidies and credits’, Stalin said in 1928. Stalin spoke with
growing optimism about the potential of large-scale mechanized collective farms.
Statistics showed that the few such farms already in existence had a much larger
marketable surplus than the small agricultural surpluses produced by the vast
majority of peasant family farms.
“This enthusiasm for collective farms was relatively new. Previously, the Party
had not placed much emphasis on collectivization. Under the NEP, the
organization of collective farms was encouraged by the state through financial and
agronomic aid, yet in Party circles it was generally agreed that collectivization was
to be a gradual and voluntary process. During the NEP the peasants showed no
sign of coming round to the collective principle, and the growth of the kolkhoz
sector was pretty insignificant. After 1927, when the state exerted greater pressure
through taxation policies – giving credits to collective farms and imposing heavy
416
fees on ‘kulak’ farms – the kolkhoz sector grew more rapidly. But it was not the
large kommuny (where all the land and property was pooled) but the smaller,
more informal and ‘peasant-like’ associations called TOZy (where the land was
farmed in common but the livestock and the tools were retained by the peasants as
their private property) that attracted the most peasant interest. The Five Year Plan
gave little indication that the Party was about to change its policies; it projected a
moderate increase in the land sown by collective farms, and made no mention of
departing from the voluntary principle.
“The sudden change in policy was forced through by Stalin in 1929. The volte
face was a decisive blow against Bukharin, who was desperately trying to retain the
market mechanism of the NEP within the structure of the Five Year Plan, which in
its original version (adopted in the spring of 1929 but dated retroactively to 1928)
had envisaged optimistic but reasonable targets of socialist industrialization. Stalin
pushed for even higher rates of industrial growth and, but the autumn of 1929, the
target figures of the Five Year Plan had been raised dramatically. Investment was to
triple; coal output was to double; and the production of pig-iron (which had been
set to rise by 250 per cent in the original version of the Plan) was now set to
quadruple by 1932. In a wave of frenzied optimism, which was widely shared by
the Party rank and file, the Soviet press advanced the slogan ‘The Five Year Plan in
Four!’ It was these utopian rates of growth that forced the Party to accept the
Stalinist policy of mass collectivization as, it seemed, the only way to obtain a cheap
and guaranteed supply of foodstuffs for the rapidly expanding industrial labour
force (and for sale abroad to bring in capital).
“At the heart of these policies was the Party’s war against the peasantry. The
collectivization of agriculture was a direct assault on the peasantry’s attachment to
the village and the Church, to the individual family farm, to private trade and
property, which all rooted Russia in the past. On 7 November 1929, Stalin wrote an
article in Pravda, ‘The Year of the Great Break’, in which he heralded the Five Year
Plan as the start of the last great revolutionary struggle against ‘capitalist elements’
in the USSR, leading to the foundation of a Communist society built by socialist
industry. What Stalin meant by the ‘great break’, as he explained to Gorky, was the
‘total breaking up of the old society and the feverish building of the new’.
“From the summer of 1929, thousands of Party activists were sent into the
countryside to agitate for the collective farms… Most of the peasants were afraid to
give up a centuries-old way of life to make a leap of faith into the unknown. There
were precious few examples of good collective farms to persuade the peasantry. A
German agricultural specialist working in Siberia in 1929 described the collective
farms as ‘candidates for death’. Very few had tractors or modern implements. They
were badly run by people who knew little about agriculture and made ‘crude
mistakes’, which ‘discredited the whole process of collectivization’. According to
OGPU, the perception of the peasants was that they would ‘lose everything’ – their
land and cows, their horses and their tools, their homes and family – if they entered
a kolkhoz. As one old peasant said: ‘Lecturer after lecturer is coming and telling us
that we ought to forget possessions and have everything in common. Why then is
the desire for it in our blood?’
417
“Unable to persuade the peasantry, the activists began to use coercive measures.
From December 1929, when Stalin called for the ‘liquidation of the kulaks as a class’,
the campaign to drive the peasants into the collective farms took on the form of a
war. The Party and the Komsomol were fully armed and mobilized, reinforced by
the local militia, special army and OGPU units, urban workers and student
volunteers, and sent into the villages with strict instructions not to come back to the
district centres without having organized a kolkhoz. ‘It is better to overstep the
mark than to fall short,’ they were told by their instructors. ‘Remember that we
won’t condemn you for an excess, but if you fall short – watch out!’ One activist
recalls a speech by the Bolshevik leader Mendel Khataevich, in which he told a
meeting of eighty Party organizers in the Volga region: ‘You must assume your
duties with a feeling of the strictest Party responsibility, without whimpering,
without any rotten liberalism. Throw your bourgeois humanitarianism out of the
window and act like Bolsheviks worthy of comrade Stalin. Beat down the kulak
agent wherever he raises his head. It’s war – it’s them or us. The last decayed
remnant of capitalist farming must be wiped out at any cost.’
“During just the first two months of 1930, half the Soviet peasantry (about 60
million people in over 100,000 villages) was herded into the collective farms. The
activists employed various tactics of intimidation at the village meetings where the
decisive vote to join the kolkhoz took place. In one Siberian village, for example, the
peasants were reluctant to accept the motion to join the collective farm. When the
time came for the vote, the activists brought in armed soldiers and called on those
opposed to the motion to speak out: no one dared to raise objections, so it was
declared that the motion had been ‘passed unanimously’. In another village, after
the peasants had voted against joining the kolkhoz, the activists demanded to know
which peasants were opposed to Soviet power, explaining that it was the command
of the Soviet government that the peasants join the collective farms. When nobody
was willing to state their opposition to the government, it was recorded by activists
that the village had ‘voted unanimously’ for collectivization. In other villages only
a small minority of the inhabitants (hand-picked by the activists) was allowed to
attend the meeting, although the result of the vote was made binding on the
population as a whole. In the village of Cheremukhova in the Komi region, for
example, there were 437 households, but only 52 had representatives at the village
assembly: 18 voted in favour of collectivization and 16 against, yet on this basis the
entire village was enrolled in the kolkhoz.
“Peasants who spoke out against collectivization were beaten, tortured,

threatened and harassed, until they agreed to join the collective farm. Many were
expelled as ‘kulaks’ from their homes and driven out of the village. The herding of
the peasants into the collective farms was accompanied by a violent assault against
the Church, the focal point of the old way of life in the village, which was regarded
by the Bolsheviks as a source of potential opposition to collectivization. Thousands
of priests were arrested and churches were looted and destroyed, forcing millions
of believers to maintain their faith in the secrecy of their own homes.”777

777 Figes, The Whisperers, London: Allen Lane Press, 2007, pp. 81-86.
418
Once the following conversation took place between Stalin and Churchill on the
collectivization of the early 1930s.
“Tell me,” asked Churchill. “Is the tension of the present war as severe for you
personally as was the burden of the politics of collectivization?”
“Oh no,” replied “the father of the peoples”. “The politics of collectivization was
a terrible struggle.”
“I thought so. After all, you had to deal then not with a handful of aristocrats
and landowners, but with millions of small peasants.”
“Tens of millions,” cried Stalin, raising his hands. “It was terrible. And it lasted
for four years. But it was absolutely necessary for Russia to avoid famine and
guarantee tractors for the countryside…”778
The human cost of collectivization has been well described by Piers Brendon:
“Stalin declared war on his own people – a class war to end class. In the first two
months of 1930 perhaps a million kulaks, weakened by previous victimisation,
were stripped of their possessions and uprooted from their farmsteads. They were
among the earliest of ‘over five million’ souls deported during the next three years,
most of whom perished. Brigades of workers conscripted from the towns, backed
by contingents of the Red Army, and the OGPU (which had replaced the Cheka),
swept through the countryside ‘like raging beasts’. They rounded up the best
farmers [as Zinoviev said, ‘We are fond of describing any peasant who has enough
to eat as a kulak’] and their families, banished them to the barren outskirts of their
villages or drove them into the northern wastes. Often they shot the heads of
households, cramming their dependents into ‘death trains’ – a prolonged process
owing to a shortage of the blood-coloured cattle trucks known as ‘red cows’. While
they waited, women and children expired of cold, hunger and disease. Muscovites,
at first shocked by glimpses of the terror being inflicted on the countryside, became
inured to the sight of peasants being herded from one station to another at
gunpoint. A witness wrote: ‘Trainloads of deported peasants left for the icy North,
the forests, the steppes, the deserts. There were whole populations, denuded of
everything; the old folk starved to death in mid-journey, new-born babies were
buried on the banks of the roadside, and each wilderness had its crop of little
crosses of boughs or white wood.’ The survivors of these ghastly odysseys were
concentrated in primitive camps which they often had to scratch with their bare
hands from taiga or tundra. They were then sent to work at digging canals,
lumbering and other projects, Stalin having recently been dazzled by the prospect
of ‘constructing socialism through the use of prison labour’.
“Whatever Stalin may have envisaged, the assault on the kulaks was less like a
considered piece of social engineering than ‘a nation-wide pogrom’. Often the

778 Berezhkov, “Memoirs”, chapter 6, in Voennaia Literatura,
http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/berezhkov_vm/06.html.
419
urban cadres simply pillaged for private gain, eating the kulaks’ food and drinking
their vodka on the spot, donning their felt boots and clothes, right down to their
woollen underwear. Moreover the spoliation was marked by caprice and chaos
since it was virtually impossible to decide which peasants were kulaks. Peasants of
all sorts (including women) resisted, fighting back with anything from sporadic
terror to full-scale revolt. There were major uprisings in Moldavia, the Ukraine, the
Caucasus, Crimea, Azerbaijan, Soviet Central Asia and elsewhere. To quell them
Stalin employed tanks and even military aircraft, unusual adjuncts to agrarian
reform (though Lenin had also used poison gas). Some units refused to kill their
countrymen and these he punished. Where troops did not mutiny their morale was
shattered. ‘I am an old Bolshevik,’ sobbed one OGPU colonel to a foreign writer. ‘I
worked in the underground against the Tsar and then I fought in the civil war. Did
I do all that in order that I should now surround villages with machine-guns and
order my men to fire indiscriminately into crowds of peasants? Oh, no, no!’
“Some kulaks fled from the holocaust, seeking refuge in the towns or the woods
and selling as many of their possessions as they could. Braving the machine-guns of
the blue-capped border guards, others crossed into Poland, Romania, China or
Alaska, taking portable property with them, occasionally even driving their flocks
and herds. Some tried to bribe their persecutors. Some committed suicide. Some
appealed for mercy, of all Communist commodities the one in shortest supply. Like
the troops, some Party members were indeed horrified at the vicious acts which
they were called upon to perform. One exclaimed, ‘We are no longer people, we are
animals.’ Many were brutes, official gangsters who revelled in licensed thuggery…
Still others were idealists of a different stamp, convinced that they were doing their
‘revolutionary duty’. They had no time for what Trotsky had once called the
‘papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life’. According to Marx’s iron
laws of history, they shed the blood of the kulaks to achieve the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Without this sacrifice the Soviet Union could not modernise and
socialism could not survive. As one apparatchik expressed it: ‘When you are
attacking there is no place for mercy; don’t think of the kulak’s hunger children; in
the class struggle philanthropy is evil.’ This view, incidentally, was often shared by
Western fellow-travellers. Upton Sinclair and A.J.P. Taylor both argued that to
preserve the Workers’ State the kulaks ‘had to be destroyed’.
“Whether facing expropriation and exile or collectivisation and servitude,

masses of peasants retaliated by smashing their implements and killing their
animals – live beasts would have to be handed over to the collectives whereas meat
and hides could be respectively consumed and concealed. In the first two months
of 1930 millions of cattle, horses, pigs, sheep and goats were slaughtered. Many
others starved to death because grain was lacking or the collective farmers
neglected them. A quarter of the nation’s livestock perished, a greater loss than that
sustained during the Civil War and one not made up until the 1960s. It was ironic,
therefore, that on 2 March 1930 Stalin should call a halt in an article in Pravda
entitled ‘Dizzy with Success’. This declared that over-zealous local officials had
made mistakes and that peasants should not be forced to join collectives. Under the
spur of coercion no fewer than 15 million households (numbering over 70 million
souls, or 60 per cent of all peasants) had already done so. But now, within a few
420
weeks, nine million households withdrew from what they regarded as a new form
of serfdom. Processions of peasants marched round villages with copies of Stalin’s
article blazoned aloft on banners. As a foreign journalist recorded, Russia’s
muzhiks had live under ‘lowering clouds of gloom, fear and evil foreboding… until
the colour of them seemed to have entered their very souls’. Now, thanks to Stalin,
the pall had lifted and the reign of terror had ended.
“It was a false dawn. Stalin was retreating the better to advance…
“… In the autumn of 1930 he resumed the policy of forcible collectivisation.

Peasant anguish was fed by rumours that women would be socialised, that
unproductive old people would be prematurely cremated and that children were to
be sent to crèches in China. Such fears did not seem extravagant, for the authorities
themselves were offering peasants apocalyptic inducements to join the collectives:
‘They promised golden mountains… They said that women would be freed from
doing the washing, from milking and cleaning the animals, weeding the garden, etc.
Electricity can do that, they said.’ Under the hammer and sickle all things would be
made new.
“In 1930, Year XIII of the Communist era, a new calendar was introduced. It
began the year on November 1 and established a five-day week: Sundays were
abolished and rest days rotated so that work could be continuous. The anti-God
crusade became more vicious and the church was portrayed as the ‘kulaks’
agitprop [agitation and propaganda agency]’. Priests were persecuted. Icons were
burned and replaced with portraits of Stalin. The bells of basilicas were silenced,
many being melted down for the metal. Monasteries were demolished or turned
into prison camps. Abbeys and convents were smashed to pieces and factories rose
on their ruins. Churches were destroyed, scores in Moscow itself. Chief among
them was the gold-domed Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, Russia’s largest place
of worship and (according to the League of Militant Atheists) ‘the ideological
fortress of the accused old world’, which was dynamited to make way for the
Palace of Soviets on 5 December 1931. Stalin was unprepared for the explosion and
asked tremulously, ‘Where’s the bombardment?’
“The new Russian orthodoxy was instilled through everything from schools in
which pupils learned to chant thanks to Comrade Stalin for their happy childhood
to libraries purged of ‘harmful literature’, from atheistic playing-cards to
ideologically sound performances by circus clowns. An early signal that the Party
was becoming the arbiter of all intellectual life was the suicide of Vladimir
Mayakovsky: he was tormented by having turned himself into a poetry factory; he
had stepped ‘on the throat of my own song’. (Even so he became a posthumous
propagandist: as Pasternak wrote, ‘Mayakovsky began to be introduced forcibly,
like potatoes under Catherine the Great. This was his second death. He had no
hand in it.’) Of more concern to the average Soviet citizen was the socialist
transformation of everyday life: the final elimination of small traders and private
businessmen, the establishment of communal kitchens and lavatories, the direction
of labour, the proliferation of informers (a marble monument was raised to Pavel
Morozov, who supposedly denounced his father as a kulak), the purging of
421
‘wreckers’ and the attempt to impose ‘iron discipline’ at every level. Stalin called
for an increase in the power of the State to assist in its withering away. Like Peter
the Great, he would bend Russia to his will even if he had to decimate the
inhabitants – as he had once presciently observed, ‘full conformity of views can be
achieved only at a cemetery’.
“Destroying the nation’s best farmers, disrupting the agricultural system and
extracting grain from a famished countryside in return for Western technology – all
this had a fatal impact on the Soviet standard of living. By 1930 bread and other
foodstuffs were rationed, as were staple goods such as soap. But even rations were
hard to get: sugar, for example, had ‘ceased to exist as a commodity’. The
cooperative shops were generally empty, though gathering dust on their shelves
were items that no one wanted, among them French horns and hockey sticks. There
were also ‘tantalisingly realistic and mouth-watering’ wooden cheeses, dummy
hams, enamelled cakes and other fake promises of future abundance. On the black
market bread cost 43 roubles a kilo, while the average collective farmer earned 3
roubles a day. Some Muscovite workers shortened the slogan ‘pobeda’ (victory) to
‘obed’ (food), or even to ‘beda’ (misfortune).’…”779
Stalin’s collectivization campaign recalled Lenin’s campaign of War

Communism in 1918-21. And, as in Lenin’s time, it was, in the words of Alan
Bullock, “as much an attack on [the peasants’] traditional religion as on their
individual holdings”.780 For, as Vladimir Rusak writes, “Stalin could no longer
‘leave the Church in the countryside’. In one interview he gave at that time he
directly complained against ‘the reactionary clergy’ who were poisoning the souls
of the masses. ’The only thing I can complain about is that the clergy were not
liquidated root and branch,’ he said. At the 15th Congress of the party he demanded
that all weariness in the anti-religious struggle be overcome.”781
Then, “on 8 April 1929,” as W. Husband writes, “the VtsIK and Sovnarkom
declaration ‘On Religious Associations’ largely superseded the 1918 separation of
church and state and redefined freedom of conscience. Though reiterating central
aspects of the 1918 separation decree, the new law introduced important limitations.
Religious associations of twenty or more adults were allowed, but only if registered
and approved in advance by government authorities. They retained their previous
right to the free use of buildings for worship but still could not exist as a judicial
person. Most important, the new regulations rescinded the previously guaranteed
[!] right to conduct religious propaganda, and it reaffirmed the ban on religious
instructions in state educational institutions. In effect, proselytising and instruction
outside the home were illegal except in officially sanctioned classes, and religious
rights of assembly and property were now more circumscribed.”782

781 Rusak, Svidetel’stvo Obvinenia, part I, p. 176.
782 Husband, “Godless Communists”, Northern University of Illinois Press, 2000, p.
66.
422
“Henceforth,” writes Nicholas Werth, “any activity ‘going beyond the limits of
the simple satisfaction of religious aspirations’ fell under the law. Notably, section
10 of the much-feared Article 58 of the penal code stipulated that ‘any use of the
religious prejudices of the masses… for destabilizing the state’ was punishable ‘by
anything from a minimum three-year sentence up to and including the death
penalty’. On 26 August 1929 the government instituted the new five-day work
week – five days of work, and one day of rest – which made it impossible to
observe Sunday as a day of rest. This measure deliberately introduced ‘to facilitate
the struggle to eliminate religion’.
“These decrees were no more than a prelude to a second, much larger phase of
the antireligious campaign. In October 1929 the seizure of all church bells was
ordered because ‘the sound of bells disturbs the right to peace of the vast majority
of atheists in the towns and the countryside’. Anyone closely associated with the
church was treated like a kulak and forced to pay special taxes. The taxes paid by
religious leaders increased tenfold from 1928 to 1930, and the leaders were stripped
of their civil rights, which meant that they lost their ration cards and their right to
medical care. Many were arrested, exiled, or deported. According to the incomplete
records, more than 13,000 priests were ‘dekulakised’ in 1930. In many villages and
towns, collectivisation began symbolically with the closure of the church, and
dekulakization began with the removal of the local religious leaders. Significantly,
nearly 14 percent of riots and peasant uprisings in 1930 were sparked by the closure
of a church or the removal of its bells. The antireligious campaign reached its
height in the winter of 1929-30; by 1 March 1930, 6,715 churches had been closed or
destroyed. In the aftermath of Stalin’s famous article ‘Dizzy with Success’ on 2
March 1930, a resolution from the Central Committee cynically condemned
‘inadmissible deviations in the struggle against religious prejudices, particularly
the administrative closure of churches without the consent of the local inhabitants’.
This formal condemnation had no effect on the fate of the people deported on
religious grounds.
“Over the next few years these great offensives against the church were replaced
by daily administrative harassment of priests and religious organizations. Freely
interpreting the sixty-eight articles of the government decree of 8 April 1929, and
going considerably beyond their mandate when it came to the closure of churches,
local authorities continued their guerrilla war with a series of justifications:
‘unsanitary condition or extreme age’ of the buildings in question, ‘unpaid
insurance’, and non-payment of taxes or other of the innumerable contributions
imposed on the members of religious communities. Stripped of their civil rights
and their right to teach, and without the possibility of taking up other paid
employment – a status that left them arbitrarily classified as ‘parasitic elements
living on unearned wages’ – a number of priests had no option but to become
peripatetic and to lead a secret life on the edges of society.”783

783 Werth, “A State against its People”, in Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-
Louis Panné, Andrzej Packowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin, The Black
Book of Communism, London: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 172-173.
423
It was the True Orthodox Church which took the brunt of this offensive. For
opposition to the betrayal of the Church by Metropolitan Sergius went hand in
hand with opposition to collectivization. Thus in 1929, the Bolsheviks began to
imprison the True Orthodox on the basis of membership of a “church monarchist
organization” called “True Orthodoxy”. The numbers of True Orthodox Christians
arrested between 1929 and 1933 exceeded by seven times the numbers of clergy
repressed from 1924 to 1928.784 The main case against the True Orthodox was called
the case of “The All-Union Counter-Revolutionary Church Monarchist
Organization, ‘the True Orthodox Church’”. In 1929 5000 clergy were repressed,
three times more than in 1928; in 1930 – 13,000; in 1931-32 – 19,000.785
It can hardly be considered a coincidence that all this took place against the
background of the collectivization of agriculture and a general attack on religion786
spearheaded by Yaroslavsky’s League of Militant Godless, who numbered 17
million by 1933.
The war of the True Orthodox against collectivization was especially fierce in the
Central Black Earth region, where resistance to collectivization and resistance to the
Sovietized Moscow Patriarchate crystallized into a single powerful movement
under the leadership of Bishop Alexis (Buy) of Voronezh. 787 Meetings of the
“Buyevtsy”, as Bishop Alexis’ followers were called, took place in the Alexeyev
monastery in Voronezh. During one of these, in December, 1929, Archimandrite
Tikhon said that collectivization was a way of removing the peasants from their
churches, which were then closed. And Igumen Joseph (Yatsk) said: "Now the
times of the Antichrist have arrived, so everything that Soviet power tried to
impose upon the peasantry: collective farms, cooperatives, etc., should be rejected."
At the beginning of 1930 the Voronezh peasantry rebelled against forcible
collectivization in several places. Thus in Ostrog district alone between January 4
and February 5 there were demonstrations in twenty villages: Nizhny Ikorets,
Peskovatka, Kopanishche, Podserednoye, Platava, Kazatskoye, Uryv, Dyevitsa,
Godlayevka, Troitskoye, Drakonovo, Mashkino, Badyeyevo, Selyavnoye and others.
At the same time there were demonstrations in the neighbouring areas of Usman
district, from where they moved to the Kozlov, Yelets, Belgorod and other districts,

784 I.I. Osipova, “Istoria Istinno Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi po Materialam Sledstvennago
Dela” (The History of the True Orthodox Church according to Materials from the
Interrogation Process), Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), N 14 (1587), July
15/28, 1997, p. 2.
785 I.I. Ospova, O Premiloserdij… Budi s nami neotstupno…Vospominania
veruiuschikh Istinno-Pravoslavnoj (Katakombnoj) Tserkvi.Konets 1920-kh –
nachalo 1970-kh godov. (O Most Merciful One… Remain with us without fail.
Reminiscences of believers of the True-Orthodox (Catacomb) Church. End of the
1920s – beginning of the 1970s), Moscow, 2008.
786 Although the Protestants had welcomed the revolution and thus escaped the
earlier persecutions, they were now subjected to the same torments as the
Orthodox (Pospielovsky, "Podvig very", op. cit., pp. 233-34). Religious Jews also
began to be persecuted.
787 M.V. Shkarovsky, "Iz Novyeishej Istorii Russkoj Tserkvi", Pravoslavnaia Rus', N
15 (1540), August 15/28, 1995, pp. 6-10; Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i
Khruscheve, Moscow, 2005, pp. 232, 233.
424
encompassing more than forty districts in all. The OGPU considered that these
demonstrations took place under the influence of the "Buyevtsy". On January 21-22,
in Nizhny Ikorets, some hundreds of peasants, mainly women, destroyed the
village soviet, tore down the red flag, tore up the portraits of the "leaders" and
walked down the streets with a black flag, shouting: "Down with the collective
farms! Down with the antichrist communists!" An active participant in this event
was Nun Macrina (Maslovskaya), who said at her interrogation: "I preached Christ
everywhere... [I urged] the citizens to struggle with the apostates from God, who
are emissaries of the Antichrist, and [I urged] the peasants not to go into the
collective farms because by going into the collectives they were giving their souls to
the Antichrist, who would appear soon... "
In February-March, 1930, the OGPU investigated 492 people in connection with

these disturbances. The anti-Soviet organization called "The Flock" which they
uncovered was supposedly made up of 22 leaders and 470 followers, including 4
officers, 8 noblemen, 33 traders, 8 policemen, 13 members of the "Union of the
Russian people", 81 priests, 75 monastics, 210 kulaks, 24 middle peasants, and 2
beggars. 134 people were arrested, of whom some were freed, some had their cases
referred to higher authorities and some died during the investigation because of the
violent methods used to extort confessions. There were several more trials of
“Buyevites” in the 1930s, and Voronezh remains a citadel of the True Orthodox
Church to this day...
This persecution began to arouse criticism in the West – specifically, from Pope
Pius XI and the Archbishop of Canterbury. On February 14, 1930 the Politburo
decided “to entrust to Comrades Yaroslavsky, Stalin and Molotov the decision of
the question of an interview” to counter-act these criticisms. The result was two
interviews, the first to Soviet correspondents on February 15 and published on
February 16 in Izvestia and Pravda in the name of Sergius and those members of his
Synod who were still in freedom, and a second to foreign correspondents three
days later. In the first interview, which is now thought to have been composed
entirely by the Bolsheviks with the active participation of Stalin, but whose
authenticity was never denied by Sergius788, it was asserted that “in the Soviet
Union there was not and is not now any religious persecution”, that “churches are
closed not on the orders of the authorities, but at the wish of the population, and in
many cases even at the request of the believers”, that “the priests themselves are to
blame, because they do not use the opportunities presented to them by the freedom
to preach” and that “the Church herself does not want to have any theological-
educational institutions”.

788 Igor Kurlyandsky, “Nash Otvet Rimskomu Pape: kak tt. Stalin, Yaroslavsky i
Molotov v 1930 godu pisali ‘interview’ Mitropolita Sergia i ego Sinoda” (Our
Reply to the Pope of Rome: how Comrades Stalin, Yaroslavsky and Molotov wrote
the ‘interview’ of Metropolitan Sergius and his Synod in 1930), Politicheskij Zhurnal
(The Political Journal), 183-184, N 21, April, 2008;
http://www.politjournal.ru/index.php?action=Articles&dirid=50&tek=8111&issue
=218
425
Commenting on the interview, Archbishop Andrew of Ufa wrote: “Such is the
opinion of the false-head of the false-patriarchal church of Metropolitan Sergius…
But who is going to recognize this head after all this? For whom does this lying
head remain a head, in spite of his betrayal of Christ?… All the followers of the
lying Metropolitan Sergius… have fallen away from the Church of Christ. The Holy
Catholic and Apostolic Church is somewhere else, not near Metropolitan Sergius
and not near his ‘Synod’.”789
With the True Church driven underground, and the peasantry destroyed, Stalin
proceeded to industrialize the country at breakneck speed, herding millions of
dispossessed peasants into the building of huge enterprises for which there existed
as yet not even the most basic workers’ living conditions.
“Egalitarian ideals were scrapped,” writes Brendon, “to increase productivity.

For example, skilled workers received extra incentives in the shape of higher pay,
better food and improved accommodation – at the massive steel plant of
Magnitogorsk in the Urals there was a whole hierarchy of canteens. But Stalin
favoured the stick rather than the carrot and those infringing industrial discipline
were harshly punished. Men were tied to their machines like helots. Those arriving
late could be imprisoned. Dismissal might mean starvation – the loss of a work
cared resulted in the denial of a food card. Diligence was kept at fever pitch by the
arrest and execution of large numbers of economic ‘wreckers’, plus well-publicised
show trials of ‘spies’ and ‘saboteurs’. Morbidly suspicious, Stalin seems to have
persuaded himself of their guilt; but even if they were innocent their punishment
would encourage the others. His solution to the shortage of small coins, hoarded
for their tiny silver content because the government had printed so much paper
money to pay for its own incompetence, was to shoot ‘wreckers’ in the banking
system, ‘including several dozen common cashiers’.
“In 1931 Stalin also tried to squeeze the last valuables, particularly gold, from
Russian citizens in order to purchase more foreign equipment. Among the methods
of torture used were the ‘conveyer’, whereby relays of interrogators deprived
prisoners of sleep; the sweat- and ice-rooms, to which victims were confined in
conditions of intolerable heat and cold; the tormenting of children in front of their
parents. Alternatively the OGPU might just beat their prey to death with a felt boot
full of bricks. These bestial practices were theoretically illegal but their employment
was an open secret. When a defendant at one show trial protested over-indignantly
that he had suffered no maltreatment in the Lubyanka it was too much even for a
court which had solemnly swallowed stories of a conspiracy masterminded by the

789 Zelenogorsky, M. Zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’ Arkhiepiskopa Andrea (Kniazia
Ukhtomskogo) (The Life and Activity of Archbishop Andrew (Prince Ukhtomsky)),
Moscow, 1991, p. 216. According to Archbishop Bartholomew (Remov), who never
joined the Catacomb Church, the whole activity of Metropolitan Sergius was
carried out in accordance with the instructions of the Bolsheviks (Za Khrista
Postradavshie (Suffered for Christ), Moscow: St. Tikhon’s Theological Institute,
1997, p. 220).
426
likes of President Poincaré and Lawrence of Arabia: everyone simply roared with
laughter. The Lubyanka, the tall grey OGPU headquarters (formerly the office of
the Rossiya Insurance Company) in Dzerzhinsky Square, was a place ‘fraught with
horror’. Appropriately it was embellished with a sculpture representing the Greek
Fates cutting short the threads of human life. Stalin saw himself as the atavar of
destiny, the embodiment of the will of history, the personification of progress…
“The achievements of Stalin’s revolution were almost as staggering as the costs,

even when propagandist fictions are discounted. Although its targets kept growing
in the making, the first Five Year Plan was anything but ‘Utopian’. Initiated in 1928,
its purpose was to transform the Russian economy at unprecedented speed. As the
British Ambassador reported, it was ‘one of the most important and far reaching
[experiments] that has ever been undertaken.’ Between 1928 and 1932 investment in
industry increased from two billion to nine billion roubles and the labour force
doubled to six million workers. Productivity too nearly doubled and huge new
enterprises were established – factories making machine tools, automobiles,
chemicals, turbines, synthetic rubber and so on. The number of tractors produced
rose from just over 3,000 to almost 50,000. Special emphasis was placed on
armaments and factories were established out of the reach of invaders – by 1936 a
plant at Sverdlovsk in the Urals was actually turning out submarines, which were
transported in sections to the Pacific, the Baltic and the Black Sea. In just four years,
by a mixture of heroic effort, ‘economic patriotism’ and implacable coercion, the
foundations of Soviet industrial greatness were laid. Cities had grown by 44 per
cent. Literacy was advancing dramatically. By the mid-1930s Russia was spending
nearly twice as much as the United States on research and development; by the end
of the decade its output was rivalling that of Germany.
“In this initial stage, of course, progress was patchy and the quality of
manufactured goods was poor. There were many reasons for this, such as the
unremitting pressure to increase quantity and the fact that (as Sukhanov had said)
‘one only had to scratch a worker to find a peasant’. The novelist Ilya Ehrenburg
described new factory hands as looking ‘mistrustfully at the machines; when a
lever would not work they grew angry and treated it like a baulking horse, often
damaging the machine’. After visiting Russia David Low drew a cartoon of a
dairymaid-turned-engineer absent-mindedly trying to milk a steam-hammer.
Managers were little help. They were terrorised from above: an American specialist
sharing a hotel bedroom with his mill boss was woken by ‘the most ghastly sounds
imaginable’ as the man ground his teeth in his sleep, tormented by stark, primitive
‘fears that none but his subconscious mind could know’. Managers in their turn
were encouraged to behave like ‘little Stalins’: as the Moscow Party chief Lazar
Kaganovich said, ‘The earth should tremble when the director is entering the
factory.’
“The atmosphere of intimidation was hardly conducive to enterprise even if

management had been competent, which it generally was not. At the Gorky
automobile plant, which had been designed by engineers from Detroit, several
different types of vehicle were made simultaneously on one assembly line, thus
making nonsense of Ford’s plan to standardise parts and performance. In the Urals
427
asbestos ore was mined underground when it could have been dug from the
surface by mechanical shovel far more safely and at a tenth of the cost. Everywhere
so many older managers were purged that inexperienced young men had to be
promoted – one found himself head of the State Institute of Metal Work Projects
two days after he had graduated from Moscow’s Mining Academy. Vigour could
compensate for callowness. Foreign experts, often Communists and others fleeing
from unemployment in the West, were impressed by the frenetic enthusiasm and
hysterical tempo with which their Russian colleagues tried to complete the Five
Year plan in four years, a task expressed in Stalinist arithmetic as 2+2=5. They were
even more impressed by the suffering involved. In the words of an American
technician who worked at Magnitogorsk: ‘I would wager that Russia’s battle of
ferrous metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne.’
“Magnitogorsk, situated on the mineral-rich boundary between Europe and Asia,

was a monument to Stalin’s gigantomania. Built to American designs, it was to be a
showpiece of ‘socialist construction’ and the largest steelworks in the world. It was
also the most important project in the Five Year Plan. So between 1928 and 1932
250,000 people were drawn willy-nilly to the remote ‘magnetic heart’ of the new
complex. There were horny-handed peasants from the Ukraine, sparsely-bearded
nomads from Mongolia, sheepskin-clad Tartars who had never before seen a
locomotive, an electric light, even a staircase. There were Jews, Finns, Georgians
and Russians, some of them products of three-month crash-courses in engineering
and disparaged by the American and German experts as ’90-day wonders’. There
were 50,000 prisoners under OGPU supervision, including scientists, kulaks,
criminals, prostitutes and child slave-labourers swept up from the gutters of
Moscow. There was even a brigade of long-haired, bushy-bearded bishops and
priests wearing ragged black robes and mitre-like hats.
“To accommodate this labour force a rash of tents, earthen huts and wooden
barracks sprang up on the rolling steppe. These grossly overcrowded refuges were
verminous and insanitary, especially during the spring thaw when Magnitogorsk
became a sea of mud and there were outbreaks of bubonic plague. Moreover they
afforded scant protection against the scorching summers and freezing winters. The
same was true of the rows of porous, box-like structures for the privileged, set up
with such haste that for years the streets lacked names and the buildings lacked
numbers. These were the first houses of the socialist city which was to rise out of
chaos during the 1930s, a city which would boast 50 schools, 17 libraries and 8
theatres but not a single church. There was, however, a Communist cathedral – the
steel plant itself. No place of worship was built with more fervour or more labour.
Its construction involved the excavation of 500 million cubic feet of earth, the
pouring of 42 million cubic feet of reinforced concrete, the laying of 5 million cubic
feet of fire bricks and the erection of 250,000 tons of structural steel.
“Ill-clad, half-starved and inadequately equipped, the workers were pitilessly

sacrificed to the work. Driven by terror and zeal, they were also the victims of
incompetence. They lacked the tools and the skill to weld metal on rickety
scaffolding 100 feet high in temperatures of -50 Fahrenheit. Countless accidents
occurred, many of which damaged the plant. Confusion was worse confounded by
428
gross management failures. American experts were horrified to find that Party
propagandists rather than engineers were determining priorities – tall, open-hearth
stacks were erected earlier than they should have been because they ‘made a nice
picture’. But despite every setback the stately blast furnaces rose from their
concrete beds, to the tune of ‘incessant hammering, resembling machine-gun fire’.
By 1 February 1932 the first pig-iron was produced. Although less than half built by
1937 (its target date for completion), Magnitogorsk was already one of the biggest
metallurgical works on earth.
“To the faithful it was a huge crucible for the Promethean energies unleashed by
Russia’s man of steel. Enterprises such as Magnitogorsk symbolised Stalin’s
successful ‘break’ with the past (perelom) and Russia’s great leap forward. It was a
leap in the dark. But the shape of future terrors could be discerned and even
committed Communists feared that too much was being sacrificed to the industrial
Moloch. In the final speech at his show trial Nikolai Bukharin likened ‘our huge,
gigantically growing factories’ to ‘monstrous gluttons which consumed everything’.
What they certainly consumed was vast quantities of grain, both directly to feed the
workers and indirectly to exchange [export] for the sinews of technology. In the 2
years after 1928 government grain requisitions had doubled and only a good
harvest in 1930 enabled Stalin to commandeer 22 million tons (over a quarter of the
total yield) from a countryside devastated by collectivisation and ‘dekulakisation’.
Yet in 1931 he took slightly more grain even though the harvest was poor. The
result was massive rural famine. It was the largest organised famine in history until
that of Mao Tse-tung in 1959-60…”790

790 Brendon, op. cit., 208-211.
429
42. STALIN’S WAR ON UKRAINE
The historian Sergius Naumov writes: “One of the most horrific crimes of the
God-hating communist regime was the artificially contrived famine in the Ukraine
and the South of Russia in 1932-1933. As a result, in the Ukraine alone more than
nine million people died within two years791, while as a whole in the USSR more
than thirteen million died. The blow was deliberately directed against the age-old
strongholds of Orthodox culture and tradition in the people for the defence of the
Faith and the Church. This sin, the responsibility for this inhuman crime lies like an
ineradicable blot on all the heirs of communism without exception. In the Ukraine
this campaign for the mass annihilation of the Orthodox peasantry was carried out
from the centre by the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of the Ukraine under the leadership of Lazarus Moiseyevich Kaganovich.
“Kaganovich personally headed the campaign for the forcible requisitioning of

all reserves of bread from the Ukrainian peasantry, which elicited the artificial
famine of the 1930s. Thus on December 29, 1932, on the initiative of Kaganovich,
the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine
adopted a directive in which the collective farms were required to give up ‘all the
grain they have, including the so-called seed funds’. It was ordered that all available
funds be removed immediately, in the course of five to six days. Every delay was
viewed as the sabotage of bread deliveries with all the consequences that ensued
from that… (Istoria SSSR, №2/1989, p. 14). Or one more characteristic example,
which helps us to understand much. At the January [1933] united Plenum of the
Central Committee and the TsKK of the Communist Party one of its participants
cried out during Kaganovich’s speech: ‘But you know, they have begun to eat
people in our area!’ To which Kaganovich cynically replied: ‘If we give rein to our
nerves, then they will be eating you and us… Will that be better?’ Nothing needs to
be added to this cannibalistic revelation. Although, it must be said, already at the
dawn of the Bolshevik dictatorship, ‘Trotsky, on receiving a delegation of church-
parish councils from Moscow, in reply to Professor Kuznetsov’s declaration that
the city was literally dying from hunger, declared: “This is not hunger. When Titus
conquered Jerusalem, the Jewish mothers ate their own children. Then you can
come and say: ‘We’re hungry.’”’ (“Tsinichnoe zaiavlenie”, Donskie Vedomosti
(Novocherkassk), N 268/1919).
“One should point out that the famine artificially organized by the Bolsheviks in
1932-1933 was a logical step in the long chain of genocide of the Slavic Orthodox
population of the country. Long before the year 1937 that is so bewailed by
Memorial, G.E. Zinoviev (Ovsej-Hershen Aaronovich Radomyshelsky) defined the
task directly: ‘We must keep ninety million out of the one hundred that populates
Soviet Russia. We don’t need to talk to the rest – they must be annihilated’... The
control figure of those marked for annihilation by Zinoviev was reached with
interest already before the forcible collectivization of the countryside began.

791 Estimates of the number of those killed in the artificially-created Ukrainian famine range from
two million to ten million souls (V.M.)
430
Collectivization and ‘dekulakization’, in the carrying out of which the People’s
Commissar for Agriculture, Yakov Arkadyevich Yakovlev (Epstein) and the
president of the collective farm centre, Gregory Nakhumovich Kaminsky
particularly distinguished themselves, brought fresh millions of peasants to their
deaths. To suppress the numerous peasant rebellions, on the orders of Over-
Chekist Genrikh Girshevich Yagoda (Ieguda) ‘individually selected GPU soldiers
accustomed to civil war, the guardians of present order,’ were thrown in. ‘Machine
guns were wheeled out, cannons were stations, balloons of poison gas were
unscrewed… And often there was nobody you could ask: what was in this village?
There was no village. None of those who lived in it were alive: neither the women
nor the children nor the old men. Nobody was spared by the shells and the gas…’
(Dmitrievsky S., Stalin, Berlin, 1931, p. 330).
“The famine of 1932-1933 was specially organized so as finally to crush the

active and passive resistance of the Orthodox peasantry to collectivization. To
break their resistance to their forcible regeneration from an Orthodox people into a
faceless mass, the so-called ‘collective farmers’ and homo sovieticus. That explains
what at first sight appears to be the paradoxical fact that the boundaries of the
famine coincided with the boundaries of the bread baskets of the country, which
were always regions of agricultural abundance and strongholds of Orthodoxy. As
the member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
the Ukraine, Mendel Markovich Khatayevich, said: ‘There had to be a famine, in
order to show them who is boss here. That cost millions of lives, but we won.’…”792
Kirill Alexandrov writes: «The Bolsheviks dekulakized about one

million peasant household (5-6 million people), and in the ten pre-war
years about four million people were subjected to exile from their
native lands. In the period from 1930 to 1940 inclusively, on the way
during the stages of ‘kulak exile’ and in distant places of special
habitation – unfit for human life – no less than one million
dekulakized peasants and members of their families perished from
deprivation, frost, hunger, diseases, the cruelty of the guards and in
flight.
“In reply to the authorities’ collectivization and dekulakization the

countryside replied with desperate resistance and sabotage of the
building of collective farms. So as to break this resistance, Stalin and
the members of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party at the end of 1932 sanctioned the carrying out of
total bread-collections. In Ukraine, in the Middle and Lower Volga, on
the Don and in the Kuban, and in Western Siberia, the Soviet and
party activists swept the bread out ‘under a broom’. The nomadic
animal-herders of Kazakhstan suffered cruelly.

792 Naumov, “Golodomor, 1932-33 godov”, Na Kazachem Postu, N 4 2004,
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=print_page&pid=1496.
431
“As a result of the Stalinist policies, in the winter of 1933 in the
above-mentioned regions of the USSR an artificial famine began:
without wars, drought or elemental catastrophes, 25-30 million people
were starving. Moreover, the Golodomor [as it was called] became de
facto a state secret. On January 22, 1933 Stalin signed a directive
forbidding the removal of the population from the regions struck
down with famine. According to his declaration, the elemental peasant
migration was organized by SRs and Polish agents in order to carry
out anti-collective farm and anti-Soviet agitation. In total, no less than
6.5 million people starved to death in torments. Only in 2008 did the
State Duma of the Russian Federation officially recognize the death of
‘about 7 million people’.” 793
“The fertile Ukraine,” writes Brendon, “where Stalin was already persecuting
anyone suspected of local nationalism, suffered worst. But other regions were also
affected, notably Kazakhstan where about 40 per cent of the 4 million inhabitants
died as a result of the attempt to turn them from nomadic herders into collective
farmers. As early as December 1931 hordes of Ukrainian peasants were surging into
towns and besieging railway stations with cries of ‘Bread, bread, bread!’ By the
spring of 1932, when Stalin demanded nearly half of the Ukrainian harvest, the
granary of Russia was in the grip of starvation. While peasants collapsed from
hunger Communist shock brigades, supported by units of the OGPU in their brown
tunics and red and blue caps, invaded their cabins and took their last ounces of
food, including seed for the spring sowing. They used long steel rods to probe for
buried grain, stationed armed guards in the fields and sent up spotter planes to
prevent the pilfering of Soviet property. This was now an offence punishable by
death or, to use the jargon of the time, ‘the highest measure of social defence’. The
OGPU suspected anyone who was not starving of hoarding. It also attempted to
stop peasants from migrating in search of food; but by the summer of 1932 three
million were on the move. Some Communist cadres tried to avoid carrying out
their task. One rebellious Party man reported that he could fulfil his meat quota,
but only with human corpses. He fled, while others like him were driven to
madness and suicide. But most activists were so frightened for their own skins that
they endorsed Stalin’s ukase.
“So the Ukraine came to resemble ‘one vast Belsen’. A population of ‘walking
corpses’ struggled to survive on a diet of roots, weeds, grass, bark and furry catkins.
They devoured dogs, cats, snails, mice, ants, earthworms. They boiled up old skins
and ground down dry bones. They even ate horse-manure for the whole grains of
seed it contained. Cannibalism became so commonplace that the OGPU received a
special directive on the subject from Moscow and local authorities issued hundreds
of posters announcing that ‘EATING DEAD CHILDREN IS BARBARISM’. Some
peasants braved machine-guns in desperate assaults on grain stockpiles. Others
robbed graves for gold to sell in Torgsin shops. Parents unable to feed their

793 Alexandrov, “Stalin i sovremennaia Rossia: vybor istoricheskikh otsenok ili vybor buduschego?”
(Stalin and contemporary Russia: a choice of historical estimates or a choice of the future?), report
read at the Russian Centre, San Francisco, February 3, 2017.
432
offspring sent them away from home to beg. Cities such as Kiev, Kharkov,
Dnepropetrovsk, Poltava, Odessa and Belgorod were overrun by pathetic waifs
with huge heads, stunted limbs and swollen bellies. Arthur Koestler said that they
‘looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles’. Periodically the OGPU rounded them
up, sending some to brutal orphanages or juvenile labour colonies, training others
to be informers or secret policemen. Still others became the victims of ‘mass
shootings’.
“Meanwhile adults, frantic to follow the slightest rumour of sustenance,

continued to desert their villages. They staggered into towns and collapsed in the
squares, at first objects of pity, later of indifference. Haunting the railway stations
these ‘swollen human shadows, full of rubbish, alive with lice’, followed
passengers with mute appeals and ‘hungry eyes’. A few managed to get out of the
region despite the guards (who confiscated the food of Ukrainians returning to
help), but for the most part these ‘miserable hulks of humanity dragged themselves
along, begging for bread or searching for scraps in garbage heaps, frozen and filthy.
Each morning wagons rolled along the streets picking up the remains of the dead.’
Some were picked up before they died and buried in pits so extensive that they
resembled sand dunes and so shallow that bodies were dug up and devoured by
wolves. In the summer of 1932 Stalin increased his squeeze on the villages, ordering
blockades of those which did not supply their grain quotas and blaming kulak
sabotage for the shortfall. It may well have been over the famine that on 5
November 1932 his wife Nadezhda Alliluyev committed suicide. Certainly she had
lost any illusions she might have possessed about her husband. Some time before
her death Nadezhda yelled at him: ‘You are a tormentor, that’s what you are! You
torment your own son… you torment your wife… you torment the whole Russian
people.’
“The better to control his victims Stalin reintroduced the internal passport.794
Communists had always denounced this as a prime instance of tsarist tyranny.
Now it enabled them to hide the famine, or at any rate to render it less visible, by
ensuring that most deaths occurred outside urban areas. This is not to suggest that
Stalin was prepared to acknowledge the existence of the tragedy. When a
courageous Ukrainian Communist gave details of what was happening Stalin
replied that he had made up ‘a fable about famine, thinking to frighten us, but it
won’t work’. It is clear, though, that Stalin was deliberately employing starvation as
an instrument of policy. Early in 1933 he sent Pavel Postyshev to the Ukraine with
orders to extract further deliveries from the barren countryside. Postyshev
announced that the region had failed to provide the requisite grain because of the
Party’s ‘leniency’. The consequence of his strictness was that, over the next few
months, the famine reached its terrible climax. Entire families died in agony.
Buildings decayed, schools closed, fields were choked with weeds, livestock
perished and the countryside became a gigantic charnel-house. About a quarter of

794 Many True Orthodox Christians refused to take passports, and from this time
the “passportless” movement begins. See Mervyn Matthews, The Passport Society,
Oxford: Westview Press, 1993, chapter 3; E.A. Petrova, “Perestroika Vavilonskoj
Bashni (The Reconstruction of the Tower of Babylon)”, Moscow, 1991, pp. 5-6
(samizdat MS). (V.M.)
433
the rural population was wiped out and the mortality rate only began to decline in
the summer of 1933, after it had become clear that no more grain could be procured
and the State’s demands were relaxed…”795
Let us look more closely at the Bolsheviks’, and in particular

Stalin’s, motivation for creating the famine. As Anne Applebaum
retells the story, the root motivation was fear that Ukraine might rise
in rebellion against the Soviet authorities as it had done in 1919
“Russian unease about Ukraine goes back to the very beginning of the
Soviet Union, in 1917, when the Ukrainians first tried to set up their
own state. During the civil war that followed the revolutions in
Moscow and Kiev, Ukrainian peasants — radical, left wing and anti-
Bolshevik all at once — rejected the imposition of Soviet rule. They
pushed out the Red Army and, for a time, had the upper hand. But in
the anarchy that followed the Red Army’s retreat, Polish armies as
well as the Czarist White Army re-entered Ukraine. One White
general, Anton Denikin, crossed into Russia and came within 200 miles
of Moscow, nearly ending the revolution before it really got
underway.
“The Bolsheviks recovered — but they were stunned. For years,

they spoke obsessively of the ‘cruel lesson of 1919.’ A decade later, in
1932, Stalin had cause to remember that lesson. That year, the Soviet
Union was once again in turmoil, following his disastrous decision to
collectivize agriculture. As famine began spreading, he became
alarmed by news that Ukrainian Communist Party members were
refusing to help Moscow requisition grain from starving Ukrainian
peasants. ‘I do not want to accept this plan. I will not complete this
grain requisition plan,’ an informer reported one saying before he ‘put
his party card on the table and left the room.’
“Stalin sent a blistering letter to his colleagues: ‘The chief thing

now is Ukraine. Things in Ukraine are terrible. .  .  . If we don’t make an
effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose’ it. He
recalled the Ukrainian national movement, and the Polish and White
Army interventions. It was time, he declared, to make Ukraine a ‘real
fortress of the USSR, into a genuinely exemplary republic.’ To do so,
harsher tactics were required: ‘Lenin was right in saying that a person
who does not have the courage to swim against the current when
necessary cannot be a real Bolshevik leader.’
“Those harsher tactics included the blacklisting of many Ukrainian

towns and villages, which were forbidden from receiving
manufactured goods and food. They also prohibited Ukrainian

434
peasants from leaving the republic and set up roadblocks between
villages and cities, preventing internal migration. Teams of activists
arrived in Ukrainian villages and confiscated everything edible, not
just wheat but potatoes, beets, squash, beans, peas, farm animals and
even pets. They searched barns and closets, smashed open walls and
ovens, looking for food.
“The result was a humanitarian catastrophe: At least 5 million

people perished of hunger between 1931 and 1934 across the Soviet
Union. Among them were nearly 4 million of 31 million Ukrainians,
and they died not because of neglect or crop failure but because their
food had been taken. The overall death rate was 13 percent, but it was
as high as 50 percent in some provinces. Those who survived did so by
eating grass and insects, frogs and toads, shoe leather and leaves.
Hunger drove people to madness: Previously law-abiding people
committed theft and murder in order to eat. There were incidents of
cannibalism, which the police noted, recorded and sent to the
authorities in Moscow, who never responded. (In acknowledgment of
its scale, the famine of 1932-33 is known in Ukraine as the Holodomor,
a word derived from the Ukrainian for hunger, ‘holod,’ and for
extermination, ‘mor’.)
“After the famine, Stalin launched a new wave of terror. Ukrainian

writers, artists, historians, intellectuals — anyone with a link to the
nationalist governments or armies of 1917-1919 — was arrested, sent
to the Gulag or executed.
“His goal was no mystery: He wanted to crush the Ukrainian

national movement and to ensure that Ukraine would never again
rebel against the Soviet state. He spoke obsessively about loss of
control because he knew that another Ukrainian uprising could thwart
the Soviet project, not only by depriving the U.S.S.R. of grain but also
by robbing it of legitimacy. Ukraine had been a Russian colony for
centuries; the two cultures remained closely intertwined; the
languages were closely related.
“If Ukraine rejected Soviet ideology and the Soviet system, Stalin
feared that rejection could lead to the downfall of the whole Soviet
Union. Ukrainian rebellion could inspire Georgians, Armenians or
Tajiks. And if the Ukrainians could establish a more open, more
tolerant state, or if they could orient themselves, as so many wanted,
toward European culture and values, then why wouldn’t many
Russians want the same?
“Like Putin many decades later, the Bolsheviks went to great

lengths to hide the true nature of their policy in Ukraine. During the
civil war, they disguised their Red Army as a ‘Soviet Ukrainian
liberation movement.’ Stalin — commissar of nationalities at the time
435
— created fake mini-states in Ukrainian provinces, designed to
undermine the Ukrainian government in 1918, much like the ‘Donetsk
People’s Republic’ seeks to undercut the Ukrainian government today.
“In the aftermath of the 1932-33 famine, a drastic information

blackout was imposed. The deaths of millions were covered up and
denied. It was illegal to mention the famine in public. Officials were
told to alter the causes of death in public documents. In 1937, a Soviet
census that revealed too many missing people in Ukraine and
elsewhere was repressed; the heads of the census bureau were shot.
Foreign journalists were pressured to conceal the famine, and with a
few exceptions, most complied.” 796
The fact of the monstrous tragedy of the Holodomor could not be concealed.
And yet many western journalists and writers, pandering to western governments
that were eager to do business with Stalin, or simply refusing to face facts that
contradicted their own socialist convictions, tried to do just that.797 A notorious
example was George Bernard Shaw, who wrote: “Stalin has delivered the goods to
an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago. Jesus Christ has come down to
earth. He is no longer an idol. People are gaining some kind of idea of what would
happen if He lived now…”798
No less egregious was the example of the Reverend Hewlett Johnson, the “Red
Dean” of Canterbury. As Robert Service writes: “In a decade when Stalin was
exterminating tens of thousands of Orthodox Church priests, this prominent
English cleric declared: ‘The communist puts the Christian to shame in the
thoroughness of his quest for a harmonious society. Here he proves himself to be
the heir of the Christian intention.’ Johnson’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1937 left
him permanently transfixed by its achievements; and as Vice-President of the
Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR he spoke up for the communist spirit
of the times more fervently than for the Holy Spirit…”799

796 Applebaum, “Why does Putin want to control Ukraine? Ask Stalin”, The
Washington Post, October 20, 2017.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/why-does-putin-want-control-
ukraine-ask-stalin/2017/10/20/800a7afe-b427-11e7-a908-
a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.8790b06102fb.
797 See Anne Applebaum, “How Stalin Hid Ukraine's Famine From the World”, The
Atlantic, October 13, 2017,

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/red-famine-anne-
applebaum-ukraine-soviet-union/542610/
798 Shaw, The Rationalization of Russia, 1931.
799 Service, Comrades, London: Pan Books, 2007, p. 205.
436
43. KING ALEXANDER I OF YUGOSLAVIA
On June 14, 1928 the Croat Peasant Party leader Radić died a few weeks after
being shot in the Yugoslav skupština or parliament. Immediately, Croat
representatives walked out of the skupština in protest and refused to return. The
kingdom’s politics became deadlocked.
King Alexander now faced a difficult dilemma. The dilemma consisted in the
fact that, on the one hand, parliament was being exploited by dissident Croats and
Slovenes (and also increasing numbers of Serbs) in order to paralyze the country.
And now, after the murder of Radić, the Croats were even less inclined to
compromise… But on the other hand, any attempt to suspend the constitution, or
introduce a new political order, might paralyze the country still more in an age that
placed freedom in the sense of unbridled self-will above everything…
In a last throw of the dice, King Alexander appointed the Slovene cleric Korošec
as the first and last non-Serb Prime Minister of the kingdom. But this attempt at
conciliating the non-Serbs failed because the Croat delegates continued to boycott
parliament, while the beginning of the Great Depression cast a dark cloud of
pessimism over the country. The result was that Korošec resigned on December 30,
1928.
It was time to change course… On January 6, 1929 King Alexander prorogued

parliament and took all political power into his own hands.
This act was not as unprecedented or radical as might at first appear, for the
democratic tide in European politics was ebbing. As Niall Ferguson writes, “Of
twenty-eight European countries… nearly all had acquired some form of
representative government before, during or after the First World War. Yet eight
were dictatorships by 1925, and a further five by 1933. Five years later only ten
democracies remained. Russia, as we have seen, was the first to go after the
Bolsheviks shut down the Constituent Assembly in 1918. In Hungary the franchise
was restricted as early as 1920. Kemal [Ataturk], fresh from his trouncing of the
Greeks, established what was effectively a one-party state in Turkey in 1923, rather
than see his policies of secularism challenged by an Islamic opposition…
“… Even before his distinctly theatrical March on Rome on October 29, 1922 –
which was more photo-opportunity than coup, since the fascists lacked the
capability to seize power by force – Mussolini was invited to form a government by
the king, Victor Emmanuel III, who had declined to impose martial law…
“Italy was far from unusual in having dictatorship by royal appointment. Other
dictators were themselves monarchs. The Albanian President, Ahmed Bey Zogu,
declared himself King Zog I in 1928. In Yugoslavia King Alexander staged a coup
in 1929, restored parliamentarism in 1931 and was assassinated in 1934; thereafter
437
the Regent Paul re-established royal dictatorship. In Bulgaria King Boris III seized
power in 1934. In Greece the king dissolved parliament and in 1936 installed
General Ioannis Metaxas as dictator. Two years later Romania’s King Carol
established a royal dictatorship of his own…”800
Not dissimilar dictatorships were created in the Baltic States, in Hungary,

Poland, Spain, Portugal and Austria. In Germany, the democratically elected
Reichstag chose Hitler as chancellor…
“Nearly all the dictatorships of the inter-war period,” continues Ferguson, “were
at root conservative, if not downright reactionary. The social foundations of their
power was what remained of the pre-industrial ancien régime: the monarchy, the
aristocracy, the officer corps and the Church, supported to varying degrees by
industrialists fearful of socialism and by frivolous intellectuals who were bored of
democracy’s messy compromises…”801
But it is unjust to describe the intellectuals who were frustrated with democracy
as “frivolous”. Some of the criticisms of democracy were well-founded and
resonate even more today than they did then. 802 For the post-war idols of
democracy and national self-determination, proclaiming only the pseudo-“rights”
but never the real obligations of individuals and ethnic groups, had led not simply
to “messy compromises”, but to gridlock, paralysis, near-anarchy and civil war in
many countries. In the short to medium term, this could only benefit one power –
the Soviet Union, the most voracious, God-hating and man-destroying state in
history. Western historians routinely describe the dictators as vain, power-hungry
men who overthrew the will of the people. Doubtless some, even the majority of
them were vain and power-hungry – although by no means always more vain and
power-hungry than the democratic politicians they replaced. But their basic aims of
preserving order and unity in the state, and suppressing the extreme left whose

800 Ferguson, The War of the World, London: Penguin, 2007, pp. 228, 229-230.
802 As, for example, in the following words of Ioannis Metaxis: “Democracy is the
offspring of Capitalism. It is the instrument through which Capitalism rules the

masses. It is the instrument through which Capitalism displays its own will as if it
were the people’s. . . . This variety of democracy relies on universal suffrage by
individual and secret ballot; i.e. it needs well-built political parties – hence the
need of capital. It needs newspapers, hence the need of capital. It . . . needs
electoral organizations and electoral combats; that means money. [And] it needs a
lot of other things that presuppose money as well. In short, only big capitalists or
their puppets are able to fight in [the framework of] such a democracy. Men or
[even] groups of people in need of money, even if they defend the noblest ideals,
are doomed to failure. For if one has the control of the newspapers, one is in a
position to shape the public opinion according to his own views; and even if he
defends principles abhorred by the people, he can conceal them in such a way, that
the people swallow them in the end. But even if the people do not swallow them,
he can declare, through the newspapers he controls, that the people have in fact
swallowed them. And then everybody believes that the others have swallowed the
‘principles’/lies [of the capitalist] and surrenders as well.” (The Diaries of I.
Metaxas, Athens: Ikaros, 1960, vol. 4, p. 446)
438
overt aim was to destroy it, was laudable and necessary. As for the will of the
people, this was usually on the side of the dictators: it was the “frivolous
intellectuals” of liberal views (Lenin called them “useful idiots”) who preferred to
fiddle and talk while Rome burned, moaning about the loss of their “human right”
to pontificate from a public tribunal while the tribunal itself was being sawn apart
from below…
King Alexander understood this as well as anyone, and his adoption of the
dictator’s path was certainly not born of vanity or lust for power, but of love for his
country and care for her salvation. As he proclaimed when he prorogued
parliament and suspended the constitution, “My expectations and those of my
people that the evolution of our internal political life would bring about order and
consolidation within our country have not been realised. Both parliamentary life
and the political outlook generally have become more and more negative and both
the nation and the State are today suffering from the consequences of this state of
affairs.
“All useful institutions within the State and the development of our national life
have been jeopardized. Such an unhealthy political situation is not only prejudicial
to internal life and progress, but also to the development of our external relations
as well as to our prestige and credit abroad.
“Parliamentary life, which as a political instrument was a tradition of my late

revered father, has also always been my ideal, but blind political passions have so
abused it, that it has become an obstacle to all profitable work in the State. The
regrettable disputes and the events in the Skupština have undermined the
confidence of the nation in this institution. All harmony and even those elementary
relations between parties and individuals have become altogether impossible.
Instead of developing and strengthening the feeling of national unity,
Parliamentarism as it has developed has begun to provoke moral disorganisation
and national disunion.
“It is my sacred duty to preserve by all means national unity and the State. I am
determined to fulfil my duty without flinching until the end. The preservation of
the unity of the people and the safeguarding of the unity of the State, the highest
ideal of my reign, must also be the most important law for me and for all…”803
National unity was indeed King Alexander’s highest political ideal, and after ten
years of failed experiment with his other ideal of parliamentarism, he was now
prepared, while not rejecting parliamentarism permanently, to place it temporarily
but firmly in subjection to national unity. As he explained to an American journalist,

803 Ulrick Loring and James Page, Yugoslavia’s Royal Dynasty, London: The
Monarchist Press Association, 1976, p. 63.
439
“a house divided against itself cannot stand. The politicians tried to divide our
people.”804
“As a gesture to advocates of federalism he renamed the country ‘Yugoslavia’

and reorganized it into nine banovine, districts named for points of geographical
interest. These modifications, along with a strict ban on activities and organizations
deemed political or ethnocentric, were to be the basis of a new Yugoslav patriotism
that admitted no national distinctions. In order to guarantee cooperation with this
new program, the king capped his list of decrees with a new Law for the Defense of
the State, an expansion of the 1921 obzana to cover any would-be dissenters. Thus
Aleksandar joined the ranks of East European dictators, although he always
rejected that interpretation. ‘This was not a dictatorship,’ he said shortly before his
death. ‘I only took a few necessary measures to further the unity of the state until
political passions cooled.’”805
Alexander made a major mistake at the beginning of his dictatorship when he

appointed General Peter Zhivković as Prime Minister. Zhivković was a close friend
of the king, but he “had opened the oak gates to Belgrade’s royal residence on the
night in May 1903 when Apis and his co-conspirators stormed the palace and
murdered King Aleksandar Obrenović”. Later, he turned against Apis. However,
his appointment “was greeted with undisguised dismay not only in Croatia but
also in Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Montenegro…”806
A more accurate description of what Alexander did in 1929 might be: an

attempted transition from constitutional monarchy to autocratic monarchy of the
traditional Orthodox kind. Of course, he could not say this, even if he had been
fully conscious that this was his goal; for the West, and the westernized classes in
the East, no longer understood the concept of the Orthodox autocracy, which they
mistakenly equated with an oriental variety of Catholic absolutism. For Orthodox
autocracy means a close relationship between Church and State in which the
hierarchy is the conscience of the king, advising and correcting him in accordance
with the precepts of the Gospel, while according him the supremacy in the political
sphere – a supremacy that the Popes did not concede to their Catholic kings.
King Alexander had such a close friend and advisor from the hierarchy in the
person of Bishop Nikolai Velimirović of Ohrid. Bishop Nikolai appears to have
gradually changed his political position from his earlier enthusiastic Yugoslavism
and ecumenism to a closer concentration on the preservation of Serbia and her
Orthodox traditions. This “conversion” appears to have taken place in the mid-
1920s and almost certainly influenced his friend the king. Always a fervent anti-
communist, Nikolai retained his close friendships in the democratic powers of

804 “Alexander tells Yugoslavia’s woes”, New York Times, March 10, 1929, p. 3.
805 Brigit Farley, “Aleksandar Karadjordjevic and the Royal Dictatorship in
Yugoslavia”, in Berndt J. Fischer, Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian
Strongmen of South Eastern Europe, London: Hurst & Company, 2006, pp. 72-73.
806 Misha Glenny, The Balkans, 1804-1999, London: Granta Books, 2000, p. 429.
440
Britain and America – a fact that later made the Germans imprison him in Dachau.
But his political ideal was the Serbian Orthodox autocracy of the Nemanjas.807
Having said that, neither king nor bishop spoke openly about the Orthodox
autocracy. That would have been impossible in an age in which the only political
choices seemed to be between democracy and totalitarianism. Besides, a transition
from constitutionalism to autocracy had never been attempted in history, and
would probably have been possible only in a country, like Russia, with a recent
strong tradition of autocracy.
So the king’s only alternative was to hold on grimly, forced to repress those
dissidents whom he was unable to persuade. At least he could not be accused of
discriminating in favour of the Serbs - his repressive measures landed many Serbs,
too, in prison. And “he underscored his personal Yugoslavism [and ecumenism] by
vacationing in Slovenia, naming a son after the Croatian king Tomislav, and
standing as godfather to a Muslim child.”808
Perhaps surprisingly, many democrats accepted the necessity of his dictatorship

- at first. “Generally,” writes Farley, “Aleksandar’s new regime received favourable
reviews. Yugoslavia’s Great Power allies swallowed their distaste for non-

807 “In those days,” wrote Bishop Nikolai, “the problem of relations between the
Church and the State did not disquiet people as it does in our days, at least not in
the Orthodox countries. It had been regulated as it were by itself, through long
tradition. Whenever Caesaropapism or Papocaesarism tried to prevail by force, it
had been overcome in a short time. For there existed no tradition in the Church of
the East of an augustus [emperor] being at the same time Pontifex Maximus, or
vice-versa. There were unfortunate clashes between civil and ecclesiastical
authorities on personal grounds, but those clashes were temporary and passing.
Or, if such clashes and disagreements arose on matters of religious doctrines and
principles, threatening the unity of the Christian people, the Councils had to judge
and decide. Whoever was found guilty could not escape condemnation by the
Councils, be he Emperor or Patriarch or anybody else.
“Savva’s conception of the mutual relations between Church and State was
founded upon a deeper conception of the aim of man’s life on earth. He clearly
realized that all rightful terrestrial aims should be considered only as means
towards a celestial end. He was tireless in pointing out the true aim of man’s
existence in this short life span on earth. That aim is the Kingdom of Heaven
according to Christ’s revelation. Consequently, both the Church and the State
authorities are duty-bound to help people towards that supreme end. If they want
to compete with one another, let them compete in serving people in the fear of God
and not by quarrelling about honors and rights or by grabbing prerogatives from
one another. The King and the Archbishop are called to be servants of God by
serving the people towards the final and eternal aim…”(“The Life of St. Sava”, in
Sabrana Dela (Collected Works), volume 12, Khimelstir, 1984, pp. 573-574)
808 Farley, op. cit., p. 76. The genuine Yugoslavism of the king is illustrated by the
following anecdote: “Once while the king was in Zagreb, there was a reception and
a ball. At the ball they introduced to the king a lady who, after curtseying, said: ’I
am a Serb from Zagreb.’’And I,’ replied the king with a gentle smile, ‘am a Croat
from Belgrade…’” (T.V., “Svetloj pamiati nezabvennago ego velichestva korolia
vitiazia Aleksandra I Yugoslavianskago” (To the Radiant Memory of his Majesty,
the Unforgettable Knight, Alexander I of Yugoslavia), Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox
Russia), N 24 (1765), December 15/28, 2004, p. 7)
441
parliamentary solutions. The London Times expressed confidence that the end-
result would be a ‘well-knit state’, while the erstwhile leftist French Prime Minister,
Briand, said only that Aleksandar should avoid ‘fascist-style bombast’. None of the
king’s allies wanted to see Yugoslavia, the crucial link between Danubian and
Balkan Europe, fractured and disunited. At home Croat leaders expressed their
relief at the end of an era. ‘This was a necessary step,’ declared Ante Trumbić, who
had continued to promote his vision of an equal partnership among the leading
groups in the state. Despairing of effecting change through the Skupština, they
turned hopefully to Aleksandar after its suspension… They believed that the end of
politics-as-usual would lead to initiatives addressing their fundamental
grievance…”809
But this optimism did not last long; and by the summer of 1929 Croatia’s
politicians resumed the offensive. Indeed, the whole province was not simply
discontented but seething with revolutionary violence. And so, as a result of the
continuous, uncompromising demands of the Croats, the “Dictatorship, which
Alexander had hoped to raise above Nationalism, became essentially anti-
Croatian”.810 For, despite his efforts “to be a colorless Yugoslav,” according to
Hugh Seton-Watson, “he was the symbol of the hegemony of the Serbs”.811 And so,
“whatever his intentions, Aleksandar’s personal rule stripped Croats of what little
influence they had had in the state”.812
Recognizing that his policy was not working, he decided on a cosmetic change.
In November, 1931 elections were permitted - but all opposition to the government
list was banned. And so 306 members of parliament were returned, all belonging to
the pro-government National Party. Yugoslavia had become a one-party state, even
if the appearance of genuine democracy was maintained. And her king was now a
real dictator, albeit less cruel and more genuinely impartial than other dictators of
the time.
Increasingly prominent in the political struggle now was the Catholic Church
under Archbishop Stepinac, who was already showing evidence of those viciously
anti-Serb and anti-Orthodox tendencies that were to explode into mass murder in
1941. This was evident already in 1932, when Metropolitan Dositheus (Vasić) was
appointed to the see of Zagreb. Alexis Gerovsky, the Carpatho-Russian political
and religious activist, wrote: “Dositheus’ appointment to Zagreb elicited great
discontent among the Catholics. The name of Bishop Dositheus was already
blacklisted because he ‘by his propaganda has converted the Carpatho-Russians to
Orthodoxy’… When some years before the Second World War Bishop Dositheus
told me that he had been appointed as metropolitan in Zagreb, I besought him not
to accept this appointment, since he had never been there and did not know the
religious fanaticism of the Zagreb Croats… I mentioned to him [the Catholic

809 Farley, op. cit., p. 73.
810 Seton-Watson, Eastern Europe between the wars, Cambridge University Press,
1945, p 226.
811 Stephen Graham, Alexander of Yugoslavia, Yale University Press, 1939, Hamden,
Conn.: Archon Books, 1972, p. 169.

442
Archbishop] Stepinac, who was already famous for his religious intolerance, and I
warned him that he would suffer many unpleasantnesses from him. ‘Stepinac, who
was educated for seven years in a Jesuit seminary in Rome,’ I said, ‘will feel
offended that an Orthodox metropolitan should be implanted in his capital’… I
advised him to convince the members of the Synod to send to Zagreb a bishop from
those who had been born before the First World War and raised in Austria-
Hungary, and who was already familiar with types like Stepinac. But Vladyka told
me that it was his duty to obey the will of the patriarch, and he went to Zagreb.
When, several months later, I again met him in Belgrade, he told me that I had been
right. He was often insulted in the street. Sometime the windows of his house were
broken at night. Stones even fell into his bedroom. I asked Vladyka whether he had
spoken to the police. He replied that it was not fitting for a bishop to call the police.
But when I told him that in such a case his enemies would think that he feared
them, and would be still more brazen, Vladyka replied: ‘No, they know that I am
not afraid of them. When they revile me or spit at me, I simply raise my hands and
bless them with the sign of the cross.’”813
Another important new factor allied to this militant Catholicism

was the rise of the Ustaše Party under Ante Pavelić, who fled
Yugoslavia in 1929 in order to organize the training of his terrorists in
Italy and Hungary. Pavelić’s Ustaše (literally: “Rebel”) Party was an
extreme offshoot of the Croatian Party of Rights, founded in 1861 by
Ante Starčević. As John Cox writes, “Starčević advocated Croatian
unity and independence. His party pursued a line that was both anti-
Habsburg and anti-Serbian… Starčević… advocated the construction
of a ‘greater Croatia’ which would include territory inhabited by
Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and even Slovenes. He wrote that, on the
whole Serbs were simply Croats who had wandered away from their
Catholic Christianity; other members of the substantial Serbian
minority living in Croatia were either recent arrivals, encouraged to
settle by the Habsburgs, or members of other groups such as ‘Vlachs’
who had taken up Orthodoxy. The Catholic Slovenes to the north, with
whom Croats have traditionally had few conflicts, were supposedly
not a distinct nation but merely ‘mountain Croats’ who spoke a
different dialect. Furthermore the Muslims of Bosnia were just
islamicized Croats, and actually very admirable Croats indeed since
they had even been willing to adopt Islam under the Turks to gain
autonomy and maintain their political and economic control over what
had been medieval Croatia. This point would be very important to
Pavelić later, when he tried to justify Croatia’s annexation of Bosnia
after the Axis invasion of 1941. He would argue that NDH [the

813 Andrew Shestakov, Kogda terror stanovitsa zakonom, iz istorii gonenij na
Pravoslavnuiu Tserkov’ v Khorvatii v seredine XX v. (When terror becomes the law:
from the history of the persecutions on the Orthodox Church in Croatia in the
middle of the 20 t h century); in Monk Benjamin, Letopis’ Tserkovnykh Sobytij
Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi nachinaia s 1917 goda (A Chronicle of Church Events of the
Orthodox Church beginning from 1917), http://www.zlatoust.ws/letopis.htm,
part 2, pp. 22-23.
443
independent state of Croatia] was a Croat state with two religions:
Catholic Christianity and Islam.
“While Starčević was right about the Bosnian Muslims being

overwhelmingly of Slavic origin, he was grossly over-estimating their
Croatian or non-Serbian character. Starčević’s ethnic nationalism
meant that the Bosnian Muslims would be co-opted later by the
Croatian fascists, but that they would also, at least initially, be spared
much of the violence directed at Croatia’s Serbs and Jews.
“The Party of Rights had moved through various declarations of

who were its allies and what were its goals. Pavelić belonged to the
most anti-Serbian branch of the Party, initiated by Josip Frank in 1894.
By Pavelić’s day the Ustaša line was that Croatia needed to get out of
Yugoslavia fast and take Bosnia with it, and that it should use any
means necessary to carry out its goals. This is what the Axis invasion
of April 1941 allowed Pavelić to do. A tragic fate then awaited the
Serbs: as Ustaša leaders publicly boasted, one-third of them were to be
slaughtered, one-third forcibly converted to Catholic Christianity, and
the rest expelled from the country.” 814
Unlike the Croatian Peasant Party under Maček, which continued

to negotiate with King Alexander, and in 1939 even came to an
agreement or sporazum on Croatian autonomy with his successor,
Prince Paul, Pavelić and the Ustaše were hate-filled terrorists with
whom it was impossible for the king to negotiate. Thus Pavelić once
“visited Bulgaria, where he made several public appearances with
leading members of Vanche Mihailov’s VMRO, the wing of the
Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization which was
committed to the violent overthrow of Yugoslav rule in Macedonia:
‘We cannot fight against those forest bandits [Serbs/Yugoslavs] with a
prayer book in our hands,’ Pavelić told large crowds of VMRO
supporters in Vidin and Sofia. ‘After the World War many believed
that we would have peace… But what sort of peace is it when Croats
and Macedonians are imprisoned? These two peoples were enslaved
on the basis of a great lie – that Serbs live in Macedonia and Croatia
and that the Macedonian people is Serbian… If we tie our hands and
wait until the civilized world helps us, our grandchildren will die in
slavery. If we wish to see our homeland free, we must unbind our
hands and go into battle.’
“Pavelić’s appeal for the violent overthrow of Yugoslavia and the

secession of Croat lands led to a Belgrade court sentencing him to
death in absentia on a charge of high treason. Persona non grata in

814 Fox, “Ante Pavelic and the Ustaše State in Croatia”, in Berndt J. Fischer, Balkan
Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Strongmen of South Eastern Europe, London:

Hurst & Company, 2006, pp. 207-208.
444
Austria, Pavelić chose Italy as his place of exile. With the financial
assistance of the Italian government, Pavelić set about the construction
of two main training camps, one in Hungary, one in Italy, for his new
organization, the UHRO [Ustaše Hrvatska Revolucionarna
Organizacija].” 815
Soon Pavelić felt ready to strike. On March 23, 1929 he sent a hit
team to Zagreb to kill Toni Schlegel, the Croat editor of the pro-
Yugoslav newspaper Novosti, and a personal friend of King Alexander.
Then, in 1932, “a unit of the Ustaše ‘invaded’ the town of Brušani in
Like by stealing across the Italian border (Italy had annexed large
amounts of Croatian territory after the World War); it attacked some
government buildings and many of the men were then caught. Inside
the country they inspired sporadic bombings and shootings.” 816
Finally, in December, 1933 Pavelić sent three men from Italy to kill the king in
Zagreb. But the leading conspirator, Peter Oreb, couldn’t carry it through, partly
because he did not want to kill innocent civilians and the Catholic Archbishop of
Zagreb, who was blessing the king, but also because he was amazed at the warmth
with which the Croats greeted the king, which was not what he had been led to
believe. And so he “made a full confession, incriminating Pavelich and
compromising Italy. The trial [took place] in March, in Yugoslavia, in a blaze of
publicity. The position of Pavelich, suborned by Italy, was made clear to the
Yugoslavs, perhaps to the world. On April 1 the three men [were] condemned to
death.”817
At the beginning of the 1930s, as both Fascism and Communism were becoming
stronger on the international stage, Alexander’s task was not becoming any easier.
Within, his kingdom was seething with malcontents and revolutionaries. From
outside, hostile powers such as Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria were helping his
internal enemies. Faced with this mounting, and increasingly united opposition,
King Alexander was forced to seek friends - or rather, counterweights to his enemies -
in one or other of the European blocs: the communists, the fascists and the liberals.
There was no question of him, the main protector of the White Russian
Orthodox Church Abroad, entering into an alliance with the communists,
especially after the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia came
out in defence of the Ustaše’s incursion into Lika… 818 The fascists were also

816 Fox, op. cit.
817 Graham, op. cit., pp. 29. 213-220.
818 The statement declared: “The Communist Party is addressing the whole
Croatian people inviting it to support the Ustashas' struggle with utmost effort,
and in doing so, not to rely exclusively on the Ustashas' terrorist actions, but also
to rely on the widest masses of the Croatian people against the Serbian nationalist
domineering oppressors…”
“At the same time,” writes Novica Vojnovic, “the communists financially
supported the issuing of the Ustashas' publications and other press, criticised the
Ustashas' leader Ante Pavelic for not fighting more vehemently against the
445
unacceptable allies because of Italy’s territorial incursions into Yugoslavia and
support for the Ustaše.
That left the democrats, who at least supported the idea of a multi-ethnic
Yugoslavia, and had close brotherly (i.e. masonic) links with many of Yugoslavia’s
leading politicians, bankers and industrialists. And so in February, 1933 Alexander
joined a “Little Entente” consisting of the democratic powers of France,
Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia…
The problem, however, was that these nations were militarily weaker and
geographically more disconnected from each other than the fascist bloc, and that
they included none of Yugoslavia’s main trading partners. Besides, the leaders of
the “Little Entente” were angry with Alexander for betraying their masonic-
democratic ideals on January 6, 1929. Perhaps that is why both Britain and France
were rather slow in coming to the aid, political or economic, of their former
wartime ally…
And so Alexander decided, while not abandoning his democratic allies, to make
feelers towards the fascist bloc...
First, in 1932, he entered into secret negotiations with Mussolini. But in spite of
intense diplomatic activity, these came to nothing. “To the proposal for a meeting
with the King [Mussolini] replied arrogantly. Alexander must first of all

"nationalist Serbian regime", threatening him that they would assume the
leadership of the Ustashas' movement, that it would be managed by the
communists if he continued with such insufficient activities against the Serbs.
“In order to be able to act more successfully against the Serbian people in
Yugoslavia, the… trio Broz[Tito]-Kardelj-Bakaric convened in 1934 the Fourth
Conference of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in Ljubljana, in the Bishop's
Court, with the black wine from the Bishop's cellar and with roast lamb which was
specially prepared by the Diocese for the communists as ‘dear guests’, as the
Bishop himself told when he greeted them at the meeting.
“The nationalist communist parties of Croatia and Slovenia were formed at the
Conference, and it was decided not to form the communist party of Serbia because
the Serbs were ‘the oppressive people’, and so the other peoples, especially the
Croats and Slovenians, should defend themselves from the Serbs by having their
national communist parties.
“Having assumed all the power in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1934,
the… trio Broz[Tito]-Kardelj-Bakaric strengthened the anti-Serbian propaganda in
the country, satanising the Serbs and the whole Serbian people, accusing it of
being the primary impediment to the creation of a new, democratic, brotherly
community of nations and nationalities in Yugoslavia, in which they were fully
supported in Moscow, by the Comintern, and the Soviet regime. Thus, the Serbian
people were even then de facto proclaimed a reactionary people, which should be
destroyed for it stood in the way of creating a better, more just, socialist society, as
in the Soviet Russia, even though Russia was at the time ruled by the most
undemocratic regime in the world.” (“Communist Crimes over the Serbian People
in the XX Century”,
http://www.akademediasrbija.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article
&id=789:communist-crimes-against-serbs-and-
russians&catid=45:english&Itemid=59)
446
consolidate the internal divisions of his country, then if he would apply again
Mussolini would consider it. ‘I wait at my window,’ said Mussolini.
“That amounted to an affront. From that time on Alexander worked more

vigorously to thwart Italian policy in the Balkans. But the phrase, ‘I wait at my
window’, was seen afterwards to have a sinister meaning. Mussolini was staging a
revolt at Lika on the boundary of Croatia and Dalmatia. His window looked across
the Adriatic. He was going to drop a lighted match into the supposed powder
factory of Croat and Dalmatian disaffection and watch the effects. Perhaps
Yugoslavia would be blown to bits. Then he could move in and impose Fascist
order on the other side of the Adriatic…”819
But Yugoslavia did not blow up, and “there are signs that in 1933 the Fascists
became discontented. Yugoslavia had not been obviously weakened by terrorism.
There was no unrest, no political ferment. The various political parties remained
passive under the dictatorship. The propaganda conducted in the foreign press had
raised no agitation against the Yugoslav government. Great Britain had privately
expressed her desire that Yugoslavia should return to democratic institutions, but
she was too occupied with other pressing problems to take sides in Balkan politics.
France was engrossed by the spectre of resurgent Germany. Travellers to
Yugoslavia heard little or nothing of the train wrecks and outrages. They reported
an uncommonly peaceful country. Tourists swarmed to the Dalmatian resorts…”820
As Italy fumed, Hungary, the other main supporter of the Ustaša, began to
rethink her relations with Yugoslavia. Yelka Pogorolets, the girlfriend of the
Croatian terrorist Perchets, had revealed the role of both Italy and Hungary in
financing Ustaša camps on their soil, and Yugoslavia protested to the League of
Nations. Admiral Horthy sent Alexander a diplomatic representative, who was
warmly received. The Ustaša camp in Hungary was closed821, and relations with
Hungary developed well. By October, 1934 they appeared to have achieved a
break-through.822
Italy still threatened – in December, 1933 the Italians and the Ustaša were behind
an attempt on Alexander’s life in Zagreb. But his stock internationally was rising,
and in the summer of 1933, only a few months after Hitler came to power, the king
decided to approach the most powerful country in the fascist bloc. He travelled
incognito by car to southern Germany, where he met Goering…823
However, French diplomats still hoped to enlist both Yugoslavia and Italy into
their anti-Hitler alliance, in spite of Alexander’s annoyingly dictatorial and anti-
Croatian ways. “If Aleksandar solved the Croat problem, they thought, Mussolini’s
opportunities for troublemaking with the Ustaša would vanish and France would

819 Graham, op. cit., pp. 177-178.
820 Graham, op. cit., p. 191.
822 Anthony Komjathy, Give Peace a Chance!, University Press of America, 1992, p
127.
823 Milan Banic, Masonerija i Jugoslavija, 1997.
447
enlist both states in the campaign to limit German expansion. The king reacted
badly to this request, curtly informing the French ambassador, Emile Naggiar, that
federalism condemned the country to anarchy. Why was Italy not being pressured
to stop its support for the Ustaša? Aleksandar then accepted some overtures from
the German government, whose representatives were probing weak links in the
French alliance system. They hastened to assure the king that Serbs were the
rightful rulers of Yugoslavia and proffered economic assistance that addressed
pressing needs. For a time Aleksandar contemplated using his German connections
as leverage against unreasonable French demands – until his diplomats learned
that Germany was secretly bankrolling various Ustaša activities both in Germany
and elsewhere…”824
Nevertheless, common interests continued to draw Alexander and the Germans

together. On the one hand, the French and the Czechs appeared to want to expand
the Little Entente to include Soviet Russia.825 Alexander could not countenance
that… On the other hand, the Germans had their own reasons, both political and
economic, for talking to Alexander. “On the political front, Hitler was disturbed by
the defence pact signed by the leaders of the Little Entente… By improving
Germany’s relations with Belgrade and Bucharest, he hoped to drive a wedge
between them, on the one hand, and Prague, on the other, which would help to
isolate Czechoslovakia, a country on which Hitler had lethal designs.
“On the economic front, closer ties with Yugoslavia and Romania (and, indeed,
Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey) would provide Germany with the agricultural and
mineral resources it needed for rearmament and, ultimately, a policy of imperial
expansion in Europe…”826
As the Germans had anticipated, Alexander’s negotiations with the fascist

powers began to alarm some of his allies in the “Little Entente”, notably France and
Czechoslovakia. The Parisian newspaper Le Temps was furious, as were the Czechs.
Already years before, the Czech President Tomas Masaryk had expressed a dislike
for King Alexander, whom he found “uncultured and undemocratic, a typical
product of military mentality”. 827 Now the Croatian architect and sculptor
Meštrović, who was a friend of the king, reported a conversation with Jan Masaryk,
the son of the President and his country’s ambassador in London in 1933, in which
Masaryk stormed against Alexander and the Serbs, saying that they would “ruin
themselves and us”, and that in the end it came down to a choice: “either
Alexander’s head, or the fall of your and our lands, which are allies”.828
Although Alexander never broke with the masonic-democratic camp

represented by Masaryk, his feelings against Masonry were becoming more intense.
In August, 1934, less than two months before his death, the king expressed his
frustration to Milan Banić. Denying that he occupied a mid-point between

827 http://www.studiacroatica.org/jcs/28/2805.htm
828 Mucic, op. cit., pp. 301-302.
448
democracy and authoritarianism, he said that he “had to chase away all the Masons,
because they are the root of all evil. No dirty business takes place without them!”829
His estrangement from them was deepened by their lurch to the left in 1934.
Until that year, the Comintern had refused to enter into any alliance with left-wing
socialist parties, which it regarded as “social fascist”. But the rise of Hitler alarmed
these parties, who began seeing “no enemies to the left”; and Stalin, sensing an
opportunity, decided that these parties were no longer “social fascist”, but simply
socialist, and blessed the formation of “Popular Fronts” in union with them. In May
an article appeared in Pravda commenting favourably on socialist-Communist
collaboration. Then, in June, Léon Blum's Socialist Party signed a pact for united
action with the French Communist Party, and the Radical Party joined the pact in
October…
While lurching to the left, French politicians still wanted to keep King Alexander
on side. Thus the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou thought that Alexander’s
regime might be a powerful asset for an anti-Hitler alliance in spite of its dictatorial
nature.“ His foreign policy was to create an anti-Hitler defense ring to be achieved
by what was known as the Eastern Pact - binding the Soviet Union and Poland and
the Little Entente, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania, to France… Barthou
went to Belgrade… at the end of June 1934 for successful introductory talks
regarding a Franco-Yugoslav alliance, and it was agreed that King Alexander
would pay a two week state visit to France starting on October 9th to lay the
groundwork for an anti-Hitler alliance…”830
In the midst of these complicated manoeuvres with the western powers, “King
Alexander had his own plan for securing peace in the Balkans, and peace in the
Balkans concerned him much more than peace in Western Europe. He believed that
a solidarity of the nations on the Balkan Peninsula was a first requirement. Let it
become unprofitable for a Western Power to start a war there and impossible
through diplomatic intrigue to set one Balkan State against another. He received
assistance to that end in an unexpected quarter. The King of Bulgaria made a move
to reconcile Bulgars and Serbs.”831
In the end King Boris was unable, for internal political reasons, to join the pact –
but relations between the two countries greatly improved. However, Romania,
Greece and even Turkey responded well to King Alexander’s overtures. In some
ways, this must be seen as one of the greatest of Alexander’s achievements, and one
that might have changed European history but for his own untimely death…
The godfather of King Alexander, Tsar Alexander III, once told his son, the
future Tsar Nicholas, that Russia had no friends. However, Imperial Russia herself
had been a true friend to the Balkan and Middle Eastern Orthodox financially,
diplomatically and militarily. It followed that with the fall of the last Russian tsar in

829 Banic, op. cit.
830 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2360302/posts.
449
1917, all the other Orthodox states found themselves essentially on their own,
friendless and under sentence of death. The most significant of these was
Alexander’s Yugoslavia. From every direction, Alexander was surrounded by
enemies: by Croats, Slovenes, Muslims, Kosovans, Macedonians and even some
Serbs from within the country, and by Italians, Austrians, Hungarians and
Albanians from without. The Romanians were allies, and perhaps in King Boris of
Bulgaria he had a real friend – but only on a personal level. For the history of bad
blood and the territorial claims and counter-claims between the two countries
made real cooperation impossible…
Already during the 1920s, Alexander was a marked man. For indeed, “many
sides wanted his death for many reasons... political mainly... either from [an]
international point of view or from [a] national point of view - and he knew it!”832
By assuming dictatorial powers in 1929 he had given his regime a few more years
of life, but it was a temporary expedient – and it created for him yet more enemies.
And so during the “dark valley” of the 1930s the wild beasts of communism,
fascism and masonic democracy circled closer and closer around the wounded lion
until one of them delivered the mortal blow.
King Alexander - whom one Russian called “the last honest man in Europe” -
was shot and killed on October 9, 1934 while on an official visit to France by “Vlada
the Chauffeur”, a well-known Bulgarian terrorist working for Pavelić. Thus
representatives of two of the illegal nationalist organizations that rejected
Alexander’s suzerainty – Croatia’s Ustaše and Macedonia’s IMRO (Internal
Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) – combined to wreak revenge on their
enemy. This much is clear, and the motivation is clear.
However, from the beginning there have been persistent rumours that
International Freemasonry – specifically, the Grand Orient of Paris - was also
involved and protected the assassins. Some say that the Masons wanted him killed
because he had once been a Mason but had withdrawn from the lodge under the
influence of Bishop Nikolai. According to one variant of this theory, Alexander had
refused to trample on the Cross in a Masonic rite… Security arrangements before
the assassination do appear to have been very weak, and that after the assassination,
the French appeared to do everything possible to protect the Ustaša and their
paymaster, Mussolini. No effort was made to extradite Pavelić and his co-
conspirators from Italy. At the League of Nations France again protected Italy. And
when the trial of the assassins finally got under way, after a great delay, in Aix-en-
Provence (not Paris, as might have been expected), the defence counsel, Desbons,
acted in such an extraordinarily obstructive manner that it was suspected that he
wanted to be expelled from the bar, with the result that the case could not go on,
the jury would be dismissed and a new trial called.833

832http://forum.alexanderpalace.org/index.php?topic=2880.385;wap2.
833Graham, op. cit., p. 296. A Serb who was present at the trial in Aix-en-Provence
claimed the following: (1) An American cine-journalist who filmed the
assassination to the smallest details, died in a hospital two months later, with no
visitors allowed to see him; (2) Desbons, the assassin’s lawyer, wanted to prove
during the trial that it was the Masons, and not the Ustaše who had killed the
450
All this, however, does not add up to a convincing argument that it was the
French Grand Orient that masterminded the assassination. All the evidence points
to the truth of the generally accepted theory, that Mussolini and Pavelić planned it.
After all, it is established that they were behind another attempt to kill the king
only ten months earlier in Zagreb. So they had the motive and intent and will to kill.
And in spite of all attempts to muddy the waters, Pavelić’s agents were eventually
convicted and executed.
The most that we can say about possible masonic involvement is that the French
authorities, most of whom were Masons, appeared to have tried to protect
Mussolini and Pavelić and save the face of Italy. For the French Masonic politicians
were trying to extend their anti-Hitlerite Little Entente to include Italy, which had
vowed to protect Austria against Germany. The fact that by protecting the Italians
from implication in the assassination (which, let us remember, also included the
assassination of the French Foreign Minister!) they offended the Yugoslavs, who
were also members of the Little Entente, seems not to have worried them. And so,
in fitting recompense for their injustice, they attained none of their aims, neither
Italy’s adherence to the Little Entente, nor Yugoslavia’s remaining in it; for under
the regency of Prince Paul Yugoslavia gravitated more and more towards
Germany…
In the last analysis, the Yugoslav kingdom foundered on the religious question,
that of the relationship between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches in the
kingdom. Although King Alexander made many ecumenical gestures to his
Catholic (Croat and Slovene) subjects, he was not prepared to abandon the
privileged position accorded in the state to the Orthodox Church. Thus early in his
reign his brother George put two questions to him. “Can you really combine Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes in one person?” and “Can you really deny your Serbian
mother and father, your Serbian Orthodox Church?” Alexander replied in the
negative…834
The importance of the religious differences between the peoples was

underestimated by idealists on both sides. Bishop Nikolai Velimirović argued
passionately for “love before logic”; he believed that questions of faith, such as the
Filioque, should be put aside for the sake of national and political unity; they were
merely “individual differences” that were far outweighed by what the Southern
Slavs had in common. “We Yugoslavs,” he said, “sincerely believe that in the future

king. But he was visited by some “influential Belgraders” who paid him five
million francs not to defend the Ustaše; (3) There was a big argument between
London’s Scotland Yard and French Sécurité. The English suspected that the
French had sabotaged the king’s escort… (Slobodno Zidarstvo ili Masonerija, izdan’e
radog komiteta antimasonske izlozhje, 1941, pp. 71-72.)
834 Brigit Farley, “Aleksandar Karadjordjevic and the Royal Dictatorship in
Yugoslavia”, in Berndt J. Fischer, Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian

Strongmen of South Eastern Europe, London: Hurst & Company, 2006, p. 86.
451
Serbian state harmony and friendship will come between the two faiths, the two
Churches.”835
It did not happen; and when, in 1937, the Serbs rose up against the heavily pro-
Catholic Concordat with the Vatican imposed on the Orthodox Church by the
prime minister Stoyadinović Bishop Nikolai was among the protestors. He had
come to understand that these “individual differences” were not simply a matter of
“logic”, but constituted a deep difference in spirit. Love and religious tolerance
between peoples must indeed be practised – but never at the expense of zeal for the
truth, never at the price of ecumenist lukewarmness. That was the truth that the
idealists of the 19th century would have to learn from the harsh realities of the
20th…836

835Velimirovic, op. cit., pp. 554-555.
836For a detailed description of the struggle over the Concordat, see V. Moss,
Letopis’ Velike Bitke (Chronicle of a Great Battle), Belgrade, 2008, pp. 324-333.
452
44. THE OLD CALENDARIST MOVEMENT
Although the True Orthodox laity of the Church of Greece with their few priests
were essentially alone in openly opposing the calendar change, there were still
some who had not “bowed the knee to Baal” in “the king’s palace” – the hierarchy
headed by Chrysostom Papadopoulos. Thus Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina
never accepted it, while Metropolitan Germanus of Demetrias protested against the
introduction of the new calendar and held it in abeyance in his diocese until
February 15, 1928.837 Others accepted it, but continued to agitate for its removal.
Thus “on July 2, 1929, in the presence of forty-four metropolitans, [Archbishop]
Chrysostom suddenly demanded the immediate signature of the hierarchs present
to a report he had prepared approving the calendar change and condemning those
who stayed with the old. This satanic plan of Chrysostom’s was opposed by the
metropolitans of Kassandreia, Maronia, Ioannina, Druinopolis, Florina, Demetrias,
Samos and Khalkis. When the archbishop insisted, thirteen hierarchs left, while of
the fifty-one who remained twenty-seven against four signed Chrysostom’s
report.”838
Indeed, it was the hope that the State Church would eventually return to the
Julian Calendar, that persuaded those bishops who later joined the True
Orthodox to stay where they were for the time being. Thus Bishop Ephraim
writes that at a “Pre-Council” held at the monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos
in 1930, “the representatives of the Serbian and Polish Churches (the Churches of
Russia, Georgia, and Bulgaria were not represented at the council; Russia and
Georgia were not present because, at the time, they were weathering the third
wave of persecutions under Stalin, Bulgaria was not present because the
‘Bulgarian schism’ was still in effect) asked for a separate chapel. When the
Greeks insisted that they all celebrate together the Slavs refused, excusing
themselves by saying that the language was different, as well as the typicon, and
that there would be confusion. The Greeks kept insisting and the Slavs kept
refusing, and in fact, to the end of the council, the two did not concelebrate, and
it became clear that the Slavs considered the calendar issue important enough at
the time to separate themselves from the Greeks. When they said that their
typicon was different, the calendar obviously weighed heavily as a part of that
difference… In fact the Serbian Church even supported the Old Calendarist
movement in Greece by sending them Chrism across the border secretly.”839

837 George Lardas, “The Old Calendar Movement in the Greek Church: An
Historical Survey”, B.Th. Thesis, Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1983, p. 12.
838 Monk Anthony Georgantas, Atheologites "Theologies" Atheologitou "Theologou"
(Atheist ‘Theologies’ of an Atheist ‘Theologian’), Gortynia: Monastery of St.

Nikodemos, 1992, pp. 7-8.
839 Monk (now Bishop) Ephraim, Letter on the Calendar issue. During this council
Bishop Nicholas (Velimirovic) of Ochrid vehemently defended the Orthodox

Calendar, declaring that the 1923 Congress which approved the new calendar had
created a schism. “Does the present assembly,” he said, “have any relation to the
Pan-Orthodox Congress of Constantinople, from which the anomalies known to us
all proceeded? The Church of Serbia was stunned when she saw the decisions of
that Congress put into practice.” (Monk Paul, Neoimerologitismos Oikoumenismos
(Newcalendarism Ecumenism), Athens, 1982, p. 78)
453
In 1929 Metropolitan Innocent of Peking wrote an open letter on the calendar
question in which he said: “In the Church of Christ there is nothing of little value,
nothing unimportant, for in every custom there is incarnate the Spirit of God, by
Whom the Church lives and breathes. Does not everyone who dares to rise up
against the customs and laws of the Church, which are based on sacred Tradition
and Scripture, rise up against the Spirit of God and thereby show to all who have
eyes to see of what spirit he is? Worthily and rightly does the Holy Church
consign such people to anathema.”840
In Greece, the number of True Orthodox parishes multiplied - 800 were founded
in the years 1926-30 alone. And, helped by a parliamentary decree of 1931 granting
freedom of worship to the Old Calendarists, the numbers of the faithful had
swelled to over 200,000 by October, 1934.
On August 8, 1934 the True Orthodox Christians declared the official church
to be schismatic. For, as Nicetas Anagnostopoulos wrote, the Greek Church had
“infringed on the dogma of the spiritual unity of the One, Holy, Catholic and
Apostolic Church, for which the Divine Founder had prayed, because it
separated itself in the simultaneous celebration of the feasts and observance of
the fasts from the other Orthodox Churches and the Orthodox world, 8/10ths of
which follows the Old Calendar (the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Holy
Mountain, Russia, Serbia and others).
“In Divine worship it has divided the pious Greek people into two
worshipping camps, and has divided families and introduced the simultaneous
feasts of Orthodox and heretics (Catholics, Protestants and others) as well as
confusion and disorder into the divine Orthodox Worship handed down by the
Fathers.
“It has transferred the immovable religious feasts and the great fasts, handed
down from ages past, of Christmas, the Mother of God and the Holy Apostles,
reducing the fast of the Apostles until it disappears when it coincides with the
feast of All Saints; and has removed the readings from the Gospel and Apostle
from the Sunday cycle.
“From this it becomes evident that the Calendar is not an astronomical

question, as the innovators of the Church of Greece claim in their defence, but
quite clearly a religious question, given that it is indissolubly bound up with the
worshipping, and in general with the religious life of the Orthodox Christian.
“Through the calendar innovation the new calendarist Church has

transgressed, not only the perennial Ecclesiastical Tradition of the Patristic and
Orthodox Calendar, and not only the above-mentioned Apostolic command [II

840 St. Elijah skete, Mount Athos, Uchenie Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi o Sviashchennom
Predanii i otnoshenie ee k novomu stiliu (The Teaching of the Orthodox Church on

Holy Tradition and its Relation to the New Calendar), Jordanville, NY: Holy
Trinity Monastery, 1989, p. 25.
454
Thessalonians 2.15; Galatians 1.8-9] and the decision of the Seventh Ecumenical
Council concerning the anathematisation of those who violate the Sacred
Tradition [“If anyone violates any ecclesiastical tradition, written or unwritten,
let him be anathema”], but also the decisions of the Pan-Orthodox Patriarchal
Councils of the years 1583, 1587 and 1593 under the Ecumenical Patriarch
Jeremiah II and of 1848 under the Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimus, which
condemned and anathematized the Gregorian calendar.
“It has also transgressed the Sacred Canons which order the keeping and
observance of the Sacred Traditions, which are: a) the Third of the Council of
Carthage, b) the Twenty-First of the Council of Gangra, and c) the Ninety-First
and Ninety-Second of St. Basil the Great, as well as the Forty-Seventh canon of
the Council of Laodicea, which forbids the concelebration with heretics, which is
what the Latins and the Protestants are, and the First of the Seventh Ecumenical
Council concerning the steadfast observance of the complete array of the divine
Canons.”841
Nor did the new calendarists lack direct warnings from the Heavenly Church
that the path they had embarked on was false. One such warning was given to
the new calendarist Bishop Arsenius of Larissa on December 12/25, 1934, the
feast of St. Spyridon according to the Old Calendar, but Christmas according to
the new calendar.
“In the morning the bishop went by car to celebrate the Liturgy in his holy
church. When he arrived there, he saw a humble, aged, gracious Bishop with a
panagia on his breast. Arsenius said to him: ‘Brother, come, let’s proclaim the
joyful letters of Christmas and then I will give you hospitality.’
“The humble Bishop replied: ‘You must not proclaim those letters but mine,
St. Spyridon’s!’ Then Arsenius got angry and said: ‘I’m inviting you and you’re
despising me. Go away then.’
“Arsenius went into the church, venerated the icons and sat in his throne.
When the time for the katavasias came, he sang the first katavasia, and then told
the choir to sing the second. Arsenius began to say the third, but suddenly felt
anxious and unwell. He motioned to the choir to continue and went into the
altar, where they asked him: ‘What’s the matter, master?’ He replied: ‘I don’t
feel well.’
“When Arsenius’ indisposition increased, they carried him to his house,

where his condition worsened, and the next day he died. He had been punished
by God for his impious disobedience to St. Spyridon. This miracle is known by
the older Orthodox faithful of Larissa.”842

841 I Phoni tis Orthodoxias (The Voice of Orthodoxy), N 844, November-December,
1991, pp. 26-27.

842 I Agia Skepe (The Holy Protection), N 122, October-December, 1991, p. 109.
455
During this early period of the struggle against the new calendar, many
people sympathized with the True Orthodox but did not join them because they
did not yet have bishops. Others continued to worship according to the
Orthodox Calendar without openly breaking communion with the new
calendarists. Among the latter was Fr. Nicholas Planas of Athens. Fr. Nicholas
was the priest who was called to conduct a service of Holy Water to bless the
“Society of the Orthodox”, which effectively marked the beginning of the Old
Calendarist struggle. At that service he said: “Whatever has been done
uncanonically cannot stand – it will fall.”
Once “he wanted to serve according to the traditional Calendar on the feast
of the Prophet Elisseus [Elisha]. But since he feared that obstacles might arise, he
agreed with his assistant priest the night before to go and serve at Saint
Spyridon’s in Mantouka. In the morning his chantress went to Saint Spyridon’s
and waited for him. Time passed and it looked as though the priest was not
going to come to serve. She despaired. She supposed that something serious had
happened to him, and that was why he hadn’t come. She left and went to
Prophet Elisseus’ (because the ‘information center’ was there), to ask what had
happened to the priest, and there, she saw him in the church preparing to
celebrate the Liturgy! She chided him for breaking the agreement which they
had made, and asked furthermore why he was not afraid, but came there in the
center, right in the midst of the seething persecution. He said to her, ‘Don’t
scold me, because this morning I saw the Prophet and he told me to come here
to serve and not to fear anything, because he will watch over me.’ His helper
was left with her argument unfinished! ‘But, how did you see him?’ she asked
him. He told her, ‘I got up this morning and got ready for Saint Spyridon’s. I
was sitting in an armchair while they brought me a carriage. At that moment I
saw Prophet Elisseus before me, and he told me to go to his church to celebrate
the Liturgy!’…
“Another example similar to that of Papa-Nicholas is that of the priestmonk

Jerome of Aegina, who followed the same path. Shortly after his ordination to
the priesthood, a year or so before the calendar change, Fr. Jerome ceased from
serving because of a vision that was granted him during the Liturgy. According
to some accounts this occurred within forty days of his ordination. He
continued to preach, however, at a hospital chapel where he lived, and which he
himself had built there on the island of Aegina. Although this chapel officially
was under the new calendar diocese of Aegina, Fr. Jerome always celebrated the
feast days according to the traditional ecclesiastical calendar…
“Although he himself did not serve as a priest, nevertheless, because of his

saintliness and his popularity among the people and because of the obvious
gifts of the Holy Spirit which he possessed, he had great influence among the
faithful who looked to him for direction and guidance. This came to the ears of
Procopius, the Bishop of Hydra and Aegina. As a result, the bishop sent word to
Fr. Jerome that he was going to come and impose on him to concelebrate with
him. Up to this time, Fr. Jerome had sought to remain faithful to the Church’s
tradition and to his conscience without making an issue of it publicly or in street
456
demonstrations. He saw, however, that the bishop was determined to create an
issue now and force him into communion with him. As a result, Fr. Jerome sent
the bishop a short note and resigned from the diocese, saying among other
things: ‘I ask you to accept my resignation from the Hospital, because from 1924
and thence, my longing, as well as my zeal, has been for the Orthodox Church
and Faith. From my childhood I revered Her, and dedicated all my life to Her,
in obedience to the traditions of the Godbearing Fathers. I confess and proclaim
the calendar of the Fathers to be the correct one, even as You Yourself
acknowledge…’”843
An especially active role in the struggle was played by Hieromonk Matthew

(Karpathakis), who in 1927, in response to a Divine vision, founded the
women’s Monastery of the Mother of God at Keratea, Attica, which soon
became the largest monastery in Greece.844
In 1934 he wrote: “For every Christian there is nothing more honourable in

this fleeting life than devout faith in the Master of all things, our Lord Jesus
Christ. For what else can save the soul from death, that is, from the
condemnation of eternal punishment, than this faultless Orthodox Christian
Faith of ours, about which the Lord speaks clearly, saying: ‘He who believes and
is baptized will be saved, but he who does not believe will be condemned’
(Mark 16.16). This Faith was compared by the Lord to a valuable treasure which
a man found hidden in a field and to buy which he sold all his possessions
(Matthew 13.13).
“Therefore the blessed Apostle Jude exhorts everyone ‘to contend for the
Faith which was once for all delivered to the saints’ (Catholic epistle, v. 3). And
the divine Apostle made such an exhortation because there were appearing at
that time men of deceit, the vessels of Satan, guileful workers, who sow tares in
the field of the Lord, and who attempt to overturn the holy Faith in Christ.
Concerning the men of impiety and perdition, the holy Apostle went on to write:
‘For admission has been secretly gained by some who long ago were designated
for this condemnation, ungodly persons who pervert the grace of our God into
licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.’ Because of
these innovators and despisers of the Faith in the Holy Church of God which
has been handed down to us, the Apostle of the Gentiles and Walker in
heavenly places Paul hurled a terrible anathema, saying: ‘If any one preaches to
you a gospel contrary to that which you received, let him be accursed’
(Galatians 1.9).
“Therefore our Lord in the Holy Gospel cries to all His faithful servants:
‘Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly
they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits… Take heed that

843 Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, Papa-Nicholas Planas, pp. 54-55, 108-
110.
844 Bishop Andrew of Patras, Matthaios (Matthew), Athens, 1963, pp. 50-66.
457
no one leads you astray… And many false prophets will arise and lead many
astray.’ (Matthew 7.15,16, 24.4, 11)
“Against these innovating false-bishops and their followers the synodical

decrees of the Church through the Most Holy Patriarchs declare that ‘whoever
has wished to add or take away one iota – let him be seven times anathema’…
“St. Basil the Great once wrote: ‘The one crime that is severely avenged is the
strict keeping of the patristic traditions… No white hair is venerable to the
judges of injustice, no pious asceticism, no state according to the Gospel from
youth to old age… To our grief we see our feasts upturned, our houses of prayer
closed, our altars of spiritual worship unused.’ All this has now come upon us.
Many and clearly to be seen by all are the great evils that the anticanonical
renovationists introduced into the menologion and calendar of the Orthodox
Church. Schisms, divisions, the overthrow of good order and complete
confusion, violation of the most ancient laws of the Church, a great scandal for
the conscience of the faithful were the consequences, though anathemas on
those who violate ‘any ecclesiastical tradition, whether written or unwritten’
had been sounded by the Holy Ecumenical Councils. On the basis of the
apostolic maxim, ‘Obey those who have the rule over you and submit to them’
(Hebrews. 13.7), the Shepherds of the Church who support this anticanonical
innovation expect absolute obedience from the fullness of the Church. But how
can the true children of the Church obey those who at the same moment disobey
the holy Fathers, of whom the prophet says: ‘The Lord chose them to love them’,
and do not venerate the Church’s established order that has been handed down
and sanctified by the Holy Spirit, while the Lord says concerning them: ‘He who
hears you hears Me, and he who despises you despises Me. And he who
despises Me despises Him Who sent Me’? How can pious Christians shut their
ears to the voices and work of such great Saints of God, and so be deprived of
the praise and blessing of the Holy Trinity, which we hear in the mouth of the
Apostle Paul himself: ‘I commend you because you remember me in everything
and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you’ (I Corinthians
11.2); thereby receiving diverse and strange teachings ‘according to the
elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ’ (Colossians 2.8),
inventions of men in which there lurks a special danger for the soul? The
faithful children of the Church, with fear of God in regard to the commandment
of the Holy Spirit: ‘Stand firm and hold to the traditions’ (II Thessalonians 2.15),
and in conformity with the other commandment: ‘Continue in what you have
learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it’ (II
Timothy. 3.14), have a reverent and God-pleasing answer to give to the
unproved claims of today’s innovating shepherds with regard to obedience: ‘We
must obey God rather than men’ (Acts 5.29).845
Now the True Orthodox Christians both in Greece and in Romania

conducted the first phase of their struggle against the innovating State Churches

845 Hieromonk Matthew (Karpathakes) (later Bishop of Bresthena), preface to the
third edition of Theion Prosevkhytarion (Divine Prayer Book), Athens, 1934.
458
without bishops. This is not to say that there were not bishops who supported
them, but they were outside Greece and Romania. Thus Bishop Nicholas
(Velimirovich) supported the Greek Old Calendarists from Serbia. Again,
Metropolitan Anastasy of Kishinev supported the Romanian Old Calendarists
from Jerusalem. In 1925 he wrote to Protopriest Vladimir Polyakov saying that
he still considered himself head of the Bessarabian Church and was waiting for
the opportunity to return there. And in 1930 he concelebrated with Fr. Glycherie
in Jerusalem. But in Greece and Romania there were no bishops of the Old
Calendar. This was a severe handicap, for while it is better to have no bishop
than a heretical or schismatic one, the absence of bishops endangers the long-
term survival of a Church for the simple reason that without a bishop it is
impossible to ordain priests. Moreover, those in the camp of the innovators who
secretly sympathize with the confessors are less likely to cross over to the latter
if they have no bishops.
On October 11, 1934 Geroge Paraschos and Basil Stamatoulis, the President
and Secretary General respectively of the Community of Genuine Orthodox
Christians, appealed to ROCOR President Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky
to consecrate bishops for them and accept them under his omophorion. But
nothing came of their appeal.846
But pressure for a return to the Julian Calendar continued to build up within
the State Church; and in May, 1935 eleven bishops decided to return to the
Julian calendar. However, pressure was exerted on them, and eight withdrew at
the last moment. This left three: Metropolitan Germanus of Demetrias, the
retired Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina (who had already distinguished
himself in the early 1920s by refusing to recognize the election of Meletius
Metaxakis) and Metropolitan Chrysostom of Zakynthos, who, according to one
source, was accepted by the first two by the laying-on of hands, since he had
been consecrated after the calendar change.847 The three bishops were accepted
through a public confession of faith.848
On May 25, 1935, the Community of the Genuine Orthodox Christians

invited the three metropolitans to break communion with the State Church and
take up the leadership of the True Church. They agreed, and on Sunday, May
13/26, in the Community’s little church of the Dormition at Colonus, Athens,
and in the presence of 25,000 faithful, they formally announced their adherence
to the True Orthodox Church – that is, the Church that followed the patristic
calendar. Metropolitan Germanus was elected president of the new Synod. This

846 Stavros Karamitsos, I Agonia en to kipo Gethsimani (The Agony in the Garden of
Gethsemane), Athens, 1999, pp. 162-164; Lardas, op. cit., p. 17.

847 Holy Transfiguration Monastery, The Struggle against Ecumenism, Boston, 1998,
p. 46. However, it should be emphasised that this cheirothesia is not mentioned in

any of the early sources, and is not confirmed by contemporary True Orthodox
sources.
848 Bishop Photius of Marathon, private communication, March 5, 2008.
459
joyful event was the people’s reward for their steadfast confession of the Faith
and the necessary condition for the further success of the sacred struggle of the
True Orthodox Christians of Greece.
The three metropolitans then issued an encyclical in which they declared,

among other things: “Those who now administer the Church of Greece have
divided the unity of Orthodoxy through the calendar innovation, and have split
the Greek Orthodox People into two opposing calendar parts. They have not
only violated an Ecclesiastical Tradition which was consecrated by the Seven
Ecumenical Councils and sanctioned by the age-old practice of the Eastern
Orthodox Church, but have also touched the Dogma of the One, Holy, Catholic
and Apostolic Church. Therefore those who now administer the Greek Church
have, by their unilateral, anticanonical and unthinking introduction of the
Gregorian calendar, cut themselves off completely from the trunk of Orthodoxy,
and have declared themselves to be in essence schismatics in relation to the
Orthodox Churches which stand on the foundation of the Seven Ecumenical
Councils and the Orthodox laws and Traditions, the Churches of Jerusalem,
Antioch, Serbia, Poland, the Holy Mountain and the God-trodden Mountain of
Sinai, etc.
“That this is so was confirmed by the Commission made up of the best jurists
and theologian-professors of the National University which was appointed to
study the calendar question, and one of whose members happened to be his
Blessedness the Archbishop of Athens in his then capacity as professor of
Church History in the National University.
“Let us see what was the opinion given by this Commission on the new
calendar: ‘Although all the Orthodox Churches are autocephalous in their
internal administration, nevertheless, in that they are united to each other
through the Dogmas and the Synodical decrees and Canons, none of them can
separate itself off as an individual Orthodox Church and accept the new Church
calendar without being considered Schismatic in relation to the others.’
“Since his Beatitude the Archbishop of Athens has by his own signature
declared himself to be a Schismatic, what need have we of witnesses to
demonstrate that he and the hierarchs who think like him have become
Schismatics, in that they have split the unity of Orthodoxy through the calendar
innovation and divided the Ecclesiastical and ethnic soul of the Greek Orthodox
People?”849
This very important document was confirmed as expressing the Faith of the
Church in several subsequent Confessions (notably the “Florinite” Confessions
of 1950, 1974 and 1991). It declares that the new calendarists are not only
schismatics but also, by clear implication, heretics in that they “have encroached
on the Dogma of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church”. Equally

849 Metropolitan Calliopius (Giannakoulopoulos) of Pentapolis, Ta Patria
(Fatherland Matters), volume 7, Piraeus, 1987, p. 43.
460
importantly, it shows that the three metropolitans recognized those Local
Orthodox Churches that were still using the Old Calendar but remained in
communion with the new calendarists to be still Orthodox.850
On May 23, 24, 25 and 26 (old calendar), 1935, the three metropolitans
consecrated four new bishops in the monastery of the Mother of God in Keratea:
Germanus (Varykopoulos) of the Cyclades, Christopher (Hatzi) of Megara,
Polycarp (Liosi) of Diauleia, and Matthew (Karpathakis) of Bresthena. For this,
on May 29, all seven bishops were arrested; later they were tried and defrocked
by the State Church.
On June 1 the believing people came out en masse in front of the cathedral in
Athens. A struggle with the police took place, and blood was shed. On June 7,
the minister of security warned the Old Calendarist bishops that they would be
exiled the next day.
On June 8, as they were being sent into exile, the three metropolitans issued
the following encyclical: “We recommend to all those who follow the Orthodox
Calendar that they have no spiritual communion with the schismatic church of
the schismatic ministers, from whom the grace of the All-Holy Spirit has fled,
because they have violated the decisions of the Fathers of the Seventh
Ecumenical Council and the Pan-Orthodox Councils which condemned the
Gregorian calendar. That the schismatic Church does not have Grace and the
Holy Spirit is affirmed by St. Basil the Great, who says the following: ‘Even if
the schismatics have erred about things which are not Dogmas, since the head of
the Church is Christ, according to the divine Apostle, from Whom all the
members live and receive spiritual increase, they have torn themselves away
from the harmony of the members of the Body and no longer are members [of
that Body] or have the grace of the Holy Spirit. Therefore he who does not have
it cannot transfer it to others.’”851
By a “coincidence” rich in symbolical meaning, it was precisely at this time –

June, 1935 – that the Turkish law banning Orthodox clergy from wearing
cassocks came into effect. Although this regulation was strongly resented by
Patriarch Photius, the lower clergy greeted it with delight, shouting: “Long live
Ataturk!” And indeed, deprived now of the inner vestment of grace, and
governed by “human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe,
and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2.8), it was only fitting that the
Patriarchate should lose even the outer sign of its former glory.852
Metropolitans Germanus and Chrysostom and Bishop Germanus were exiled

to distant newcalendarist monasteries, while Bishop Matthew was allowed to
stay confined in his monastery in Keratea on account of his poor health. The

850 http://www.genuineorthodoxchurch.net/images/GOC1935DiangelmaBgrk.pdf.
851 Metropolitan Calliopius, op. cit., pp. 277-278.
852 A. Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations, 1918-
1974, Athens: Centre for Asia Minor Studies, 1983, p. 200.
461
remaining three bishops repented, and were received back into the State Church
in their existing orders.853
However, in October the three exiled bishops were freed before time by the
government (the new prime-minister, George Kondyles, sympathized with the
True Orthodox).
The four Old Calendarist bishops then formed a Sacred Synod of the Greek
Old Calendarist Church with Metropolitan Germanus as president.
In December, 1935 Metropolitan Chrysostom set off for Jerusalem and

Damascus in order to discuss the possibility of convening a Council to resolve
the calendar question. The two Patriarchs received him kindly and promised to
help towards this goal.
However, as he prepared to return to Greece, the Greek consul in Jerusalem,

acting under orders from Athens, refused to stamp a visa into his passport. For
several months Metropolitan Chrysostom languished in Jerusalem as a virtual
prisoner of the Greek consul. But Divine Providence, through a miracle wrought
by “the liberator of captives”, St. George, found a way out for him. 854
The two metropolitans continued to be harassed by the State Church. Thus in

1937 a magistrate’s court tried Chrysostom on the charge of having served in the
church of the Three Hierarchs in Thessalonica. He was declared innocent.
However, further trials followed in 1938 and 1940855, and in 1943 Metropolitan
Germanus died in exile.
The Old Calendarists were also strong in Romania… In 1920, Carol, the heir
to the Romanian throne, having been obliged to leave his first wife, Zisi
Lambrino, was married to Princess Helen of Greece, who bore him the present
king, Mihail.856 In 1922, however, he took as his mistress the Jewess Magda
Lupescu. This was a public scandal, and in 1925 he was obliged both to resign
his right of succession (in favour of his son) and leave the country. From the
death of King Ferdinand in 1927 until 1930, as the king was a small boy, the
country was ruled by a regency council that included Patriarch Miron and
Carol’s younger brother Nicolae. Carol was recalled in 1930, and his former wife
was forced into exile, while the king lived openly with Lupescu (he only

853 Hieromonk Nectarius (Yashunsky), Kratkaia istoria sviaschennoj bor’by
starostil’nikov Gretsii protiv vseeresi ekumenizma (A Short History of the Sacred
Struggle of the Old Calendarists of Greece against the Pan-Heresy of Ecumenism).
854 Elijah Angelopoulos, Dionysius Batistates, Chrysostomos Kavourides, Athens,
1981, pp. 21-25.

855 The Zealots of the Holy Mountain, Syntomos Istorike Perigraphe, pp. 23-24.
856 Since King George of Greece, Helen’s brother, wished to marry Carol’s sister
Elizabeth, and this is forbidden by the canons, it was arranged that the two
marriages took place exactly simultaneously in Bucharest and Athens, so that the
one should not be an impediment to the other!
462
married her after his exile from Romania in 1940). During this period, Patriarch
Miron used his power as temporary prime minister to persecute the True
Orthodox Christians of Romania.
“The first and foremost problem” for the True Orthodox, writes Constantin
Bujor, “was the lack of Priests. Religious persecution against the clergy and
Faithful was in full swing, especially in Moldavia. Great sacrifice and an
unwavering will were needed in order to uphold the True Faith…
“In later 1930, Hieromonk Glicherie and Hierodeacon David went to

Jerusalem to discuss with Patriarch Damianos of Jerusalem (1848-1931) the
situation of the Romanian Orthodox Christians who wished to continue
observing the Julian Calendar. The Patriarch blessed them to continue their
struggle and to build and Consecrate new Churches, for which purpose he
provided them with Holy Chrism. To this day, in the home of Father Nicholae
Onofrei there is a photograph of Father Glicherie serving with Patriarch
Damianos. On returning to Romania, Father Glicherie continued the struggle
with greater zeal and invigorated the Old Calendar Church by building over
thirty new Churches. He went to many places in the country, including
Basarabia, accompanied by a group of monks from both Romania and Mount
Athos, who helped him in convincing the Faithful to keep alive love, hope, and
confidence in the power of the traditional Faith…”857
In 1935, Fr. Glycherie, heard of the return of the three bishops to the Old
Calendar in Greece. And so late in the autumn he “travelled again to Mount
Athos, accompanied by Monk Ghimnazie, who knew Greek… Their purpose
was to bring an Old Calendarist Hierarch to Romania to perform Ordinations,
or to have Father Ghimnazie or any other Romanian living on Mount Athos
Consecrated to serve the Church back home.”858
However, when they “asked the Old Calendar Greek bishops to consecrate
Fr. Ghimnazie to the episcopate, the bishops could do nothing without their
first-hierarch, Metropolitan Chrysostom of Florina, who, at the insistence of the
newcalendarist Metropolitan of Athens, had been detained by the English
authorities in Palestine...
“St. Glycherie set off for Yugoslavia. He visited the church of the Russian
Church Abroad in Belgrade, where Metropolitan Anastasy was serving.
Metropolitan Anastasy advised Fr. Glycherie to turn to Bishop Seraphim
(Lyade) of the Russian Church Abroad, and ask him to go to Romania to order
Old Calendar priests. Bishop Seraphim at that time was in Vienna. St. Glycherie
set off there, but Vladyka Seraphim did not decide to go to Romania, knowing
how dangerous it was.”859

857 Bujor, Resisting unto Blood: Sixty-Five Years of Persecution of the True (Old
Calendar) Orthodox Church of Romania (October 1924 – December 1989), Etna,

Ca.: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2003, pp. 55-60.
858 Bujor, op. cit., p. 98.
859 Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 2, p. 52.
463
After returning to Romania, on September 1, 1936 Fr. Glycherie came to the
consecration of a church in the village of Bukhalniya-Neamts. He was
accompanied by 4000 peasants on 500 waggons. When the procession was
passing through the town of Piatra Neamts, the road was blocked by soldiers
with machine guns. St. Glycherie and many other monks and laypeople were
arrested. Many were killed. Glycherie was savagely beaten on the head with
various clubs. Deacon David Bidascu was also beaten, and suffered from his
wounds for the rest of his days.860
Metropolitan Cyprian writes: “Hieromonk Glycherie… was taken under

guard to Bucharest and there condemned to death. He was, however,
miraculously saved, in that the Theotokos appeared to the wife of the Minister
of Justice and gave her an order to intercede with her husband on Father
Glycherie’ behalf. Her husband did not react in the manner of Pilate, but rather
commuted Father Glycherie’s death sentence and ordered him imprisoned in a
distant monastery…
“[Patriarch Miron] ordered all of the churches of the True Orthodox

Christians razed, and imprisoned any cleric or monastic who refused to submit
to his authority. The monks and nuns were incarcerated in two monasteries,
where they were treated with unheard of barbarity. Some of them, such as
Hieromonk Pambo, founder of the Monastery of Dobru (which was demolished
and rebuilt three times), met with a martyr’s end. During the destruction of the
Monastery of Cucova, five lay people were thrown into the monastery well and
drowned. By such tactics the Patriarch wished to rid himself of the Old
Calendarist problem!”861

860Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 2, p. 57.
861Metropolitan Cyprian, "The True Orthodox Christians of Romania", The Orthodox
Word, January-February, 1982, vol. 18, N 1 (102). Over ten priests were killed or
died in prison, including Fathers Pambo, Gideon and Theophanes. See Victor
Boldewskul, "The Old Calendar Church of Romania", Orthodox Life, vol. 42, N 5,
October-November, 1992, pp. 11-17. Metropolitan Blaise writes: “Take, for
example, Fr. Euthymius – he was in a concentration camp for 3 years with Fr.
Pambo, and he told us how they tortured him: they threw him into a stream and
forced other prisoners to walk over him as over a bridge: he was at that time about
27 years old.” (Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), N 2 (1479), 15/28 January,
1993)
464
45. THE FIRST PROJECT FOR A EUROPEAN UNION
Although the Versailles Treaty had enshrined the principle of

national self-determination at the heart of the international
community’s ideology, there were also manifestations of a tendency in
the opposite direction, towards greater integration of nations. One of
these was the creation of Yugoslavia – although the Serbs’ disdainful
and imperialist attitude towards the non-Serb nations did not bode
well for the country’s long-term survival. Another was the zeal of the
leading French and German politicians for the project of an economic
European Union.
Ironically, it was probably an Englishman, William Penn, the

founder of Pennsylvania, who sketched the first plan for a united
Europe as far back as 1693. His proposal was that the Sovereign
Princes of Europe should “agree to meet by their stated deputies in a
General Diet, Estates or Parliament, and there Establish Rules of
Justice for Sovereign Princes to observe one to another; and… before
which Sovereign Assembly, should be brought all Differences
depending between one Sovereign and another… Europe would
quietly obtain the so much desired and needed Peace.” 862
According to Yanis Varoufakis, the idea goes back to “the time-

honoured Central European tradition associated with catchwords such
as Mitteleuropa or Paneuropa…
“At its most wholesome, Mitteleuropa evoked a multinational

multicultural intellectual ideal for a united Central Europe that the
non-chauvinistic section of its conservative elites were rather fond of.
However, Mitteleuropa was also the title of an influential book by
Friedrich Naumann, authored in the midst of the Great War, which
advocated an economically and politically integrated Central Europe
run on German principles and with the ‘minor’ states placed under
German rule. A great deal more liberal than Mitteleuropa, Paneuropa
was the brainchild of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austrian-
Japanese intellectual who conducted a lifelong campaign to bring
about a pan-European political and economic union.
“Despite these differences, Mitteleuropa and Paneuropa were aimed

at protecting Europe’s centre from the geopolitical and economic
encroachments of Russia from the east and the Anglosphere from the
west. They also shared a view that European unity would have to be
overlaid on Central Europe’s existing national institutions and,
indeed, on its prevailing corporate power structures. A European

862 Penn, An Essay towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe by the Establishment of an European
Parliament, or Estates, in Peter Shröder, “Penn’s Plan for a United Europe”, History Today,
October, 2016, p. 32.
465
union consistent with Mitteleuropa and Paneuropa visions would have
to operate by limiting competition between corporations, between
nations and between capital and labour. In short, Central Europe
would resemble one gigantic corporation structured hierarchically and
governed by technocrats, whose job would be to depoliticize
everything and minimize all conflicts.
“Needless to say, the Mitteleuropa-Paneuropa vision enthused

industrialists. Walter Rathenau, chairman of AEG (Allgemeine
Elekricitäts-Gesellschaft) and later Germany’s foreign minister, went
as far as to suggest that a Central European economic union would be
‘civilization’s greatest conquest’. The idea appealed not only to
corporations like AEG, Krupp and Siemens, but also to the Roman
Catholic Church and politicians like Robert Schuman, another of the
European Union’s fathers, who was born in Germany but ended up
French courtesy of a shifting border…” 863
However, the first politician to really get the wheels of European

integration moving was the French statesman Aristide Briand. He
insisted, writes Judt, that “the time had come to overcome past
rivalries and think European, speak European, feel European. In 1924
the French economist Charles Gide joined other signatories in Europe
in launching an International Committee for a European Customs
Union. Three years later a junior member of the British Foreign Office
would profess himself ‘astonished’ at the extent of continental interest
in the ‘pan-European’ idea.
“More prosaically, the Great War had brought French and

Germans, in a curious way, to a better appreciation of their mutual
dependence. Once the post-war disruption had subsided and Paris had
abandoned its fruitless efforts to extract German reparations by force,
an international Steel Pact was signed, in September 1926, by France,
Germany, Luxembourg, Belgium and the (then autonomous) region of
the Saar, to regulate steel production and prevent excess capacity.
Although the Pact was joined the following year by Czechoslovakia,
Austria and Hungary, it was only ever a cartel of the traditional kind;
but the German Prime Minister Gustav Stresemann certainly saw in it
the embryonic shape of future trans-national accords. He was not
alone…” 864
As Fischer writes, “French leaders had also begun to question

whether individual European states could sustain their empires in the
longer term and whether they were a match for the emerging
continental superpowers, such as the United States and (potentially)
the Soviet Union. Such ideas informed Briand’s thinking when, in

863 Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? London: Vintage, 2017, pp. 56-57.
864 Judt, op. cit., pp. 153-154.
466
1929-30, he proposed creating a European Union, while Stresemann
entertained comparable thoughts up to his death in October 1929. It
followed that France and Germany would pursue rapprochement
through the medium of European integration as national governments
pooled aspects of sovereignty. French and German officials
understood that even economic integration would entail a wider range
of common policies and both countries also evoked common values,
democratic and Christian, further to legitimize European integration
and to counter the growing challenges of Bolshevism and
Fascism…” 865
Tooze writes: “In light of America’s uncompromising stance over

war debts, in June 1929 at a meeting in Madrid, Briand and
Stresemann had discussed a vision of a European bloc large enough to
withstand American economic competition and capable of releasing
itself from dependence on Wall Street. In a speech on 5 September
1929, using the League of Nations as his stage, Briand seized the
initiative. The European members of the League must move toward a
closer union. The toothless peace pact that bore his name was not
enough. Given the obvious downward trend in the world economy
and the looming prospect of further American protectionism, Briand’s
first approach was to propose a system of preferential tariff
reductions. But this economic approach met with such hostility that
over the winter he moved to a different tack.
“In early May 1930, within weeks of the conclusion of the ticklish
London Naval Conference, the French government circulated a formal
proposal to all 26 of the other European member states of the League
of Nations. Paris called upon its fellow-Europeans to realize the
implications of their ‘geographical unity’ to form a conscious ‘bond of
solidarity’. Specifically, Briand proposed a regular European
conference with a rotating presidency and a standing political
committee. The ultimate aim would be a ‘federation built upon the
idea of union and not of unity’. ‘Times have never been more
propitious nor more pressing,’ Briand concluded, ‘for the starting of
constructive work of this kind… It is a decisive hour when a watchful
Europe may ordain in freedom her own fate. Unite to live and
prosper!’” 866
However, Stresemann’s death a few weeks later brought an end to

this initiative. Briand’s “Memorandum on the Organization of a
Regime of European Federal Union” had to wait for the rise and fall of
another scheme of European unity – Hitler’s – before it was revived
and realized in the European Union of the late twentieth century. 867

865 Fischer, op. cit., p. 14.
867 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristide_Briand.
467
468
46. THE RISE OF HITLER AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT
The French project for a European Union was probably motivated at this time
(and certainly after 1945) by the desire to tame and control the great German
tiger. So let us look more closely at the German experience. As we have seen,
Hitler did not grow on an empty place: already in the 1920s resentment at
Versailles and the anarchy introduced by hyperinflation encouraged
nationalism and the cult of war, and anti-semitism was marked. Nationalist
writers “glorified combat as the noblest of the arts and as part of the natural
order, Jünger likening the war to ‘the crucifixion paintings of the old masters…
a grand idea overwhelming sight and blood’.”868
In the years 1930-33, writes Norman Davies, “the Nazis took part for the first
time in a rash of five parliamentary elections. On three successive occasions they
increased both their popular vote and their list of elected deputies. On the
fourth occasion, in November 1932, their support declined; and they never won
an outright majority. But in a very short time they had established themselves as
the largest single party in the Reichstag. What is more, the rising tide of street
violence, to which Nazi gangs greatly contributed, took place in a much-
changed international setting. In the early 1920s, Communist-led strikes and
demonstrations were overshadowed by the apparently limitless power of the
Entente. German industrialists and German democrats knew exactly whom to
call in if the Communists ever tried to take over. But in the early 1930s Britain,
France and the USA were in no better fettle than Germany; and the Soviet Union
was seen to be modernizing with remarkable energy. With the communists
claiming almost as many votes as the Nazis, Germany’s conservative leaders
had much-reduced means to keep the red menace at bay.
“In September 1930, in the interests of democracy, one minority Chancellor

persuaded President Hindenburg to activate Article 48 of the Weimar
Constitution. Henceforth, the German president could ‘use armed force to
restore order and safety’ and suspend ‘the fundamental rights of the citizen’. It
was an instrument which others could exploit to overthrow democracy.
“The sequence of events was crucial. The storm raged for three years:
deepening recession, growing cohorts of unemployed, communists fighting
anti-communists on the streets, indecisive elections, and endless Cabinet crises.
In June 1932 another minority Chancellor, Franz von Papen, gained the support
of the Reichstag by working with the Nazi deputies. Six months later, he cooked
up another combination: he decided to make Hitler Chancellor, with himself as
Vice-Chancellor, and to put three Nazi ministers out of twelve into the Cabinet.
President Hindenburg, and the German right in general, thought it a clever idea:
they thought they were using Hitler against the Communists. In fact, when
Hitler accepted the invitation, suitably dressed in top hat and tails, it was Hitler
who was using them.

868 David Stevenson, 1914-1918, London: Penguin, 2004, pp. 569-70.
469
“Less than a month later, and a week before the next elections, a mysterious
fire demolished the Reichstag building. The Nazis proclaimed a Red plot,
arrested communist leaders, won 44 per cent of the popular vote in the frenzied,
anti-communist atmosphere, then calmly passed an Enabling Act granting the
Chancellor dictatorial powers for four years. In October Hitler organized a
plebiscite to approve Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and
from the Disarmament Conference. He received 96.3 per cent support. In
August 1934, following the President’s death, he called another plebiscite to
approve his own election to the new party-state position of ‘Führer and Reich
Chancellor’ with full emergency powers. This time he received 90 per cent
support. Hitler was in control. In the final path to the summit, he did not breach
the Constitution once…
“Hitler’s democratic triumph exposed the true nature of democracy.

Democracy has few values of its own: it is as good, or as bad, as the principles of
the people who operate it. In the hands of liberal and tolerant people, it will
produce a liberal and tolerant government; in the hands of cannibals, a
government of cannibals. In Germany in 1933-34 it produced a Nazi
government because the prevailing culture of Germany’s voters did not give
priority to the exclusion of gangsters…”869
Davies’ point about democracy is well taken. And yet the weaknesses, indeed
profound dangers, of democracy go deeper than that. First, democracy tends to
make people think that the solution of all major problems, whether material or
spiritual, lies in the State. But as President Calvin Coolidge said in his State of
the Union Address for 1926, “Unfortunately, human nature can not be changed
by an act of the legislature…”
Secondly, over time the leaders elected by democracy become worse and
worse. For the fundamental ethos of democracy, in modern as in ancient times, is
secularist, anti-religious and anti-traditional. So as this ethos becomes more deeply
entrenched in the people, they will be more inclined to elect anti-religious and
anti-traditionalist, even wholly demonized leaders.
The result is that, just as Russian democracy in 1917 elected the worst of men
to lead it, who then handed democracy into the hands of the communists, so
German democracy in 1933 elected the worst of men, who promptly turned it
into a fascist dictatorship…
Thirdly, to the extent that democracy is successful in generating prosperity, it

shows itself loath to protect that prosperity, or sacrifice any significant part of it
for the sake of necessary defensive warfare or preparation for warfare. In other
words, it is inclined to appeasement in the face of its enemies, putting off a
confrontation with them until it is almost or in fact too late. For democracy
usually goes with a quite unrealistic view of human nature, a refusal to
understand that evil such as Hitler’s or Stalin’s cannot be negotiated away by

869 Davies, Europe: A History, London: Pimlico, 1997, pp. 967, 969.
470
constant concessions, which only increase the predator’s fury and appetite, and
that original sin makes war between nations, while deeply regrettable and
tragic, an unavoidable necessity at times.
We see the beginning of appeasement, if not with Hitler, at any rate with
Germany, in the Treaty of Locarno. This was the result of a conference between
Britain, France, Germany and Italy in 1925 that “jointly guaranteed Germany’s
western border and renounced military aggression. Nothing, deliberately, was
said about its disputed eastern border. The vestigial organization for monitoring
German disarmament was abolished and a blind eye was turned to its evasion
of the Versailles limitations, which many in Britain regarded as a dead letter.
Whitehall hoped its Continental entanglements were ended. Churchill,
Chancellor of the Exchequer voiced a common opinion when he argued that
Britain should concentrate on defending the empire. But he resisted naval
expansion – ‘Why should there be a war with Japan?’ he demanded in 1924. ‘I
do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in my lifetime.’ In 1928 the
highly publicized Kellogg-Briand pact (initiated by the American and French
foreign ministers) was an international renunciation of war, signed with a
golden pen by statesmen who privately regarded it as an empty gesture, a
‘pious declaration against sin’. But it was very popular and revived public
optimism. In 1929-30, the Labour government slashed naval strength, stopped
work on the Singapore naval base, and in 1930 limited warship-building by
treaty with the United States and Japan. This was the time when powerful
literary works appeared exposing the horrors of the Great War. Churchill
assured an audience in Montreal in 1929 that ‘the outlook for peace has never
been better for fifty years’.
“But a large part of the German public was not reconciled. Even the relatively
moderate Weimar Republic was evading arms limitations by tank training with
the Red Army in Russia, developing civil aircraft that could be converted for
military use, and building ‘pocket battleships’ just inside the tonnage limits. Its
politicians invoked the ‘spirit of Locarno’ to press for a reduction of the French
army and immediate evacuation of the Rhineland, garrisoned by Allied troops.
Prominent German politicians also demanded union with Austria, forbidden by
the Versailles treaty. The French rather desperately urged a federal ‘European
Union’, and began building the Maginot Line of fortifications to defend their
eastern frontier.
“The international peace movement, in its multifarious forms, was probably

strongest in Britain. It spread across ages, classes and parties, and attracted
unparalleled mass involvement in which women were particularly prominent.
Vast quantities of literature were disseminated. Schoolchildren were taught that
‘collective security’ through the League of Nations was like the whole class
standing up against a bully. A World Disarmament Conference of fifty-nine
states met in Geneva in February 1932, the object of hopes, prayers and millions
of petitions. But disarmament was a dangerous issue. It caused disagreement
among the democratic states, which all claimed to have special security needs
and wanted disarmament to be led by others. Worse, it gave a platform to
471
Germany, which although it was secretly rearming was legally under restraints,
and it demanded ‘equal treatment’, for which MacDonald’s government
thought it had ‘strong moral backing’. In effect, this would mean Germany
rearming and everyone else disarming. Churchill raised a rare warning voice:
‘When they have the weapons, believe me they will ask for the return… of lost
territories.’ But he too urged that ‘the just grievances of the vanquished’ should
be addressed.
“In January 1933, while the Disarmament Conference was in session, Adolf
Hitler, supported by some 40 percent of the electorate, becamehead of a
coalition government. The Nazis soon seized sole power. At first there was no
change in German foreign policy. The new regime continued to press for ‘equal
rights’, and Hitler put on a convincing show of being a man of peace. But on 14
October Germany walked out of the conference, left the League of Nations,
denounced the Versailles disarmament clauses, reintroduced conscription, and
began to triple the size of its army. One of Hitler’s constant themes had been the
iniquity of the Versailles treaty, and many thought this explained his rise. As the
Manchester Guardian saw it, ‘the Nazi revolution’ was an outcome of ‘brooding
over the wrongs of Germany’. The Labour Daily Herald even welcomed hs
reintroduction of conscription as ‘bright with hope’, a sign that ‘the poison of
Versailles if at last draining from [Europe’s] blood’.”870

870 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 675-677.
472
47. THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM
The theories of the early psychoanalysts have been dismissed by most

succeeding generations of psychologists as either unverifiable or, in those cases
where they have been found capable of testing – simply false. Nevertheless,
there is one sphere and one period – the extreme criminality and unprecedented
bloodshed of the years 1914-45 – where such theories have remained in vogue as
having some partial explanatory value. Let us examine some of these
explanations.
Niall Ferguson writes that in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud
“suggested that ‘beside the instinct preserving the organic substance and
binding it into ever larger units, there must exist another in antithesis to this,
which would seek to dissolve these units and reinstate their antecedent
inorganic state; that is to say, the death instinct as well as Eros.’ It was the
interaction of the death instinct and the erotic instinct which he now saw as the
key to the human psyche: ‘The tendency to aggression is an innate, independent,
instinctual disposition in man, and … constitutes the most powerful obstacle to
culture… Eros… aims at binding together single human individuals, then
families, then tribes, races, nations into one great unity, that of humanity. Why
this has to be done we do not know; it is simply the work of Eros. These masses
of men must be bound to one another libidinally; necessity alone, the
advantages of common work, would not hold them together.
‘The natural instinct of aggressiveness in man, the hostility of each against us

all of all against each one, opposes this programme of civilization. The instinct
of aggression is the derivative and main representative of the death instinct we
have found alongside Eros, sharing his rule over the earth. And now, it seems to
me, the meaning of the evolution of culture is no longer a riddle to us. It must
present to us the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instincts of life
and the instincts of destruction.’
“Though it is now fashionable to sneer at Freud, there is something to be said

for this interpretation – at least with respect to the behaviour of men at war.
Today’s neo-Darwinian genetic determinism may be more scientifically
respectable than Freud’s mixture of psychoanalysis and amateur anthropology,
but the latter seems better able to explain the readiness of millions of men to
spend four and a quarter years killing and being killed. (It is certainly hard to
see how the deaths of so many men who had not yet married and fathered
children could possibly have served the purpose of Dawkins’s ‘selfish genes’.)
In particular, there is a need to take seriously Freud’s elision of the desire to kill
– ‘the destructive instinct’ – and the lack of desire not to be killed – the striving
of ‘every living being… to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of
inert matter.’
“There is some evidence to support Freud’s thesis. In June 1914 – before the
war in which he would fight had even begun – the ‘Vorticist’ artist Wyndham
473
Lewis wrote: ‘Killing somebody must be the greatest pleasure in existence:
either like killing yourself without being interfered with by the instinct of self-
preservation – or exterminating the instinct of self-preservation itself.’”871
But there is a problem in seeing Thanatos as an integral part of human

nature. Orthodox Christian anthropology has much to say about the thinking,
desiring and aggressive faculties of man, and sees them all as positive in their
original creation. Even aggression is good if it is turned to its original object –
evil and the evil one. Only when, as a result of original sin, it is turned to hatred
of man and a suicidal urge to destroy oneself, can we say that it has become
evil. But this perverted force should not be seen, as the Freudians see it, as an
ineradicable part of that human nature which God created in the beginning as
“very good”. Moreover, even the perverted faculty can be turned back to the
good. For, as St. Maximus the Confessor says: “For him whose mind is
continually with God, even his concupiscence is increased above measure into a
divinely burning love; and the entire irascible element is changed into divine
charity.”872
How do we explain the mass-worship of the most evil of men by populations

previously deemed to be among the most civilized? Moderns refer to a nebulous
something called “charisma”. Thus Laurence Rees writes: “Emil Klein, who
heard Hitler speak at a beer hall in Munich in the 1920s,.. believes that Hitler
‘gave off such a charisma that people believed whatever he said’.
“What we learn from eye-witnesses like… Klein is that charisma is first and
foremost about making a connection between people. No one can be charismatic
alone on a desert island. Charisma is formed in a relationship. As Sir Neville
Henderson, British ambassador to Berlin in the 1930s, wrote, Hitler ‘owed his
success in the struggle for power to the fact that he was the reflection of their [i.e.
his supporters’] subconscious mind, and his ability to express in words what
that subconscious mind felt that it wanted.’
“It’s a view confirmed by Konrad Heiden, who heard Hitler speak many
times in the 1920s: ‘His speeches begin always with deep pessimism and end in
overjoyed redemption, a triumphant happy ending; often they can be refuted by
reason, but they follow the far mightier logic of the subconscious, which no
refutation can touch… Hitler has given speech to the speechless terror of the
modern mass…’”873
However, this is too vague – and too simple. The fact is that for most of their
careers both Stalin and Hitler were considered singularly lacking in charisma.
Stalin spoke with a heavy Georgian accent and was pockmarked. As for the

871 Ferguson, The Pity of War, 1914-1918, London: Penguin, 1999, pp. 358-359.
872 St. Maximus the Confessor, Second Century on Charity, 48.
873 Rees, “The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 13, N 10,
October, 2012, pp. 20-21.
474
“Bavarian corporal”, as Hindenburg called him, he was widely despised. And
as late as 1928 the Nazis polled just 2.6 per cent of the German electorate.
“It took the Wall Street Crash and the dire economic crisis of the early 1930s
to make millions of Germans responsive to Hitler’s appeal. Suddenly, to people
like student Jutta Ruediger, Hitler’s call for a national resurgence made him
seem like ‘the bringer of salvation’. So much so that by 1932 the Nazis were
suddenly the biggest political party in Germany… Hitler was dismissed as a
peripheral figure in 1928, yet lauded by millions in 1933. What changed was not
Hitler, but the situation. Economic catastrophe made huge numbers of Germans
seek a charismatic ‘saviour’…”874
“… But then Hitler and the Nazis seemed to hit a brick wall – in the shape of
President Hindenburg. State Secretary Otto Meissner reported that Hindenburg
said to Hitler on 13 August 1932: ‘He [i.e. Hindenburg] could not justify before
God, before his conscience or before the Fatherland, the transfer of the whole
authority of government to a single party, especially to a party that was biased
against people who had different views from their own.’
“In this crucial period between Hindenburg’s rejection of Hitler’s bid for the
chancellorship of Germany, and his final appointment as chancellor in January
1933, two different perceptions of Hitler’s charisma came together… Hitler,
during these months, had never been more impressive to devoted followers like
Joseph Goebbels. On 13 August 1932, Hitler discussed the consequences of
Hindenburg’s rejection with his Nazi colleagues. ‘Hitler holds his nerve,’
recorded Goebbels in his diary. ‘He stands above the machinations. So I love
him.’ Hitler exuded confidence that all would come right…”875
And it did – for a time… So it was not simply dire economic circumstances,
and the need for a saviour from them, but also overweening self-confidence,
that went into the making of Hitler’s “charisma”. And yet this is still not enough
to explain his rise. Freud considered it too simple to explain the worship of the
masses for their totalitarian leaders simply as the consequence of fear of
persecution, or because of political or economic motives. That would be to treat
the matter in “far too rational a manner... Libidinal ties are what characterize a
group”.876
It is the love of the people for their leader that creates the group and the
relationships within the group, which disappear “at the same time as the
leader”.877 (This was true of Nazism, but less so of Stalinism.) “The credulity of
love,” said Freud, “is the most fundamental source of authority”.878

874 Rees, op. cit., pp. 21-22, 24.
875 Rees, op. cit., p. 22.
876 Freud, Group Psychology, p. 103; in Philip Rieff, Freud; The Mind of the Moralist,
University of Chicago Press, 1979, p. 233.

877 Freud, Group Psychology, p. 94; in Rieff, op. cit., p. 235.
878 Freud, Three Essays, p. 150; in Rieff, op. cit., p. 237.
475
Hitler himself came to a similar conclusion about his powers, emphasizing
that the masses should stop thinking and surrender themselves to the power of
instinct: “The masses are like an animal that obeys its instincts. They do not
reach conclusions by reasoning… At a mass meeting, thought is eliminated…
Mastery always means the transmission of a stronger will to a weaker one,
[which follows] something in the nature of a physical or biological law.”879
Hitler certainly believed in such a law. He refused to marry his mistress, Eva
Braun, because he considered that a married man, like a married movie star,
exercised less of a libidinal power over his worshippers. Thus when Hitler
entered Vienna in 1938, “’the whole city behaved like an aroused woman,
vibrating, writhing, moaning and sighing lustfully for orgasm’, wrote one
witness, George Clare, who stated that this was no purple passage but an ‘exact
description’.”880
Certainly, it seems impossible to explain the passionate love of the Nazi

Germans or Soviet Russians for their leaders without invoking some such deep
psychological motive – stirred up and exploited by the demonic powers of the
spirit world. Let us consider, for example, the quasi-hypnotic effect that Hitler
had on the German masses.
The 1934 Nuremberg rally, writes Martin Gilbert, “had seemed to Hitler the
ideal vehicle for nationwide propaganda, using documentary film with artistic
presentation. He entrusted this task to a former actress and fiction film maker,
Leni Riefenstahl, who worked to turn the 1934 rally into an epic paean of praise
for the ‘Leader’. Her film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willes) was finished in
1935, and gave German audiences an almost mystical view of Hitler’s
charismatic appeal: the film opens with Hitler in an aeroplane flying to
Nuremberg, and descending through the clouds to the city and the rally, where
the Nazi Party officials proclaim repeatedly: ‘Hitler is Germany, the Party is
Germany, thus Germany is Hitler and the Party is Germany’. The film historian
Charles Musser writes: ‘The exchange of looks and salutes creates a bond of
obedience between these different levels, one in which the identity of the self is
only found through identifying with the nation and the Party. In the process,
Hitler and the various troops are eroticized by Riefestahl’s adoring vision.’”881
We see a similar process taking place in Stalinist Russia. “Consider this diary
entry written by a witness of Stalin’s visit to a young communist congress in
April 1936: ‘And HE stood, a little weary, pensive and stately. One could feel the
tremendous habit of power, the force of it, and at the same time something
feminine and soft. I look about: Everybody had fallen in love with this gentle,
inspired, laughing face. To see him, simply to see him, was happiness for all of
us’.”882 Again, a Lithuanian writer wrote: “I approached Stalin’s portrait, took it

879 Overy, op. cit., p. 19.
881 Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2: 1933-1951, London:
HarperCollins, 1998, p. 83. Italics mine (V.M.).
882 Overy, op. cit., p. 129.
476
off the wall, placed it on the table and, resting my head in my hands, I gazed
and meditated. What should I do? The Leader’s face, as always so serene, his
eyes so clear-sighted, they penetrated into the distance. It seems that his
penetrating look pierces my little room and goes out to embrace the entire
globe… With my every fibre, every nerve, every drop of blood I feel that, at this
moment, nothing exists in this entire world but this dear and beloved face.”883
The masses’ eroticization of their leaders went together with their own
brutalization - eros with thanatos. For “perhaps the most fundamental affinity
among the three totalitarian movements lay in the realm of psychology:
Communism, Fascism and National Socialism exacerbated and exploited
popular resentments – class, racial, and ethnic – to win mass support and to
reinforce the claim that they, not the democratically elected governments,
expressed the true will of the people. All three appealed to the emotion of
hate.”884 Thus anti-war films, such as Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front,
were mocked in Germany, and violence and hardness were exalted over
tenderness and compassion. “Hitler rejected ‘the loathsome humanitarian
morality’, which he followed Nietzsche in seeing as a mask for people’s defects:
‘In the end, only the urge for self-preservation can conquer. Beneath it is so-
called humanity, the expression of a mixture of stupidity, cowardice, and know-
it-all conceit, will melt like snow in the March sun. Mankind has grown great in
eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish.’…”885
The same moral revaluation, the same emphasis on violence and steely
hardness (Stalin comes from the Russian word for “steel”) was taking place in
Stalinist Russia. Thus “Nadezhda Mandelstam described how ‘Thou shalt not
kill’ was identified with ‘bourgeois’ morality: ‘A number of terms such as
‘honour’ and ‘conscience’ went out of use at this time – concepts like these were
easily discredited, now the right formula had been found.’ She noticed that
people were going through a metamorphosis: ‘a process of turning into wood –
that is what comes over those who lose their sense of values’.”886
*
Psychoanalysis attributes a cardinal importance to childhood conflicts and
traumas in the explanation of behaviour. Thus Erich Fromm argued that Stalin,
like Hitler, was a narcissist. As Alan Bullock writes: “’Narcissism’ is a concept
originally formulated by Freud in relation to early infancy, but one which is
now accepted more broadly to describe a personality disorder in which the
natural development of relationships to the external world has failed to take
place. In such a state only the person himself, his needs, feelings and thoughts,
everything and everybody pertaining to him are experienced as fully real, while
everybody and everything else lacks reality or interest.

883 Quoted in Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,
London: Jonathan Cape, 1999, p. 253.

884 Pipes, op. cit., p. 262. My italics (V.M.).
885 Glover, op. cit., p. 326.
886 Glover, op. cit., pp. 260-261.
477
“Fromm argues that some degree of narcissism can be considered an
occupational illness among political leaders in proportion to their conviction of
a providential mission and their claim to infallibility of judgement and a
monopoly of power. When such claims are raised to the level demanded by a
Hitler or a Stalin at the height of their power, any challenge will be perceived as
a threat to their private image of themselves as much as to their public image,
and they will react by going to any lengths to suppress it.
“So far psychiatrists have paid much less attention to Stalin than to Hitler.
Lack of evidence is part of the reason. There has been no parallel in the case of
the Soviet Union to the capture of documents and interrogation of witnesses
that followed the defeat of Germany. But more important is the striking contrast
in temperament and style between the two men: the flamboyant Hitler,
displaying a lack of restraint and extravagance of speech which for long made it
difficult for many to take him seriously, in contrast to the reserved Stalin, who
owed his rise to power to his success, not in exploiting, but in concealing his
personality, and was underestimated for the opposite reason – because many
failed to recognize his ambition and ruthlessness. Nor surprisingly, it is the first
rather than the second who has caught the psychiatrists’ attention. All the more
interesting then is the suggestion that underlying the contrast there was a
common narcissistic obsession with themselves.
“There is one other insight, which Stalin’s American biographer, Robert

Tucker, has adopted from Karen Horney’s work on neurosis. He suggests that
his father’s brutal treatment of Stalin, particularly the beatings which he
inflicted on the boy, and on the boy’s mother in his presence, produced the basic
anxiety, the sense of being isolated in a hostile world, which can lead a child to
develop a neurotic personality. Searching for firm ground on which to build an
inner security, someone who in his childhood had experienced such anxiety
might naturally search for inner security by forming an idealistic image of
himself and then adopting this as his true identity. ‘From then on his energies
are invested in the increasing effort to prove the ideal self in action and gain
others’ affirmation of it.’ In Stalin’s case, this fits his identification with the
Caucasian outlaw-hero, whose name he assumed, and later with Lenin, the
revolutionary hero, on whom he fashioned his own ‘revolutionary persona’,
with the name of Stalin, ‘man of steel’, which echoed Lenin’s own pseudonym…
“The earliest recorded diagnosis of Stalin as paranoid appears to have been

made in December 1927, when an international scientific conference met in
Moscow. A leading Russian neuropathologist, Professor Vladimir Bekhterev
from Leningrad, made a great impression on the foreign delegates and attracted
the attention of Stalin, who asked Bekhterev to pay him a visit. After the
interview (22 December 1927) Bekhterev told his assistant Mnukhin that Stalin
was a typical case of severe paranoia [more precisely: “a paranoiac with a
withered arm”] and that a dangerous man was now at the head of the Soviet
Union. The fact that Bekhterev was suddenly taken ill and died while still in his
hotel has inevitably led to the suspicion that Stalin had him poisoned. Whether
this is true or not, when the report of Bekhterev’s diagnosis was repeated in
478
Liternaturnaia Gazeta in September 1988, it was accepted as correct by a leading
Soviet psychiatrist, Professor E.A. Lichko.”887
And yet Donald Rayfield may be right that “psychopaths of Stalin’s order
arise so rarely in history that forensic psychiatry has few insights to offer”.888 In
such cases, psychiatry needs to be supplemented with demonology, and in the
essentially religious idea that a nation that has abandoned its faith and given in
to the most primitive passions of envy, lust and hatred will be easily invaded
and taken over by Satan.
The demonic nature of the Russian revolution hardly needs demonstrating.

Many reported that the coming of Soviet power was as if the country had been
invaded by demons, and there were many incidents in which demonic activity
was almost palpable. Thus the Catacomb Christian P.M. writes: “I want to tell
about the miracles of God of which I was a witness. In our village they closed
the church and made it into a club. And then they declared that they would be
showing a film – this was the first opening of the club. In the church everything
was as it had been before, even the iconostasis was standing with its icons. They
put in benches, hung up a screen and began to show the film. About half an
hour passed, and then suddenly the people began to shout. Those who were at
the back jumped up and rushed towards the exit, while those in front fell on the
floor or crawled under the benches. What had happened? As many people later
recounted, the holy Great Martyr George came out of an icon that was on the
iconostasis on a horse, and taking a spear, galloped at the people, who began to
flee in fear. But that was not the end of it. Somehow they got at any rate some of
the people together again and continued to show the film. It was being shown
by a mechanic and his assistant. And suddenly up in the choir they began to
sing the Cherubic hymn – and so loudly that the film was scarcely audible. At
that point they decided that some believers had climbed up and wanted to
interrupt the showing of the film. So about seven members of the Komsomol
and the assistant climbed up in order to catch them all and bring them down.
But then they said that when they had climbed up the stairs the singing
stopped, and they rejoiced – the believers had got frightened and fallen silent.
But when they climbed up into the choir they saw that it was empty. They stood
in bewilderment and could not understand how the singers could have run
away. And then suddenly in the midst of them unseen singers began to sing the
Cherubic hymn. Pursued by an unknown fear, they rushed to get out, not
knowing the way, pushing and shoving each other. The assistant mechanic, who
was running in front, suddenly fell down, and everyone ran over him since
there was no other way because of the narrowness of the place. Having run
down, they rushed out into the street. Now the showing was finally abandoned.
The assistant mechanic was ill for a month and died, while the mechanic left,

Bullock, Stalin and Hitler, London: HarperCollins, 1991, pp. 10-12, 401.
887
Rayfield, “A Georgian Caliban”, Review of Stalin, vol. I: Paradoxes of Power,

888
1878-1928 by Stephen Kotkin, Literary Review, November, 2014, p. 25.
479
and nobody wanted to go to work in the club as a mechanic for any money. So
from that time they stopped having a cinema in it.”889
Similar incidents were reported in Nazi Germany. Thus “two British guests at
a Hitler rally in Berlin in 1934, seated in a stadium just feet behind him, watched
him captivate his listeners with the familiar rising passion and jarring voice.
‘Then an amazing thing happened,’ continued the account: ‘[we] both saw a
blue flash of lightning come out of Hitler’s back… We were surprised that those
of us close behind Hitler had not all been struck dead.’ The two men afterwards
discussed whether Hitler was actually possessed at certain moments by the
Devil: ‘We came to the conclusion that he was.’”890
Freud’s former disciple Karl Jung declared in 1945 that the cause of the
German people’s surrender to Nazism was demon-possession: “Germany has
always been a country of psychological catastrophes: the Reformation, the
peasant and religious [30-year] wars. Under the National Socialists the pressure
of the demons increased to such an extent that human beings that fell under
their power were turned into sleep-walking super-men, the first of whom was
Hitler, who infected all the others with the same. All the Nazi leaders were
possessed in the literal sense of the word... Ten percent of the German
population today is hopelessly psychopathic…”891
This psychopathology had deep roots in history. Already in the 1840s the
poet Heinrich Heine wrote: “A drama will be enacted in Germany compared
with which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll. Christianity
may have restrained the martial ardour of the Teutons for a time, but it did not
destroy it. Now that the restraining talisman, the cross, has rotted away, the old
frenzied madness will break out again.”

889 Tserkovnie Vedomosti Russkia Istinno-Pravoslavnia Tserkve,
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=print_page&pid=1221.
890 Overy, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
891 Jung, “The Post-War Psychological Problems of Germany”,
http://gestaltterapija.lv/karl-gustav-yung-poslevoennye-psixicheskie-problemy-
germanii/#more-466.
480
48. THE VATICAN AND RUSSIA
On the eve of the Russian revolution, Pope Pius X declared: “Russia is the
greatest enemy of the [Roman] Church”. In spite of this age-old antipathy, the
Vatican at first appeared to condemn the revolution, and support the Orthodox.
Thus on March 12, 1919 Pope Benedict XV protested to Lenin against the
persecutions of the Orthodox clergy, while Archbishop Ropp sent Patriarch
Tikhon a letter of sympathy. The Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Affairs
Chicherin noted with dissatisfaction this “solidarity with the servers of the
Orthodox Church”.892
However, these expressions of sympathy were untypical. As Protodeacon

Herman Ivanov-Trinadtsaty writes: “The Roman Catholic world greeted the
Bolshevik Revolution with joy. ‘After the Jews the Catholics did probably more
than anyone else to organize the overthrow of tsarist power. At least they did
nothing to stop it.’ Shamelessly and with great candour they wrote in Rome as
soon as the Bolshevik ‘victory’ became evident: ‘there has been uncontainable
pleasure over the fall of the tsarist government and Rome has not wasted any
time in entering into negotiations with the Soviet government.’ When a leading
Vatican dignitary was asked why the Vatican was against France during World
War I, he exclaimed: ‘The victory of the Entente allied with Russia would have
been as great a catastrophe for the Roman Catholic Church as the Reformation
was.’ Pope Pius conveyed this feeling in his typically abrupt manner: ‘If Russia
is victorious, then the schism is victorious.’…
“Even though the Vatican had long prepared for it, the collapse of the
Orthodox Russian Empire caught it unawares. It very quickly came to its senses.
The collapse of Russia did not yet mean that Russia could turn Roman Catholic.
For this, a new plan of attack was needed. Realizing that it would be as difficult
for a Pole to proselytise in Russia as for an Englishman in Ireland, the Vatican
understood the necessity of finding a totally different method of battle with
Orthodoxy, which would painlessly and without raising the slightest suspicion,
ensnare and subordinate the Russian people to the Roman Pope. This
Machiavellian scheme was the appearance of the so-called ‘Eastern Rite’, which
its defenders understood as ‘the bridge by which Rome will enter Russia’, to
quote an apt expression of K.N. Nikolaiev.893

892 Peter Sokolov, “Put’ Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi v Rossii-SSSR (1917-1961)”
(The Path of the Russian Orthodox Church in Russia-USSR (1917-1961)), in Russkaia

Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ v SSSR: Sbornik (The Russian Orthodox Church in the USSR:
A Collection), Munich, 1962, p. 16.
893 Nicholas Boyeikov writes: “In his epistle of 25 June, 1925, the locum tenens of
the All-Russian Patriarchal Throne, Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa, who suffered

torture in Soviet exile, expressed himself on the ‘Eastern Rite’ as follows: ‘the
Orthodox Christian Church has many enemies. Now they have increased their
activity against Orthodoxy. The Catholics, by introducing the rites of our divine
services, are seducing the believing people – especially those among the western
churches which have been Orthodox since antiquity – into accepting the unia, and
by this means they are distracting the forces of the Orthodox Church from the
more urgent struggle against unbelief.’” (Tserkovnie Vedomosti (Church Gazette),
481
“This treacherous plot, which can be likened to a ship sailing under a false
flag, had very rapid success in the first years after the establishment of Soviet
power. This too place in blood-drenched Russia and abroad, where feverish
activity was begun amongst the hapless émigrés, such as finding them work,
putting their immigration status in order, and opening Russian-language
schools for them and their children.
“It cannot be denied that there were cases of unmercenary help, but in the
overwhelming majority of cases, this charitable work had a thinly disguised
confessional goal, to lure by various means the unfortunate refugees into what
seemed at first glance to be true Orthodox churches, but which at the same time
commemorated the pope…”894
In 1922 Hieromartyr Benjamin of Petrograd said to the exarch of the Russian

Catholics, Leonid Fyodorov: “You offer us unification… and all the while your
Latin priests, behind our backs, are sowing ruin amongst our flock.” Indeed, the
Catholics welcomed the revolution as providing a wonderful, God-sent
opportunity to convert Russia to the “Holy Father”, as the false vision of Fatima
in 1917 had prophesied. As the Benedictine monk Chrysostom Bayer put it in
Bayrischer Kurier: “Bolshevism is creating the possibility of the conversion of
stagnant Russia to Catholicism.”
So powerful was this desire to convert the Orthodox that even when
Fyodorov was put on trial by the Bolsheviks in in March of 1923 along with
fourteen other clergymen and one layman, “he pathetically testified to the
sincerity of his feelings in relation to the Soviet authorities, who, Fyodorov
thought later, did not fully understand what could be expected from Roman
Catholicism. He explained: ‘From the time that I gave myself to the Roman
Catholic Church, my cherished dream has been to reconcile my homeland with
this church, which for me is the only true one. But we were not understood by
the government. All Latin Catholics heaved a sigh of relief when the October
Revolution took place. I myself greeted with enthusiasm the decree on the
separation of Church and State… Only under Soviet rule, when Church and
State are separated, could we breathe freely. As a religious believer, I saw in this
liberation the hand of God.’”895
“The Catholics,” continues Ivanov-Trinadtsaty, “were ready to close their

eyes to all the atrocities of Bolshevism, including the shooting of the Roman
Catholic Bishop Butkevich in April of 1923 and the imprisonment of Bishops
Tseplyak, Malyetsky and Fyodorov. Six weeks later, the Vatican expressed its
sorrow over the assassination of the Soviet agent Vorovsky in Lausanne! The
People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs told the German Ambassador, ‘Pius XI

1925, NN 21-22); Boyeikov, Tserkov’, Rus’ i Rim (The Church, Russia and Rome),
Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983, p. 13). (V.M.)
894 Ivanov-Trinadtsaty, “The Vatican and Russia”,
http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/new.htm.
895 Ivanov-Trinadtsaty, op. cit.
482
was amiable to me in Genoa, expressing the hope that we [the Bolsheviks]
would break the monopoly of the Orthodox Church in Russia, thus clearing a
path for him.’
“We have discovered information of the greatest importance in the archives

of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A secret telegram N 266 of February 6,
1925 from Berlin, stated that the Soviet ambassador, Krestinsky, told Cardinal
Pacelli (the future Pius XII) that Moscow would not oppose the existence of
Roman Catholic bishops and a metropolitan on Russian territory. Furthermore,
the Roman clergy were offered the very best conditions. Six days later, secret
telegram № 284 spoke of permission being granted for the opening of a Roman
Catholic seminary. Thus, while our holy New Martyrs were being annihilated
with incredible cruelty, the Vatican was conducting secret negotiations with
Moscow. In short, Rome attempted to gain permission to appoint the necessary
bishops and even permission to open a seminary. Our evidence shows that this
question was discussed once more in high circles in the autumn of 1926.”896
But this did not stop the persecution of Catholics; for nobody, not even the
Jews, was immune from persecution in Soviet Russia. Thus, as John Cornwell,
writes, “by 1925 most of the bishops of the Latin rite in Soviet Russia had been
thrown out, imprisoned, or executed. [In spite of that,] that year, Pius XI sent a
French Jesuit, Michel d’Herbigny, on a secret mission to Russia to ordain as
bishop half a dozen clandestine priests.897 On his way to Moscow, Herbigny
stayed in Berlin with Pacelli [then papal nuncio to Germany], who advised him
and secretly ordained him bishop. Herbigny’s mission was successful insofar as
he managed to ordain his six secret Russian bishops, but they were all
discovered and eliminated.
“In 1929, the year Pacelli was appointed Cardinal Secretary of State, Pius XI
founded a Vatican ‘Commission for Russia’. Later that year he opened on
Vatican territory the ‘Pontifical Russian College’, better known as the Russicum,
and the ‘Pontifical Ruthenian College’ where students were to be trained for
service in the Soviet Union. Other institutions were also secretly enlisted to
educate men for the Russian mission…
“Meanwhile, many hundreds of bishops, clergy, and laity were rounded up

and transported to… Solovki… By 1930 there were no more than three hundred
Catholic priests in Soviet Russia (compared with 923 in 1921), of whom a
hundred were in prison.”898

896 Ivanov-Trinadtsaty, op. cit.
897 The Pope’s continued optimism, according to Mark Aarons and John Loftus, was
based on his confidence “that Communism was corrupt and transitory. The
inevitable collapse of Soviet rule in Russia would give the Vatican the longed for
opportunity to bring the Orthodox schismatics back into Rome’s fold. Therefore,
‘quiet but thorough preparations [were] continually being made in Rome’ for
eventual missionary work in the East” (Aarons and Loftus, Unholy Trinity: the
Vatican, the Nazis and the Swiss Banks, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998, p. 5).
898 Cornwell, op. cit., pp. 263, 112-113.
483
However, it was not the sufferings of Catholics in Russia that finally
convinced the Vatican to turn against the Bolsheviks. The decisive factor was the
change in Soviet policy after the declaration of Metropolitan Sergius in 1927. For,
as an “unexpected and indirect result” of the declaration, writes Ivanov-
Trinadtsaty, “Moscow put an end to the negotiations and the attention it was
devoting to Vatican offers… The restitution of the traditional [in appearance]
Russian Orthodox Church, neutralized as it were, seemed more useful to the
Soviet authorities than the Vatican. From then on, the Soviets lost interest in the
Vatican. Only at the end of 1929 and the beginning of 1930 did the Vatican
finally admit that it had suffered a political defeat and began vociferously to
condemn the Bolshevik crimes. It had somehow not noticed them until 1930.
Only in 1937 did Pope Pius XI release the encyclical Divini Redemptori (Divine
Redeemer), which denounced communism…”899
It is sometimes forgotten that there were not two, but three great totalitarian
dictators who reached the pinnacle of their power in this period. The third, after
Hitler and Stalin, was the Papacy, which on March 12, 1939 enthroned Cardinal
Eugenio Pacelli as Pope Pius XII in a ceremony of extraordinary pomp and
circumstance. “Receive this Tiara,” intoned the cardinal deacon, “adorned with
three crowns, that thou mayest know that thou art the father of princes and of
kings, the ruler of the world, the Vicar on earth of our Saviour Jesus Christ, to
Whom be honour and glory for ever and ever, Amen.”900

899 Ivanov-Trinadtsaty, op. cit. See also Oleg Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii
(Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow: Rodnik, 1998, pp. 464-465.

900 Cornwell, op. cit., p. 214.
484
49. THE WALL STREET CRASH AND AMERICA’S HUNDRED
DAYS
We have seen that the United States was the only major country that emerged
from the Great War relatively unscathed and even prosperous. The result was a
boom time, accompanied by the kind of excess portrayed in Fitzgerald’s famous
novel The Great Gatsby or the 1960s film Some Like It Hot. “The cinema,” writes
Robert Tombs, “became a mass phenomenon, along with the gramophone and,
soon, the wireless. There was, all over Europe, Americanization. It had begun
shortly before the First World War, but American participation in the war
accentuated it: ragtime, jazz (first performed in England in 1917), and their
offshhots transformed popular music and dancing. It is this, of course, that has
left a strong image in popular memory of the ‘Roaring Twenties’, the Jazz Age,
the Charleston (1925) and flappers with bobbed hair and (relatively) short skirts.
Hollywood quickly established its pre-eminence as the source of new cultural
phenomena, not least the creation of global celebrities.”901
However, the general miasma that enveloped Europe would soon descend
also on the brash new leader of the West “across the pond”…
The crisis began in Europe. As we have seen, writes Tombs, “the

international postwar boom disguised Europe’s underlying weakness, but it
was fuelled, like all booms, by a mixture of greed and wishful thinking. The
appearance of prosperity rested on a façade if cheap money, because European
governments had largely paid for the war by printing banknotes while holding
down prices. It became increasingly clear that postwar Europe was suffering
from fundamental economic problems. A short but severe depression came in
1920-21, leaving a ruinous trail of bankruptcies and debt. Hyperinflation in
Germany in 1923 reduced the mark in a few months from 7,000 to the dollar to a
trillion.
“The war had cost Britain the financial and economic pre-eminence built up
since the eighteenth centur, undermining its foundations as the world’s greatest
creditor, exporter and financial centre. Its long-established deficit in ‘visible’
trade (goods, including food and raw materials) had previously been balanced
by ‘invisible’ earnings from banking, insurance and shipping, and pushed far
into surplus by overseas investment earnings. The war cost Britain more than
any of the Allies and its national debt had risen to 126 percent of GDP. (In 2014
it was around 60 percent.) Its old financial strength had ebbed and its balance of
payments was in the red. Worse still, Europe’s overseas markets had shrunk. In
1913 Britain had been the world’s biggest exporter of manufactured goods,
principally in India, Germany, South America and the Dominions. During the
war, production had been diverted to the war effort, cutting deliveries to
overseas customers. They had found other suppliers or built their own factories.
America and Japan had moved into British markets in South America and Asia,

901 Tombs, The English and their History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, p. 664.
485
tripling their exports during the war years. India, the biggest customer for
England’s biggest export, cotton cloth, was being lost: the war boosted India’s
own textile industry, and political boycotts of British goods increased. China
followed the same path. Total exports of cotton cloth fell by 71 percent between
1913 and 1937. The war had stimulated frenetic production of coal, ships, metals,
aircraft, motor vehicles and chemicals. Some new industries survived and
helped to transform the economy; but others depended on wartime demand –
for example, replacing merchant ships sunk by submarines. The end of the war
saw a collapse of both overseas and home demand in staple industries: 60
percent of the steel industry was idle; total exports fell by half between 1913 and
1937. This was the economic death of Victorian England…
“An attempted economic cure was returning to the gold standard – fixing the
value of the pound in terms of gold. This system had been suspended as a
wartime measure, but was due to resume in 1925. The aim was to restore
international price stability, which export-oriented British industry sorely
needed. Before 1914 the gold standard had facilitated trade and investment, and
so most countries, like Britain, returned to gold if and when they could,
including the United States, Germany, Australia, New Zealand and Scandinavia.
Moreover, gold was popular in England, being associated with cheap food.
Economic historians now generally agree that the return to gold was a
fundamental cause of economic disaster…
“The system had worked before 1914 because the main financial centres –
London, Paris, Berlin, New York – had cooperated to try to ensure stability, and
the keystone of the system, the Bank of England, had been at the centre of a
global free-trading economy willing to buy goods from countries in difficulty
and invest in their growth. The Bank had when necessary provided bail-outs in
foreign countries as ‘lender of last resort’. After 1918 the City was no longer the
world’s banker – Wall Street was. But the Americans lacked the will to manage
the world economy and, moreover, America was not a free trader. After the war
Europe owed America money: the Allies owed what they had borrowed; the
defeated Central Powers owed reparations. But protectionist America did not
buy enough European goods to enable them to earn the money to pay their
debts, and even imposed a 30 percent import tariff. Hence, Europeans depended
on America lending them more money to repay what they already owed. A final
problem was that America and France had deliberately undervalued their
currencies, creating trade surpluses which drew in gold from other countries –
by 1929 40 percent of the world’s god was in Fort Knox. Other countries, losing
godl, the guarantee of their currency, were forced to raise interest rates to halt
the loss, which further slowed their economies…”902
“As he left office in 1928,” writes A.N. Wilson, “President Coolidge told the
electorate that their prosperity was ‘absolutely sound’ and that stocks were
‘cheap at current prices’.

902 Tombs, op. cit., p. 665-666, 667-668.
486
“His successor was Herbert Hoover, born in the tiny Midwestern town of
West Branch, Iowa, a devout Quaker, who had become a mining engineer in his
twenties and amassed a fortune. His was an archetypal, virtuous American
success story and he probably spoke with complete sincerity when, in his
inaugural address in 1929, he said: ‘We in America today are nearer to the final
triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse
is vanishing from among us. We have not reached the goal, but, given a chance
to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon with the
help of God be in sight of the day when poverty shall be banished from this
nation.’”903
Hoover had evidently not heard the words of Christ” “The poor you have
with you always” (Matthew 26.11)… Soon, beginning in America, and
spreading throughout the capitalist world, the numbers of the poor would
multiply rapidly. This was the Great Crash, followed by the Great Depression.
“It was in October that the crash came, and a wild scramble began to unload
stocks which were tumbling in value. On 29 October the New York Times index
of industrials fell 49 points, followed next trading day by another 43 points. The
fall from high to low is awesome to consider. By 1 March 1933, the value of
stocks on the New York Exchange was less than one-fifth of the market’s peak.
The New York Times stock average, which stood at 452 on 3 September 1929,
bottomed at 52 in July 1932.
“The cost in human terms was terrible. Industrial production in the United
States fell by 50 per cent, and by 1933 one-third or one-quarter of the labour
force – no one could calculate exactly – were out of work. The Ford Motor
Corporation, which in spring 1929 employed 128,000 workers, was down to
37,000 by August 1931. This was the era of the soup kitchens, semi-starvation in
the cities, the mass exodus, described in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, of
dispossessed migrants into California. Almost overnight, the richest country in
the capitalist West had become what we would call a Third World country,
dominated by the basic need to eat and the fear of starvation itself. Twenty
thousand took part in the Bonus March of 1932 – some from as far away as
California. This was when war veterans, holding government bonus certificates
which were due years in the future, marched on Washington demanding that
Congress pay them off now. They came in battered old cars, on freight trains, or
by hitch-hiking. Chief Running Wolf, a jobless Mescalero Indian from New
Mexico, came in full Indian dress with a bow and arrow. The 20,000 were
mostly encamped, when they reached Washington, on Anacosta Flats, on the far
side of the Potomac River from the Capitol. President Hoover, a Quaker,
ordered the army to evict them. He walled himself up in the White House
guarded by four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine-gun
squadron and six tanks, commanded by General Douglas MacArthur and aided
by Major Dwight Eisenhower…”904

904 Wilson, op. cit., pp. 324-325.
487
*
What had gone wrong? Yanis Varoufakis explains: “Just as one person’s debt
is another’s asset, one nation’s deficit is another’s surplus. In an asymmetrical
world the money that surplus economies amass from selling more stuff to
deficit economies than they buy from them accumulates in their banks, but these
banks are then tempted to lend much of it back to the deficit countries or
regions, where interest rates are always higher because money is so much
scarcer. In this way, banks help maintain some semblance of balance during the
good times. If an exchange rate seems likely to remain stable or even the same,
banks will tend to lend more to the deficit country in question, unworried by the
prospect of a devaluation further down the line that might make it hard for
debtors in the deficit country to repay them. Bankers, in this sense, are fair-
weather surplus recyclers. They profit from taking a chunk of the surplus
money from the surplus nation and recycling it to the deficit nations.
“But if the exchange rate is fixed, the banks go beserk, transferring mountains
of money to the deficit regions so long as the storm clouds are absent, the skies
are blue and the financial waters calm. Their credit line allows those in deficit to
keep buying more and more stuff from the surplus and deficit economies alike,
confidence in the financial system swells, the surpluses get larger and the
deficits deeper.
“As long as the fair financial weather continues, fair-weather surplus

recycling endures. But it cannot endure for ever. With the certainty and
abruptness that a pile of sand will collapse once the critical grain is added on
top of it, vendor-financed trade will always go into sudden, violent spasm. No
one can predict when but only fools doubt that it must. The equivalent of the
critical grain of sand is one container full of imported goodies that goes
unclaimed by an insolvent importer, or one loan that is defaulted upon by some
over-leveraged real estate developer. It takes just one such bankruptcy in a
deficit country to start a whirlpool of panic among surplus nations’ banks.
“Suddenly, confident globetrotting bankers turn into jelly. Lax lending turns
to no lending at all. In the deficit regions importers, developers, governments
and city councils which have grown dependent on the banks are hung out to
dry. House prices collapse, public works are abandoned, office buildings turn
into ghostly towers, shops are boarded up, incomes disappear and governments
announce austerity. In no time bankers are left holding ‘nonperforming loans’
the size of the Himalayas. Panic reaches a deafening climax and Keynes’s
inimitable words resonate once more: ‘As soon as a storm arises’, bankers
behave like a ‘fair-weather sailor’ who ‘abandons the boat which might carry
him to safety by his haste to push his neighbour off and himself in’.
488
“It is the destiny of fair-weather surplus recycling to prompt a crash and
occasion a complete halt to all recycling. This is what happened in 1929. It is also
what has been happening since 2008 in Europe…”905
The result was described by Paul Reynaud: “The oceans were deserted, the
ships laid up in the silent ports, the factory smoke-stacks dead, long files of
workless in the towns, poverty throughout the countryside. Argentina saw the
wheat and livestock prices collapse; Brazil, the price of coffee; America, that of
corn and cotton; Malaya, of rubber; Cuba, of sugar, and Burma, of rice. Then
came the stage when wealth was destroyed. The Brazilians threw their sacks of
coffee into the sea, and the Canadians burned their corn in railway engines. Just
as a man leaving a house at a moment’s notice, burns his papers, civilization
seemed to destroy, before disappearing, the wealth it had created. Men
questioned the value of what they had learned to admire and respect. Women
became less fertile… The crisis was even more prolonged than the war. Nations
were economically cut off from one another, but they shared the common lot of
poverty.”906
Tombs continues: “Ramsey MacDonald’s 1929 Labour government… was

bereft of a policy for coping with the financial crisis. One minister, Sir Oswald
Mosley, urged huge job creation, but most feared financial strain. The Cabinet
fragmented when a run on the pound forced it to seek financial support in Wall
Street, which insisted on a cut in public spending.” Finally, after hanging for
nearly two years of economic downturn, during which an attempt cut public
wages led to the “Invergordon Mutiny” – a strike in the navy – and another run
on the pound, the British National government, now a coalition of Tories,
Liberals and Labour, “abandoned the gold standard in September 1931, and the
pound lost 30 percent of its value – a milestone in modern economic history. But
the decision was less tortured than in some countries. Britain had suffered far
less from inflation in the 1920s than France or Germany: the latter had suffered
the traumatic experience of hyperinflation in 1923, when people had needed
barrow-loads of banknotes to buy groceries and savings had become worthless.
So British politicians and public opinion were less fixated on gold, and
devaluation happened without a political outcry. Not for the last tie, the
economy benefited from a currency debacle, followed by a cut in interest rates
from 6 to 2 percent. English goods became cheaper, winning back home and
foreign markets. Fifteen other countries followed suit. By 1932 the economy was
starting to recover, growing by 4 percent per year, with average unemployment
over the 1930s (9.8 percent) roughly half that in the United States (18.2 percent).
“In Europe, new and fragile democracies with average unemployment

seemed impotent to halt the economic crisis. Many were hamstrung by
proportional representation, which gave no clear majority to govern.
Communists, radical nationalists or authoritarian conservatives were
threatening to take or actually taking power in Poland, Germany, Austria,

905 Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What they Must? London: Vintage, 2017, pp. 22-23.
906 Reynaud, in Brendon, op. cit., p. 132.
489
Hungary, the Balkans, Portugal and Spain. Even in traditionally stable countries,
including Belgium and Norway, extremist populist parties emerged. In France,
Europe’s oldest large democracy, a Communist party and several fascist-style
movements threatened the parliamentary republic. Most seriously of all, in
Germany the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party began winning the
votes of people desperate for some way out of the slump, blamed on reparations
and the Treaty of Versailles…”907
The Socialist Beatrice Webb saw the Depression as preparing the way for the
world revolution: “The U.S.A., with its cancerous growth of crime and
uncounted but destitute unemployed; Germany hanging over the abyss of a
nationalist dictatorship; France, its dread of a new combination of Italy,
Germany and Austria against her; Spain on the brink of revolution; the Balkan
states snarling at each other; the Far East in a state of anarchic ferment; the
African continent uncertain whether its paramount interest and culture power
will be black or white; South American states forcibly replacing pseudo-
democracies by military dictatorships; and finally – acutely hostile to the rest of
the world, engulfed in a fabulous effort, the success of which would shake
capitalist civilization to its very foundations – Soviet Russia.”908
Salvation – relatively speaking – came with a new president, Franklin D.

Roosevelt. His inauguration as president on March 4, 1933, only a few weeks
after Hitler’s, had a similarly uplifting effect on his people. He took America off
the Gold Standard. Then he revived the nation’s confidence. “This great Nation,”
he said, “will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of
all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself –
nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to
convert retreat into advance.”
“America’s new president,” writes David Reynolds, “understood the power

of confidence to vanquish fear and that became the watchword of his
presidency. It was needed in his very first crisis: how to get the banking system
going again. Using the dubious pretext of the wartime Trading with the Enemy
Act, the president declared a three-day Bank Holiday during which Treasury
officials worked round the clock to draw up a list of which banks could open for
business again and which were so rickety that they should be shut down for
good. To cover the expected dash for cash when the banks reopened the Federal
Reserve was authorized to issue additional notes. These emergency measures
were passed by the House of Representatives in less than forty minutes, sight
unseen – the Speaker read out the bill from the one available draft…

907 Tombs, op. cit., p. 669. Thus “the reaction to mainstream politics,” writes Dani Rodrik, “took
two forms. Communists chose social reconstruction over the international economy, while
fascists and Nazis chose national reassertion. Both paths took a sharp turn away from
globalisation.” (“The Great Globalisation Lie”, Prospect, January, 2018, p. 31)
490
“When the banks reopened, to general amazement deposits far exceeded
withdrawals. Roosevelt, the political artist, had pulled off the trick in a way
Hoover, the dour technocrat, never could have. In legislation passed during a
congressional session from 9 March to 16 June 1933 which was dubbed the
‘Hundred Days’ FDR went on to honour the Democrats’ election pledge to end
Prohibition and its sordid underworld of bootleg liquor and violent crime.
Congress and the states quickly amended the Constitution and beer became
legal again within a month of Roosevelt’s inauguration. By April the national
mood was upbeat and positive – testament that the Depression was in part a
psychological malaise.
“By the summer Congress had addressed the fundamentals of the banking
system, at the heart of the nation’s crisis of confidence. The Glass-Seagall Act of
June 1933 established a system of federal insurance for bank deposits, initially
set at $2,500 per account but raised over the years. The Act also separated
investment banks (engaged in the capital markets) from commercial banks
(handling loans and deposits) because a blurring of the line, it was believed, had
contributed to the Crash [of 1929] and Depression. This legal demarcation
remained in place until 1999; its removal… led in part to the financial crisis of
2008…”909
The National Recovery Act, passed by Congress on June 16, “gave Roosevelt
extraordinary powers, unprecedented in the United States in peacetime”.910 But
it worked: the American economy was now on the road to recovery. However,
while Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, as it was called, placed America on the road to
recovery, the recovery itself was a long time coming. It began in Britain with
rearmament in 1936. In Germany “recovery was ‘due more to Mr. Hitler than to
Mr. Keynes’”.911 And it was fully activated in America only by the outbreak of
World War Two and the huge fillip that gave to industrial production. As
Varoufakis writes, “it took industrial-scale carnage (aka the Second World War),
and similarly sized public ‘investment’ in mega-death, to lift the world economy
out of the slump.”912
The New Deal more than any other factor determined that democracy would
defeat Hitler’s despotism; for his second major mistake after invading the Soviet
Union in June, 1941 was to declare war on the United States in December,
1941…
“Nevertheless,” writes Piers Brendon, “critics, some of whom had earlier

called for a dictatorship, damned Roosevelt for having established one. This
charge, which reveals much about the power of ideas to transcend reality, soon
became the common currency of polite conversation. It was repeated in the
press, most rabidly by Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, which

909 Reynolds, America: Empire of Liberty, London: Penguin, 2010, pp. 344-346.
910 Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2: 1933-1951, London:
HarperCollins, 1998, p. 28.
911 Tombs, op. cit., p. 675.
912 Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur, London: Zed Books, 2013, p. 45.
491
described Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and Roosevelt as the four horsemen of the
Apocalypse. It was first heard from the pulpit in the summer of 1933, when
Roosevelt was denounced as a ‘dictator’ by the President of the Church of
Latter-day Saints. Similarities can be adduced, it is true, between Roosevelt’s
remedies for the Depression and those of fascist and Communist leaders. FDR
himself said that he was doing, in a more orderly way, ‘some of the things that
were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done
under Hitler in Germany’. The President built highways while the Führer built
autobahns. Roosevelt regarded the CCC work camps as a means of getting
young people ‘of the city street corners’; Hitler described similar projects as a
way to keep the youth from ‘rotting helplessly in the streets’. When Roosevelt
refused to cooperate at the World Economic Conference of June 1933 – he feared
its attempt to stabilise international currency would interfere with his price-
raising efforts in the United States – Hjalmar Schacht, President of the
Reichsbank, congratulated him for being an economic nationalist like the Führer.
He may even have been influenced by writers such as Stuart Chase, populariser
of the term ‘New Deal’, who likened Communism to ‘the flaming sword of
Allah’ seen ‘over the plains of Mecca’.
“However, Roosevelt’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in

November 1933 was not prompted by any ideological sympathy. On the
contrary, religious Americans went so far as to hope that he had ‘restored God
to Russia’. In fact the President wanted good relations with the USSR to counter
Japan and to promote trade. At home he was clearly trying to preserve the
American way of life. His version of the planned economy was not socialism but
state capitalism…
“Equally, the President was repelled by Hitler’s organised savagery,

especially as expressed in war-mongering and anti-Semitism – though in
practice FDR would do as little to succour German Jews as to assist American
blacks. As chief of the world’s greatest trading nation he did not, like Hitler and
Mussolini, lust for autarky; though at a time when European states were
refusing to pay their war debts Roosevelt was inclined to ignore the warning of
his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, that economic wars are the germs of real
wars. While the President was influenced by isolationism – he wrecked the
World Economic Conference with his bombshell message urging each nation to
set its own house in order – he aspired (as his later policies showed) towards
internationalism. Furthermore, Roosevelt’s New Deal hardly compares in
essentials with Hitler’s Gleichschaltung (coordination). The Blue Eagle could not
be mistaken for the swastika. The fireside chat was the antithesis of the
Nuremburg rally. Organised labour flourished under Roosevelt whereas Hitler
smashed the trade unions. Roosevelt’s manipulation of the media bore no
relation to the national brainwashing attempted by Goebbels. The President did
not possess, as the New York Times sagely observed, ‘a private army of, say,
2,000,000 Blueshirts’. The American constitution remained intact. No senators
were sent to concentration camps; no congressmen were forcibly fed on castor
oil. True, there were Americans who believed that a little castor oil might have
started the wheels of industry going, not least the red-necked, red-suspendered,
492
Red-hating Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia. But Roosevelt organised no
‘Fascist movement’ – a vital necessity, in the opinion of Sir Oswald Mosley, if
the President were to become a bona fide dictator.”913
Thus the U.S.A. avoided revolution (whether fascist or otherwise) by a heavy

injection of state capitalism, Roosevelt’s “New Wave” - not socialism. Britain
muddled through, although T.S. Eliot opined that “the present system does not
work properly, and more and more people are inclined to believe that it never
did and never will”.914 Germany, Spain and Japan adopted the Fascist path. And
France nearly went along the same path after the bloody Fascist riots of
February 6, 1934, in the wake of which “few Frenchmen looked so cheerfully to
the future. Since 1929 they had seen their country sink from its gleaming peak of
prosperity into a dark valley of Depression. The economic crisis appeared to
have sapped France’s will to defend itself, menaced though it was by rampant
Nazism without and creeping fascism within. The riots were, in Mussolini’s
view a convincing argument for fascist discipline, and politicians such as Laval
were not ashamed to declare that ‘the parliamentary system is decidedly
incapable of functioning except in times of prosperity and ease’.”915

493
50. THE REVOLUTION IN PHYSICS
The first decade after the Great War was a period of extraordinary
excess and experimentation in morality, in politics, in art – and
especially in physics. The advances in physics overthrew the whole
understanding of the physical world that had prevailed since Newton.
Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity transformed our
ideas of space, time and gravity, and of the largest-scale events and
objects. In particular, relativity changed our ideas of time, linking
time to matter and gravitation in such a way that the one cannot exist
without the other. 916 Quantum mechanics transformed our ideas of the
smallest-scale events and objects.
The impact of Quantum mechanics was still more fundamental and

paradoxical than that of Relativity theory; so it is to Quantum
mechanics that we turn now.
Now the pagan Greeks and Romans believed in the goddess Chance
(Tyche in Greek, Fortuna in Latin). They also believed in what would
appear to be its precise opposite, Fate (Fatum). More precisely, they
believed in the Fates (plural), the three goddesses, Atropos, Clotho, and
Lachesis, who were supposed to determine the course of human life in
classical mythology.
Christianity rejected this belief, as we can see in the witness of two

holy bishops. Thus St. Basil the Great, probably the most learned man
of his time, wrote: “Do not say, ‘This happened by chance, while this
came to be of itself.’ In all that exists there is nothing disorderly,
nothing indefinite, nothing without purpose, nothing by chance…
How many hairs are on your head? God will not forget one of them.
Do you see how nothing, even the smallest thing, escapes the gaze of
God.” Again, in the nineteenth century, the scientifically trained St.
Ignaty Brianchaninov wrote: “There is no blind chance! God rules the
world, and everything that takes place in heaven and beneath the
heavens takes place according to the judgement of the All-wise and
All-powerful God.” 917

916 Brandon Gallaher writes: “Augustine… is concerned with the relation of time to
creation and eventually concludes [in book 11 of his Confessions] that the thinker is
always implicated by time since he is in time. In other words, time itself is
meaningless unless it presupposes created things in time including the thinker.”
(“Chalice of Eternity: A Look at Orthodox Christian Theology of Time”, The
Catalogue of Good Deeds, December 26, 2017,
http://catalogueofstelisabethconvent.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/chalice-of-eternity-
look-at-orthodox.html)
917 Brianchaninov, “Sud’by Bozhii” (The Judgements of God), Polnoe Sobranie Tvorenij (Complete
Collection of Works), volume II, Moscow, 2001, p. 72.
494
However, modern physics since the 1920s, in addition to being
essentially atheist – it does not believe in “the judgement of the All-
wise and All-powerful God”- is also pagan. For it has the same
paradoxical combination of faith both in radical determinism and in an
equally radical indeterminism – both fate and chance – as did the
ancient Greeks and Romans. For on the one hand, it believes that in
most of the sciences there reigns the most absolute, iron-like dominion
of natural law without any exceptions in the form of miracles; that is,
it believes in fate. On the other hand, as regards the most fundamental
science of all, quantum physics, the study of the smallest units of
matter and energy, it believes that no determinist laws in fact exist,
but only indeterminism – that is, chance. This creates a radical schism,
an unbridgeable gulf, between the two halves of what has been called
“the Theory of Everything” (TOC).
Let us briefly examine the indeterminism of quantum physics

through the words of the physicist Carlo Rovelli: “The two pillars of
twentieth-century physics – general relativity and quantum mechanics
– could not be more different from each other. General relativity is a
compact jewel: conceived by a single mind, based on combining
previous theories, it is a simple and coherent vision of gravity, space
and time. Quantum mechanics, or quantum theory, on the other hand,
emerges from experiments in the course of a long gestation over a
quarter of a century, to which many have contributed; achieves
unequalled experimental success and leads to applications which have
transformed our everyday lives…; but, more than a century after its
birth, it remains shrouded in obscurity and incomprehensibility…”
The reality this theory has unveiled, continues Ravelli, has three
aspects: granularity, indeterminism and relationality. Granularity is not
directly relevant to our theme: we shall come to the relationality of
quantum theory later. With regard to indeterminism, the problem for
the physicists lies in the following. The British physicist Paul Dirac
discovered the equations enabling us to compute the velocity, energy,
momentum and angular momentum of an electron with great
accuracy. However, these equations are statistical and probabilistic in
nature: in spite of their accuracy, they provide us with no certain
knowledge of what will be. And not only because all scientific
hypotheses are uncertain and provisional, but in principle. Thus
quantum physics, the most successful theory in the history of science,
declares that reality at the most basic, fundamental level does not follow
law; it is lawless. Thus “we do not know with certainty where the
electron will appear, but we can compute the probability that it will
appear here or there. This is a radical change from Newton’s theory,
where it is possible, in principle, to predict the future with certainty.
Quantum mechanics bring probability to the heart of the evolution of
things. This indeterminacy is the third cornerstone of quantum
mechanics: the discovery that chance operates at the atomic level.
495
While Newton’s physics allows for the prediction of the future with
exactitude, if we have sufficient information about the initial date and
if we can make the calculations, quantum mechanics allows us to
calculate only the probability of an event. This absence of determinism
at a small scale is intrinsic to nature. An electron is not obliged by
nature to move towards the right or the left; it does so by chance. The
apparent determinism of the macroscopic world is due only the fact
that microscopic randomness cancels out on average, leaving only
fluctuations too minute for us to perceive in everyday life.” 918
The greatest minds in science wrestled with this problem, trying to

get rid of it if they possibly could. Even Einstein – who considered
Dirac a great genius, albeit one bordering on madness - could not be
reconciled with the theory at first: “God does not play with dice,” he
declared. And yet he, too, was finally, but reluctantly, reconciled with
what appeared to be undeniable reality, confirmed by the
extraordinary predictive accuracy of quantum physics.
It took a non-scientist, an Oxford professor of medieval literature,

the famous Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, to express the full,
shattering implications of quantum indeterminism for the nature of
science and scientific laws – and the possibility of miracles. “The
notion that natural laws may be merely statistical results from the
modern belief that the individual unit obeys no laws. Statistics were
introduced to explain why, despite the lawlessness of the individual
unit, the behaviour of gross bodies was regular. The explanation was
that, by a principle well known to actuaries, the law of averages
leveled out the individual eccentricities of the innumerable units
contained in even the smallest gross body. But with this conception of
the lawless units the whole impregnability of nineteenth-century
Naturalism has, it seems to me, been abandoned. What is the use of
saying that all events are subject to laws if you also say that every
event which befalls the individual unit of matter is not subject to laws.
Indeed, if we define nature as the system of events in space-time
governed by interlocking laws, then the new physics has really
admitted that something other than nature exists. For if nature means
the interlocking system then the individual unit is outside nature. We
have admitted what may be called the sub-natural. After this
admission what confidence is left us that there may not be a
supernatural as well? It may be true that the lawlessness of the little
events fed into nature from the sub-natural is always ironed out by the
law of averages. It does not follow that great events could not be fed
into her by the supernatural: nor that they also would allow
themselves to be ironed out…” 919

918Ravelli, Reality is Not What it Seems, London: Penguin, 2014, pp. 91, 103-104.
919Lewis, “Religion without Dogma?” (1946), in Compelling Reason, London: Fount, 1986, pp. 92-
93.
496
The great mystery is this: why should the essential lawlessness of
every single microscopic subatomic event translate, at higher levels of
macroscopic perception – those of atoms, molecules, organs, objects,
planets, galaxies – into law-governed things and events? In other
words, why does indeterminism become determinism, chance become
fate – not in time, but simultaneously, and not only in some places but
everywhere? The answer, I would suggest, can only be that God, Who
is subject neither to chance nor to fate but is supremely free and
omnipotent and beyond all space, time and matter, decrees every single
event in the universe in order to give the impression of chance and
indeterminism at one level of perception and fate at the other. Thus
Ravelli’s declaration: “An electron is not obliged by nature to move
towards the right or the left; it does so by chance” should be changed
to read: “An electron is not obliged by nature to move towards the
right or the left; it does so by the command of God”.
So is God deliberately deceiving the scientists? By no means! They

are deceiving themselves!
This is most obvious at the macroscopic level. Since ancient times

human beings, even primitive, uneducated ones, have always known
that nature is governed by laws. And the great majority of them have
drawn the obvious conclusion: that there is a Law-giver who
commands things to happen in an orderly, lawful way - “He spake and
they came into being; He commanded, and they were created” (Psalm
32.9). At the same time, it was obvious to all human beings in ancient
times, both primitive and sophisticated, that there were exceptions to
natural law – what we call miracles. For if He speaks and they come
into being, why should He not at some times not speak so that they do
not come into being? Or why should He not change a law of nature for
a longer or shorter period for reasons known to Him alone? Indeed,
any unprejudiced observer of history will accept that while some
“miracles” are fake, there is a vast number of well-attested events
whose only explanation must be God’s temporary suspension of the
laws He Himself created.
It was this belief in laws and the Law-giver, combined with

intellectual curiosity, that was the main motivation of modern science
from the seventeenth century onwards. Newton was such a believer
(he also believed in the Holy Scriptures); even Einstein appears to
have been one. But then the new belief arose that we can study the
laws of nature without positing a Law-giver; that is, “the God
hypothesis” is unnecessary. And yet God remains the elephant in the
room of modern physics. Why else would they call the most recent
discovery in particle physics – that of the Higgs Boson – “the God
particle”? It would be hard to imagine a more inappropriate name for
a newly discovered particle. Or are they in fact still obsessed by “the
497
God hypothesis”, and are subconsciously trying to reduce the massive
invisible elephant behind their back to the smallest visible particle in
front their nose?
Be that as it may, the fact is that science before the advent of

quantum theory believed only in fate, absolute, iron necessity and
determinism at every level of reality, a necessity that was lawful (and
awful) but did not presuppose (in the scientists’ opinion) a Law-giver.
That is why the recent enthronement of chance, the exact opposite of
fate, at the centre of physics is such a shock to the whole system. But it
is no shock to the Christian scientist. For if an electron is not obliged
to move to the right or to the left by any law – in fact, the laws we
have suggest that such predictions and prescriptions are in principle
impossible – why should that be a problem for the Law-giver? Thus
the discovery of chance at the heart of the fate-based system of pre-
quantum theory physics actually restores God to the heart of that
system, destroying its from within and banishing both fate and chance
in favour of the Providence of God.
Let us now turn to the second major aspect of quantum theory:

relationality…
As we have seen, the quantum wave function that is the

fundamental unit of the modern physicist's universe is not a thing or
an event, but a spectrum of possible things or events. Moreover, it
exists as such only while it is not being observed. When the wave
function is observed (by a physical screen or a living being), it
collapses into one and one only of the possibilities that define it.
Now this idea creates hardly less serious problems for the classical
view of the world as the idea of indeterminism. For it suggests that the
objective existence of the world is tied up to an extraordinary, almost
solipsistic extent with the subjective perception of that world. Indeed,
the fundamental unit of objective reality, the quantum wave function,
becomes real – that is, a single actual event, as opposed to a multiple
spectrum of possible events – only when it is observed, that is, when it
becomes part of subjective reality, when it is in a relationship with an
observer…
That this continues to disturb the minds of scientists even to this

day is witnessed by a very recent cover story in the prestigious
scientific weekly New Scientist: “Before observation, such quantum
objects are said to be in a superposition of all possible observable
outcomes. This doesn’t mean that we exist in many states at once,
rather that we can only say that all the allowed outcomes of
measurement remain possible. This potential is represented in the
498
quantum wave function, a mathematical expression that encodes all
outcomes and their relative possibilities.
“But it isn’t at all obvious what, if anything, the wave function can
tell you about the nature of a quantum system before we make a
measurement. That act reduces all those possible outcomes to one,
dubbed the collapse of the wave function – but no one really knows
what that means either. Some researchers think it might be a real
physical process, like radioactive decay. Those who subscribe to the
many-worlds interpretation think it is an illusion conjured by the
splitting of the universe into each of the possible outcomes. Others
still say that there is no point in trying to explain it – and besides, who
cares? The maths works, so just shut up and calculate.
“Whatever the case, wave function collapse seems to hinge on

intervention or observation, throwing up some huge problems, not
least about the role of consciousness in the whole process. This is the
measurement problem, arguably the biggest headache in quantum
theory. ‘It is very hard,’ says Kelvin McQueen, a philosopher at
Chapman University in California. ‘More interpretations are being
thrown up every day, but all of them have problems.’” 920
This debate reminds the present writer of the work of the Swiss
developmental psychologist Jean Piaget, who hypothesized that
children are not born with a belief in the continued existence of objects
when they are not being observed. It is only from about the age of five
that they acquire the belief that an object such as a ball continues to
exist even when it is hidden behind a sofa so that they cannot see it
any longer. 921 Can it be that contemporary scientists were regressing,
as it were, to a state of childlike solipsism, of unbelief in the existence
of reality when nobody is observing it? If they were, then there was
and is a simple remedy for this form of madness: belief in God. For St.
Paul’s “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17.28) is
not merely a pretty poetic phrase. On the contrary, it bears the very
precise meaning that we exist only by God’s continual upholding
every particle in our body and every movement of our soul by the
word of His power. If He withdrew this upholding of us, even for one
moment, we would immediately revert to the nothingness from which
we came.

920Philip Ball, “Reality? It’s What You Make of It”, New Scientist, November, 2017, p. 29.
921Actually, the present writer with C.C. Russell demonstrated in an undergraduate experiment
at Oxford in 1970 that this ability is present in children much earlier, from at least the age of
three. But this is not relevant to the present argument.
499

IV. THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1933-1945)
500
51. HITLER’S IDEOLOGY
Golo Mann writes: “’National Socialism’, its spokesman often said, was a
Weltanschauung, an ideology. Basically, however, it was not; not in the sense
that Communism for example was. Communism was an elaborate system of
doctrines about the world, man and history; false science, false religion which
many people seriously believed in. 922 Many people died willingly for
Communism, including German Communists. In places where the party was
proscribed its followers went underground and when, years later, the pressure
was lifted, they reappeared – genuine, indestructible fanatics that they were.
The Nazis also boasted of their fanatical faith – they were very fond of the word
‘fanatical’ – but their fanaticism was only skin deep. Fanaticism demands faith,
and what did the Nazis believe in? When Hitler’s Reich was broken up almost
no National Socialists were to be found. People claimed that they had never
been Nazis, that they had known nothing, that they had been forced to join in or
had joined in merely to prevent worse things from happening, not because they
acted in accordance with their beliefs. Only in the disputed frontier regions
where there was momentarily no distinction between the Nazi cause and the
pan-German nationalistic one, as in Austria in 1934, were people ready to die for
the cause. This was the exception, not the rule. Democrats, Socialists, students,
conservative noblemen and trade unionists risked their lives in Germany for the
sake of human decency. The Nazis wanted to live and enjoy life.
“When these words were written people were saying that there were still or
again ‘National Socialists’ in Germany. One wonders why they should be called
thus. Because they believe that not everything that Hitler did was wrong; that
Germany was entitled to tear up the Versailles treaty; that the West should not
have stabbed Germany in the back when it was defending Europe against
Bolshevism; that the Germans were the most industrious nation in Europe; that
firm, secure government was needed; and more such things. These may have
been sentiments and opinions which National Socialists made use of. But they
were there before; they survived National Socialism, and their sum total does
not by any means add up to the essence of National Socialism.
“What then was National Socialism? It was an historically unique

phenomenon, dependent on an individual and on a moment, a phenomenon
which can never reappear in the same form. It was a state of intoxication
produced by a gang of intoxicated experts, kept up for a few years. It was a
machine for the manufacture of power, for the safeguarding of power and for
the extension of power. The machine was located in Germany and therefore
used to fuel German energies, German interests, passions and ideas. ‘We want
power’ – this cry of the year 1932 was the essence of the new message. Power
means organization, indoctrination and the authority to give orders; it meant

922 Yes, but as Elder Aristocles of Moscow said in 1911, Communism was not so
much an ideology as a spirit, a spirit from hell. Both totalitarian movements were
spiritual in essence, being two variants of the spirit of the revolution. (V.M.)
501
the suppression of all independent life, of anything capable of resistance. In that
sense it was essentially a negative element. The power of National Socialism
over Germany thus only became complete when the Reich was close to collapse,
when it army had already been defeated.
“The determination to have power was considerable; the doctrine was not.
Who can say today what the Nazis ‘taught’? The superiority of the Nordic race?
They made fun of it, admitting when they were among themselves that it was a
weapon not a truth. Few of them seemed to have seriously believed this
nonsense. Anti-semitism? This was probably the most genuine feeling of which
Hitler was capable, but it was hardly a Weltanschaung. Nor did anti-Semitism
arouse the imagination of the Germans among whom it was no stronger than
among most other nations.923 Later, when the authorities ordered the murder of
Europe’s Jews there were people prepared to do this, just as they would have
carried out any other order. Himmler himself said shortly before the end that it
was time for Germans and Jews to bury the hatchet and become reconciled.
When he wanted to save himself and worm his way into the Allies’ favour he
pretended that the murder of the Jews was nothing but a regrettable
misunderstanding. This was not an article of faith but crime produced by evil
propaganda. The same was true of the old Party programme, abandoned as
soon as the Nazis came to power, of the economic theories and the talk about
the common good. One member of the gang, the President of the People’s Court
during the war years, said that the bond between National Socialism and
Christianity was that both claimed the whole man. Yet even that was evil
propaganda, boasting, imitation of the Communists, of the Jacobins. He would
not have been able to say for what National Socialism required the whole man.
Relatively the most interesting formulations of the Nazi theory came from
outsiders who were quick to place their talents at the disposal of the new rulers
and to credit them with all sorts of refinements. Equally there were German
scholars who did not find it difficult to avoid the whole mish-mash and who
followed their pursuits as before; much less difficult than it is under
Communism. As personified in its leaders ‘National Socialism’ was a
determination of tremendous intensity which cared for nothing but itself and
was for that reason identical with cynical opportunism; without its leaders it did
not exist at all. Hence it vanished with Hitler’s death and at the same time
people looked at each other in surprise as though they had woken from a long
period of bewitchment. If the Nazis believed in anything they believed in the
great man. If he believed in anything it was in himself; in the last years of his life
his conviction that he was the chosen one assumed dimensions which can no
longer be called human…”924

923 This assertion is dubious. Anti-semitism had been built up and incited in
Germany since at least the 1870s. It was certainly strong also in other countries,
especially France and Romania, but it was particularly strong in Germany. See
Paul Johnson, History of the Jews, London, 1987, part 6. (V.M.)
924 Mann, The History of Germany since 1789, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 445-447.
502
If, as Mann says, anti-semitism was the most genuine emotion of which
Hitler was capable, then we lead to examine it more closely, even if, as he also
claims, few of his followers believed in the superiority of the Nordic race.
Yuval Noah Harari sees Hitler’s doctrine as a species of evolutionary

humanism, a third kind of humanism to range alongside liberal humanism and
socialist humanism. “Like liberal humanism, socialist humanism is built on
monotheist foundations. The idea that all humans are equal is a revamped
version of the monotheist conviction that all souls are equal before God. The
only humanist sect that has actually broken loose from traditional monotheism
is evolutionary humanism, whose most famous representatives are the Nazis.
What distinguished the Nazis from other humanist sects was a different
definition of ‘humanity’, one deeply influenced by the theory of evolution. In
contrast to the other humanists, the Nazis believed that humankind is not
something universal and eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or
degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or degenerate into a subhuman.
“The main ambition of the Nazis was to protect humankind from

degeneration and encourage its progressive evolution. This is why the Nazis
said that the Aryan race, the most advanced from of humanity, had to be
protected and fostered, while degenerate kinds of Homo Sapiens like Jews, Roma,
homosexuals and the mentally ill had to be quarantined and even exterminated.
The Nazis explained that Homo Sapiens itself appeared when one ‘superior’
population of ancient humans evolved, whereas ‘inferior’ populations such as
the Neanderthals became extinct. These different populations were at first no
more than different races, but developed independently along their own
evolutionary paths. This might well happen again. According to the Nazis,
Homo Sapiens had already divided into several distinct races, each with its own
unique qualities. One of those races, the Aryan race, had the finest qualities –
rationalism, beauty, integrity, diligence. The Aryan race therefore had the
potential to turn man into superman. Other races, such as Jews and blacks, were
today’s Neanderthals, possessing inferior qualities. If allowed to breed, and in
particular to intermarry with Aryans, they would adulterate all human
populations and doom Homo Sapiens to extinction.
“Biologists have since debunked Nazi racial theory. In particular, genetic

research conducted since 1945 has demonstrated that the differences between
the various human lineages are far smaller than the Nazis postulated. But these
conclusions are relatively new. Given the state of scientific knowledge in 1933,
Nazi beliefs were hardly outside the pale. The existence of different human
races, the superiority of the white race, and the need to protect and cultivate this
superior race were widely held beliefs among most Western elites. Scholars in
the most prestigious Western universities, using the orthodox scientific methods
of the day, published studies that allegedly proved that members of the white
race were more intelligent, more ethical and more skilled than Africans or
Indians. Politicians in Washington, London and Canberra took it for granted
that it was their job to prevent the adulteration and degeneration of the white
503
race, by, for example, restricting immigration from China or even Italy to ‘Aryan’
countries such as the USA and Australia.
“These positions did not change simply because new scientific research was
published. Sociological and political developments were far more powerful
instruments of change. In this sense, Hitler dug not just his own grave but that
of racism in general. When he launched the Second World War, he compelled
his enemies to make clear distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Afterwards,
precisely because Nazi ideology was so racist, racism became discredited in the
West. But the change took time. White supremacy remained a mainstream
ideology in American politics at least until the 1960s. The White Australia policy
which restricted immigration of non-white people to Australia remained in
force until 1973. Aboriginal Australians did not receive equal political rights
until the 1960s, and most were prevented from voting in elections because they
were deemed unfit to function as citizens…”925
If, as Harari argues, evolutionary humanism is the only form of humanism

which does not have Christian roots, then the words of the novelist Thomas
Mann, who was a Christian married to a Jewess, acquire a particular resonance.
In 1930, he “gave a high-profile ‘Address to the Germans: An Appeal to Reason”,
in which he denounced the Nazis as barbarians. “The anti-semitism of today,”
he said, “is… nothing but a wrench to unscrew, bit by bit, the whole machinery
of our civilization.” Mann argued that the Nazis’ attack on the Jews was “but a
starting signal for a general drive against the foundations of Christianity, that
humanitarian creed for which we are forever indebted to the people of the Holy
Writ, originated in the old Mediterranean world. What we are witnessing today
is nothing else than the ever-recurrent revolt of unconquered pagan instincts,
protesting against the restrictions imposed by the Ten Commandments.”926
Immediately after coming to power, Hitler began the persecution of the Jews
that was his prime obsession and the central part of his ideology to the very end
of his life. It has even been argued that the central mistake of his life – the
invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 – was dictated by his hatred of the Jews.
For it was in Poland and the Soviet Union that the main concentration of
European Jewry was found…
Himmler believed that the Germans were descended from a master race that
had survived the flooding of Atlantis and had migrated to Tibet; and in the
1930s he sent scientific expeditions to Tibet to verify his theory (needless to say,
he found nothing).
In 1935 he started the Lebensborn eugenics programme in order to select the

finest specimens of the Nordic race, mate them and thereby create a super race
embodying the finest physical and spiritual characteristics.927 Eventually this

925 Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, London: Vintage, 2011, pp. 258-260.
926 Mann, in History, Literature, June 6, 2013.
927 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_and_race
504
would lead to the birth of a superman, a kind of Antichrist figure. At this point
Social Darwinism combined with Nietzscheanism and paganism and anti-
semitism to form a lethal mixture that justified the extermination of lower races
for the sake of the ultimate triumph of the master race.
The Jews of America reacted quickly. “In late July 1933, an International
Jewish Boycott Conference (New York Times, 7th August 1933) was held in
Amsterdam to devise means of bringing Germany to terms. Samuel Untermayer
of New York presided over the Conference and was elected President of the
World Jewish Economic Federation. Returning to America, Mr. Untermayer
described the planned Jewish move against Germany as a ‘holy war… a war
must be waged unremittingly.’ (New York Times, 7th August 1933)… The
immediately feasible tactic of the ‘economic boycott’ was described by Mr.
Untermayer as ‘nothing new’, for ‘President Roosevelt, whose wise
statesmanship and vision are the wonder of the civilized world, is invoking it in
furtherance of his noble conception of the relations between capital and labor’.
Mr. Untermayer gave his hearers and readers specific instruction…”928 Under
largely Jewish influence, as we shall see, Roosevelt would pursue the policy of
unconditional surrender, the de-industrialization of Germany and the surrender
of most of Europe to the Soviet Union until his death in 1945. The Second World
War really began in 1933…
In spite of the Jewish economic boycott, Hitler was able to employ a

combination of Keynesian economics and massive spending on rearmament to
drag his nation out of depression, both psychological and economic. “Single-
handed,” as Antony Beevor writes, “he had restored German pride, while
rearmament, far more than his vaunted public works programme, halted the
rise in unemployment. The brutality of the Nazis and the loss of freedom
seemed to most Germans a small price to pay...”929
Soon it became evident that even if France and Britain could cooperate again,
they would have difficulty in defeating Germany in a new European war –
although “difficulty” by no means meant “impossibility”. The smaller Central
and Eastern European countries – especially Czechoslovakia, the most heavily
industrialized – might tip the balance against the Axis powers – but only if the
western Allies were genuinely prepared to protect them against Germany. That,
however, they were not prepared to do. As the history of the later 1930s
demonstrated, their threats and promises were equally hollow as they followed
a policy of appeasing rather than truly opposing the Nazis…

928 J. Beaty, The Iron Curtain over America, p. 62; in Comte Léon de Poncins, State
Secrets: A Documentation of the Secret Revolutionary Mainspring Governing

Anglo-American Politics, Chulmleigh, Devon: Britons Publishing Company, 1975,
p. 23.
929 Beevor, The Second World War, London: Phoenix, 2014, p. 5.
505
52. THE JAPANESE INVASION OF CHINA
Democracy is in general less cruel than despotism – but more hypocritical;

for democracy proclaims its adherence to lofty moral ideals which it then fails to
live up to, whereas despotism, as often as not, despises the ideals themselves.
Thus when the democracies of Britain and France prided themselves on their
adherence to the ideals of freedom and equality for all men while holding in
subjection hundreds of millions of men in their vast global empires, they were
rightly accused of hypocrisy. However, the hypocrisy of democracy was
exposed as never before in the 1930s, when Britain, France and even the United
States fawned before the despotisms of Italy, Germany and Japan. Only in
relation to Japan did the Europeans have some excuse – resisting her was
simply beyond their strength at the time. But in relation to Italy and Germany
this was by no means the case, which makes the history of appeasement so
illuminating as regards the true nature of democratic power…
From the beginning of the 1930s there was a steady rise in international
warfare. In 1931 the Japanese invaded Manchuria and then China. Antony
Beevor writes: “Anti-western feeling grew in Japan with the effects of the Wall
Street Crash and the world-wide depression. And an increasingly nationalistic
officer class viewed Manchuria and China in a similar way to the Nazis’ designs
on the Soviet Union: as a landmass and a population to be subjugated to feed
the home islands of Japan…
“In September 1931, the Japanese military created the Mukden Incident, in
which they blew up a railway to justify their seizure of the whole of Manchuria.
They hoped to turn the regime into a major food-producing region as their own
domestic agriculture had declined disastrously. They called it Manchukukuo
and set up a puppet regime, with the deposed [Qing] emperor Henry Pu Yi as
figurehead. The civilian government in Tokyo, although despised by officers,
felt obliged to support the army. And the League of Nations in Geneva refused
Chinese calls for sanctions against Japan. Japanese colonists, mainly peasants,
poured in to seize land for themselves with the government’s encouragement. It
wanted ‘one million households’ established as colonial farmers over the next
twenty years. Japan’s actions left it isolated diplomatically, but the country
exulted in its triumph. This marked the start of a fateful progression, both in
foreign expansion and in military influence over the government in Tokyo…”930
As Maria Hsia Chang writes, Japan’s invasion of Manchuria “was conceived

to be the beginning of what was disingenuously referred to as a ‘Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’ that would ultimately encompass not just Japan,
Korea, and Manchuria but all of China, Mongolia, Nepal, Vietnam, Thailand,
Burma, the Philippines, Malaya, Indonesia, the Andaman Islands, India, New
Zealand, and Australia…931 In 1935, Japan occupied parts of Chahar and Hobei.

Beevor, The Second World War, London: Phoenix, 2014, p. 8.
930
In this “New Order in Asia”, writes Henry Kissinger, “Japan strove to organize its own anti-
931
Westphalian sphere of influence – a ‘bloc of nations led by the Japanese and free of Western
506
Two years later, in 1937, a full-scale invasion of China began. In rapid
succession, the vital regions of China from the industrialized northeast to the
cities of Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai along the coast fell before the invading
Japanese armies.”932
“The ‘China incident’, as the Japanese continued to call it, was to take eight
years’ fighting and inflict grave social and physical damage on China. It has
been seen as the opening of the Second World War. At the end of 1937 the
Chinese government removed itself for safety’s sake to Chungking in the far
west while the Japanese occupied all the important northern and coastal
areas…”933
“In December 1938,” continues Chang, “Japanese soldiers under the

command of General Matsui Iwane took the Nationalist capital of Nanjing and
began ‘an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history’. As
recounted by Irish Chang in her pathbreaking book, ‘For months the streets of
the city were heaped with corpses and reeked with the stench of rotting flesh…
Tens of thousands of young men were… mowed down by machine guns, used
for bayonet practice… and in decapitation contests,… or soaked with gasoline
and burned alive… An estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped.
Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts,
nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons
their mothers… Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and
the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were
practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying
people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.’
“By the time the mayhem was over, more than 200,000 Chinese civilians had
been massacred. Some experts believe the figure to exceed 350,000, which would
place the Rape of Nanjing in the ranks of the world’s worst instances of
barbarism. In a matter of a few weeks, the death toll in Nanjing exceeded the
number of civilian casualties of some European countries for the entire duration
of World War II. The figure in the case of Britain was 61,000; for France, 108,000;
Belgium, 101,000; and the Netherlands, 242,000. More Chinese were killed in
Nanjing than the Japanese death toll of 210,000 from America’s atomic bombing
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“In all, in the eight years of China’s War of Resistance (Kangzhan) against
Japan from 1937 to 1945, Japanese war casualties (dead, missing, captured, and
wounded) numbered some 400,000 – one-fiftieth that of the Chinese. By the time
Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 10, 1945, more than 10 million

powers,’ arranged hierarchically to ‘thereby enable all nations to find each its proper place in the
world.’ In this new order, other Asian states’ sovereignty would be elided into a form of
Japanese tutelage” (World Order, London: Penguin, 2015, p. 188). (V.M.)
932 Chang, Return of the Dragon, Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 2001, p. 80.
933 J.M. Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon, 1991, p. 742.
507
Chinese civilians and soldiers had lost their lives – the equivalent of the entire
population of Greece or Belgium. Forty million Chinese were rendered
homeless. Some estimates put the Chinese death roll at 20 million.”934
Such cruelty was not channelled only against Chinese victims - the Japanese
had refused to sign the Geneva Convention of 1929 and the people had been
taught to hate foreigners in general. As Paul Ham writes, “more recent Japanese
atrocities involved American soldiers: on the Bataan Death March, for example,
2330 American and 7000 Filipino prisoners died of starvation, sickness, torture
and execution after General Douglas MacArthur’s forces surrendered to the
Japanese in the Philippines on 9 April 1942. ‘To show mercy is to prolong the
war,’ was how the Japan Times justified the general treatment of prisoners at the
time…
“A series of spectacular military triumphs had persuaded many ordinary

Japanese of their sacred destiny – to rule the world. By 1945 this notion relied on
a mystical faith in Japanese ‘spirit’, the residual delusion of four decades of
unbeaten conquest. In 1894, the Meiji Emperor looked out from his headquarters
in Hiroshima, the point of his troops’ embarkation and triumphal return,
flushed with pride after victory in the first modern war with China. Greater
laurels awaited the armies of Nippon: only the fall of Singapore in 1942 would
imbue the Imperial name with greater reverence than Japan’s defeat of Russia in
1904-05…
“Throughout Japan’s military expansion, the Imperial forces claimed to be

acting in the Emperor’s name, or with the Emperor’s tacit approval. Since the
1920s, the Japanese people had been taught to believe in the policy of military
expansion as the divine right of Nippon, an expression of the Imperial Will. In
the 1930s, Tokyo’s newly minted propagandists dusted down the ancient idea of
the Emperor’s divinity. The Essence of the Kokutai (the Imperial state), published
in 1937 by the Thought Bureau of the Ministry of Education, described the
Emperor as a deity in whom the blood of all Japan ran, back to Jimmu and the
Sun Goddess. ‘Our country is a divine country’ stressed The Essence, ‘governed
by an Emperor who is a deity incarnate.’ Belief in the Kokutai became orthodoxy.
“Hirohito, accordingly, despite his diminutive appearance, shrill voice and

spectacles, embodied the power of the sun, ‘the eternal essence of his subjects
and the imperial land’. He existed at the heart of Japanese identity. The people
worshipped him as Tenno Heiko, the ‘Son of Heaven’, and a divine monarch.
Their adoration of the Emperor cannot be understated: killing or removing him
dismembered the body and soul of the nation; the rough equivalent of the
crucifixion of Christ.”935
This pagan faith shows how superficial had been Japan’s westernization
programme, assimilating the technological achievements of European

934Chang, op. cit., pp. 80-81.
935 Ham, Hiroshima Nagasaki, London: Doubleday, 2011, pp. 12, 15-16, 17.
508
civilization, but not its deeper beliefs. Except, that is, those beliefs linked to
Europe’s recent return to paganism in the form of communism and fascism…
And so, in imitation of the Gestapo and the KGB, “in the 1940s, ‘Thought
Prosecutors’ roamed the cities under the control of the Justice Ministry, ferreting
out ‘dangerous thinkers’ – pacifists, leftists, journalists and Koreans. Meanwhile,
Special Higher Police (tokko ka), deployed under the Peace Preservation Law,
monitored the mind as well as the voice of Japan. That meant throttling the
expression of both. In 1944, a Mainichi reporter thoughtfully asked in an article,
‘Can Japan Defeat America with Bamboo Spears?’ A furious [Prime Minister]
Tojo had the miscreant dispatched to China. Persistent dissidents were tortured.
But few challenged the censorship laws. Between 1928 and 1945, only 5000
people were found guilty of violating the Peace Preservation Law. In 1934, the
peak year, 14,822 were arrested and 1285, prosecuted; in 1943, those figures
were 159 and 52 respectively…
“By 1945, most Japanese had become compliant self-censurers who rallied
around the war effort. State-approved intellectuals applauded the war as a
sacred cause against ‘Anglo-Saxon exploitation’. Poets eagerly volunteered to
recite their haiku in factories and at the front. Newspaper editors exulted in
news of victory and distorted evidence of looming defeat…”936
The Japanese occupation of Manchuria placed an important part of

the Russian emigration in great spiritual danger in what was in effect
a militantly pagan country. In the autumn of 1940 the Japanese passed
a new law forbidding foreigners to lead religious organizations.
Metropolitan Sergius (Tikhomirov) was forced to retire. But in March,
1941 Protopriest Ioann (Ono) was consecrated by ROCOR bishops in
Japan as Bishop Nicholas, the first Japanese Orthodox bishop. On his
return, some parishioners rejected him. However, with the help of the
retired Metropolitan Sergius, the believers were pacified.937
In Harbin, in May, 1943, the Japanese placed a statue of their

goddess Amateras, the supposed foundress of the imperial race,

936 Ham, op. cit., p. 20.
937 Monk Benjamin, Letopis’ Tserkovnykh Sobytij (Chronicle of Church Events), part
3, pp. 13-14, 19. Hieromonk Enoch quotes a friend: "Upon the enactment of the
Religious Organizations Law in 1940 which gave the state full control over all
religious bodies, the vast majority, if not all, of Orthodox Christians succumbed to
state-mandated shinto worship. As far as I know, there was no notable attempt by
any priests or lay people to resist state shinto. I only know of two "Christian"
organizations (protestant) during WW II in Japan that fiercely resisted the evil of
Shinto worship: Mino Mission and Orthodox Presbyterian Church Japan Mission.
A small group of Roman Catholic college students refused to worship at Yasukuni
shrine citing their religious belief. However, they were later reprimanded by their
bishop and the Vatican intervened directly to approve Shinto worship among all
Catholics. It is now known as The 1932 Sophia University Yasukuni Incident."
(Facebook, November 30, 2016)
509
directly opposite the Orthodox cathedral of St. Nicholas, and
demanded that Russians going to church in the cathedral should first
make a “reverential bow” towards the goddess. They also required
that on certain days Japanese temples should be venerated, while a
statue of the goddess was to be put in Orthodox churches.
The question of the admissibility of participating in such ritual

venerations was discussed at the diocesan assemblies of the Harbin
diocese on September 8 and October 2, 1943, in the presence of the
hierarchs of the Harbin diocese: Metropolitan Meletius, Bishop
Demetrius and Bishop Juvenal (Archbishop Nestor was not present).
According to the witness of the secretary of the Episcopal conference,
Fr. Leonid Upshinsky, “the session was stormy, since some objected
that… Amateras was not a goddess but the Ancestress.” It was decided
“to accept completely and direct to the authorities” the reports of
Bishop Demetrius of Hailar and Professor K.I. Zaitsev (the future
Archimandrite Constantine), which expressed the official view of the
episcopate that participation in the ritual venerations was
inadmissible.938
However, on February 5, 1944 the congress of leaders of the

Russian emigration in Manchuria met in Harbin. The congress opened
with a moleben in the St. Nicholas cathedral, after which the
participants went to the Japanese temple “Harbin-Jinjya”, where they
carried out a veneration of the goddess Amateras. On February 12 the
Harbin hierarchs responded with an archpastoral epistle, in which
they said: “Since any kind of veneration of pagan divinities and
temples is forbidden by the commandments of God…, Orthodox
Christians, in obedience to the will of God and his Law, cannot and
must not carry out this veneration, for such venerations contradict the
basic theses of the Orthodox Faith.” Archbishop Nestor refused to sign
this epistle. In March both vicars of the Harbin diocese, Bishop
Demetrius and Bishop Juvenal, were summoned to the police, where
they were closely interrogated about the circumstances of the illegal
distribution of the archpastoral epistle and about the attitude of the
flock to this question. On April 28 Metropolitan Meletius was
subjected to interrogation. The conversation, which lasted for several
hours, produced no result. Referring to his extreme exhaustion and
illness, Vladyka Meletius asked that the conversation be continued on
May 1. This again produced no result. Bishop Demetrius, who also
took part, categorically and sharply protested against the venerations.
On May 2, an Episcopal Convention took place (Archbishop Nestor,

as usual, was not present), at which this position was confirmed.
Several days later, Metropolitan Meletius presented the text of the
Episcopal Convention to Mr. Kobayasi. Kobayasi demanded that he

510
give a written promise not to raise the question of venerations until
the end of the war. Metropolitan Meletius asked that the words “if
there will be no compulsion to venerations” should be added to the
text. Vladyka’s demand again elicited a quarrel. However, in the end
Kobayasi gave in. On August 31 the Harbin archpastors sent a letter to
Archbishop Nestor in which they appealed to him “to unite with us,
return and may your voice sound out in defence of the purity of the
Faith and zeal for its confession. Sign (better late than never) our
Archpastoral Epistle and announce this publicly – in whatever way
and place you can.” In reply, Vladyka Nestor wrote that he did not
disagree with his brother archpastors about the inadmissibility of
venerating the temples of Amateras.939
Eventually the Japanese climbed down - through the courageous

confession of Archimandrite Philaret (Voznesensky), the future first-
hierarch of the ROCOR. The Japanese tortured him and almost tore out
his eyes, but he suffered this patiently. “We have a red-hot electrical
instrument here,” they said. “Everybody who has had it applied to
them has agreed to our requests. And you will also agree.” The
torturer brought the instrument forward. Fr. Philaret prayed to St.
Nicholas: “Holy Hierarch Nicholas, help me, otherwise there may be a
betrayal.” The torturer commenced his work. He stripped the
confessor to his waist and started to burn his spine with the burning
iron. Then a miracle took place. Fr. Philaret could smell his burning
flesh, but felt no pain. He felt joyful in his soul. The torturer could not
understand why he was silent, and did not cry out or writhe from the
unbearable pain. Then he turned and looked at his face. Amazed, he
waved his hand, muttered something in Japanese and fled, conquered
by the superhuman power of the confessor’s endurance. Fr. Philaret
was brought, almost dead, to his relatives. There he passed out.
When he came to he said: “I was in hell itself.” Gradually his

wounds healed. The Japanese no longer tried to compel the Orthodox
to worship their idol…940

939Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, pp. 67-69.
940Protopriest Alexis Mikrikov, “Unia s MP privedet k dukhovnoj katastrofe” (The Unia with
the MP will lead to a spiritual catastrophe),
http://metanthonymemorial.org/VernostNo34.html.
511
53. APPEASEMENT: (1) ABYSSINIA AND THE RHINELAND
In 1935, the Italians invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia), a Christian (Monophysite)

kingdom led by “Emperor Haile Selassie I, Elect of God, Lion of Judah, King of
Zion, who traced his ancestry back to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba”.941
A cultured and dignified man, the emperor was trying to drag his ancient,
poverty-stricken country into the twentieth century at a steady pace, without
endangering its native institutions. Mussolini, barbarian that he was, thought
that progress could be brought more quickly to the country by raping it, killing
tens of thousands with bombs and mustard gas. The British and the French
responded to this threat by trying to buy Mussolini off when they could have
stopped the whole venture immediately by simply sealing off the Suez Canal...
Haile Selassie decided to appeal to the League of Nations; the “dark

continent’s” last European colony would try to enlighten the European
colonists…
The League of Nations, the organ created in 1920 by President Wilson and
the Versailles Conference for the resolution of international conflicts, was
helpless. It was of some use with small conflicts, but had neither the resources
nor the international consensus required in order to intervene effectively in
larger conflicts. Nor was this surprising when the American Congress refused to
ratify American participation, when the largest European powers, Russia and
Germany, were either excluded from the beginning or excluded themselves, and
when Japan adopted the slogan “Asia for the Asiatics”…
The only Great Powers remaining in the League, France and Britain, were
forced to resort to a more conventional form of conflict resolution – “collective
security”, which in effect meant building up alliances of nations or “cordons
sanitaires” to deter potential aggressors on the model of the pre-war Entente
between France, Britain and Russia. But with Russia – which had supported
Abyssinia against Italy in the 1890s - now enslaved to the irreconcilably hostile
Soviet Union, and America retreating into splendid isolation, the main objects of
deterrence, Germany and Italy, inevitably felt less than overawed by the nations
opposed to their expansion. Besides, the Germans, at any rate, were doing better
than the western democracies, which, in order to deter Germany, felt compelled
to appease Italy…
When the Ethiopian emperor came to Geneva, he “made an eloquent plea for
morality in international affairs. He appealed to the conscience of the League
and accused it of failing in its duty: ‘You abandoned us to Italy’. Had not its
connivance at the rape of Ethiopia set a ‘terrible precedent of bowing before
force?’ What would happen next and what could he tell his people?

941 Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, London: Pimlico, 2001,
p. 265. Ethiopia is often described as an “Orthodox” country. But it is not: it

adheres to the ancient heresy of Monophytism.
512
“He was questioning a corpse. Damaged by its impotence over Manchuria,
the League of Nations, as many had anticipated, was destroyed by its failure
over Ethiopia. Like the preserved body of Lenin, it had the appearance of life
but its veins were filled with embalming fluid. As Léon Blum noted bitterly,
‘The League of Nations no longer condemns the Fascist acts of aggression, the
League ‘notes’, the League ‘does this and thus’, the League ‘deplores’ – the
League makes a hypocritical show of balancing between the criminal and his
victim… Even more intolerable are the lies concealed in these formulae, and
what can be read between the lines: the League’s confession of impotence, its
abject surrender, its acceptance of the fait accompli.’… As he stalked proudly
from the platform of Geneva, the Lion of Judah growled, ‘It is us today. It will
be you tomorrow.’”942
Not long after, in March, 1936, Hitler invaded the Rhineland. “It began,”
writes Tombs, “as a cautious dipping of the jackboottoe: a mere 3,000 troops
crossed the Rhine, with orders to withdraw if the French reacted. This was the
moment at which, legend has it – a legend encouraged by Hitler himself – the
Nazi adventure could have been snuffed out: the Führer would have been
humiliated, and the army might have overthrown him. But Hitler had adroitly
accompanied his move with various peace offers, using the usual moral
equivalence tactic of demanding that the Belgians and the French demilitarize
their frontiers too. No one in Britain or France – public, politicians or generals –
wanted to pick up Hitler’s gauntlet. Even Churchill hoped for a ‘peaceful and
friendly solution’. For appeasers, the Rhineland was a hangover from the
Versailles treaty and of French ‘militarism’. MacDonald hoped that Hitler’s bold
action had taught the French a ‘severe lesson’. The former Labout chancellor
Philip Snowden muttered that the ‘damned French are at their old game of
dragging this country behind them in the policy of encircling Germany.’
Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, proclaimed that it was ‘the appeasement
of Europe as a whole that we have constantly before us,’ and that the
government was eager to take up Hitler’s peace offers – which nevera actually
materialized. A government appraisal of the strategic situation concluded that
Britain had too many commitments and could not contemplate going to war
with any chance of success before 1939, or even 1942.”943
Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland was in direct violation of the Versailles

treaty. It was the moment of truth when Britain and France had to act if the 1919
settlement was to retain any credibility. They did not, in spite of the fact that at
that very early stage of German rearmament they could probably have expelled
the Germans from the Rhineland with some ease. The Germans had in effect
restarted the First World War, and the western powers, by their acquiescence in
their aggression had made the Second World War inevitable.
*

943 Tombs, op. cit., p. 679.
513
How are we to understand this acquiescence?
Jean-François Revel explains: “Sensing that the totalitarian threat cannot be

dispelled by compromise, at least by the kind of compromise standard in classic
diplomacy, democrats prefer to deny the danger exists. They are even enraged
by those who dare to see and name it. Rightly valuing peace above all
possessions, they persuade themselves that all they need do to defend it is to
renounce its defense, for this is the only factor they control in the situation, the
only merchandise they can offer in quantity for negotiation. It is easier to win
concessions from yourself than from an adversary.
“Western diplomats seem to have forgotten long ago that the object of
negotiation is to wring concessions from their opponents. In Geneva on March
16, 1933, six weeks before Hitler came to power, British Prime Minister Ramsay
MacDonald proposed sharp cuts in French and British armaments. A widely
respected left-wing journalist, Albert Bayer, an antifascist intellectual, prolific
author, and brilliant teacher, wrote at the time that ‘Mr. MacDonald’s central
idea seems to be that we must at all costs prevent the rearmament of the Reich
and that, to do this, the nations not disarmed by the Versailles Treaty must
agree to substantial reductions.’
“A few days later, after Hitler obtained plenary powers from the Reichstag
and revealed the Nazi program to the world, Bayer, while condemning the
barbaric oppression foreseeable in Germany, nevertheless declared, ‘On the
other hand, the Chancellor’s foreign-policy statements are so conscientiously
moderate that it would be unfair not to emphasize this.’…
“Idealists whose judgement was too much a prisoner of their intellectual

systems to remain lucid were not the only ones who insisted on thinking that
Hitler nursed a secret desire for peace even though all his overt actions denied it.
At the time, the mania also infected the political realists. In a report on
December 29, 1932, André François-Poncet, France’s ambassador to Berlin,
declared that ‘the disintegration of the Hitler movement is proceeding at a rapid
pace’ (Hitler would come to power on January 30, 1933, with 44 percent of the
popular vote); three years later he detected with pleasure ‘how much the Führer
has evolved since the period in which he wrote Mein Kampf,’ adding, in a
dispatch dated December 21, 1936, that this was an ‘inevitable evolution toward
moderation.’ Convinced of the keenness of the insights he gained in his
‘frequent meetings with Hitler’ (Ah, the childish myth of personal contacts!),
His Excellency gave his government the benefit of his reliable predictions: ‘The
occupation of the Rhineland will probably not take place in the coming weeks,’
he telegraphed at the end of February 1936. Hitler marched into the Rhineland
on March 7, 1936…”944

944 Revel, How Democracies Perish, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985, pp. 217-218.
514
As we have seen, appeasement was already discernible in the 1920s, in the
Western Allies’ refusal to enforce the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles in
relation to reparations. 1930s appeasement was not identical in the two major
western powers…
France had suffered most in the Great War, and was naturally desperate to
avoid a second war against the same foe. Always clearer-eyed than the more
relaxed and myopic British, they saw how powerful the Germans were
becoming and feared the worst. But they also feared to take any initiative
without British support – which the British were not always prepared to give.
David Stevenson writes that “the influence of war memory on French public
opinion was to move it in favour of appeasement at precisely the time when
Hitler might have been halted at relatively little cost. But other war-related
factors were operating in the same way, and probably more powerfully. The
manpower available to French planners diminished from 1935 onwards as a
result of the 1914-18 decline in birth rate. France had to pay most of its
reconstruction costs (only a small proportion of Germany’s reparations liability
ever being collected), and much of its budget was committed to repaying war
loans and supporting the bereaved and disabled. Unlike Germany, it also repaid
war debts to the United States, until it defaulted on them. But in any case much
of the money available went not on tanks and aircraft but on the steel and
concrete of the Maginot Line”945, that purely defensive set of fortifications that
symbolised the defensive, even defeatist mentality of the French.
“Moreover, the nation was not united within itself. In 1934 the threat of a
rightist coup pushed into power a leftist coalition of communists and socialists
called the Popular Front. This elicited a huge wave of strikes – and the
government promptly gave in to all the strikers’ demands. As a result the
economy continued to decline, politicians on all sides of the political spectrum
were held in contempt, and the famed levity and sensuality of Parisian life came
to be combined with a spirit of defeatism and even pacifism.
“When the Berlin-based American correspondent William L. Shirer visited

Paris in October, 1938 he found it: ‘a frightful place, completely surrendered to
defeatism with no inkling of what has happened to France… Even the waiters,
taxi-drivers, who used to be sound, are gushing about how wonderful it is that
war has been avoided, that it would have been a crime, that they fought in one
war and that was enough.’ That, Sheerer thought, ‘would be okay if the
Germans, who also fought in one war, felt the same, but they don’t’.”946
All this would bring forth bad fruit in the rapid collapse of the French armies
in 1940…

945 Stevenson, 1914-1918, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 574.
946 Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, London: Pan Books, 2002, p. 390.
515
The British, while sympathetic to the fears of the more sober French leaders
about Germany, felt less directly threatened by German expansion, and were
more influenced by global factors, such as the defence of their empire. Their
military planners suffered from an amateurish, over-optimistic approach that
was hampered by the government’s refusal to spend enough on arms until it
was almost too late, and by the fact that the forces at their dispersal were
manifestly insufficient to do three things at once: both intervene to support
victims of German aggression abroad, and defend the island homeland, and
protect Britain’s vast colonial empire and overseas commercial interests.
Moreover, the British, unlike the French, were tormented by the sneaking
feeling that perhaps the Germans had been unjustly treated at Versailles, and
that perhaps they had a case in demanding, for example, the return of the
Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia…
Of course, the British were less inclined to apply such notions of “fair play”
to their own empire. Thus while it might be “fair” to return the Sudetenland to
the Germans (although it had belonged to Austria, not Germany), it was by no
means fair to return India to the Indians… The racist attitudes that underlay
their own refusal to give up their empire perhaps made the British less sensitive
to the evil of Nazi racism. Of course, British racism was more condescending
and less hate-filled than Nazi racism, especially against the Jews. But, as they
found to their cost in 1941, it meant that their subject peoples did not jump to
defend their colonial masters…
Moreover, British racism had a masochistic aspect: anti-Britishness, as

expressed in the famous motion passed by the Oxford Union in February 1933:
“This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”. This
attitude, compounded by outright pacifism in some cases, undermined the
country’s will to defend itself. As Max Hastings writes, “In 1938, the Armed
Forces were in a desperate condition – as the chiefs of staff warned the
Government before Munich – because of a comprehensive lack of national will
to make them anything better.”947
In 1941 George Orwell wrote: “England is perhaps the only great country
whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.
“In Left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly

disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every
English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings.
“It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English
intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save
the King than of stealing from a poor box.”

947 Hastings, “Was Appeasing Hitler Actually a Masterstroke?”, Daily Mail, September 29, 2017,
p. 17.
516
There was an alternative to appeasement. The figures for spending on
rearmament in the 1930s reveal that the only country matching Germany in
spending was the Soviet Union. As Norman Davies writes, these figures
underlined the fact that “the totalitarian powers had suffered from the
Depression much less than the Western democracies had. Their military
expenditure was twice as great as that of all the Western Powers put together.
Their ‘relative war potential’ – which was a calculation based on the ability to
translate industrial strength into military power through indices such as
machine-tool levels – was roughly equal, and was separately equivalent to that
of Britain and France combined.”948 It was logical, therefore, to expect that the
next war might not involve the West at all, but would be between Germany and
the Soviet Union. This was the more to be expected in that Hitler in Mein Kampf
(1925), which was now given as a state gift to all newly married couples in
Germany, openly declared his intention to conciliate Britain and acquire
Lebensraum and raw materials in the East at the expense of the Slavs.949 So if the
western democracies were not prepared for war on the western front, they
might be prepared to incite it on the eastern front, playing off their two most
dangerous enemies against each other…

948 Davies, Europe: A History, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 992.
949 As Mitt Romney, the American Presidential candidate in 2012, wrote: ‘We should study what
is said and written by evil men, and take them at their word. Adolf Hitler told the world exactly
what his aspirations were in Mein Kampf and in his speeches, but at first the world dismissed his
claims as political bluster” (No Apology: The Case for American Greatness).
517
54. APPEASEMENT: (2) SPAIN
In 1936 there began the Spanish Civil War, which prefigured the shape of
world war that was to come, with the future antagonists of Italy and Germany,
on the one hand, and Soviet Russia, on the other, supporting the nationalist and
republican causes respectively. It indicated that the coming world war would in
fact be a civil war between related secular ideologies…
Almost immediately after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January,

1933, the Spanish right began to set out along the same path of the overthrow of
democracy – and on a very similar anti-communist basis, albeit more
traditionally religious and reactionary. Thus in February the Confederación
Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA) was created under the leadership of
José Maria Gil Robles, who declared: “When the social order is threatened,
Catholics should unite to defend it and safeguard the principles of Christian
civilization… We are faced with a social revolution. In the political panorama of
Europe I can see only the formation of Marxist and non-Marxist groups. That is
what is happening in Germany and in Spain also. This is the great battle which
we must fight this year…
“We must reconquer Spain… We must give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a
totalitarian polity… It is necessary now to defeat socialism inexorably. We must
found a new state, purge the fatherland of judaizing freemasons… We need full
power and that is what we demand… To realize this ideal we are not going to
waste time with archaic forms. Democracy is not an end but a means to the
conquest of the new state. When the time comes, either parliament submits or
we will eliminate it…”950
For the next three years, in an atmosphere of increasing violence and hatred,
right and left struggled for control of the republican government. Eventually, in
July, 1936, the army carried out a coup d’état. It was General Franco who
eventually emerged as the leader of the new state, not least because his Army of
Africa (he had been commander of the Canaries Islands garrison) in its journey
north had shown itself to be the most ruthless and most prepared to murder any
suspected Republican.
“Of course the atrocities were not confined to the rebel zone. At the
beginning of the war, particularly, there were waves of assassinations of priests
and suspected Fascist sympathizers. Militia units set themselves up to purge
their towns of known rightists and especially churchmen. Churches and
religious monuments were destroyed. More than six thousand priests and
religious were estimated to have been murdered…”951

950 Robles, in Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War, London: Harper Perennial, 2006,
pp. 62, 64.

951 Preston, op. cit., p. 124.
518
“At the outset,” writes Norman Davies, “the political spectrum in Spain was
extremely wide and complicated… Inexorably, however, the strains of civil war
boosted the fortunes of the two most violent and radical extremes. The Falange
was destined to become the main political instrument of the army. The
communists were destined to dominate the beleaguered Republic. Franco said,
and possibly believed, that he was fighting to forestall Bolshevism…
“The fighting was long, fragmented, and often confused… Behind the lines,
massacres of prisoners and civilians were perpetrated by both sides… In
Barcelona, ‘the wildest city in Europe’, where Catalans and anarchists were
opposed to any form of Spanish government, whether Red or White, the tragedy
ended [in 1939] with frightful massacres perpetrated by both the defeated
communists and their erstwhile anarchist allies. In Madrid, where the rump
Council of Defence of the Popular Front eventually renounced the communists,
it ended with the rebels’ triumphal entry on 29 March.952 Spain lay firmly in the
Fascists’ grip for 40 years.
“Franco’s victory over ‘the Spanish people’, as his opponents put it, was
frequently attributed to his superior armaments and foreign help [from
Mussolini and Hitler]. But the truth was not so simple or so palatable. The
‘Spanish people’ were not all on one side, and neither were all of Spain’s ‘anti-
democratic’ forces. It is hard to say whether the Spanish Republic was more
discomfited by its nationalist enemies or by the totalitarian elements within its
own ranks. Franco could unite his supporters; the Republic’s supporters could
not organize a united or effective democracy…”953
It was the unity of Franco’s fascists, combined with the frequent stories of
atrocities by their leftist opponents, and the active support of Italy and Germany,
that guaranteed his final victory. But it was not a victory that brought internal
peace to Spain. For the fascist atrocities, which were greater in number954 and
carried out in a more systematic, cold-blooded way than those of the leftists,
alienated large parts of the population. Thus the philosopher Unamuno wrote to
a friend “about the Nationalist repression that he had witnessed in Salamanca,
referring to ‘the most bestial persecution and unjustified murders’. Regarding
Franco, he wrote: ‘He takes no lead in the repression, in the savage terror of the
rearguard. He lets others get on with it. The repression in the rearguard is left to
a venomous and malicious monster of perversity, General Mola… I said, and
Franco repeated it, that what has to be saved in Spain is Western Christian
civilization under threat from Bolshevism, but the methods they are using are

952 “Hundreds of thousands of Republicans fled the country as, between 1939 and 1943, anything
between 100,000 and 200,000 non-combatants or surrendering troops were summarily and
systematically executed.” (Simon Sebag Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercus, 2012, p.
513 (V.M.)
953 Davies, op. cit., pp. 982, 984-985.
954 “One of the ironies of history is that while the Stalinist terror within the Republicans is as
notorious as the Red Terror that slaughtered supposed rightists, Franco and the Nationalists
killed many, many more: some 200,000 were murdered by Franco in his White Terror during the
war, while another half million remained in his torture chambers and camps afterwards.”
(Montefiore, op. cit., p. 513)
519
not civilized, nor Western, but rather African, certainly not Christian. The crude
traditionalist Spanish Catholicism has very little that is Christian. What we have
here is pagan, imperialist, African militarization. In this way there will never be
real peace. They will win but they will not convince; they will conquer but they
will not persuade…”955
He was right, and yet there is a paradox here: although he came to power,
and retained it, through unacceptably murderous methods, Spain’s fate under
his rule was by no means as bad as several other nations’. “General Franco,”
writes A.N. Wilson, “became a dictator who held power until his death in 1975.
Tens of thousands of republicans, after the civil war, were shot, or given prison-
sentences of over twenty years. But estimates for the numbers actually killed in
the war ‘have dropped and dropped’ according to the historian Hugh Thomas,
who also believes that ‘it would be perfectly admissible to argue that Spain lost
fewer people dead in acts of violence than any other major European nation in
the twentieth century’…
“[Franco] was prepared to exercise a murderous autocracy for about eight

years after his victory, went on to lead a modern European state deep into our
own lifetime, and did so peaceably, prosperously and seamlessly. He achieved,
without any Marshall Aid or outside help, an economic revolution in the 1960s,
and he handed over his regime into the hands of a constitutional monarch, Juan
Carlos, who must rank as one of the most enlightened of modern world leaders.
Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, which had sent aid to the
elected government of Spain throughout the civil war, and which was to
become the ally of the Western powers during the Second World War, is now
seen to be without any rival as the most murderous, repressive and tyrannous
system of human enslavement ever to exercise dominion over the human
race…”956
One might have expected that the western democracies would have
supported another democracy, Spain, against its fascist-militarist enemies,
especially since the real nature of Italy and Germany was at last beginning to be
recognized. And indeed, a large majority of the western electorate did support
the Republic. However, the governments sat on the fence, sponsoring a Non-
Intervention Agreement whose patchy implementation in fact favoured Franco;
for the Italians and Germans were quite uninhibited in ignoring non-
intervention and supplying Franco with all the arms he needed together with
men on the ground – much more uninhibited than Stalin, who, of course, did
not want the Republic to be defeated, but at the same time did not want to stop
the democracies from forming an alliance with himself against Hitler.

955 Preston, op. cit., pp. 217-218.
956 Wilson, After the Victorians, London: Hutchinson, 2005, pp. 349, 350.
520
The reason for western hesitation was only partly a well-grounded fear of
communism and the extreme left. “The British were inclined by their
considerable commercial interests in Spain, with substantial investments in
mines, sherry, textiles, olive oil and cork, to be anything but sympathetic to the
Republic. The business community inevitably tended towards the Nationalist
side since it was believed that the anarchists and other Spanish revolutionaries
were liable to seize and collectivize British holdings…
“[Moreover,] like the French, the British government was committed at all
costs to diminishing the risks of a European conflagration. In addition, an
implicit goal of British appeasement was to persuade the Germans that they
should look to the East if they wished to expand. Hence the willing sacrifice of
Austria and Czechoslovakia; hence the attempts by Chamberlain to extricate
Britain from her agreement to go to Poland’s aid in the event of attack. This was
the logical concomitant of British policy since 1935, during which a blind eye
had been turned to Germany’s open rearmament and to the Italian invasion of
Abyssinia, a member state of the League of Nations.”957
“But outside worldly-wise diplomatic circles,” writes Tombs, “the conflict

acquired powerful emotional and ideological significance. Some 60,000 men
from fifty countries, 80 percent of them communists, volunteered for
International Brigades to defend the Republic; 2,300 were from Britain, of whom
500 were killed. They were there, said one statement reminiscent of the First
World War, ‘to defend our own homes, the homes of Britain against ‘the
aggressors’; and on their return they placed a wreath at the Cenotaph.”958
The only real obstacle to Hitler’s expansion in the late 1930s was France’s
system of alliances with the smaller states of Central and Eastern Europe,
Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania. However, as Golo Mann writes, “no
dramatic blows were needed to break up the French alliance system; it
gradually rotted away. Economic factors entered. Germany, not France, had
always been the big buyer and seller on the central European markets. Under
Hjalmar Schacht’s so-called ‘New Plan’ this relationship assumed curious forms;
in order to avoid spending foreign exchange Germany concluded a number of
bi-lateral agreements, barter arrangements in effect, as a result of which the
states of central and south-east Europe became increasingly dependent on
Germany. As long as Germany paid with useful finished goods and not with
loot there was little objection to this method. Britain, for example, regarded this
development as fundamentally natural. Neville Chamberlain thought good-
naturedly that there was no cause for anxiety if Germany wanted to revive its
economy and that of the south-eastern states by intensive bilateral trade; sooner
or later the British economy would also somehow benefit.
“This was the direction in which events seemed to be moving in the period of
appeasement. The problems and conflicts of the war were out of date because

957 Preston, op. cit., 139, 137.
958 Tombs, op. cit., p. 681.
521
Germany had long ceased to be the vanquished nation of 1918. It was as feared
and powerful as under the Hohenzollerns, even more powerful because France
was weaker than before, because the whole European system was weaker, and
because in central Europe there was no longer the Habsburg monarchy but a
collection of artificial, small states distrustful and envious of each other…”959
So the multi-national empires, for all their faults, had served a good purpose,
in preventing the rise of nationalist empires like Germany’s! But self-
determination, the principle promoted by the democratic statesmen at Versailles,
had destroyed the multi-nationalism of the Romanov and Habsburg empires.
The result was Nazism, which tried to reconstitute these empires into one Reich
and under a far harsher regime…

959 Mann, The History of Germany since 1789, London: Pimlico, 1996, p. 443.
522
55. APPEASEMENT: (3) AUSTRIA AND CZECHOSLOVAKIA
In spite of the fact that Hitler and Stalin were already fighting a proxy war in
Spain, the liberal West continued to stick its ostrich-like head in the sand and
believe in peace. “When Churchill organised a cross-party public meeting in
October 1936 to back rearmament, it flopped… Labout politicians and
newspapers adamantly opposed increased defence spending until 1937: ‘Not a
single penny for the government’s rearmament programme. The new party
leader, Clement Attlee [who became Prime Minister in 1945], attacked the
government for putting the country ‘permanently on a war basis’ and having
‘absolutely no policy for peace’. He declared: ‘Do not compete with the fascists
in arms and they will not rearm.’ The Manchester Guardian attacked the
government programme as ‘£400 million for death’…
“The wealthy Labour MP Stafford Cripps financed an anti-rearmament film

in 1936, seen by over 2 million people, reiterating, with a stressful musical score
by the young pacifist Benjamin Britten, that ‘there is no defence against air
attack’, and urging people to write to their MPs to demand that ‘the
governments of the world should get together to make war impossible’. The
British government’s Joint Planning Committee warned in 1936 of an immediate
knock-out blow from the air in case of war with Germany, with 20,000 casualties
within hours. Daylight bombing, mainly by German aircraft, of the undefended
Basque town of Guernica in April 1937, which killed several hundred people,
showed these horrors in action and seemed to justify the most pessimistic
assumptions.
“Despite the vehemence of the peace movement, the mainly Conservative

National Government, nominally headed by MacDonald, announced expansion
of the RAF in 1943, and his successor Baldwin, began major rearmament in 1936;
war, he said, was not ‘inevitable’, but it was ‘a ghastly possibility and it is our
duty to fight it in every way we can.’”960
It was Baldwin who had had to deal with the man who was in many ways
the symbol of western appeasement in the 1930s, the popular young King
Edward VIII, who succeeded his father in 1936, and was determined to marry
the twice-divorced American Mrs. Simpson and make her his queen. This
“seemed to Baldwin, and much of the public, [and, importantly, the Anglican
Church], to undermine the modern justification of monarchy: as a dignified
symbol of unity and duty, and a ‘moral force’ serving as a ‘guarantee’, as
Baldwin put it in the Commons, ‘against many evils that have afflicted other
countries’. Contrary to myth, the king’s supposed political beliefs, whether left
or right wing, seem not to have been an issue for the government, though one
Labour MP warned of a ‘fascist monarchy’… Baldwin soon formed a dim view
of his new monarch, told him firmly that he could not marry Mrs. Simpson and
keep the throne, and steered an Abdication Bill swiftly through Parliament. The

960 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 682, 683.
523
crisis evaporated when the uncharismatic, dutiful and suitably married Duke of
York succeeded as George VI in December 1936. Baldwin thereupon retired.”961
Baldwin certainly earned his retirement, for a king of dubious morality and
strongly anti-war and pro-German views such as Edward (he is even shown on
one newreel beamingly shaking the hand of Hitler) would have served the
country badly in the coming years. Indeed, even in retirement as the Duke of
Windsor in Paris, he dabbled sufficiently in politics to force the government to
“exile” him to the governorship of Bermuda, where he could be watched and
kept out of harm’s way. For Baldwin was right in considering that even a
constitutional monarchy such as Britain’s could be a “moral force” – for good or
for ill.
The British Prime Minister since May, 1937 was Neville Chamberlain. He was
“convinced that he must and could do business with Hitler and Mussolini. What
was needed was to obtain a list of Germany’s real demands – rabble-rousing
aside – ‘run through their complaints and claims with a pencil,’ and strike a deal
for a ‘general settlement’ of Europe, including disarmament. [Foreign Minister
Lord] Halifax was sent in November 1937 to sound the Nazis out. He met Hitler,
who advised him to sort out India by shooting Gandhi and a few hundred
nationalists, and made it perfectly plain that he was not interested in anything
Britain could offer. Halifax noted that ‘we are not talking the same language’.
But he – like Chamberlain – was incapable of drawing the unpalatable
conclusion: Hitler inhabited an alien mental and moral universe in which it was
possible to want war, not peace. Halifax decided that a policy of ‘reassurance’
was needed. Chamberlain wrote to his sister (his principal confidant) that we
should say to Germany: “Give us satisfactory assurances that you won’t use
force to deal with the Austrians and Czecho-Slovakians and we will give you
similar assurances that we won’t use for to prevent the changes you want.’
“Having sized up his opponents, Hitler invaded Austria in March 1938 and
proclaimed its union with Germany, breaking the Versailles treaty. Chamberlain
hoped that things would ‘settle down’ so that he could ‘start peace talks
again’…”962
The democrats’ justification for inaction was that (i) the Austrians were
Germans anyway, (ii) since they seemed to want the Anschluss (the few
exceptions such as the Jews and some aristocratic families could be discounted),
there was no point in stopping them, and (iii) the Versailles treaty was a dead
letter and could be ignored.
By his annexation of Austria, writes Mann, “Hitler had made ‘greater’

Germany a reality. The dream of the men of 1848 had at last become a fact. In

961 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 670.
962 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 685.
524
three days he had done what Bismarck had not attempted in thirty years.”963
Indeed, if he had stopped there, he might have gone down in German history as
greater than Bismarck, and with his earlier sins forgiven. For, as Admiral
Doenitz, Hitler’s successor in 1945, who signed the capitulation, wrote: “The
idea of a national community, in the proper, social sense of this word, and the
cohesion of the German people upon this base, fired me with enthusiasm.
Hitler’s reunion of all the branches of the German race under one Reich seemed
to me the achievement of one of the oldest dreams of our nation. Our dispersion
can be traced back to the Thirty Years War. Our adversaries, who had achieved
their own unity at the beginning of the modern era, wanted to keep us weak
and to prevent us achieving our unity for a very long time. Only National
Socialism has been able to overcome all these obstacles…”964
Next on Hitler’s list was Czechoslovakia, a very different proposition from

Austria: not German, and a prosperous country at the centre of Europe whose
conquest would radically alter the European balance of power… “The Treaty of
Versailles, mainly to give it defensible frontiers, had included the largely
German-speaking Sudetenland, whose ethnic nationality had been a pernicious
nuisance since Habsburg days. They were happy to provide Hitler with a
pretext to rescue them from Czech oppression by ‘always demand[ing] so much
that we cannot be satisfied’. The British, including Churchill, were taken in,
thinking that ethnic grievances were the cause of the crisis and that the Germans
had an arguable case. But the real reason, Hitler told his generals, was to ‘clear
the rear for advancing against… Britain and France,’ as the Czechs, who had a
large and well-equipped army, were France’s allies. He envisaged taking the
Low Countries, knocking out France, and expelling Britain from the Continent.
In the meantime he was accelerating military, naval and air preparations. The
French prime minister, Édouard Daladier, came to warn Whitehall that Hitler
was far more dangerous than Napoleon – ‘awful rubbish’, thought the Foreign
Office.”965
“Pan-Germanism,” writes A.N. Wilson, “had begun to show the violence

which had been inherent in Hitler’s schemes from the beginning. It was not like
self-determination for the Welsh, or even for the Irish. Hitler in the Sudetenland
had the perfect launch-pad for the fulfilment of these dreams which he spelled
out in such lurid details in Mein Kampf: vengeance upon his Slavic neighbours
for the brutality they had meted out to the East Prussians at the end of the First
World War; the destruction of the Eastern Barbarian…”966

963 Mann, op. cit., pp. 452-453.
964 Doenitz, “Ten Years and Twenty Days”, translated in Comte Léon de Poncins,
State Secrets: A Documentation of the Secret Revolutionary Mainspring Governing
Anglo-American Politics, Chulmleigh: Britons Publishing Company, 1975, p. 65.
965 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 685-686.
525
Mann writes: “As envisaged by the men of the Paulskirche [the German
parliament of 1848] ‘greater’ Germany included Bohemia. Now Bohemia was
the heart of a post-war state clumsily called Czechoslovakia in which there lived
about four million German-speaking people. They enjoyed complete equality of
civic status, were fully protected by the law and free to pursue their economic,
cultural and political interests; but not in a state which satisfied them
emotionally. The old game of disliking each other which the Czechs and the
Germans had inherited from the Habsburg Empire found enthusiastic
supporters in Czechoslovakia. But after 1918 the Czechs had the advantage.
They were the rulers and they were in the majority; where they could hurt the
Germans a little without actually breaking the law they did so. Now they were
to pay for this attitude. Many ‘Sudeten Germans’ followed a leader who, having
started on his own, quickly became a tool of Hitler and of the policy of the Reich.
What his followers really wanted cannot be said with certainty because they
were never asked; probably they did not want to become part of Germany but
to have an autonomous existence within a Bohemian-Moravian state. However,
it must not be thought that the individual citizen knows exactly what he wants
in such a crisis; in the end he is inclined to want what a vociferous leadership
tells him to want. When Eduard Beneš, President of the Czechoslovak Republic,
summoned the Sudeten German leaders to his castle in order to grant any and
every wish they might have, they extricated themselves from the discussions
and broke them off under a flimsy excuse. They were now more anxious to
break away than to obtain advantages within the Czech state.
“The German dictator did not particularly want the Sudeten Germans to
break away from Czechoslovakia. The great philanthropist cared little about the
happiness of the Sudeten Germans or about the ideal of the pan-German state.
The real or alleged emotions of the Germans in Bohemia, their real or alleged
plight, were an opportunity for him, nothing more. Nationalism was an
instrument which he would employ as long as it was useful, in this case to
smash and then to swallow the whole Czech state. This was his next aim.
Meanwhile let Europe’s and America’s star journalists rush to northern Bohemia
in order to study the living conditions and demands of the Sudeten Germans on
the spot; let those duped people enjoy the limelight and let them feel that they
were at the centre of history, just as a few months previously the Austrians, now
swallowed up by the grey everyday life of the Nazi Reich had felt that they had
occupied the centre of the world stage. A glance at the map, moreover, showed
that to take away the Germans in practice meant the end of the Czechoslovak
state. Without the industries of northern and eastern Bohemia, the fortifications
and the lines of communications, the Prague republic ceased anyway to be a
state; it could only have lived out an impotent satellite existence in the shadow
of the Reich, almost completely encircled by it. The Western powers had
accepted the annexation of Austria as an internal German affair. They could not
do the same in the case of Czechoslovakia.
“For that the republic had after all played too important an international role
for twenty years. Here was a people which even in the most generously
interpreted sense of the word could not be called ‘German’, a people which had
526
an alliance with France, a similar form of association with Russia, an ‘Entente’
with the Balkan states, which enjoyed considerable popularity in America,
possessed an up-to-date Army and occupied a strategic position of classical
importance – on this occasion the world could not pretend to be unconcerned.
In May therefore French diplomacy began to spread the word that an attack on
Czechoslovakia would spark off a European war. The Russians supported this
attitude and even Britain, uncommitted by any treaty, made warning
representations in Berlin. Confronted with what seemed to be a defensive front
Hitler drew back on 23 May and announced that no one planned to attack the
Czechs. Exactly a week later he issued a directive to his generals: ‘It is my
irrevocable determination to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the
foreseeable future. To await or to create a suitable opportunity from the political
and military point of view is a matter for the political leadership.’
“The method was always the same: to create disorder, if necessary to use
terror in order to produce counter-terror and then to intervene, allegedly with
the aim of preventing civil war and chaos and of helping one’s friends. The
method was used first in Germany and then in Austria; now it was used, not for
the last time either, on the Czechs and, as always, it was adapted to the local
peculiarities of the case. As planned the crisis reached boiling point in the late
summer. At the Nuremburg Party rally Hitler screamed threats against Beneš:
he would not tolerate a second Palestine ‘in the heart of Germany’, he would
come to the aid of his German brothers in distress whatever the cost.
Disturbances in Eger and Carlsbad were suppressed by the Czechs. The Sudeten
German leaders expected German intervention, and rightly; the German attack
on Czechoslovakia was planned to start on 28 September. Hitler for his part was
right in maintaining that the Czechs were asserting themselves because they
were relying on their Western allies…
“They were mistaken in their hopes. The French had helped to found the
Czechoslovak state because it seemed to bring them political and military
advantages, and as long as it did this it was a genuine, a necessary state. Now it
brought no more advantages. Because of the sheer necessity of having to defend
it, Czechoslovakia threatened to draw France into a second world war for which
the French had little inclination. As a result Czechoslovakia now seemed to
them to be a pretty unnatural state. France was anxious, if could be done, to
extricate itself honourably or at least not discreditably. The mood in Britain was
similar, except that here the public spirit was stronger and juster, less corrupted
by monetary influences. If Hitler wanted to conquer Europe the British were
morally prepared to oppose him by force as they had, by tradition, opposed
Napoleon and William II. However, let Hitler first prove that this was really his
intention. If his aim was merely, as he maintained, to gather together in one
nation-state all these Germans who wanted to belong to it, that was a different
matter. Then there was nothing to be done, however tiresome effects such an
action might have on the European balance of power. If the Sudeten Germans
really wanted ‘to return to the Reich’ it was wrong to prevent them by means of
a world war and it was better to let nature, which in this instance was probably
identical with right anyway, take its course. The best, said The Times on 7
527
September, would be if the Sudetenland were taken from Czechoslovakia and
made part of Germany. When Neville Chamberlain made his surprise flight to
Berchtesgaden two weeks later he carried the same proposal in his pocket” 967 –
in other words, that he could have the Sudetenland in return for a four-power
guarantee of the new Czech borders.
When Chamberlain met Hitler again on September 22, he was surprised and
irritated as “Hitler began tearing away the diplomatic figleaves by threatening
an immediate invasion. Not only Churchill now, but Robert Cecil and even
Labour Party leaders favoured a stronger line. The French began mobilization.
Whitehall informed Berlin that Britain ‘would not guarantee that they would
not do the same’ – almost a clarion call by Chamberlain’s standards – and the
navy and air force prepared for action. But it was made clear to the French –
while trying not to ‘offend France beyond what is absolutely necessary’ – that
Britain could give negligible aid. French and British intelligence grossly
overestimated the German army and airforce, claiming that it could cause 10,000
civilian deaths in Britain within twenty-four hours, while the RAF ‘would have
been wiped out in three weeks.’ Air raid shelters were dug and gas masks
distributed. Over half a million people volunteered for Air Raid Precautions…
On 27 September Chamberlain made his characteristically disheartening
broadcast lamenting the ‘nightmare’ of war over ‘a far away country of which
we know nothing,’ and ‘a quarrel which has already been settled in principle’.
When Hitler suggested a conference of himself, Chamberlain, Mussolini and
Daladier at Munich on 29 September, Chamberlain leapt at it. His constant hope
was that ‘the longer the war is put off the less likely it is to come at all.’
“’Munich’ and ‘appeasement’ are now potent insults in our political

vocabulary, synonyms for myopia, betrayal and cowardice. At the time, Munich
seemed the only chance of saving the world from catastrophe, and ‘appeasment’
was a very positive terms in diplomatic vocabulary. People cheered, from the
benches of the House of Commons to the streets of Munich, where they threw
flowers and shouted ‘Heil Chamberlain!’ Even Churchill wished him well, as
did the Labour and Liberal leaders. Mussolini produced a ‘compromise’ plan
(drafted by the Germans}, which was accepted after a few cosmetic concessions
by Hitler – notably that he would take over the Sudetenland in stages under
international supervision. Chamberlain ignored Daladier throughout. After the
deal was done, he asked for a private meeting with Hitler and produced a
declaration of ‘the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another
again,’ and promising ‘consultation… to remove possible sources of differences
[and] ensure the peace of Europe.’ This was the longed for ‘general settlement’.
A surprised Hitler signed. He was later ashamed at having flinched at the threat
of war and angry at having been deprived, as she saw it, of the prestige of a
military victory – ‘that fellow Chamberlain has spoiled my entry into Prague’.
Ironically, his popularity and prestige benefited enormously, for he had
triumphed without the war the German people and the German army feared.

967 Mann, op. cit., pp. 453-455.
528
Thereafter he would act without constraint: ‘Our enemies are small worms. I
saw them in Munich…’”968
“The Czechs,” writes Mann, “were not asked. These bogus victors of 1918
were forced to accept an arrangement the harshness of which far exceeded that
of the Treaty of Versailles. Not even the Sudeten Germans were asked, although
the Munich Agreement promised plebiscites in the disputed regions. Many of
them did not really know what was happening to them; they were surprised
and confused when German troops moved in with the consent of Europe to
liberate them from Czechoslovakia. Besides it was impossible to separate the
two peoples without employing the barbarous method of an exchange of
‘populations’. Almost one million Czechs now came under German sovereignty
together with the Sudeten Germans.
“… However, the atmosphere in Germany remained tense. Screams, barks

and offended threats went on coming through the loudspeakers at public
meetings even after Munich. And as if to show the world with whom it was
dealing and to destroy any illusion about the nature of the German regime, the
most terrible pogrom thus far against the Jews was staged in November; in one
night all synagogues were destroyed, thousands of Jews were dragged into
camps and torture and finally a ‘fine’ of one milliard marks was imposed on the
German Jews. Chamberlain had said tolerantly at Munich, that like Britain,
Germany had the political system which appeared to suit it and which it should
certainly keep. Could one say this of a government which of its own free will
indulged in such activities while the mass of the people watched, indifferently
or bitterly, without taking part in these crimes? Only a few weeks after Munich
even the most confirmed British supporters of appeasement began to wonder
whether they were on the right road and whether they could follow it much
longer…”969
“The Sudetenland had been occupied by Germany… Where did this leave the
body from which the great Sudeten limb had been amputated, Czechoslovakia?
This, the former region of Bohemia, now focused the minds of all the statesmen
in the West. From the point of view of the democrats, Czechoslovakia was one
of the great success stories of Versailles. It was an extremely prosperous
democracy, it had efficient industry, mineral resources, a large and well-trained
army. Any Western power that wanted to put a limit on Hitler’s expansionist
powers, or to restrain his murderous activities at home by some resolute sabre-
rattling would have been well-advised to keep Czechoslovakia united, and
strong.
“By handing over Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Britain neutered 36 Czech

divisions, fully equipped, trained and armed, waiting on the German border.
Such an army could not have fought Germany unaided, but with the help of
France’s 80 division, and with British aircraft now rolling off the production

968 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 686-687.
969 Mann, op. cit., pp. 455-456.
529
lines at 240 a month, a formidable opposition could have been offered to Hitler –
especially when we remembers that this was before the Russians signed their
pact with him; they could easily have been persuaded, as they later were, to
fight on the side of Britain…”970
On October 5, 1938 Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons: “The

British should know the truth. They should know that we have sustained a
defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along
the road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our
history, when the whole equilibrium of Europe has been deranged, and that the
terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western
democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ And do not
suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is
only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proferred to us
year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour,
we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the older time.”
Hitler finally got everything he wanted, including his entry into Prague in
March, 1939, violating the Munich agreement. In that month “there was a
disagreement between Czechs and Slovaks, a repetition of the Austrian and the
Sudeten-German crisis, only that this time it was not Germans among
themselves, or Germans and Slavs but Slavs among themselves who irritated
each other with German encouragement. Again it was necessary to restore order.
The weak old President of Czechoslovakia was told to come to Berlin and
confronted with choosing between a German invasion, the destruction of
Prague by bomber squadrons, and entrusting his people to German protection.
The President signed; the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed;
German tanks entered Prague and Brünn without encountering any resistance
and Hitler enjoyed a night in the castle of the ancient kings of Bohemia.
“… After a brief moment of hesitation Britain’s long-standing policy of

appeasement collapsed, amid the sound of furious indignation…”971
“The idea of British and French weakness and vulnerability is ingrained into
our ideas of the period, and was certainly in the forefront of the minds of many
politicians, military leaders and the public. But from the German viewpoint the
situation looked very different, as Hitler was being emphatically told by his
military and civilian advisers. The Czechs had a powerful modern army and the
Russians were willing to give them at least some help. The Czechs could have
done serious damage to the Germans army and air force, making it impossible
to launch a rapid attack on the west. The French Army was still by far the
largest in Europe, backed by the financial and material resources of the British
Empire protected by the world’s most powerful navy. The German army in 1938
was not capable of inflicting a decisive defeat on the French. Despite fears of a
devastating knock out blow from the air, the Luftwaffe was outnumbered by the

970 Wilson, op. cit., pp. 362-363.
971 Mann, op. cit., p. 457.
530
combind forces of Britain, France and Czechoslovakia, and its aircraft could not
even reach England from German bases. In short, Nazi Germany was risking a
long unwinnable war without allies against a coalition access to the world
economy. Hitler accepted the ‘extraordinarily generous settlement’ offered at
Munich and ‘almost certainly saved his regime from disaster’. The Allies were
better armed by 1940. But were the Germans: much better…”972

972 Tombs, op. cit., p. 688.
531
56. THE GREAT TERROR OF 1937-38
Two events portended the coming of this unprecedentedly bloody massacre.

The first was the suicide of Stalin’s wife, which made him turn more in on
himself. (There is a parallel here with his favourite Ivan the Terrible, who also
began to get worse after the death of his first wife, Anastasia.) The second was
the murder of Leningrad Party Boss Sergei Kirov on December 1, 1934. As
Evgenia Ginzburg put it in Into the Whirlwind: “That year, 1937, really began on
the 1st of December, 1934”.973 Although it is likely that Stalin himself ordered the
killing, it – together with the continued opposition of Trotsky from abroad -
became the excuse to root out supposed counter-revolutionary conspiracies and
fascist spy-rings within the party…
In the summer of 1934, Stalin summoned Kirov to spend the summer at his
dacha in Sochi, “to join him and Zhdanov in laying down the guidelines for the
rewriting of history textbooks. Published in 1936, Remarks Concerning the
Conspectus of a Textbook on the History of the USSR produced an abrupt reversal in
Soviet historiography, establishing the Soviet regime as the custodian of
national interests and traditions. The new history celebrated the great men of
Russia’s Tsarist past – Peter the Great, Suvorov, Kutuzov – whose state-building,
military victories and territorial conquests had created modern Russia. It was
the autocratic [in this context – “absolutist”] tradition… which was highlighted,
so establishing a natural link between the new patriotism and the cult of
Stalin.”974
It was ironic that Stalin, who had spent the last five years in an
unprecedented assault on everything Russian, should now seek to celebrate the
great tsars and military leaders of Russia’s past. Of course, not all of them were
celebrated - Nicholas II would remain “bloody Nicholas” to the end. But Stalin
was proud to see himself as the successor of the more totalitarian and bloody
tsars such as Ivan the Terrible (his favourite) and Peter the Great.
In this policy, as Alan Bullock writes, “sentiment and calculation coincided.

To combine the Marxist vision with the deep-seated nationalist and patriotic
feelings of the Russian people was to give it a wider and stronger emotional
appeal than ideology by itself could generate. As early as June 1934 Pravda had
sounded the new note, ‘For the Fatherland’, ‘which alone kindles the flame of
heroism, the flame of creative initiative in all fields, in all the realms of our rich,
our many-sided life… The defence of the Fatherland is the supreme law… For
the Fatherland, for its honour, glory, might and prosperity!’”975
Other factors influencing Stalin’s change of tactics probably included the

failure of the revolution to catch fire in other countries – and the success of

973 Ginzburg, in Bullock, op. cit., p. 516.
974 Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, London, 1991, p. 702.
532
Hitler’s nationalist socialism. Probably he came to realize that, as Mussolini had
put it, “the nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that it was
annihilated. Instead, we see it rise, living, palpitating before us!” Hence his
adoption of the slogan: “Socialism in one country”, which emphasized the
national uniqueness of Russia. Hence, too, his persecution of many ethnic
minorities from the early 1930s, transporting them en masse from one end of the
Union to the other, and the artificially-induced famine of 1932-33, whose aim
appears to have been to wipe out Ukrainian nationalism. After all, in spite of the
fact that Stalin was Georgian, Lenin had called him “a real and true ‘nationalist-
socialist’, and even a vulgar Great Russian bully”.
In the middle of the 1930s, in consequence of his new national policy, Stalin
began to ease up in his unprecedentedly savage war on the Russian people.
There seemed to be no need for it: the God-haters had triumphed, violence was
no longer so necessary, and they were now building a new, godless civilization
to replace the old one of Holy Russia. But the reign of fear continued, and was
about to be ratcheted up yet again…
The West, to its shame, cooperated with the red beast. America now joined
the European nations recognizing the Soviet Union, and helped its rapid
industrial growth through trade. Moreover, comparing their own economic
slump with the Soviet performance, westerners even began to applaud the
achievements of Communism, as journalists closed their eyes to Stalin’s
appalling assault on his own people. “The chief luminaries of the British Labour
Party,” writes Norman Davies, “wrote a glowing survey of the ‘New
Civilization’. The chief reporter of the New York Times, Walter Duranty,
probably a victim of blackmail, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his enthusiastic
descriptions, which have since been found to be completely and knowingly
false.”976 Probably the cleverest of these fellow-travellers was the famous Irish
playwright George Bernard Shaw, who had spent his life championing
democracy and equality, but who in this period spoke out for dictatorship – not
only Stalin’s, but also Hitler’s and Mussolini’s!
“Totalitarianism,” writes Piers Brendon, “won adherents across frontiers, for

the failures of capitalism were palpable during the Depression and the
democracies suffered a sharp crisis of confidence. Hearing that Stalin had
achieved planned progress and social equality [!], that Hitler had abolished
unemployment and built autobahns, that Mussolini had revived Italy and made
the trains run on time, people in Britain, France and the United States were
inclined to believe that Utopia was another country…”977
“The trauma of the Great Slump,” writes Eric Hobsbawn, “was underlined
by the fact that the one country that had clamorously broken with capitalism
appeared to be immune to it: the Soviet Union. While the rest of the world, or at

976 Davies, Europe at War 1939-1945. No Simple Victory, London: Pan Books, 2006, p.
49. Duranty also mocked the truthful despatches of British journalists Gareth Jones
and Malcolm Muggeridge on the famine in Ukraine.
977 Brendon, op. cit., p. xvi.
533
least liberal Western capitalism, stagnated, the USSR was engaged in massive
ultra-rapid industrialization under its new Five Year plans. From 1929 to 1940
Soviet industrial production tripled, at the very least. It rose from 5 per cent of
the world’s manufactured products in 1929 to 18 per cent in 1938, while during
the same period the joint share of the USA, Britain and France, fell from 59 per
cent to 52 per cent of the world’s total. What was more, there was [supposedly]
no unemployment. These achievements impressed foreign observers of all
ideologies, including a small but influential flow of socio-economic tourists to
Moscow in 1930-35, more than the visible primitiveness and inefficiency of the
Soviet economy, or the ruthlessness and brutality of Stalin’s collectivisation and
mass repression. For what they were trying to come to terms with was not the
actual phenomenon of the USSR but the breakdown of their own economic
system, the depth of the failure of Western capitalism. What was the secret of
the Soviet system? Could anything be learned from it? Echoing Russia’s Five
Year Plans, ‘Plan’ and ‘Planning’ became buzz-words in politics… Even the very
Nazis plagiarized the idea, as Hitler introduced a ‘Four Year Plan’ in 1933.”978
So far, Stalin had simply continued the work of Lenin on a larger, more
systematic scale. But in 1937 he began to do what Lenin had never done: destroy
his own party. According to Hobsbawm: “Between 1934 and 1939 four or five
million party members and officials were arrested on political grounds, four or
five thousand of them were executed without trial, and the next (eighteenth)
Party Congress which met in the spring of 1939, contained a bare thirty-seven
survivors of the 1827 delegates who had been present at the seventeenth in
1934.”979
Norman Davies writes that Stalin “killed every single surviving member of
Lenin’s original Bolshevik government [except Ordzhonikidze, who had killed
himself]. Through endless false accusations, he created a climate of collective
paranoia which cast everyone and anyone into the role of suspected spy or
traitor or ‘enemy’. Through orchestrated show trials, he forced distinguished
Communists to confess to absurd, indecent charges. Through the so-called
‘purges’, he would thin the ranks of the Communist Party, and then, having put
the comrades into a mood of zombie-like deference, he would order the exercise
to be repeated again and again. Everyone accused would be cajoled or tortured
into naming ten or twenty supposed associates in crime. By 1938 he reached he
point where he was ordering the shooting of citizens by random quota: 50,000
this month from this province, 30,000 next month from the next province. The
OGPU (the latest incarnation of the Cheka) sweated overtime. (They too were
regularly purged.) The death pits filled up. The GULag became the biggest
employer of labour in the land. State officials, artists and writers, academics and
soldiers were all put through the grinder. Then, in March 1939, it stopped, or at
least slowed down. The Census Bureau had just enough time to put an
announcement in Izvestia saying that 17 million people were missing, before the

978 Hobsbawn, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London:
Abacus, 1994, pp. 96, 97.

979 Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p. 391.
534
census-takers themselves were shot…”980 Thus was fulfilled the prediction of
Pierre Vergniaud in 1793 concerning the French revolution: “There is reason to
fear that, like Saturn, the Revolution may devour each of its children in turn”.981
One of the few Old Bolsheviks who refused to incriminate themselves was
Nicholas Bukharin, whom Lenin had called “the party’s favourite”. In his
“Letter to a Future Generation of Party Leaders”, he wrote: “I feel my
helplessness before a hellish machine, which has acquired gigantic power,
enough to fabricate organised slander… and which uses the Cheka’s bygone
authority to cater to Stalin’s morbid suspiciousness… Any member of the
Central Committee, any member of the Party can be rubbed out, turned into a
traitor or terrorist.”982
Bukharin wrote to the Politburo from prison that he was innocent of the
crimes to which he had confessed under interrogation – and, probably, torture.
But he said that “he would submit to the Party because he had concluded that
there was some ‘great and bold political idea behind the general purge’ which
overshadowed all else. ‘It would be petty of me to put the fortunes of my own
person on the same level as those tasks of world-historical importance, which
rest upon all your shoulders’…
“During his final speech from the dock [he] said that he had given in to the
prison investigators after having completely re-evaluated his past. ‘For when
you ask yourself: “If you must die, what are you dying for?” – an absolutely
black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness. And, on the
contrary, everything positive that glistens in the Soviet Union acquires new
dimensions in a man’s mind. This is the end disarmed me completely and led
me to bend my knees before the Party and the country… For in reality the whole
country stands behind Stalin; he is the hope of the future…”983
But it was Trotsky whom Stalin hated most, and around whom so many of
the trials and executions revolved. “By the mid-1930s,” write Christopher
Andrews and Vasily Mitrokhin, “Stalin had lost all sense of proportion in his
pursuit of Trotskyism in all its forms, both real and imaginary. Trotsky had
become an obsession who dominated many of Stalin’s waking hours and
probably interfered with his sleep at night. As Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac
Deutscher, concludes: ‘The frenzy with which [Stalin] pursued the feud, making
it the paramount preoccupation of international communism as well as of the
Soviet Union and subordinating to it all political, tactical, intellectual and other
interests, beggars description; there is in the whole of history hardly another
case in which such immense resources of power and propaganda were
employed against a single individual.’ The British diplomat R.A. Sykes later
wisely described Stalin’s world view as ‘a curious mixture of shrewdness and
nonsense’. Stalin’s shrewdness was apparent in the way that he outmanoeuvred

980 Davies, op. cit., p. 50.
982 Bukharin, in Bullock, op. cit., p. 541; Brendon, op. cit., p. 568.
535
his rivals after the death of Lenin, gradually acquired absolute power as general
secretary, and later outnegotiated Churchill and Roosevelt during their wartime
conferences. Historians have found it difficult to accept that so shrewd a man
also believed in so much nonsense. But it is no more possible to understand
Stalin without acknowledging his addiction to conspiracy theories about
Trotsky (and others) than it is to comprehend Hitler without grasping the
passion with which he pursued his even more terrible and absurd conspiracy
theories about the Jews.”984
In September, 1936 Stalin appointed Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov as head of the

NKVD in succession to Yagoda. As he “supervised the spread of the Terror,
arresting ever-larger circles of suspects to be tortured into confessing imaginary
crimes, the Soviet press worked the population up into a frenzy of witch-
hunting against Trotskyite spies and terrorists. Yezhov claimed that Yagoda had
tried to kill him by spraying his curtains with cyanide. He then arrested most of
Yagoda’s officers and had them shot. Then he arrested Yagoda himself. ‘Better
that ten innocent men should suffer than one spy get away,’ Yezhov announced.
‘When you chop wood, chips fly!’”985
In November, 1938 Yezhov himself was arrested and killed. He was

succeeded by Stalin’s fellow-Georgian, Lavrenty Beria, who was killed only
after Stalin’s death in 1953…
With the murder of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940 the last possible threat to
Stalin’s absolute authority from the Old Guard was gone. For, as Bullock writes,
“his suspicion never slept: it was precisely the Bolshevik Old Guard whom he
distrusted most. Even men who had been closely associated with him in
carrying out the Second Revolution were executed, committed suicide or died in
the camps.”986
Hannah Arendt defined the true role of Stalin’s party purges: as

“an instrument of permanent instability.” “The state of permanent
instability, in turn” writes Masha Gessen, “was the ultimate
instrument of control, which sapped the energies and attention of all.
The best way to insure being able to strike when it is least expected is
to scramble all expectations.” 987
The manifest absurdity of the trials, and of the idea that so many of Lenin’s
and Stalin’s closest and most loyal collaborators were in fact spies, did not stop
the “useful idiots” of the West from justifying the charade. Thus, as Tony Judt
writes, in 1936 the French Ligue des Droits de l’Homme established a
commission to investigate the great Moscow trials of that year. The conclusion

984 Andrews and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, London: The Allen Press, 1999, pp. 93-94.
985 Montefiore, Titans of History, pp. 522-523.
987 Masha Gessen, “The Very Strange Writings of Putin’s New Chief of Staff”, The New Yorker,
August 15, 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-very-strange-writings-of-

putins-new-chief-of-staff.
536
to its report state: “It would be a denial of the French Revolution… to refuse [the
Russian] people the right to strike down the fomenters of civil war, or
conspirators in liaison with foreigners.”988 Again, the US ambassador Joseph
Davies wrote to Washington that “the indictments of the defendants in the
Moscow show trials had been proved ‘beyond a reasonable doubt and that ‘the
adjudication of the punishment’ had been entirely justified’”…989
The great purges of 1937-38 wiped out a large proportion of the leaders of
Soviet society, and not only the Party. In fact, no section of society was exempt
from Stalin’s murderous cull of his own people. He used the term “enemy of the
people” to wipe out anyone who represented the remotest prospect of
opposition to the regime. In spite of these horrors, it was precisely in 1937 that
Stalin said: “Life has become better, life has become happier”!
His assault on the army was still more thorough than his assault on the party.
Thus, according to the Soviet press, “the military purge accounted for:
“3 of the 5 Soviet marshals

“11 of the 15 army commanders
“8 of the 9 fleet admirals and admirals Grade 1
“50 of the 57 corps commanders
“154 of the 186 divisional commanders
“16 of the 16 army political commissars

“25 of the 28 corps commissars
“58 of the 64 divisional commanders
“11 of the 11 vice-commissars of defence

“98 of the 109 members of the Supreme Military Soviet
The effect was not confined to the upper echelons. Between May 1937 and
September 1938, 36,761 army officers and over 3000 navy officers were
dismissed. Allowing for 13,000 re-enrolled and adding the numbers ‘repressed’
after September 1938, this gives a total for 1937-41 of 43,000 officers at battalion
and company-commander level arrested and either shot or sent to the camps
(the great majority) or permanently dismissed. Roy Medvedev sums up an
operation without parallel in the striking sentence: ‘Never has the officer staff of
any army suffered such great losses in any war as the Soviet Army suffered in
this time of peace.’”990
“However,” writes Brendon, “as the liquidation of top managers took its toll
on the economy and the armed forces suffered a further assault, few doubted

988 Judt, “Francois Furet (1927-1997)”, in When the Facts Change, London: Vintage, 2015, p. 352.
989 Service, Comrades, p. 208.
990 Bullock, op. cit., pp. 547-548.
537
that Russia’s capacity to resist alien aggression was being seriously impaired. So
on 24 January 1938 Stalin touched the brakes and changed direction, just as he
had done in 1930 when he wrote his article ‘Dizzy with Success’, condemning
the excesses of collectivisation. Now he launched a campaign against false
informers, those who had denounced others in order to save their skins. He
turned his withering gaze on the secret police, who had reckoned that their
‘personal salvation lay in swimming’ with the tide of terror. The purgers
themselves should be purged, though no one knew who would accomplish this
or how far they would go.”991
The purges reached their peak on September 12, 1938, when – just
one day - Stalin killed 3173 people, more than all the death sentences
carried out in the Russian Empire from 1905 to 1913 inclusive.
We should also not forget the foreign victims of the Terror. Trotskyites, real
and imaginary, were killed all around the world; even in Spain, the NKVD was
as occupied in destroying the Trotskyite organization POUM as in fighting
fascists. 992 Christopher Andrew and Vasily Mitrokhin write: “Comintern
representatives in Moscow from around the world lived in constant fear of
denunciation and execution. Many were at even greater risk than their Soviet
colleagues. By early 1937, following investigations by the NKVD (predecessor of
the KGB), Stalin had convinced himself that Comintern was a hotbed of
subversion and foreign espionage. He told Georgi Dmitrov, who had become its
General Secretary three years earlier, ‘All of you there in the Comintern are
working in the hands of the enemy.’ Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the NKVD
whose sadism and diminutive stature combined to give him the nickname
‘Poison Dwarf’, echoed his master’s voice. ‘The biggest spies,’ he told Dmitrov,
‘were working in the Communist International’. Each night, unable to sleep, the
foreign Communists and Comintern officials who had been given rooms at the
Hotel Lux in the centre of Moscow waited for the sound of a car drawing up at
the hotel entrance in the early hour, then heard the heavy footsteps of NKVD
men echo along the corridors, praying that they would stop at someone else’s
door. Those who escaped arrest listened with a mixture of relief and horror as
the night’s victims were taken from their rooms and driven away, never to
return. Some, for whom the nightly suspense became too much, shot themselves
or jumped to their deaths in the inner courtyard. Only a minority of the hotel’s
foreign guests escaped the knock on the door. Many of their death warrants
were signed personally by Stalin. Mao’s ferocious security chief, Kang Sheng,
who had been sent to Moscow to learn his trade, enthusiastically co-operated
with the NKVD in the hunt for mostly imaginary traitors among Chinese
émigrés…”993
As a kind of coda to the Great Terror, Stalin decided to conduct a “purge of

the purgers”, in the words of Lynne Viola. Those who had sent almost 1.5

992 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, p. 95.
993 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The KGB and the World, London: Penguin, 2006, pp. 3-4.
538
million people either to the Gulag or to execution were themselves put on trial.
In 1939, nearly a thousand of them were arrested; many were subjected to
torture – the very crime for which a lot of them were being tried. They were
either sent to the Gulag, or executed, or sent to serve at the front in World War
Two.994
In March, 2014 an inter-departmental Commission for the Defence

of State Secrets lengthened the period of secrecy for Cheka-KGB
documents in the period 1917-1991 to the following thirty years (that
is, until 2044). Under the scope of this decision fell the whole mass of
archival documents touching on the Great Terror of 1937-38.” 995 There
is a great irony, even a great mystery here: what has already been
revealed about the Great Terror is already so appalling, so
unprecedented, that it is difficult to imagine that further revelations
from closed archives could add anything significant to the horror of
what we already know…

994 Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine, Oxford
University Press, 2017; reviewed in Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2018, p. 203.

995 Fr. Alexander Prapertov, Facebook communication, June 8, 2018.
539
57. A PARABLE OF SOVIET REALITY
Already years before the purges of 1937-38 truth had disappeared from the
public life of the Russian nation. Both Trotskyites at the one extreme, and the
official Orthodox Church at the other, had been silenced and crushed; people
hardly dared to speak the truth even in the privacy of their own homes.
Probably the only places where some remnants of free speech still existed were
the confessional (but not that of the official church) and the camps – if only
because the inmates now had nothing but their chains to lose…
But where, in the midst of this nightmare, was the traditional bastion of truth
and justice against tyranny in Russian society – the writer?.. Of course, the cult
of the writer since the time of Pushkin had been largely created by the
revolutionary-minded intelligentsia as a tool for overthrowing the Orthodox
tsars and the Orthodox faith in general. Writers such as Alexander Herzen, Lev
Tolstoy and Maxim Gorky were exalted because they lambasted the official
order; and the restrictions placed on them by the authorities were exaggerated
in order to give their sufferings an aura of martyrdom. When the infinitely more
repressive order of Soviet power came into being, the great majority of these
“champions of truth and justice” fell strangely silent – or, like Gorky, publicly
supported the new order.
However, the very prestige that the writer’s profession had acquired in pre-
revolutionary Russia meant that the authorities could not simply crush them out
of existence. Nor was it useful to them to have just hacks churning out
communist propaganda or the communist parody of true realism in art that they
called “Socialist Realism”. The Russian public was highly educated and had a
discerning literary palate: only real literature and real writers could be expected
to have a real influence on this higher class of Soviet citizen.
So the authorities began looking around for writers with talent who could
serve the communist cause in a truly creative way. Of course, there were
dangers in such a search: a talented writer might betray the revolutionary cause
as some of the most talented writers of pre-revolutionary Russia had done:
instead of a Herzen, they might find themselves with a Gogol; or instead of a
Tolstoy – with a Dostoyevsky… But the risk had to be taken…
One of the most talented and truthful of Soviet writers was Michael
Afanasyevich Bulgakov. His Heart of a Dog (1924), for example, was a brilliant
satire on the regime’s attempts to create a new kind of human being, Homo
Sovieticus. As a natural result of this truthfulness, however, he suffered
repression, and by the end of the 1920s it looked as if his career would end in
the way that the careers of other talented writers such as Mandelstam ended: in
death-row or the camps. In a letter to the Soviet government in 1930 he
requested permission to emigrate. For, as he explained to them, as a banned
writer he was facing “persecution, desperation and death”.996

540
But by Divine Providence he had one extremely influential admirer: Stalin,
who had seen Bulgakov’s play Days of the Turbans no less than fifteen times.
(“Under duress, Bulgakov had changed the play’s title [from The White Guard]
and provided an ending loosely sympathetic to the communist cause.”997) A
phone call from Stalin was enough to ensure that Bulgakov lived undisturbed in
his Moscow flat until his death in 1940. This enabled him to write his
masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, in relative peace and quiet at the very
centre of the 1930s maelstrom. It was not published, however, until 1967, and
that only in a severely cut edition. For not even the favour of a Stalin could
ensure that a true parable on Soviet reality, however heavily disguised, would
be allowed to corrupt the minds of Soviet citizens…
The Master and Margarita is a novel on two, or even three levels: there is the
novel about Pontius Pilate and Yeshua (Jesus), which is set in Yershalaim
(Jerusalem) on Great Friday; there is the novel about the Master, who writes the
novel, and his mistress, Margarita, who ensures its survival; and there is the
novel about the poet Bezdomny, who continues the Master’s work, and the
Moscow society of writers, theatre agents and government officials in which he
lives and works. The action is precipitated by a visit to Moscow by Satan, posing
as the German Professor of Black Magic Woland, and his demonic suite: the
dapper ex-choirmaster Korovyev, the black cat Behemoth, the executioner
Azazello and the naked witch Hella (not to mention other minor demons such
as Abadonna). As one would expect, all hell is set loose: the editor Berlioz loses
his head (literally), various people are tricked, robbed or go out of their minds,
and the house of the union of writers, Griboyedov, is burned to the ground.
However, good comes out of this evil. Not only are many bad writers and
officials given their just deserts, and the vices and vanities of Moscow society
exposed: the Master is rescued from the asylum into which repression and
rejection by his fellow writers had driven him through the good offices of Satan
and Margarita, who becomes (temporarily) a witch for his sake; and the bad
poet Bezdomny renounces his bad poetry and becomes the faithful disciple of
the Master.
The interpretation of the novel must also proceed on several levels. Most
obviously, it is a satire on the literary world of Moscow in the 1930s, a hilarious
exposure of how the writers had betrayed their calling to tell the truth about the
society they lived in, and of how the best writers had suffered at the hands of
their philistine colleagues. Here there also enters a strong autobiographical
element: clearly Bulgakov sees himself, the writer who suffered from other
writers, in the figure of the unjustly persecuted Master, and to a lesser extent in
the figure of Bezdomny; while his wife, who later published The Master and
Margarita, is portrayed in the role of Margarita. The way in which Satan-Woland
rescues the Master and Margarita also recalls the way in which Stalin rescued
the real-life Bulgakov in 1929. And there are many incidents and people in the

541
novel that industrious researchers have traced to real incidents and people in
Bulgakov’s life.998
But there are also deeper, moral and philosophico-religious strands. Thus
Satan-Woland causes the beheading of Berlioz because the latter denies the very
existence of Christ and therefore also of himself, Satan, who likes to point out
that he was personally present when Pilate gave sentence on Yeshua. It is
difficult not to see in this an implicit rebuke to the literary world for its inane
atheism… Again, the destruction of the Griboyedov house by fire can be seen as
Divine retribution for the sins of the writers – God uses the evil Satan as His
instrument in the accomplishing of this good. This latter interpretation is
supported by the quotation at the beginning of the whole novel from Faust: “…
so who are you in the end?” “I am a part of that power which eternally desires
evil and eternally does good.”
However, we look in vain in Bulgakov’s novel for a placing of the whole of the
revolution in the scheme of Divine Providence. Satan comes to Moscow to carry
out God’s judgement on the Soviet Union of Writers, and we ask: but is not
every Soviet institution, and the whole of Soviet reality, the creation of Satan
and therefore subject to God’s wrath? And was not the revolution itself a
deliverance of Russia to Satan, allowed by God as His punishment for the sins
of the Russian people? But Bulgakov does not pose these questions, even
indirectly, just as there is only the very slightest hint in the novel at the great
fact of the age – the terrible persecution of the Church and faith. Of course,
Bulgakov was not writing a historical or theological treatise (although,
significantly, Bezdomny becomes a member of the Institute of History and
Philosophy at the end). But to omit the widest questions and perspectives from
what was clearly designed to be a hugely ambitious parable of Soviet reality
indicates a certain pusillanimity, or lack of faith…
But this failing, too, is portrayed in the novel. For its main theme is cowardice.
Both Pilate and the Master suffer from guilt at their cowardice – Pilate, because
he delivered the innocent Yeshua to death out of fear of being denounced to
Caesar, and the Master - because he had cringed before Soviet power. Again,
there is an autobiographical element here: Bulgakov survived when many
writers perished, and although he was more truthful than most, it was
impossible to survive in Soviet conditions without bowing, even if shallowly
and stiffly, to the false Soviet god. The theme of cowardice is confronted more
directly in the Pilate novel – Pilate is haunted by the last words of Yeshua, that
one of the most important vices was cowardice 999 , and after nearly two
thousand years of purgatorial suffering he is redeemed by Yeshua. The Master,

998 For example, the chapter on Satan’s ball was inspired by a real-life ball given by
the American ambassador in 1935. See J.A.E. Curtis, “Mikhail Bulgakov and the
Red Army’s Polo Instructor: Political Satire in The Master and Margarita”, in
Laura D. Weeks (ed.), The Master and Margarita: A Critical Companion,
Northwestern University Press, 1996, pp. 213-226.
999 Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, ch. 25, p. 312 in the Hugh Aplin translation,
Richmond: Oneworldclassics, 2008.
542
on the other hand, does not appear to face this issue directly; and his lapse into
mental illness appears to be the result, less of his persecution by others (which
was mild, relatively speaking), as of his own inner conflict, his suppressed guilt
at failing to live up fully to his calling as a writer, who, as Russian tradition
affirmed, must tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his
society. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Yeshua does not redeem
him as he redeems Pilate, but through his faithful disciple Levi Matthew he
pronounces the following sentence: “He has not merited light, he has merited
peace”.1000
Is this how Bulgakov judged himself: as worthy of peace because of the good
novel he had written, but not of the light because he had done a deal with Satan
(Stalin) to keep his career alive? It is impossible to say - there is no reliable path
from the characters of a novel to the true nature of a writer or his religious
beliefs. What we can say is that there was indeed no place for the true writer, the
Christian writer, in Soviet society; and that even the finest products of Soviet
literature were poisoned from within by their sin of cowardice, by their
schizophrenia, by their serving a master whom they hated while thinking to
serve another whom they loved - but not well enough.
“Manuscripts don’t burn”, said Satan-Woland in the most famous line of the
novel. However, this was not true of Soviet literature. Without the real
conversion of the writer to True Christianity that took place in, for example,
Gogol and Dostoyevsky, there could be no true eternity for the Soviet writer’s
work, no protection against the flames of the Last Day (or even the penultimate
day: we remember that Gogol, Bulgakov’s favourite writer, burned the second
part of Dead Souls). Even if the writer injected a Christian element into his work,
as Bulgakov did in The Master and Margarita and Pasternak would later do in
Doctor Zhivago, that Christian element could not sanctify the rest of the work,
but would rather be deformed by the alien context in which it found itself. And
so Yeshua in The Master and Margarita is a pitiful shadow of the real Jesus, being
shorn of His power and majesty - Satan-Woland is much more interesting. Of
course, this is a phenomenon found throughout the history of literature: it is
much easier to depict the evil than the good; and from Shakespeare to Milton,
from Dostoyevsky to Bulgakov, the satanic characters stick longer in the
memory than the Christlike. But the truly Christian writer at least comes closer
to the mark, as Dostoyevsky did in The Brothers Karamazov.
The great tragedy of the Russian revolution was that it defiled everything it
touched, making it impossible to be a true Christian and a real participant in
public life. And that public life included its artistic and literary life… So the
lesson from literature was the same as the lesson from every other sphere: true
life, the life of the spirit, the life in Christ, could only be preserved in the
catacombs, in hiding from the satanic ball taking place above ground…

1000 Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, ch. 29, p. 367.
543
58. THE FRUITS OF SERGIANISM
The category of the population that suffered most during Stalin’s great
purges – and this fact has been woefully neglected by secular historians - was
neither the party, nor the army, but the Orthodox clergy, followed by the Orthodox
laity. If Metropolitan Sergius, deputy leader of the Russian Church, thought that
by his “Declaration” of loyalty to the Communist state in 1927 he would “save
the Church”, the next few years would prove him terribly wrong. From 1935 the
Bolsheviks, having repressed most of the True Orthodox clergy, began to
repress the sergianists – i.e. those who accepted Sergius’ leadership and justified
his Declaration. In fact, the sergianists often received longer sentences than their
True Orthodox brothers whom they had betrayed. This only went to show how
futile their Judas-like collaboration with the Antichrist, and betrayal of their
brothers in Christ, had been. Even a recent biography of Sergius by a sergianist
author accepts this fact: “If Metropolitan Sergius, in agreeing in his name to
publish the Declaration of 1927 composed by the authorities, hoping to buy
some relief for the Church and the clergy, then his hopes not only were not
fulfilled, but the persecutions after 1927 became still fiercer, reaching truly
hurricane-force in 1937-38.”1001
In the nineteen years before the Great Terror of 1937-38, Soviet power killed:
128 bishops; 26,777 clergy; 7,500 professors; about 9,000 doctors; 94,800 officers;
1,000,000 soldiers; 200,000 policemen; 45,000 teachers; 2,200,000 workers and
peasants. Besides that, 16 million Orthodox Russians died from hunger and
three million from forced labour in the camps.1002 As for the years of the Great
Terror, according to Russian government figures, in 1937 alone 136,900 clergy
were arrested, of whom 106,800 were killed (there were 180,000 clergy in Russia
before the revolution). Again, between 1917 and 1980, 200,000 clergy were
executed and 500,000 others were imprisoned or sent to the camps.1003 The
numbers of functioning Orthodox churches declined from 54,692 in 1914 to
39,000 at the beginning of 1929 to 15, 835 on April 1, 1936.1004 By the beginning

1001 Sergius Fomin, Strazh Doma Gospodnia (Guardian of the House of the Lord), Moscow, 2003, p.
262.
1002 Kharbinskoe Vremia, February, 1937, N 28, in Protopriest John Stukach,
“Vyskomerie kak prepona k uiedineniu” (Haughtiness as an obstacle to union),

http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=page&pid=1357
1003 A document of the Commission attached to the President of the Russian
Federation on the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Political Repressions, January 5,

1996; Service Orthodoxe de Presse (Orthodox Press Service), N 204, January, 1996, p.
15. The rate of killing slowed down considerably in the following years. In 1939
900 clergy were killed, in 1940 – 1100, in 1941 – 1900, in 1943 – 500. In the period
1917 to 1940 205 Russian hierarchs “disappeared without trace”; 59 disappeared in
1937 alone. According to another source, from October, 1917 to June, 1941
inclusive, 134,000 clergy were killed, of whom the majority (80,000) were killed
between 1928 and 1940 (Cyril Mikhailovich Alexandrov, in V. Lyulechnik,
“Tserkov’ i KGB” (The Church and the KGB), in
http://elmager.livejournal.com/217784.html).
1004 Nicholas Werth, “A State against its People”, in Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas
Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Packowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin,
544
of the Second World War, there were none at all in Belorussia (Kolarz), “less
than a dozen” in Ukraine (Bociurkiw), and a total of 150-200 in the whole of
Russia.1005
This was, without a doubt, the greatest persecution of Christianity in history.

But it did not wipe out the faith: the census of 1937 established that one-third of
city-dwellers and two-thirds of country-dwellers still believed in God. Stalin’s
plan that the Name of God should not be named in Russia by the year 1937 had
failed…
Nevertheless, the immediate outlook for believers was bleak indeed. Thus
E.L. writes about Hieromartyr Bishop Damascene: “He warmed the hearts of
many, but the masses remained… passive and inert, moving in any direction in
accordance with an external push, and not their inner convictions… The long
isolation of Bishop Damascene from Soviet life, his remoteness from the gradual
process of sovietization led him to an unrealistic assessment of the real relations
of forces in the reality that surrounded him. Although he remained unshaken
himself, he did not see… the desolation of the human soul in the masses. This
soul had been diverted onto another path – a slippery, opportunistic path which
led people where the leaders of Soviet power – bold men who stopped at
nothing in their attacks on all moral and material values – wanted them to go…
Between the hierarchs and priests who had languished in the concentration
camps and prisons, and the mass of the believers, however firmly they tried to
stand in the faith, there grew an abyss of mutual incomprehension. The
confessors strove to raise the believers onto a higher plane and bring their
spiritual level closer to their own. The mass of believers, weighed down by the
cares of life and family, blinded by propaganda, involuntarily went in the
opposite direction, downwards. Visions of a future golden age of satiety, of
complete liberty from all external and internal restrictions, of the submission of
the forces of nature to man, deceitful perspectives in which fantasy passed for
science… were used by the Bolsheviks to draw the overwhelming majority of
the people into their nets. Only a few individuals were able to preserve a
loftiness of spirit. This situation was exploited very well by Metropolitan
Sergius…”1006
Sergius has had many apologists. Some have claimed that he “saved the
Church” for the future. This claim cannot be justified. He saved only a false
church that had been morally crushed. It was rather the Catacomb Church,
which “in a sense saved the official Church from complete destruction because
the Soviet authorities were afraid to force the entire Russian Church
underground through ruthless suppression and so to lose control over it.”1007

The Black Book of Communism, London: Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 172,
173.
1005 Nathanael Davis, A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian
Orthodoxy, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003, p. 13.

1006 E.L., Episkopy-Ispovedniki (Bishop Confessors), San Francisco, 1971, pp. 65-66.
1007 W. Alexeyev, "The Russian Orthodox Church 1927-1945: Repression and
Revival", Religion in Communist Lands, vol. 7, N 1, Spring, 1979, p. 30.
545
As St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco wrote: “The Declaration of
Metropolitan Sergius brought no benefit to the Church. The persecutions not
only did not cease, but also sharply increased. To the number of other
accusations brought by the Soviet regime against clergy and laymen, one more
was added – non-recognition of the Declaration. At the same time, a wave of
church closings rolled over all Russia… Concentration camps and places of
forced labor held thousands of clergymen, a significant part of whom never saw
freedom again, being executed there or dying from excessive labors and
deprivations.”1008
Others have tried to justify Sergius by claiming that there are two paths to
salvation, one through open confession or the descent into the catacombs, and
the other through compromise. Sergius, according to this view, was no less a
martyr than the Catacomb martyrs, only he suffered the martyrdom of losing
his good name.1009 However, this view comes close to the “Rasputinite” heresy
that there can be salvation through sin – in this case, lying, the sacrifice of the
freedom and dignity of the Church, and the betrayal to torments and death of
one’s fellow Christians! Thus Hieromartyr Sergius Mechev was betrayed by
"Bishop" Manuel Lemeshevsky.1010 And more generally, Metropolitan Sergius'
charge that all the catacomb bishops were "counter-revolutionaries" was
sufficient to send them to their deaths.1011
This fact demonstrates that “sergianism” can best be defined as, quite simply,
the sin of Judas…
Meanwhile, deep in the underground, the Catacomb, True Orthodox Church

delivered its verdict. In July, 1937, four bishops, two priests and six laymen met
in Ust-Kut, Siberia, convened a council, and declared:
“1. The Sacred Council forbids the faithful to receive communion from the
clergy legalized by the anti-Christian State.
“2. It has been revealed to the Sacred Council by the Spirit that the anathema-
curse hurled by his Holiness Patriarch Tikhon is valid, and all priests and
Church-servers who have dared to consider it as an ecclesiastical mistake or
political tactic are placed under its power and bound by it.

1008 St. John Maximovich, The Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. A Short History,
Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1997, pp. 28-29.

1009 E.S. Polishchuk, "Patriarkh Sergei i ego deklaratsia: kapitulatsia ili
kompromiss?" (Patriarch Sergius and his Declaration: Capitulation or
Compromise?), Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian
Christian Movement), N 161, 1991-I, pp. 233-250.
1010 Alla D. "Svidetel'stvo" (Witness), in Nadezhda (Hope), vol. 16, Basel-Moscow,
1993, 228-230. See also N.V. Urusova, Materinskij Plach Sviatoj Rusi (The Maternal
Lament of Holy Russia), Moscow, 2006, pp. 285-287.
1011 I.M. Andreyev, Is the Grace of God Present in the Soviet Church?,Wildwood,
Alberta: Monastery Press, 2000, p. 30.
546
“3. To all those who discredit and separate themselves from the Sacred
Council of 1917-18 – Anathema!
“4. All branches of the Church which are on the common trunk – the trunk is
our pre-revolutionary Church – are living branches of the Church of Christ. We
give our blessing to common prayer and the serving of the Divine Liturgy to all
priests of these branches. The Sacred Council forbids all those who do not
consider themselves to be branches, but independent from the tree of the
Church, to serve the Divine Liturgy. The Sacred Council does not consider it
necessary to have administrative unity of the branches of the Church, but unity
of mind concerning the Church is binding on all.”1012
This completed the de-centralization of the Church, which Patriarch Tikhon

had already begun through his famous ukaz no. 362 of 1920. It was elicited by
the fact that the organization of the Church was now destroyed, and all its
leaders dead or in prison or so deep underground that they could not rule the
Church. This process was sealed in the autumn of 1937, when the patriarchal
locum tenens Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa, and his only possible successors,
Metropolitans Cyril of Kazan and Joseph of Petrograd, were shot. And so by the
end of 1937, the Church’s descent into the catacombs, which had begun in the
early 20s, was completed. From now on, with the external administrative
machinery of the Church destroyed, it was up to each bishop – sometimes each
believer – individually to preserve the fire of faith, being linked with his fellow
Christians only through the inner, mystical bonds of the life in Christ. Thus was
the premonition of Hieromartyr Bishop Damascene fulfilled: “Perhaps the time
has come when the Lord does not wish that the Church should stand as an
intermediary between Himself and the believers, but that everyone is called to
stand directly before the Lord and himself answer for himself as it was with the
forefathers!”1013
Even sergianist sources have spoken about the falsity of Sergius’ declaration,
the true confession of those who opposed him, and the invalidity of the
measures he took to punish them. Thus: “Amidst the opponents of Metropolitan
Sergius were a multitude of remarkable martyrs and confessors, bishops, monks,
priests… The ‘canonical’ bans of Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) and his
Synod were taken seriously by no one, neither at that time [the 1930s] nor later
by dint of the uncanonicity of the situation of Metropolitan Sergius
himself…”1014

1012 Schema-Monk Epiphanius (Chernov), personal communication; B. Zakharov,
Russkaia Mysl’ (Russian Thought), September 7, 1949; "Vazhnoe postanovlenie

katakombnoj tserkvi" (An Important Decree of the Catacomb Church),
Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox Russia), N 18, 1949. According to one version, there
is a fifth canon: “To all those who support the renovationist and sergianist heresy
– Anathema”. See Bishop Ambrose (von Sievers), “Katakombnaia Tserkov’: Ust’-
Kutskij Sobor 1937g.” (The Catacomb Church: the Ust-Kut Council of 1937),
Russkoe Pravoslavie (Russian Orthodoxy), N 4 (8), 1997, pp. 20-24.
1013 E.L., op. cit., p. 92.
1014 M.E. Gubonin, Akty Sviatejshago Patriarkha Tikhona, Moscow, 1994, pp. 809, 810.
547
And again: “The particular tragedy of the Declaration of Metropolitan
Sergius consists in its principled rejection of the podvig of martyrdom and
confession, without which witnessing to the truth is inconceivable. In this way
Metropolitan Sergius took as his foundation, not hope on the Providence of
God, but a purely human approach to the resolution of church problems… The
courage of the ‘catacombniks’ and their firmness of faith cannot be doubted, and
it is our duty to preserve the memory of those whose names we shall probably
learn only in eternity…”1015
Sergius made the basic mistake of forgetting that it is God, not man, Who
saves the Church. This mistake amounts to a loss of faith in the Providence and
Omnipotence of God Himself. The faith that saves is the faith that “with God all
things are possible” (Matthew 19.26). It is the faith that cries: “Some trust in
chariots, and some in horses, but we will call upon the name of the Lord our
God” (Psalm 19.7). This was and is the faith of the Catacomb Church, which,
being founded on “the Rock, which is Christ” (I Corinthians 10.7), has prevailed
against the gates of hell. But Sergius’ “faith” was of a different, more “supple”
kind, the kind of which the Prophet spoke: “Because you have said, ‘We have
made a covenant with death, and with hell we have an agreement; when the
overwhelming scourge passes through it will not come to us; for we have made
lies our refuge, and in falsehood we have taken shelter’; therefore thus says the
Lord God,… hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and waters will overwhelm
the shelter. Then your covenant with death will be annulled, and your
agreement with hell will not stand; when the overwhelming scourge passes
through you will be beaten down by it…” (Isaiah 28.15, 17-19)
A Catacomb Appeal of the period wrote: “May this article drop a word that
will be as a burning spark in the heart of every person who has Divinity in
himself and faith in our One Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ. Beloved
brethren! Orthodox Christians, peace-makers! Do not forget your brothers who
are suffering in cells and prisons for the word of God and for the faith, the
righteousness of our Lord Jesus Christ, for they are in terrible dark bonds which
have been built as tombs for all innocent people. Thousands and thousands of
peace-loving brothers are languishing, buried alive in these tombs, these
cemeteries; their bodies are wasting away and their souls are in pain every day
and every hour, nor is there one minute of consolation, they are doomed to
death and a hopeless life. These are the little brothers of Christ, they bear that
cross which the Lord bore. Jesus Christ received suffering and death and was
buried in the tomb, sealed by a stone and guarded by a watch. The hour came
when death could not hold in its bonds the body of Christ that had suffered, for
an Angel of the Lord coming down from the heavens rolled away the stone
from the tomb and the soldiers who had been on guard fled in great fear. The
Lord Jesus Christ rose from the dead. But the thunder will also strike these

1015 M.V. Danilushkin, Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi ot Vosstanovlenia Patriarshestva do nashikh dnej (A
History of the Russian Church from the Reestablishment of the Patriarchate to our Days), vol. I,
St. Petersburg, 1997, pp. 297, 520.
548
castles where the brothers languish for the word of God, and will smash the
bolts where death threatens men..."1016
59. THE SECOND ALL-DIASPORA COUNCIL
The Russian diaspora numbered in the millions and was scattered

all round the world. In 1936 General Voeikov wrote: “Although our
emigration is divided by personal disagreements and are at odds both
in political and in moral-religious questions, there are practically no
people who are not dreaming of the day when we shall all return to
our homeland.
“Understanding this, both individual persons, and whole

organizations, are striving, by means of various deceptions, to enrol as
many as possible adherents. Not a little effort in this direction has
been contributed by the Masons, who have instilled the conviction that
in the re-establishment of Russia the leading role will belong to them,
as being now the only united and well organized union. However,
even now the leading role belongs to them in certain states, where all
the appointments, elections, reception of orders, etc., depend
exclusively on that organization, which (according to information
provided by the press and literature) number 4,252,910 members and
having 556 billion francs at their disposal.
“Their brothers, the leaders of leftist society, who openly supported the
revolution, are applying all their efforts to instil liberal ideas into the masses and
to root out patriotism from the growing generation...
“Our émigré press, with few exceptions, instead of stirring up the feeling of
patriotism, sings in unison with the Russophobe circles; they instil the thought
that the re-establishment of a patriotic, national and, perhaps, also monarchical
Russia is dangerous, and they do much to support quarrels in the emigration
that have been strengthened as a consequence of the family disagreements that
have arisen even among the members of our royal dynasty. Being exposed to
publicity, these quarrels have been far from helping to raise their prestige.”1017
The political make-up of the Russian Diaspora was complex; every part of the
political spectrum from monarchists to communists was represented. The
monarchists continued the struggle against Bolshevism, but with very little
success. At the end of 1921 a Monarchical Union of Central Russia (MUCR),
known by the Cheka as “The Trust”, was established in Moscow, with close

1016 M.V. Shkvarovsky, Iosiflianstvo: techenie v Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi
(Josephitism: a tendency in the Russian Orthodox Church), St. Petersburg:
Memorial, 1999, p. 236.
1017 Voeikov, So Tsarem i Bez Tsaria (With and Without the Tsar), Moscow, 1995, pp.
331, 332.
549
links with the Diaspora. However, it was infiltrated by the Cheka, and its
leaders executed. So in September, 1923 General Wrangel established ROVS (the
Russian Inter-Forces Union) – 25,000 veterans of the Civil War who recognized
the Romanov Grand Duke Kyril Vladimirovich as heir to the Throne of
Russia.1018
After the death of General Wrangel, the leader of ROVS became General
Eugene Karlovich Miller. He wrote: “For every victory it is necessary to strive
for a single goal with maximum effort. For victory over Soviet power the
Russian emigration must recognize that not one émigré can have the right to do
or say anything that could harm another émigré, that is, a man who in one way
or another fights Bolshevism, and not one émigré can have the right not to do
what is in his power and he can do in one way or another to harm communism.
“With this thought in mind he must get up in the morning and go to sleep in
the evening. From this point of view he must evaluate every step he makes,
every work, sacrificing everything personal, secondary and factional to the main
and only important thing. He must never do what could give joy to the common
enemy. All his efforts must be directed against communisn, the communists and
the communist authorities in Moscow. Discipline and self-limitation will lead to
victory.”
On September 22, 1937 this noble warrior was kidnapped by NKVD agents
from Paris to Moscow. He was sentenced by the Supreme Court of the USSR
and shot in the inner prison of the NKVD on May 11, 1939.1019
The Russian Diaspora contributed mightily to the culture of their host nations
in Europe and America in such fields as painting, music and ballet. But much
more importantly, the Russian Church Abroad brought the light of Orthodoxy
to millions. It was from this time that Russian theology and theologians began
to exert a powerful influence on western thought.
On August 14, 1938 the Second All-Diaspora Council of ROCOR consisting of

13 bishops, 26 priests and 58 laymen was convened. The main issue discussed at
it was the attitude that ROCOR should take to other Orthodox Churches.
Bishop John (Maximovich) of Shanghai said, in his report “The Situation of

the Orthodox Church after the War”: “We (the faithful of the Russian Church
Abroad) must firmly stand on the ground of the Church canons and not be with
those who depart from them. Formerly, in order to reproach canonical
irregularities in a Local Church, canonical communion with her was broken.
The Russian Church Abroad cannot act in this way since her position has not

1018 Roland Gaucher, Oppositon in the USSR 1917-1967, New York: Funk & Wagnalls,
1969.
1019 http://pereklichka.livejournal.com/67964.html).
550
been completely determined. For that reason she must not break communion
with other Churches if they do not take this step first. But, while maintaining
communion, she must not be silent about violations of Church truth…”1020
This “liberal” position was followed by a still more liberal declaration,

Protocol number 8 for August 16, which stated: “Judgement was made
concerning concelebrations with clergy belonging to the jurisdiction of
Metropolitan Sergius and his Synod. Metropolitan Anastasy pointed out that
clergy coming from Russia from the named jurisdiction were immediately
admitted to communion in prayer, and cited the opinion of Metropolitan Cyril
of Kazan in his epistle published in Church Life to the effect that the sin of
Metropolitan Sergius did not extend to the clergy subject to him. It was decreed:
to recognize that there is no obstacle to communion in prayer and
concelebration with the clergy of Metropolitan Sergius.”1021
This was a dangerous declaration which threatened to put ROCOR at odds

with the Catacomb Church, whose position in relation to Metropolitan Sergius
was stricter, and in danger of merging with World Orthodoxy. Moreover, it was
not accurate in its assertions. First, Metropolitan Cyril never expressed the view
that “there are no obstacles to prayerful communion and concelebration with
clergymen of Metropolitan Sergius”. On the contrary, in his earliest epistle, that
of 1929, he wrote: “I acknowledge it as a fulfillment of our archpastoral duty for
those Archpastors and all who consider the establishment of the so-called
‘Temporary Patriarchal Synod’ as wrong, to refrain from communion with
Metropolitan Sergius and those Archpastors who are of one mind with him.”
Nor did he ever declare that while it was wrong to have communion with the
Sergianist bishops, it was alright to have communion with their priests – which
would have been canonical nonsense in any case. True, he refrained – at that
time – from declaring the Sergianists to be graceless. However, he did say, in his
epistle of 1934, that Christians who partook of the Sergianist sacraments
knowing of Sergius’ usurpation of power and the illegality of his Synod would
receive them to their condemnation – a point for all those contemplating union
with the MP today to consider very carefully…
Moreover, we now know (as Metropolitan Anastasy did not know) that by
1937 Metropolitan Cyril’s position had hardened considerably: “The
expectations that Metropolitan Sergius would correct himself have not been
justified, but there has been enough time for the formerly ignorant members of
the Church, enough incentive and enough opportunity to investigate what has
happened; and very many have both investigated and understood that
Metropolitan Sergius is departing from that Orthodox Church which the Holy
Patriarch Tikhon entrusted to us to guard, and consequently there can be no
part or lot with him for the Orthodox. The recent events have finally made clear

1020 Monk Benjamin, “Letopis’ Tserkovnykh Sobytij Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi nachinaia
s 1917 goda” (A Chronicle of Church Events of the Orthodox Church beginning

from 1917), http://www.zlatoust.ws/letopis.htm, part 2, p. 75.
551
the renovationist [that is, heretical] nature of Sergianism…” 1022 That
Metropolitan Anastasy did not know the true position of Metropolitan Cyril, not
to mention that of a whole series of other Catacomb hierarchs and martyrs,
indicates a growing difference in outlook between the True Russian Church
inside and outside Russia…
The 1938 Council also discussed the Church’s participation in the ecumenical
movement. As we have seen, as early as 1920 the Ecumenical Patriarchate had
declared the Catholics and Protestants to be “fellow heirs” of the promises of
Christ together with the Orthodox; and the main purpose of the introduction of
the new calendar into the Greek and Romanian Churches had been to facilitate
union in prayer with the western heretics. In the inter-war years progress
towards the unia with the heretics had been slow but steady. ROCOR had said
little against the new heresy, and had sent representatives to the ecumenical
conferences in Lausanne, Edinburgh and Oxford.
In his report, Bishop Seraphim (Lyade) of Berlin defended this position,

saying that the Orthodox had always expounded and defended the sacred
dogmas. “Therefore the Orthodox delegates both in Lausanne and in Edinburgh
considered it their duty to give and publish special declarations; in this way
they clearly marked the Orthodox Church off from other confessions calling
themselves ‘churches’… We must disperse all perplexities and ideas about
Orthodoxy that are often simply caricatures… To be reconciled with the existing
situation of alienation of the larger part of the Christian world from the
Orthodox Church, and an indifferent attitude towards the ecumenical seeking of
the unity of the Church, would be an unforgiveable sin, for we must bear
responsibility for the destiny of those who still remain beyond the boundaries of
the Church and for the future destiny of the whole of the Christian world… But
while participating in the ecumenical movement, we must beware of
concessions and condescension, for this is extremely harmful and dangerous,
and confirms the heterodox in the conviction that they are members of the true
Church. In the sphere of dogmatics and other essential and basic questions we
cannot diminish our demands…”
Bishop Seraphim’s position was supported by Metropolitan Anastasy and

Count George Grabbe.
However, others took a more “rightist” position. Thus N.F. Stefanov read a
report on the influence of Masonry on the Oxford conference. And Archbishop
Seraphim (Sobolev) said: “Extra-ecclesiastical unity brings nothing but harm.
Orthodox Truth is expressed in the grace of the Holy Spirit, which is precisely
what the ecumenical movement does not want to know… Unity can take place
only on the ground of grace-filled life. The aims of the ecumenical movement

1022 Letter of Metropolitan Cyril to Hieromonk Leonid, February 23 / March 8, 1937,
Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), N 16, August 15/28, 1997, p. 7. Italics mine
(V.M.).
552
are unattainable. ‘Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the council of the
ungodly.’”
Metropolitan Anastasy said: “We have to choose between two dangers – a

temptation or a refusal to engage in missionary work in the confession of
Orthodoxy. Which danger is greater? We shall proceed from our premises. The
grace-filled Church must carry out missionary work, for in this way it is
possible to save some of those who waver. Beside the leaders who want to
disfigure Orthodoxy, there are others, for example the young, who come to
conferences with true seeking. Comparing that which they see and hear from
their own pastors and from the Orthodox pastor, they will understand the truth.
Otherwise they will remain alone. I have heard positive reviews from heterodox
of Bishop Seraphim’s speeches at conferences. We must also take into account
that the Anglo-Saxon world is in crisis, and is seeking the truth. Protestantism is
also seeking support for itself. Moreover, we have a tradition of participating in
such conferences that was established by the reposed Metropolitan Anthony. To
avoid temptation we must clarify the essence of the matter.”
A resolution was passed that ROCOR members should not take part in the
ecumenical movement. However, for the sake of missionary aims, bishops could
instruct their representatives to attend conferences and explain without
compromise the teaching of the Orthodox Church, without allowing the
slightest deviation from the Orthodox point of view.1023 This lack of clarity in the
definition of ROCOR’s relationship to the Moscow Patriarchate, to the rest of
World Orthodoxy and the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and to the ecumenical
movement in general, continued to plague ROCOR in the post-war period,
causing complications in her relations with other True Orthodox Churches. This
problem was not really resolved until Metropolitan Philaret (Voznesensky)
became first-hierarch in 1964; he firmly established that the only True Church
inside the Soviet Union was the Catacomb Church, wrote a series of “sorrowful
epistles” to the leaders of World Orthodoxy condemning their heresy, and
finally, in 1983 secured the anathema against ecumenism – probably the most
important ecclesiastical document of the second half of the twentieth century.
The incorrupt body and many miracles of Metropolitan Philaret made it clear to
all those with eyes to see that his position was the correct one, truly expressing
the mind of Christ…
Bishop John Maximovich’s report also contained an assessment of the

spiritual condition of the Diaspora as a whole that was not encouraging: “A
significant portion of the Russians that have gone abroad belong to that
intellectual class which in recent times lived according to the ideas of the West.
While belonging to the Orthodox Church and confessing themselves to be
Orthodox, the people of that class had strayed far from Orthodoxy in their
world view. The principal sin of these people was that their beliefs and way of

1023 Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 2, pp. 75-77.
553
life were not founded on the teachings of the Orthodox faith; they tried to
reconcile the rules and teachings of the Church with their own habits and
desires. For this reason they had, on the one hand, very little interest in the
essence of Orthodox teaching, often even considering the Church’s dogmatic
teaching completely unessential, and, on the other hand, they fulfilled the
requirements and rites of the Orthodox Church but only insofar as this did not
interfere with their more European than Russian way of life. This gave rise to
their disdain for the fasts, to their going to church for only a short time (and
then only to satisfy a more aesthetic than religious feeling) and to a thorough
lack of understanding of religion as the principal foundation of man’s spiritual
life. Many, of course, were inwardly otherwise disposed, but few possessed
sufficient strength of spirit and the ability to manifest it outwardly in their way
of life.
“In the social sphere this class also lived by the ideas of the West. Without
giving any room at all to the influence of the Church, they strove to rebuild the
whole life of Russia, especially in the realm of government, according to
Western models. This is why in recent times an especially bitter struggle was
waged against the government. Liberal reforms and the democratic structuring
of Russia became, as it were, a new faith. Not to confess this idea meant that one
was behind the times. Seized with a thirst for power and utilizing for their
struggle with the monarchy widespread slander against the Royal Family, the
intelligentsia brought Imperial Russia to its downfall and prepared the way for
the Communist regime. Then, unreconciled to the thought of losing the power
for which they had waited for so long, they declared war on the Communists, in
the beginning mainly out of their unwillingness to cede them power. The
struggle against Soviet power subsequently involved broad sectors of the
populace, especially drawing in the youth to an outburst of enthusiasm to
reconstruct a ‘United, indivisible Russia’, at the cost of their lives. There were
many exploits which manifested the valor of the Christ-loved Russian army, but
the Russian nation proved itself still unprepared for liberation, and the
Communists turned out to be the victors.
“The intelligentsia was partially annihilated and partially it fled abroad to

save itself. Meanwhile, the Communists showed their true colors and, together
with the intelligentsia, large sections of the population left Russia, in part to
save their lives and in part because of ideology: they did not want to serve the
Communists. Finding themselves abroad, the Russian people experienced great
spiritual shocks. A significant crisis occurred in the souls of a majority, which
was marked by a mass return of the intelligentsia to the Church. Many churches
abroad are filled primarily by these people. The intelligentsia took an interest in
questions of spiritual life and began to take an active part in church affairs.
Numerous circles and societies were formed for the purpose of religious
enlightenment. Members study the Holy Scriptures, the works of the Holy
Fathers, general spiritual life and theological questions, and many of them have
become clergy.
554
“However, all these gratifying manifestations also had a negative aspect. Far
from all of those who returned to the faith adopted the Orthodox teaching in its
entirety. The proud mind could not be reconciled to the fact that, until then, it
had stood on a false path. Many began to attempt to reconcile Christian teaching
with their previous views and ideas. This resulted in the appearance of a whole
series of new religious-philosophical trends, some completely alien to Church
teaching. Among them Sophiology was especially widespread.1024 It is based on
the recognition of man’s worth in and of himself and expresses the psychology
of the intelligentsia.
“As a teaching, Sophiology is known to a comparatively small group of

people and very few openly espouse it. Nonetheless, a significant part of the
immigrant intelligentsia is spiritually related to it because the psychology of
Sophiology is based on the worship of man, not as a humble servant of God, but
rather as a little god himself, who has no need for being blindly obedient to the
Lord God. The feeling of keen pride, joined with faith in the possibility of man
living by his own wisdom, is quite characteristic of many people considered to
be cultured by today’s standards, who place their own reasonings above all else
and do not wish to be obedient in everything to the teaching of the Church,
which they regard favourably but with condescension. Because of this, the
Church Abroad has been rocked by a series of schisms which have harmed her
up till now and have drawn away even a part of the hierarchy. This

1024Sophiology, or Sophianism, was invented by the Paris-based theologian Fr.
Sergius Bulgakov. The heresy centred on the mythological, quasi-divine figure of
Sophia, and was based, according to Archbishop Theophan of Poltava in a letter he
wrote in 1930, “on the book of Fr. [Paul] Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the
Truth. But Florensky borrowed the idea of Sophia from V.S. Soloviev. And V.S.
Soloviev borrowed it from the medieval mystics.
“In V.S. Soloviev Sophia is the feminine principle of God, His ‘other’. Florensky
tries to prove that Sophia, as the feminine principle of God, is a special substance.
He tries to find this teaching in St. Athanasius the Great and in Russian
iconography. Protopriest Bulgakov accepts on faith the basic conclusions of
Florensky, but partly changes the form of this teaching, and partly gives it a new
foundation. In Bulgakov this teaching has two variants: a) originally it is a special
Hypostasis, although not of one essence with the Holy Trinity (in the book The
Unwaning Light), b) later it is not a Hypostasis but ‘hypostasisness’. In this latter
form it is an energy of God coming from the essence of God through the
Hypostases of the Divinity into the world and finding for itself its highest ‘created
union’ in the Mother of God. Consequently, according to this variant, Sophia is not
a special substance, but the Mother of God.
“According to the Church teaching, which is especially clearly revealed in St.
Athanasius the Great, the Sophia-Wisdom of God is the Lord Jesus Christ.
“Here, in the most general terms, is the essence of Protopriest Bulgakov’s
teaching on Sophia! To expound any philosophical teaching shortly is very
difficult, and so it is difficult to expound shortly the teaching of the ‘sophianists’
on Sophia. This teaching of theirs becomes clear only in connection the whole of
their philosophical system. But to expound the latter shortly is also impossible.
One can say only: their philosophy is the philosophy of ‘panentheism’, that is, a
moderate form of ‘pantheism’. The originator of this ‘panentheism’ in Russia is
V.S. Soloviev.”
In 1935 both the Moscow Patriarchate and ROCOR condemned Sophianism as
heretical. (V.M.)
555
consciousness of a feeling of personal worthiness is manifested also in social
affairs, where each person who has advanced a little among the ranks, or thinks
he has, puts his own opinion higher than everyone’s and tries to be a leader. As
a result, Russian society is split into countless parties and groups irreconcilably
at odds with each other, each trying to put forwards its own program, which is
sometimes a thoroughly developed system and sometimes simply an appeal to
follow this or that personality.
“With the hope of saving and resurrecting Russia through the realization of
their programs, these social activists almost always lose sight of the fact that
besides human activity making history, there moves the hand of God. The
Russian people as a whole has committed great sins, which are the reasons for
the present misfortunes; namely, oath-breaking and regicide. Civic and military
leaders renounced their obedience and loyalty to the Tsar, even before his
abdication, forcing the latter upon him, who did not want internal bloodshed.
The people openly and noisily greeted this act, without any loud protest
anywhere. This renunciation of obedience was a breach of the oath taken to the
Emperor and his lawful heirs. On the heads of those who committed this crime
fell the curses of their forefathers, the Zemsky Sobor of 1613, which imposed a
curse on those who disobeyed its resolutions. The ones guilty of the sin of
regicide are not only those who physically performed the deed but the people as
a whole, who rejoiced when the Tsar was overthrown and allowed his
degradation, his arrest and exile, leaving him defenceless in the hands of
criminals, which itself spelled out the end.
“Thus, the calamity which befell Russia is the direct result of terrible sins,
and her rebirth is possible only after she has been cleansed from them. However,
until now there has been no real repentance; the crimes that were committed
have not been openly condemned, and many active participants in the
Revolution continue even now to assert that at the time it was impossible to act
otherwise.
“By not voicing an outright condemnation of the February Revolution, of the

uprising against the Anointed One of God, the Russian people continue to
participate in the sin, especially when they defend the fruits of the Revolution,
for in the words of the Apostle Paul, those men are especially sinful who,
‘knowing… that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only
do the same but also approve of those who practice them’ (Romans 1.32).
“While punishing the Russian people, the Lord at the same time is pointing
out the way to salvation by making them teachers of Orthodoxy throughout the
world. The Russian Diaspora has acquainted the four corners of the earth with
Orthodoxy, for a significant part of the Russian immigration unconsciously
preaches Orthodoxy. Everywhere, wherever Russians live, they build little
refugee churches or even majestic cathedrals, or simply serve in premises
adapted for this purpose.
556
“The majority of Russian refugees are not familiar with the religious
tendencies of their intelligentsia, and they are nourished by those spiritual
reserves which they accumulated in the homeland. Large masses of refugees
attend Divine services, some of them actively participate in them, helping with
the singing and reading on cliros and serving in the altar. Affiliated
organizations have been established which take upon themselves the
responsibility of maintaining the churches, often performing charitable work as
well.
“Looking at the faithful who pack the churches on feast days, one might
think that in fact the Russian people have turned to the Church and are
repenting of their sins. However, if you compare the number who go to church
with the number of Russians who live in a given place, it turns out that about
one-tenth of the Russian population regularly goes to church. Approximately
the same number attend Divine services on major feasts, and the rest either very
rarely – on some particular occasions – go to church and occasionally pray at
home, or have left the Church altogether. The latter sometimes is a conscious
choice under sectarian or anti-religious influences, but in most cases it is simply
because people do not live in a spiritual manner; they grow hard, their souls
become crude, and sometimes they become outright nihilists.
“The great majority of Russians have a hard life full of personal difficulties
and material deprivation. Despite the hospitable attitude towards us in some
countries, especially in our fraternal Yugoslavia, whose government and people
are doing everything possible to show their love for Russia and to ease the grief
of the Russian exiles, still, Russians everywhere feel the bitterness of being
deprived of their homeland. Their surrounding environment reminds them that
they are strangers and must adapt to customs that are often foreign to them,
feeding of the crumbs that fall from the table of their hosts. Even in those
countries which are very well disposed towards us, it is natural that in hiring
practices preference should be given to the country’s citizens; and with the
current difficult situations of most countries, Russians often cannot find work.
Even those who are relatively well provided for are constantly make to feel their
lack of rights in the absence of organizations which could protect them from
injustices. Although only a comparatively insignificant numbe have been
completely absorbed into local society, it quite often happens in such cases that
they become totally alienated from their own people and their own country.
“In such a difficult situation in all respects, the Russian people abroad have
shown a remarkable degree of patient endurance and self-sacrifice. It is as if
they have forgotten about their formerly wonderful (for many) conditions of life,
their service to their homeland and its allies in the Great War, their education
and everything else that might prompt them to strive for a comfortable life. In
their exile they have taken up every kind of work and occupation to make a
living for themselves abroad. Former nobles and generals have become simple
workmen, artisans and petty merchants, not disdaining any type of work and
remembering that no work is degrading, provided it is not bound up with any
immoral activity. The Russian intelligentsia in this respect has manifested an
557
ability, whatever the situation, to preserve its vitality and to overcome
everything that stands in the way of its existence and development. It has also
shown that it had lofty spiritual qualities, that it is capable of being humble and
long-suffering.
“The school of refugee life has morally regenerated and elevated many
people. One has to give honor and credit to those who bear their refugee cross
doing difficult work to which they are unaccustomed, living in conditions
which previously they did not know or even think of. Remaining firm in spirit,
they have maintained a nobility of soul and ardent love for their homeland, and,
repenting over their former sins, they endure their trial without complaints.
Truly, many of them, men and women, are now more glorious in their
dishonour than in the years of their glory. The spiritual wealth which they have
now acquired is better than the material wealth they left in the homeland, and
their souls, like gold purified by fire, have been cleansed in the fire of suffering
and burn like brightly glowing lamps…”1025

1025 St. John Maximovich, “The Spiritual Condition of the Russian People in the
Diaspora”, in Man of God, Redding, Ca.: Nikodemos Orthodox Publication Society,

1994, pp. 204-210.
558
60. PERSECUTION IN ROMANIA
Like several Balkan countries, and indeed Europe as a whole,

Romania during the 1930s was torn by the rivalry between the two
totalitarian powers, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Romania was in
a particularly vulnerable position because she shared a frontier with
the Soviets, across which, in the event of a Soviet-German war, the
Soviets would undoubtedly want to send their troops. The question
was: should Romania allow it?
As is revealed in the Memoirs of Prince Michael Sturdza 1026, on

October 22, 1934 Göring, speaking in the name of Hitler, set forth the
following proposal to the Romanian Ambassador in Berlin, Petrescu-
Comnen: a guarantee of all Romania’s frontiers, including those with
Soviet Russia and Hungary and the complete rearmament with the
most modern weapons of Romania’s military forces. Germany did not
ask Romania to abandon any of her alliances. The only thing she asked
in exchange was a pledge to oppose any attempt of the Soviet troops
to cross Romania’s territory. Titulescu, Romania's pro-western Foreign
Minister at the time, concealed Petrescu-Comnen's report, and the
German proposals, though repeated several times before the outbreak
of World War Two, continued to be rejected by Romanian statesman.
However, there was a strong movement in favour of a

rapprochement with Germany within Romania. Because of its pro-
fascist, anti-semitic and occasionally violent nature, this, the
Legionnaire or Iron Guard movement has had a bad press generally in
the West. 1027 And there can be no doubt about its pro-fascism:

1026 Sturdza, The Suicide of Europe: Memoirs of Prince Michel Sturdza, Former
Foreign Minister of Rumania, Belmont, Mass.: Western Islands, 1968.

1027 See, for example, Michael Burleigh’s assessment: “Few European Fascist
movements went so far as to proclaim that ‘God is a Fascist!’ or that ‘the ultimate
goal of the Nation must be resurrection in Christ!’ Romania was the exception.
Romanian Fascists wanted ‘a Romania in delirium’ and they largely got one. The
Legion of the Archangel Michael was founded in 1927 in honour of the archangel,
who had allegedly visited Corneliu Codreanu, its chief ideologist, while he was in
prison. It was the only European Fascist movement with religion (in this case
Romanian Orthodoxy) at its core. In 1930 the Legion was renamed the Iron Guard.
While rivalling only the Nazis in the ferocity of their hatred of Jews, these
Romanian Fascists were sui generis in their fusion of political militancy with
Orthodox mysticism into a truly lethal whole. One of the Legion’s intellectual
luminaries, the world-renowned anthropologist Mircea Eliade, described the
legionary ideal as ‘a harsh Christian spirituality’. Its four commandments were
‘belief in God; faith in our mission; love for one another; son’. The goal of a ‘new
moral man’ may have been a totalitarian commonplace, but the ‘resurrection of the
[Romanian] people in front of God’s throne’ was not routine in such circles. But
then few European Fascists were induced into an elite called the Brotherhood of
Christ by sipping from a communal cup of blood filled from slashes in their own
arms, or went around with little bags of soil tied around their necks. Nor did they
do frenzied dances after chopping opponents into hundreds of pieces. Not for
559
documentary films show the Legionnaires making the fascist salute,
and their leader, Corneliu Codreanu, declared on November 30, 1937:
"Forty-eight hours after the victory of the Legionary Movement,
Rumania will be allied to Rome and Berlin, thus entering the line of its
historical world-mission: the defense of the Cross, of Christian Culture
and Civilization."
Nevertheless, in view of its political and religious importance, and

its brave resistance to Soviet influence in Romania, for which
Codreanu and several other legionnaires paid with their lives, it will
be worth citing more positive estimates of its significance.
“The Legionary Movement,” writes Thomas Haas, “was founded on

June 24, 1927, under the name of the Legion of the Archangel Michael,
by one of the truly great men of our era. Corneliu Codreanu was born
on September 13, 1899 in Husi, a town in northern Moldavia, where
his father was a teacher at the local lycee. He attended the famous
military school Manastirea Dealului and the Infantry Officer's school.
The beginning of what was to be his career and mission can be dated
from January 1918. After the Bolshevik takeover in Petrograd, the
Russian troops which had been fighting alongside their Rumanian
allies degenerated into no more than a collection of drinking, looting,
raping rabble. During that fateful January, Codreanu organized a
group of high school students to fight the Russian marauders, who
were menacing the Moldavian city of Iasi. Shortly thereafter he
organized the Guard of National Conscience from among the students
and workers of Iasi.
“Codreanu reached what can be considered a point of no return in

his tragic life, a life entirely dedicated to the battle for the moral
purity and the welfare and the glory of his nation, in 1922 when he
organized the Association of Christian Students. He and twenty-six
students took a pledge of honor, in a religious ceremony, to continue
for the rest of their lives the nationalist fight—a pledge to which many
of them remained faithful even unto their deaths. In 1923 he founded
the League of National Christian Defense (LANC, which polled
120,000 votes in the election of 1926). When Codreanu returned to
Rumania in 1927 after a period of study at Grenoble University, LANC
had disintegrated into a collection of feuding splinter groups. From
the best of the earlier league, he organized the Legion of the
Archangel Michael which came to be called the Legionary Movement.
In 1930 a group of hard-core members formed an elite section within
the Legion, called the Iron Guard. In time the Legion came to be

nothing was the prison massacre of Iron Guard leaders – including the captain
Codreanu himself – by supporters of King Carol II known to local wits as ‘the
Night of the Vampires’. Although the Romanian elites emasculated the Guard’s
leadership, much of their furious potential was at that elite’s disposal…” (Sacred
Causes, London: Harper Perennial, 2007, p. 270)
560
known by the name of this elite group. Although the two are almost
synonymous, the reader should keep in mind that they represent two
different aspects of the Movement.
“The purpose of the Legionary Movement was the defense of the

endangered nation and of all the spiritual and historic values which
formed the texture of Rumania's national existence…
“We think it is fitting to quote the basic rules of the organization.

These are contained in the Manual of Legionary Laws, written for the
use of the head of each Legionary group.
“The Law of Discipline: [The] Legionary [must] be obedient;

without discipline we will not win. Follow your chief for better or
worse.
“The Law of Work: Do your daily work. Work with joy. Let the
reward of your work be not any material profit, but the satisfaction
that you have contributed something to the glory of the Legion and
the greatness of your country.
“The Law of Silence: Talk little. Talk only when you must. Your
eloquence is in deeds. Let others talk; you do.
“The Law of Education: You must become another man. A hero.
“The Law of Assistance: Help your brother in distress. Do not

abandon him.
“The Law of Honor: Follow only the ways shown by honor. Fight.
Never be a coward. Leave to others the ways of infamy. Better fall
fighting the way of honor, than to conquer by infamy.” 1028
Monk Moise gives another positive assessment: “After wandering

off in different directions, Codreanu and other young people, troubled
by the need to do something for their country, realized that what was
needed to instigate a profound change in society was not so much a
new party or a new political program – as they themselves had been
tempted to believe – but rather education of a Christian and national
character leading to moral renewal. ‘This country [wrote Codreanu] is
perishing from lack of people, not from a lack of programs. This is our
opinion. It is not programs that we must create, but people, new
people… Therefore the cornerstone from which the Legion sets out is
humankind, not political programs. The reform of people, not the
reform of political programs. Therefore, the Legion of the Archangel
Michael will rather be a school and army than a political party. The

1028 Haas, introduction to Sturdza, op. cit., pp. xvii-xix.
561
Romanian people, at this point in its history, do not need a great
politician, as some mistakenly believe, but a great educator and leader
to vanquish the powers of evil and shatter the ranks of evildoers. In
order to do this, however, he must first overcome the evil in himself
and in his brethren.’
“In order to form a Legionnaire elite, the best from among the
youth were selected, beginning with those of high school age. This
organization of young men was named Frąţia de Cruce (FDC), the
Brotherhood of the Cross. Those targeted were screened according to
certain criteria: faithfulness and attendance at church, good academic
achievement, respectfulness toward others, love of country, honesty,
etc. Candidates were not admitted to the FDC automatically but in
accordance with certain requirements. It set out be an elite
organization that would admit only the best.
“Those admitted found an atmosphere of love, seriousness, and

enthusiasm highly suited to their spiritual growth. They received a
primarily moral and spiritual education, along Christian lines; they
were encouraged to participate in the sacraments of confession, to
adhere to a prayer schedule, to fast, to avoid bodily sins, to be
merciful, correct, punctual, sympathetic, ready to help others,
obedient, and studious. Since work played an important role in
Legionnaire training, work camps were organized in which, along
with Legionnaires, brothers of the cross participated in the construction
and repair of churches, schools, roads, bridges, levees, etc. They
worked in an atmosphere of youthful enthusiasm, while the camps
also provided an opportunity for the formation and strengthening of
spiritual ties.
“Their meetings began with a prayer commemorating those who

had died for the Legionnaire cause, followed by a reading from the
New Testament. At every meeting, those present took turns
introducing a theme having to do with faith, morality, national
history, culture, etc. Legionnaire songs were sung and memorized;
participants took turns reciting from Legionnaire writings, while the
final portions of meetings were reserved for decision-making
regarding new goodwill projects that needed to be undertaken such as
help for someone in need, collection of assistance for the family of an
arrested Legionnaire, or similar work for the benefit of their brethren.
“The young men who gathered together in the FDC made up a real
family; they were taught to love one another and to help one another
in time of need. The friendship that existed between them sprang from
an impressive degree of love and sincerity. The most original part of
the meetings was the moment of friendship or sincerity, a form of
public ‘confession’ of all mistakes made since the last meeting. This
did not replace the sacrament of confession – each of them also
562
confessed to his spiritual father; rather, it was an expression of the
trust and sincerity that united them. After they all confessed their
mistakes, each of them reported what mistakes they’d noticed among
the others who were present. Then each of them received a ‘penance’…
“In addition to educational activity, the brothers of the cross

participated in the political activity of the Legion through the
distribution of leaflets and posters and through occasional
involvement in electoral propaganda. They also participated in the
collection of funds for imprisoned Legionnaires and their families…
“The moral-spiritual component of this education was interwoven

with a national-heroic component. The accent was placed on love of
country and on knowledge of history and well-known Romanians.
There was pronounced consideration of historical struggles and
national heroes, the Legionnaires identifying with these heroes and
looking to them as models. The intention was to cultivate the heroic
and soldierly qualities of these young men: courage, strength of will,
steadfastness, a spirit of sacrifice, discipline, the ability to confront
danger, etc.
“The Legionnaires’ organization and discipline were of military

inspiration, but this freely-assumed discipline did not have an air of
dryness and barrack-like rigidity for those involved. The harshness
was alleviated by their spiritual relationships and states of spirit. The
conduct of a brother of the cross, like that of a Legionnaire, had to be
dignified, firm, disciplined, and orderly, like that of a soldier…
“A very important trait for … the Legionnaire … was a sense of

justice. While being obligated by their code of conduct not to do
anything that would stain their sense of honor or that would prevent
them from supporting any just cause, this very sense of honor also
required them to react when anyone offended them. This kind of
conduct is debatable from a Christian point of view, which advocates
humility and requires that one turn the other cheek when struck.
When the Legionnaire encountered Christianity in all its profundity in
the Communist prisons, this concept of honor turned out to be a
source of great difficulty for them, as they realized that the passion of
pride can lie behind it…
“Because measures were taken against the Legion such that they
were almost constantly persecuted, the education of the brothers of the
cross did not follow its natural course. Forced to meet in secret,
sheltered from the far-reaching sight of the authorities, without
experienced guides, these young men were not always able to benefit
from a solid spiritual education. Borne along primarily by enthusiasm
and sincerity, they nevertheless lacked a profoundly Christian vision,
which most of them would acquire in prison. The seeds sown by
563
training in the Brotherhood of the Cross, despite their shortcomings,
were significant [and] important, for the young men received a
spiritual foundation based on Christian principles that was much more
solid than any training offered in traditional, academic milieus. The
Christian conduct they later displayed in prison found its source in
these principles that formed their characters, principles which
cultivated the virtues of steadfastness, solidarity, and a spirit of
sacrifice, while many non-Legionnaires, as Steinhardt noted, lost their
balance, humanity, and self-control.” 1029
Perhaps the finest fruit of the Legionnaire movement was a group

of martyrs who suffered in Tărgu-Ocna in the 1950s. Valeriu Gafencu
was imprisoned by the communists precisely because of his training in
the Legionnaire spirit. He was attracted to the religious rather than
the political aspects of the movement, was opposed to its occasional
violence and anti-semitism, and instilled in the quasi-monastic
community that formed around him in the camp-hospital an Orthodox
spirit of love and self-sacrifice. His group therefore represented
Legionnairism purged of all dubious political elements and striving
only to fulfil the commandments of God in the spirit of Orthodox
Christianity.
The Legionnaires did not separate from the official, new calendar
church. Nevertheless, in their own way they represented a separation
from the spiritual deadness of that church, whose head, Patriarch
Miron became prime minister in the cabinet of the “royal dictatorship”
of King Charles II in February, 1938. Immediately there began a severe
persecution of the Legionnaires. In April Codreanu was arrested and
sentenced to ten years in prison. In November he was killed…
Although the Romanian True Orthodox Church, unlike the

Legionnaire movement, was a purely spiritual organization, it is not
surprising that its leaders should have been put into the same
category. Thus in 1938 the authorities decided to accuse the True
Orthodox leader Fr. Glycherie of being an Iron Guard. “After Father
Glicherie was arrested in 1936,” writes Constantin Bujor, “all means of
intimidation were employed to shatter his nervous system. He was
incarcerated for more than two years in a variety of prisons, being
transferred from one jail to another; Bucharest, Iezeru, Rāmnicu
Vālcea, Iezeru, Rāmnicu Vālcea, Craiova, Bucharest, Iaşi, Iezeru, and
Piatra Niamţ. The accusation of being an Old Calendarist could not
carry too long a sentence, and Father Glicherie was thus finally set at
liberty in 1938 – much to the chagrin of those who had gone to such

1029 Monk Moise, The Saint of the Prisons, Sibiu: Agnos, 2009, pp. 28-32, 32-34, 34-35,
36-37. For another positive assessment of the Legionnaire movement, see

Alexander Ronnett and Faust Bradescu, “The Legionary Movement in Romania”,
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p193_Ronnett.html.
564
great lengths to have him arrested. So, once again, they fabricated
false charges, this time accusing him of more serious infractions in
order to have him decisively condemned. Thus, Hieromonk Glicherie
was falsely accused of being active in the Legionary Movement.
Although Legionnaires were highly regarded and visible in Romanian
political life at this time, the Monarch had dictatorially abolished all
political parties. Ironically, Father Glicherie was also falsely accused
at the same time of Communist or Bolshevik activity, because the
Russian Orthodox Church followed the Julian Calendar. This, too, was
a serious charge: the Communists were mortal enemies of Romania,
and therefore, through guilt by association, the Old Calendarists were
enemies of the State. Accusations of these kinds provoked a variety of
reactions and even frightened many people, who came to believe that
the Old Calendarists posed a danger to society. To discourage
supporters of the Old Calendar Church, appropriate punishments
were levied. Plenty of ‘witnesses’, denunciations, and contrived ‘facts’
could easily be produced; the elimination of inconvenient opponents
by such methods was the order of the day. Thus, in 1938, Father
Glicherie was arrested and sent to Miercurea Ciuc to a death camp for
political prisoners. After nine months’ imprisonment, he was
scheduled for execution with a group of Legionnaires. Miraculously,
at the very moment that he was to face the firing squad, he was saved
by the government’s unexpected amnesty of the camp’s remaining
detainees…” 1030
K.V. Glazkov writes that while Fr. Glycherie was in this camp
“there came an order to divide all the prisoners into two parts and
shoot one part and then the other. When the first group had been shot,
Fr. Glycherie and several legionnaires in the second group prayed a
thanksgiving moleben to the Lord God and the Mother of God for
counting them worthy of death in the Orthodox faith. The Lord
worked a miracle – suddenly there arrived a governmental order
decreeing clemency.” 1031
“King Carol II’s attempt to crush the Legionary movement, rather

than weakening it, strengthened it more. Moreover, the king’s grasp
on power was slipping because of the corruption of his regime and its
powerlessness to oppose the territorial losses to neighboring states in
1940 [Bessarabia, was occupied by the Red Army]. Carol was thus
forced to accommodate the Legionnaires, who even gained positions in
the government. The tables were finally turned on him when General
(later Marshal) Ion Antonescu became President of the Council of
Ministers and forged an alliance with the Iron Guard. On August

Bujor, op. cit., pp. 99-101
1030
1031Glazkov, “Istoricheskie prichiny nekotorykh sobitij v istorii Rumynskoj
Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi do II Mirovoj vojny” (The Historical Reasons for some Events
in the History of the Romanian Orthodox Church before the Second World War),
Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), NN 3-4, May-August, 2000, pp. 57-58.
565
24/September 6, 1940, King Carol II was forced to abdicate in favour
of the previous Monarch, his son Mihai; Antonescu dubbed himself
Conducător Statului, ‘Leader of the State’ [a title used by the
murdered Iron Guard leader Codreanu]; Horia Sima (1907-1993),
Commander of the Iron Guard, became Vice-President of the Council
of Ministers, and the National Legionary State of Romania was
formally established. Antonescu’s alliance with the Iron Guard was
one of political expediency, however, not one of ideological
conviction; its draconian methods and goals often clashed with his
own personal authoritarian agendum. The Legionnaires thus betrayed
Antonescu, staging a coup d’état in January of 1941, which, lacking
support from the Third Reich of Germany, proved abortive. This
enabled Antonescu, with the blessing of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), to
suppress the Iron Guard, thereby consolidating his power as military
dictator of Romania.” 1032
As for the Romanian True Orthodox (Old Calendarists), “with the outbreak
of World War II in 1939, Father Glycherie was set free and, along with his
beloved co-struggler, Deacon David Bidascu, fled into the forest. There the two
lived in indescribable deprivation and hardship, especially during the winter. In
the midst of heavy snows, when their few secret supporters could not get frugal
provisions to them, the Fathers were obliged to eat worms! However, Divine
Providence protected them from their persecutors and, directed by that same
Providence, the birds of the sky would erase traces of the Fathers’ footprints in
the snow by flying about and flapping their wings in the snow. And despite the
harsh cold, not once did they light a fire, lest the smoke might betray their
refuge. (The cold often approaches thirty degrees below zero during the winter
in Romania.) Other ascetics were also hidden in the deserts, among them Father
Damascene, Father Paisius, et al.”1033

Bujor, op. cit., p. 101, translator’s note.
1032
Metropolitan Cyprian, "The True Orthodox Christians of Romania", The

1033
Orthodox Word, January-February, 1982, vol. 18, N 1 (102).
566
61. THE MOLOTOV-RIBBENTROP PACT
After Munich and the fall of Prague, public opinion in Britain began to turn
against appeasement. “Chamberlain told the Commons… that ‘we must arm
ourselves to the teeth’, and the government doubled defence spending from
1938 to 1939, further fuelling economic recovery. Although weakened by the
Depression, and by earlier defence cuts, the aircraft, engineering and
shipbuilding industries were among the strongest in the world. Production for
exports was slashed. Air defences took shape, with a chain of radar stations
being built covering the southern and eastern coasts, and by the summer of 1939
early all biplanes had been replaced by monoplances, mostly Hawker Hunters.
The navy was outbuilding every other in the world, and by 1939 it had more
battleships, aircraft carriers and cruisers than any other country…
“… The Prime Minister surprised the Commons on 6 February with a sudden

pledge of support to France – ‘Really Chamberlain is an astonishing and
perplexing old boy,’ sighed the MP Harold Nicolson. ‘We have at last got on top
of the dictators,’ wrote Chamberlain to his sister on 19 February. ‘Of course, that
doesn’t mean I want to bully them.’ Joint military planning belatedly began, and
it was decided to expand the army’s Field Force from two to nineteen divisions.
Offers of support were showered on eastern Europe, especially Romania
(important for its oil) and Poland. Poland was the crux, as the Nazis repeated
their Sudetenland tactic, using as a pretext for aggression Danzig (an
international city) and the corridor through German territory connecting Poland
with the sea. On 31 March 1939 Chamberlain told the Commons that Britain and
France would aid Poland if its independence were endangered. This did not
mean that he was resolved to face an inevitable war. He still hoped to maintain
peace by combining deterrence (building bombers and finding allies) with
appeasement (offering large slices of Africe and economic favours).
“Deterrence was also the aim of the unenthusiastic Franco-British attempt in

August 1939 to explore alliance with the Soviet Union, even today a
controversial issue. The left had long been keen to cooperate with what it
considered ‘the most peaceful Great Power’, and so was Churchill. Neither
Chamberlain nor Stalin had any reason to trust the other. It was not clear – and
is still not – what the crafty and paranoid Staline really wanted and whether he
would or could have provided effective aid in case of war, having recently
slaughtered his senior military commanders. Moreover, for obvious reasons
neither Poland nor Romania wanted the Red Army on their soil. Stalin seems to
have been keen on promoting a war between Germany and the Western Powers,
and on 24 August the Soviet Union astonished the world by announcing a non-
aggression pact with Nazi Germany: all the ‘isms’, quipped a Foreign Office
official, had become ‘wasisms’. This may be what Stalin had intended all along:
negotiations with France and Britain being bargaining counters to get a good
deal from Hitler, promote a destructive war among the ‘imperialist’ states, seize
territory, and gain time to prepare for war with Japan. Soviet exports of food
567
and raw materials to Germany rose by 2,000 percent. This set the seal on Hitler’s
war…”1034
As Professor Andrei Zubov writes, in spite of the Soviet Union’s

huge advantage over Germany in tanks, airplanes and artillery, “he
would still not be able to conquer all the other countries. So Stalin’s
calculation was that he should push the Western Axis powers into
conflict with the Atlantic democracies, which would lead to their
mutual extermination in the fire of war.” 1035 And so in August, 1939,
after years of reviling each other, the two states in the persons of their
foreign ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop signed a non-aggression
pact whose secret protocols in effect divided up the vast regions
between the two powers between them.
The pact was sealed, according to Richard Overy, “because, in 1939,

neither wanted a war with the other. Hitler hoped that the pact would
weaken the resolve of Britain and France to confront him over the
German-Polish war, launched on 1 September 1939; when it did not,
the pact helped to secure the German rear and supplied the German
war economy with a large list of essential supplies. Stalin approved
the pact, despite the shock it represented to the many thousands of
communists worldwide who took Soviet anti-fascism for granted,
because it allowed the Soviet Union to consolidate its security position
in eastern Europe, acquire vanguard technologies from German
industry, and, above all, to avoid war at the side of two capitalist
empires, Britain and France, against another capitalist state,
Germany.” 1036
Max Hastings writes: “The secret protocols of the Nazi-Soviet pact,

delineating the parties’ territorial ambitions, were unknown in Western capitals
until German archives were captured in 1945. But in September 1939, many
citizens of the democracies perceived Russia and Germany alike as their foes.
The novelist Evelyn Waugh’s fictional alter ego, Guy Crouchback, adopted a
view shared by many European conservatives: Stalin’s deal with Hitler, ‘news
that shook the politicians and young poets of a dozen capital cities, brought
deep peace to our English heart… The enemy at last was plain in view, huge
and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.’ A few
politicians aspired to separate Russia and Germany, to seek the support of Stalin
to defeat the greater evil of Hitler. Until June 1941, however, such a prospect
seemed remote: the two dictatorships were viewed as common enemies of the
democracies.”1037
Although the two dictatorships were indeed the common enemies of the
democracies, still some explanation is required why, after so many years of

1034 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 689-690.
1035 Zubov, quoted on Facebook by Tatiana Spektor, May 8, 2017,
1036 Overy, The Dictators, London: Penguin Books, 2005, pp. 484-485.
1037 Hastings, All Hell Let Loose, London: HarperPress, 2011, p. 8.
568
hating and fighting each others, they should now have formed an alliance that
left so many of their supporters speechless in surprise and incomprehension…
Part of the explanation lies in the fact that the Nazis and the communists
were more similar than their open enmity appeared to admit. “At the conscious
level,” writes Norman Davies, “communists and fascists were schooled to stress
their differences. On the other hand, when pressed to summarize their
convictions, they often gave strikingly similar answers. One said, ‘For us Soviet
patriots, the homeland and communism became fused into one inseparable
whole.’ Another put it thus: ‘Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism,
and extracted the [real] meaning of socialism from it. It also took Nationalism
from the cowardly bourgeois parties. Throwing them together into the cauldron
of our way of life, the synthesis emerged as clear as crystal – German National
Socialism.’ It is not for nothing that people treated to such oratory were apt to
think of communists as ‘red fascists’ and of fascists as ‘brown communists’.”1038
It is therefore not surprising that the leaders of the two movements should
have respected each other. Each was more complimentary of the other than
either was of the Western democrats. Thus “Hitler called Stalin ‘one of the
greatest living human beings’. The Soviet leader, he said, ‘towered above the
democratic figures of the Anglo-Saxon powers’.” 1039 Towards the end, he
expressed the wish that he had purged his generals as Stalin had so wisely
purged his! Stalin for his part considered Hitler to be “a very able man but not
basically intelligent, lacking in culture and with a primitive approach to political
matters”1040 – which was mild criticism by comparison with what he said of the
great majority of his fellow men.
Moreover, as Daniel Pipes points out, “Stalin facilitated the Nazi ascent to
power in 1933 by refusing to let the German Communist party ally with the
Social Democrats. Already in April 1936 the two sides signed an economic
agreement; thereafter, Stalin worked hard to reach a political accord with Hitler.
‘We must come to terms with a superior power like Nazi Germany,’ an aide
quotes him saying. In early 1938 Stalin initiated diplomatic contact with Hitler
and did him more favors, completely staying out of the Czechoslovak crisis and
letting collapse the Republican forces in Spain.”1041
“The Second World War,” writes Kirill Alexandrov, ”which was largely the
result, not only of the ambitions of Hitler, but also of the policies of Stalin,
turned out to be the most terrible national woe. In 1939-40, Stalin not only
established a common state boundary with Nazi Germany, but, according to the
open acknowledgement of the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Molotov,
guaranteed ‘peaceful confidence in the East’ for Hitler’s Reich, so that it could

1038 Davies, Europe, op. cit., p. 945.
1040 Fenby, op. cit., p. 239.
1041 Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy, New York: The Free Press, pp. 102-103.
569
carry on a successful war in Europe. Hitler thereby obtained time and
opportunity to prepare an attack on the USSR in the summer of 1941.
“The war, in which according to the vivid expression of the writer and front-
line soldier Victor Astafiev, Stalin and Zhukov [Stalin’s leading general] ‘burned
the Russian people and Russia in the fire of war’, took the woes of the people to
their extreme. ‘Russia simply ceased to exist. It is terrible to say it, but the
country-victor disappeared, annihilated itself, wrote Astafyev… The victims among
our people in the Second World War, including the Soviet-Polish war of 1939
and the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-40, are estimated at roughly 27 million
1042
people, including more than 17 million men between the ages of 15 and 59.”

These figures, whether accurate or not, reflect the fact that Russia suffered, in
both absolute and relative terms, far more than any other belliberent. Although
other nations played important roles and also suffered much (particularly the
Chinese), the Second World War was in the first place a German-Russian or
Fascist-Communist war with this peculiarity, that for the first two years of the
war the Fascists and Communists were allies and brothers-in-arms.

It began on September 1, 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland; the Soviet
invaded from the East two weeks later. Although the British and French
declared war on Germany, they were not able to help their hapless ally. Within
a few weeks the Polish army had been crushed and half of Poland occupied by
the Nazis. Two weeks later, the Soviets invaded from the East.
Hitler’s excuse for invading Poland was, as in the case of Czechoslovakia,

national self-determination, the ideal of pan-German unity, of the unification of
all Germans under one Reich. This ideal required just two further changes: the
incorporation of the free city of Danzig, whose population was German, and the
creation of a land corridor with East Prussia. When Hitler demanded these
concessions from the Poles, they refused.
Now the Poles were both more numerous and bolder than the Czechs. But
they were also proud – and their pride concealed weaknesses that made them
vulnerable. First, as Golo Mann points out, “their state occupied former Russian
and former German or Habsburg territory, and it was a Prussian-German
tradition to regard the whole Polish state, not just a monstrosity like Danzig, as
intolerable in the long run. In 1919 Poland had spread further to the West and to
the East than it should have done; in its ambitions it had been as intoxicated by
victory and as blind as the other small nations.”1043 Secondly, in the inter-war
period the Poles had alienated two important minorities: the traditionally
Orthodox Christian Ukrainians and Belorussians in the East, most of whose

1042 Alexandrov, “Stalin i sovremennaia Rossia: vybor istoricheskikh otsenik ili vybor
buduschego?” (Stalin and contemporary Russia: a choice of historical estimates or a choice of the
future?), report read at the Russian Centre, San Francisco, February 3, 2017. However, as we
shall see, a very recent estimate by a Duma deputy is much higher.
1043 Mann, op. cit., p. 460.
570
churches they had closed down and given to the Catholics1044, and the Jews,
whom they continued to discriminate against.1045 Thirdly, when the Germans
occupied the Sudetenland in 1938, the Poles occupied Czechoslovak province of
Teschen, which they claimed was ethnically Polish. They thereby lost the moral
high ground.1046
But of course these weaknesses did not justify Hitler’s bullying. Moreover,
the Poles were quite right in rejecting the appeasement course: if they had given
Hitler Danzig and the corridor to East Prussia, there was absolutely no
guarantee that these would be his last demands. Indeed, Hitler told his generals
in May, 1939: “Danzig is not the object at stake. For us it is a matter of expansion
in the East… Therefore the question of sparing Poland does not arise and the
decision remains to attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity.”
The Poles trusted the Soviets even less than the Germans. When Stalin, in
negotiations with the English and French for an alliance against Germany,
demanded access across Polish and Romanian territory, the Poles refused. As
the Polish commander-in-chief, Marshal Edward Smigly-Ridz, said, “with the
Germans we risk the loss of our liberty, but with the Russians we lose our
soul”.1047

1044 “Before the beginning of the Second World War,” write V.I. Alexeyev and F.
Stavrou, “the Poles had closed hundreds of Orthodox churches on their territory
on the grounds that the Tsarist government had in 1875 returned theses churches
from the unia to Orthodoxy. The Polish government considered the return of the
uniates to Orthodoxy an act of violence, and they in their own way restored justice
by means of violence, which, needless to say, elicited protests even from the
Catholic and Uniate churches.
“The results of these measures of the Polish government were such that, for
example, in the region of Kholm out of 393 Orthodox churches existing in 1914, by
1938 there remained 227, by 1939 – 176, and by the beginning of the war – 53 in
all.” ("Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov' na Okkupirovannoj Nemtsami Territorii"
(The Russian Orthodox Church on German-Occupied Territory), Russkoe
Vozrozhdenie (Russian Regeneration), 1980 (IV), N 12, pp. 122-124)
According to Monk Benjamin (“Letopis’ Tserkovnykh Sobytij Pravoslavnoj
Tserkvi nachinaia s 1917 goda” (A Chronicle of Church Events of the Orthodox
Church beginning from 1917), http://www.zlatoust.ws/letopis.htm, part 2, p. 73),
in June and July of 1938 150 village churches visited by Ukrainian Orthodox were
demolished. On July 16 the Polish Church issued a memorandum on the event, as
did the MP on the same day. For further details of the persecution, see
Danilushkin, M.B (ed.) Istoria Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi Tserkvi ot Vosstanovlenia
Patriarshestva do nashikh dnej (A History of the Russian Orthodox Church from the
Reestablishment of the Patriarchate to our days), St. Petersburg: “Voskresenie”,
1997, vol. I, p. 588; K.N. Nikolaiev, ”’Unia’ i vostochnij obriad” (The ‘Unia’ and the
Eastern Rite), Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), N 6 (1411), March 15/28, 1990.
Among the buildings destroyed was the cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky (in
1927), and the Orthodox cathedrals in Liublin, Kalisha, Vlotslavka, Plotsk and
Koltsy (Monk Benjamin, part 1, op. cit., p. 175).
1045 In 1931 there were 8,228,000 Ukrainians and Belorussians in Poland (nearly 36%
of the total population), and nearly two million Jews (6%) (David Vital, A People
Apart: The Jews in Europe 1789-1939, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 763).
1046 Antony Beevor, The Second World War, London: Phoenix, 2014, p. 19.
1047 Beevor, op. cit., p. 21.
571
Molotov’s excuse for invading Poland from the East was very similar to
Hitler’s for invading from the West; the protection of blood relatives. As Serhii
Plokhy writes, it “was surprisingly simple: the Red Army had crossed the
border to protect fellow Eastern Slavs – the Ukrainians and Belarussians who
had settled in the eastern provinces of Poland. ‘The Soviet government,’ claimed
Molotov, ‘cannot be expected to take an indifferent attitude to the fate of its
blood relatives, Ukrainians and Belarussians residing in Poland who previously
found themselves in the positions of nations without rights and have now been
completely abandoned to the vagaries of fate…’”1048
The language of blood kinship was common to both dictatorships. Thus in

December, 1939, Stalin wrote to Ribbentrop, declaring that “the friendship of the
peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, being sealed in blood, has every
grounds for being long and firm…”1049 That the friendship was sealed in blood –
the blood of the Poles - was true: that it would last long turned out to be an
illusion…
The Soviet invasion of Poland and Belorussia – agreed with the Nazis in the
secret clauses of the Molotov-Ribbentropp pact – was accompanied by the usual
Soviet atrocities, and brought yet more Orthodox Christians into the Soviet maw.
As Nathanael Davis writes, it “allowed the Soviets to occupy eastern Poland,
and 1,200 Orthodox parishes [with a theological seminary in Kremenets] were
incorporated into the Soviet Union as a result. Then, in June of 1940, the Soviets
occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, among whose 6 million people were
almost half a million traditionally Orthodox persons who worshiped in about
300 Orthodox churches. Later in the same month the Soviets compelled the
Romanians to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina with their 4 million
people, 3 million of them traditionally Orthodox. There were between 2,000 and
2,500 parishes in these formerly Romanian lands. These annexations brought the
Russian Orthodox Church more than 6 million traditionally Orthodox people
and 3,500-4,000 churches with active priests, as well as many monasteries and
nunneries, some bishops and seminaries, and other resources. The institutional
strength of the church must have increased fifteenfold.”1050
Further north, the Bolsheviks, although repulsed by the Finns in the Winter
War of 1939-40 with the loss of 250,000 lives, took control of the Baltic States
without any trouble. This conquest was ecclesiastical as well as political. Thus in
1939 the MP sent Archbishop Sergius (Voskresensky) of Dmitrov to Riga as the
patriarchal exarch in the occupied Baltic States. In December, 1940 he received
the Churches of Latvia and Estonia, which had been granted autocephaly by
Constantinople, into the MP. Metropolitan Augustine (Peterson) of Riga went
into retirement. 1051 Then, in March, 1941, after the death of Metropolitan

1048 Plokhy, Lost Kingdom, London: Allen Lane, 2017, p. 261.
1049 Pravda, December 25, 1939, N 355 (8040), quoted by Sergius Shumilo.
1050 Davis, op. cit., p. 15.
1051 The letter he sent to Metropolitan Alexander of Tallin is cited by Monk
Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, pp. 15-18.
572
Eleutherius on December 31, he took control of the see of Vilnius and Lithuania.
In December, 1941 Metropolitans Alexander of Tallin and Augustine of Riga
travelled to Moscow, repented publicly of the sin of schism and were received
into communion.1052
“Rule over the new diocesan provinces,” writes Dmitri Volkogonov, “was
established, naturally, by means of the secret services. As an illustration of the
process, the following report was received by Stalin in March, 1941 from B.
Merkulov, People’s Commissar for State Security of the USSR:
“’There are at present in the territories of the Latvian, Estonian and

Lithuanian republics autocephalous [autonomous] Orthodox churches, headed
by local metropolitans who are placemen of the bourgeois governments.
“’In the Latvian SSR there are 175,000 Orthodox parishioners. Anti-Soviet
elements, former members of the Fascist organization ‘Perkanirust’, are grouped
around the head of the Synod, Augustin.
“’In the Estonian SSR there are 40,000 Orthodox. The head of the eparchy has
died. Archbishop Fedosi Fedoseev, who heads an anti-Soviet group of
churchmen, is trying to grab the job.
“’The NKVD has prepared the following measures:
“’1) Through an NKVD agency we will get the Moscow patriarchate to issue
a resolution on the subordination of the Orthodox churches of Latvia, Estonia
and Lithuania to itself, using a declaration from local rank and file clergy and
believers for the purpose.
“’2) By a decision of the Moscow patriarchate we shall appoint as eparch

Archbishop Dmitri Nikolayevich Voskresensky1053 (an agent of the NKGB of the
USSR), using for the purpose appropriate requests from the local clergy, which
are to be found in the Moscow patriarchate.”1054
The fact that Sergius (Voskresensky) was an agent of the NKGB makes it
highly probable that his three fellow metropolitans – Sergius (Stragorodsky),
Nicholas and Alexis – were also agents. Indeed, according to the apostate
professor-priest A. Osipov, Patriarch Alexis feared that Nicholas was an agent
of the Bolsheviks.1055 He was right to be afraid: Nicholas was an agent. This was
confirmed by a secret letter from Beria to Stalin, in which it was proposed
“under the cover of NKVD agent B.D. Yarushevich, Archbishop of the

1053 This is probably a mistake for “Archbishop Sergius Voskresensky of Dmitrov”.
(V.M.)
1054 Volkogonov, Lenin, London: Harper Collins, 1994, pp. 385-386.
1055 M.E. Danilushkin (ed.), Istoria Russkoj Tserkvi ot Vosstanovlenia Patriarshestva do
nashikh dnej (A History of the Russian Church from the Re-establishment of the
Patriarchate to our Days), vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1997, p. 922.
573
Leningrad diocese, to create an illegal residency for the NKVD of the USSR so as
to organize the work of agents amidst churchmen”.1056 Nicholas denied that he
“had never collaborated with the communists”. 1057 However, KGB defector
Major Deriabin testified before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee
on May 5, 1959 that under instructions from the KGB, he himself had
collaborated with Agent Nicholas, and that when a Soviet delegation to the
Vienna Conference for Peace was to arrive in Vienna, Colonel Kovalev referred
to him a telegram with the order “to take care of the delegation”, and that
“Metropolitan Nicholas is an agent of State Security”.
This demonstrates, continues Volkogonov, “the reasons behind Lenin’s

confident assertion that ‘our victory over the clergy is fully assured’. So
complete indeed was that victory that even Stalin and his associates were at
times at a loss to know whether someone was a priest or an NKGB agent in a
cassock. While boasting loudly of freedom of conscience and quoting copiously
from Lenin’s hypocritical statements on how humanely socialism treated
religion, the Bolshevik regime, through the widespread use of violence, had
turned the dwelling-place of the spirit and faith into a den of the thought-
police…”1058

1056 Moskovskaia Pravda (Moscow Truth) (12 March, 1996. See also Protopriest
Michael Ardov, “Russkij Intelligent v Arkhierejskom Sane” (A Russian Intellectual

in the Rank of a Bishop), Tserkovnie Novosti (Church News), N 1 (77), January-
February, 1999, p. 8.
1057 Associated Press report of June 6, 1956.
1058 Volkogonov, op. cit., p. 386.
574
62. DUNKIRK AND THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
Meanwhile, the “phoney war” (at first called the “Bore War”) was taking
place in Western Europe. The spirit of appeasement took some time to melt
away, and the Western allies hesitated to take the battle to the Germans, in spite
of the golden opportunity presented by Germany’s preoccupation with the
invasion and absorption of Poland. Thus the French, writes Tombs, “had no
intention of attacking Germany’s western frontier, which was defended only by
middle-aged reservists with three days’ ammunition and no air cover: the Allies
had a superiority of 3:1 in men and 5:1 in artillery, and all the German tanks
were in Poland. But the Allies sat tight. They had digested the bloody lessons of
1916-17: the Maginot Line, the West Wall (or Siegfried Line) and strong Belgian
fortifications ruled out breakthroughs…
“Scandinavia seemed crucial: about a third of Germany’s total iron ore

supply came from Sweden, via the Norwegian port of Narvik, which the allies
were preparing to block. So on 9 April 1940 the Germans, to everyone’s surprise,
invaded Norway by sea and air. Allied counter-attacks started badly on land,
though a large part of the Germany navy was sunk and 200 of their aircraft
destroyed. After parliamentary criticism on 7-8 May Chamberlain decided to
form a National Government; but the Labour Partyr refused to serve under him.
The situation was transformed overnight by a sudden German attack on
Holland, Belgium and France beginning at 5.35 a.m. on 10 May. Churchill
(ironically, largely responsible for the Norwegian operation) became Prime
Minister at the age of sixty-five.”1059
But things went badly for Churchill and the British at first. The Germans
boldy and decisively swept through Belgium and into France, crushing all
resistance and pinning the small British Expeditionary Force into Dunkirk. “On
19 May the Germans reached the coast, cutting communications with Calais and
Boulogne. A small force held out at Calais with what their German besiegers
called ‘unheard of obstinacy’ and won several days’ respite. But by 23 May
another divisional commander, General Alan Brooke, thought that ‘nothing but
a miracle can save the BEF now and the end cannot be very far off…
‘[B]eginning to be short of ammunition, supplies still all right for three days but
after than scanty.’ The BEF’s survival depended not only on its own resolve, but
on the actions of the Germans and the French. The German troops, tired and
short of ammunition, were ordered on 24 May to halt their advance. This was
confirmed by Hitler, still alarmed at the risks being taken. Soldiers and tanks
needed rest and repair before moving south to complete the conquest of France.
German caution was confirmed by a French counter-attack on 25 May, and
French troops fought desperately from 23 to 29 May to hold the Germans away
from Dunkir. Hitler probably did not believe the BEF could escape, and he
might have considered it a bargaining counter in future armistic negotiations,
which now seemed likely.

1059 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 695, 696.
575
“The last week in May was the low point: the only moment at which the
government seriously contemplated giving up the struggle… Hitler was
dropping hints of a deal. Voices inside and outside the government urged
negotiation and muttered criticsm of Churchill. Halifax thought Germany had
won and that the government must ‘safeguard the security of our Empire’. He
told the Italian ambassador on 25 May that they would ‘consider any
proposals… provided our liberty and independence was [sic] assured.’ On 26
May Reynaud flew to London to suggest either a joint request for an armistice
or British consent to a French request. He urged making concessions to Italy
(still at peace) in the hope that Mussolini might mediate. The inner War Cabinet
– Churchill, Chamberlain, Halifax and two Labout ministers, Clement Attlee,
the party leader, and his deputy, Arthur Greenwood – met secretly the same
day. Churchill argued that Britain, unlike France, could still resist and should
not be dragged by France into accepting ‘intolerable terms’. Halifax replied that
it was not ‘in Herr Hitler’s to insist on outrageous terms’. For the time being, of
course, this was true. That evening, Churchill felt ‘physically sick’. He was an
imperialist, who stressed that he was fighting for the empire; and, logically,
preservation of the empire required a deal with Hitler. But he knew there was
more at stake even than the empire, and for several years had been trying to
rally anti-Nazi opinion, including Jews and trade unionists. His position in the
Cabinet was fragile. Halifax was supported by Chamberlain. Attlee and
Greenwood, understandably hesitant in the face of the disaster, nevertheless
backed Churchill’s refusal to negotiate. Now a forgotten figure, Greenwood, MP
for Wakefield and a former economics lecturer at Leeds, thus helped to make
history…1060
The evacuation from Dunkirk – Operation Dynamo – began on May 26, the
feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury, the Apostle of the English, according to the
Anglican calendar, on which King George VI had called for a National Day of
Prayer to be held. As Gary DeMar writes: “In a national broadcast he instructed
the people of the UK to turn back to God in a spirit of repentance and plead for
Divine help. Millions of people across the British Isles flocked into churches
praying for deliverance...
“Two events immediately followed.
“Firstly, a violent storm arose over the Dunkirk region grounding

the Luftwaffe which had been killing thousands on the beaches.
“And then secondly, a great calm descended on the Channel, the

like of which hadn’t been seen for a generation, which allowed
hundreds of tiny boats to sail across and rescue 335,000 soldiers,
rather than the estimated 20-30,000. From then on people referred to
what happened as ‘the miracle of Dunkirk.’ Sunday June 9 th was
officially appointed as a Day of National Thanksgiving.” 1061

1060 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 699-700.
1061 DeMar, Review of the film “Dunkirk”.
576
“On 7 June,” continues Tombs, “the Panzers began to pierce the
rapidly improvised and over-stretched French defensive line. On the
tenth Mussolini declared war. On the twelfth the French army began a
general retreat,. The Germans marched into Paris on the fourteenth,
and that same day the last British troops left France. The French
increasingly felt abandoned. On 16 June they again asked British
consent to an exploration of armistice terms. The British reply, as
before, was that France should fight on, with a government in exile in
England or North Africa. Hoping to encourage French resolve,
Churchill made the famous offer ‘that France and Great Britain shall
no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union.’ This,
however, precipitated the collapse by splitting the French cabinet.
Marshal Philippe Pétain, the Anglophobe deputy prime minister,
dismissed it as an invitation to ‘marry a corpse’. Reynaud resigned,
and Pétain became prime minister on 17 June. He at once broadcast to
the nation that ‘the fighting must cease’ and asked for an armistice.
Over a million soldiers began to lay down their arms. Against all
expectations, Britain found itself without European allies, with all its
strategic assumpions overturned, facing for the first time since
Napoleon the perild the English had fought to prevent for centuries:
an enemy dominating the Continent and poised on the Channel and
South Sea coasts. Yet talk of negotiation had ended: by 16 June the
Cabinet had accepted Churchill’s view that ‘in no circumstances
whatever would the British Government participate in any
negotiations for armistice or peace… We were fighting for our lives
and it was vital that we would allow no chink to appear in our
armour.’” 1062
God’s favour continued to shine on the British during the Battle of

Britain, the biggest air battle in history, which took place over
southern England between July and October, 1940. In spite of being
outnumbered by three to one at the beginning, the British and allied
pilots, by dint of courageous flying, furious over-production of
aircraft and skillful use of radar, retained control of the skies. A major
tactical blunder made by Hitler was his decision, on September 5, to
divert the main target of the Luftwaffe from airfields to cities like
London (hence “the Blitz”); in the opinion of some, this blunder gave
the RAF time to recover and eventually win the battle.
“On 15 September – Battle of Britain Day’ – attacks on London were

met by massed fighters. The RAF claimed to have shot down 185
planes. The real number was about 60 – a still considerable figure
which brought German losses in a week to some 175, an unsustainable
rate of loss and a blow to their belief that they were on the verge of
victory. Operation Sealion was postponed. The great daylight battles

1062 Tombs, op. cit., pp. 702-703.
577
of 15 August and 15 September showed that German fighter strength
was inadequate to gain air superiority. In the view of one historian of
Germany, it was ‘an extremely one-sided affair’ for the RAF.Between
July and October the RAF lost about 790 planes and the Luftwaffe
about 1,300. Britain was producing more aircraft than Germany (15,000
during 1940 to Germany’s 10,800), including twice the number of
fighters; it had also ordered another 10,000 planes and 13,000 aero
engines from the United States. The success boosted public confidence.
‘At any rate, we have won the first round.’” 1063
The pilots who won the battle numbered only 3,000, including a
large contingent of Czechs and Poles. Churchill called them the Few:
“Never in the field of human combat have so many owed so much to
so few.” And he was not far wrong; for the survival of Britain was
essential to the later entry of the United States into the war on
Britain’s side, to the arming of the Soviet Union and to the successful
invasion of German-occupied Europe from Britain in June, 1944…
There were many other important battles fought (and usually won)
by the British in the Second World War – against the German U-boats
in the Battle of the Atlantic and the Arctic convoys to Russia, against
the Italians and Germans in the Mediterranean, against the Italians
and Germans in the sands of North Africa, against the Japanese in the
jungles of Burma, against the Italians and Germans on various parts of
the Continent, and finally in the skies over Germany. But none of them
equaled in importance the Battle of Britain. And in none of them was
the Providence of God, “the God of Battles”, so clearly evident.
“If the Battle of Britain had been lost,” writes Daniel Johnson, “the
threat to America would have been immediate. The British could
prevent the French fleet from being seized by the Nazis or Fascists,
but if Britain had been defeated, the Americans could not have
prevented the Royal Navy falling into German hands, which would
have left the US Navy outnumbered by the combined naval forces of
the Axis. Roosevelt knew this, because Churchill had warned him; that
is why Churchill unhesitatingly ordered the destruction of the French
fleet at Mers-el-Kéhir. The Atlantic Alliance, which has endured from
that day to this, was and is the essential prerequisite for the survival
of Western civilization…” 1064
The truly heroic feats of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain cannot
hide the fact that Britain in 1940 had been defeated on land and very
nearly defeated in the air. And she would suffer more defeats in 1941
until the turning of the tide that began with the victory over the

Tombs, op. cit., p. 711.
1063
Johnson, “The Righteous and the Right: Thoughts on the Survival of Western Civilisation”,
1064
Standpoint, May, 2018, p. 48.
578
Germans at El-Alamein in 1942. Peter Hitchens is right in declaring:
“Britain lost the first part of the Second World War, which ended in
the autumn of 1940. But, having been beaten back into her own
territory, she was able to fight off the final humiliation of seeing a
victorious foe parade through her cities… She came frighteningly close
to suing for peace in 1940, but avoided this mainly because she had a
Prime Minister who was a living embodiment of the national history,
and who refused to accept the ‘inevitable’ surrender pressed on him
by ‘moderate’ and ‘reasonable’ politicians.
“There then came a second half of the war, in which Britain fought
as the involuntary ally of one former rival and one potential foe, the
UA and the USSR, and in which she sustained terrible national defeats
– in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tobruk. Those defeats would make it
morally impossible for Britain to keep her Empire conce the war was
over, even if she had been rich enough to do so, and even if the USA
had not actively sought to wind up the Empire as a political and
trading association. They prepared the way for the humiliation at Suez
fifteen years later, the last time a British government attempted to
ignore the reality of this country’s weakened position. The Japanese
triumph in Singapore ended the British Indian and Far Eastern
Empire, though there would be a half-hearted attempt to hold on to
some of if once the war was over. It was also during this stage of the
war that Britain fell under foreign occupation [by 1.6 million
American soldiers] for the first time in her modern history, an
occupation which was welcome and unavoidable, but which
permanently affected the national state of mind.” 1065
1940 demonstrated both the importance in history of individual

human leaders, and of the overriding Providence of Almighty God.
How different it would have been if Hitler had not led Germany to
invade France against the counsel of his generals – and Churchill had
not chosen to fight on against the counsel of so many of his colleagues!
And how clearly did God intervene in the historical process in 1940-
41, “proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of
vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61.2). First vengeance fell on the
appeasers, Britain and France. It was worse for France than for Britain,
perhaps because France had been the formal ally of Czechoslovakia
and, with the largest army in Western Europe, was well able to defend
her ally, while the British, though hardly less foolish, had at least
turned to God in prayer and had at last found the courage to resist.
The Soviet Union was a third appeaser – or rather, accomplice of
Germany in its vile deeds of conquest and repression in Poland, the
Baltic States and Finland. And on June 22, 1941 it would receive the
most terrible recompense for its sins in the most terrible war in
modern history…

1065 Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain, pp. 274-275.
579
63. THE FASCISTS INVADE THE BALKANS
By the beginning of the Second World War, the Orthodox Church, having
suffered the most terrible and sustained onslaught in her history in the 1920s
and 30s, had lost most of her pre-revolutionary glory. The Moscow Patriarchate,
on the one hand, and the Churches of Constantinople, Alexandria, Greece and
Romania, on the other, could no longer be counted as truly Orthodox in their
official confession. The Churches of Serbia, Bulgaria and Jerusalem were still
Orthodox – but they had not broken communion with the heretics, so the
prospects of their remaining free from the quicksands of “World Orthodoxy” for
long were not good. The situation of the ROCOR was only a little better – she
was not in communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, but had not broken
decisively with the other heretical Churches, and even her attitude to Moscow
was not entirely unambiguous. The Greek Old Calendarist Church was strong
in the faith, but tragically divided. The Romanian Old Calendarists were also
strong, but as yet had no bishops. The Catacomb Church of Russia was bathed
in the glory of a vast multitude of new martyrs and confessors; but the whole
apparatus of the most evil and most powerful state in history was directed
towards her complete annihilation…
Could the outbreak of world war bring relief to the Orthodox Church? Or
would it consolidate the power of the antichristian powers ranged against her?
That was the question in October, 1940, when Mussolini invaded Greece
through Albania. His forces immediately got bogged down in the face of fierce
Greek resistance, and in November, the British, after hastily evacuating
mainland Greece, occupied Crete. Hitler was contemplating the consequences of
this, and whether he should intervene to help Mussolini, when the Soviet
Foreign Minister Molotov arrived in Berlin…
Misha Glenny writes: “Hitler wished to invite the Soviet Union to join
Germany, Italy and Japan in the Tripartite Pact. Were Stalin to accept the offer to
join the Axis, this would create the mightiest political alliance in history,
stretching from the Atlantic and Mediterranean to the Pacific. Hitler had hit
upon the idea of incorporating the Soviet Union into his scheme partly to pre-
empt a future alliance of the Soviet Union, Britain and, possibly, the United
States, and partly because he had become anxious about the gradual westward
expansion of the Soviet Union through Finland, the Baltics, Bessarabia and
northern Bukovina. In the Molotov-Ribbentrop accord of August, 1939, Hitler
had effectively recognized the Balkans as a Russian sphere of interest.
Meanwhile, however, Germany’s interest in the region had become more urgent.
By persuading the Soviet Union to sign up to the Tripartite Pact, Hitler hoped,
among other things, to extinguish Soviet influence in the Balkans. Berlin offered
to compensate Moscow by supporting Soviet expansion in what Hitler termed
the ‘Großasiatischer Raum’ (greater Asian space). When Molotov asked what
‘Großasiatischer Raum’ actually meant, the Germans were unable to give him a
concrete answer; it has been assumed that it meant India, Central Asia and Iran.
580
“As Hitler unveiled his vision of the new order, covering half the globe,
Molotov sat impassively and, having heard the Führer out, stated he agreed ‘in
principle’ to the idea. He then proceeded to raise difficulties about all the
individual issues that Hitler had hoped to resolve in Germany’s favour. The
Foreign Minister mentioned Finland, Poland and Romania but he also raised for
the first time the question of Bulgaria. Molotov claimed that Britain was
threatening the security of the Black Sea Straits, which had prompted the Soviet
Union to consider an offer ‘of a Russian guarantee to Bulgaria’.
“Molotov’s intervention threatened Wehrmacht plans to invade Greece,

which included sending its divisions through Bulgaria. Stalin’s response to the
Tripartite proposal arrived by letter two weeks after Molotov’s visit. The Soviet
leader was adamant on the issue of Bulgaria: ‘2. Provided that within the next
few months the security of the Soviet Union in the Straits is assured by the
conclusion of a mutual assistance pact between the Soviet Union and Bulgaria…
and by the establishment of a base for land and naval forces of the USSR within
range of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles by means of a long-term lease.’
“Hitler needed the Balkans for economic reasons. He could not tolerate
Soviet interference in the region, and certainly not a Soviet military presence
there. Persuaded that Stalin was becoming too conceited and dangerous as an
ally, Hitler decided to destroy the Soviet Union once and for all…”1066
Hitler especially needed Romania because of her oilfields… Now the

Romanians suffered much from both great powers. Ernest Latham writes that
on June 26, 1940, Molotov, “acting on the secret annex to the Nazi-Soviet Pact,
handed the Romanian minister in Moscow, Gh. Davidescu, a note with a map
demanding the return forthwith of Bessarabia and the cession of the northern
half of Bucovina, which Russia had never before ruled. On the advice of
Germany and Italy, with Hungary and Bulgaria clamoring for their own
irredentae, Romania submitted to the Soviet demands and endured the loss of
50, 762 sq. km. and 3,776,000 people, more than half of whom, some 2,020,000,
were ethnic Romanians. The following August 19 negotiations with Bulgaria
began to determine the fate of the Quadrilateral, which was returned to Bulgaria
on September 7 with the Treaty of Craiova at a cost to Romania of 7412 sq. km.
An exchange of populations ensued with 103,711 Romanians transferred north
and 62,272 Bulgarians moved south. The most painful and humiliating loss,
however, had occurred a week before in Vienna when Hitler determined that
northern Transylvania should be ceded to Hungary. The Vienna Diktat cost
Romania 42,243 sq. km and 2,600,000 people about half of whom were ethnic
Romanians. 110,000 Romanian refugees fled from Transylvania to the kingdom
adding their care to the other responsibilities of the Romanian social services
already buckling under the weight of the 45,000 Polish refugees who had fled
from war-torn Poland the previous year. The total Romanian losses in the
summer of 1940 were awesome: one-third of her territory, 6.600,000 of her

1066 Glenny, The Balkans, 1804-1999, London: Granta Books, 2000, pp. 469-470.
581
population including 3,000,000 ethnic Romanians, 37% of the arable land, 44% of
the forests, 27% of the orchards, 37% of the vineyards, 37% of wheat acreage,
30% of corn acreage, 75% of sunflower acreage, 43% of hemp acreage and 86%
of soya acreage.
“September 1940 was arguable the nadir of Romania’s history… [However,]

on September 5, 1940, there stepped General Ion Antonescu, called by Carol II
from house arrest in the face of widespread rioting and a pending total
breakdown of law and orderly governance. The following day he demanded
and got the abdication of Carol in all but name, and Mihai for the second time
became king of Romania…”1067
Antonescu formed an alliance with the Legionnaires, whom King Carol had
tried to crush. He “dubbed himself Conducător Statului, ‘Leader of the State’ [a
title used by the murdered Legionnaire leader Codreanu]; Horia Sima (1907-
1993), Commander of the Iron Guard, became Vice-President of the Council of
Ministers, and the National Legionary State of Romania was formally
established. Antonescu’s alliance with the Iron Guard was one of political
expediency, however, not one of ideological conviction; its draconian methods
and goals often clashed with his own personal authoritarian agendum. The
Legionnaires thus betrayed Antonescu, staging a coup d’état in January of 1941,
which, lacking support from the Third Reich of Germany, proved abortive. This
enabled Antonescu, with the blessing of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), to suppress
the Iron Guard, thereby consolidating his power as military dictator of
Romania.”1068
Wherever the Germans came, they rounded up and deported the Jews – there
were one and a half million in the Balkans. Some local populations – the Ustaše
in Croatia, and the Legionnaires in Romania – did not need encouraging, and
the Ustaše were even more savage than the Nazis. However, In Serbia, Bulgaria
and Greece some leaders tried to protect the Jews.1069
One of these was Tsar Boris of Bulgaria – even if the initiative came from
leading churchmen and leading politicians such as Dimitr Peshev rather than
himself.

1067 Latham, Romanian Nationalism during the Reign of King Mihai I, Etna, Ca.: Center
for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2010, pp. 10-11. In addition to losing so many
territories, Romania lost thousands of lives to Soviet border guard shooting when
they tried to cross the border from Soviet-occupied Bukovina into Romania. See
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A2nt%C3%A2na_Alb%C4%83_massacre
1068 Bujor, op. cit., p. 101, translator’s note.
1069 Thomas King, “What Every Christian Needs To Know About All Of The
Christians Who Saved Jews In The Holocaust”, 22 July, 2015, Pravmir.com,

http://www.pravmir.com/what-every-christian-needs-to-know-about-all-of-the-
christians-who-saved-jews-in-the-holocaust/
582
Ya.Ya. Etinger writes: “Hitler demanded from his ally Bulgaria the despatch
of all the Jews of Bulgaria, Macedonia and Thrace to Auschwitz – about 48,000
people were subject to deportation. The head of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church,
Metropolitan Stefan of Sophia, on learning from the chief rabbi Asher Khamanel,
the president of the capital’s Jewish community, that ‘the Commissariat for
Jewish questions’ had already prepared the first lists of eminent Jews subject to
deportation to Hitler’s death camps, openly declared: ‘I will conceal all the Jews
in the churches and monasteries, but I will not hand them over for reprisals.’ He
personally demanded that Prime-Minister Filov revoke the arrests of Jews in a
series of cities in the country. The metropolitan also sent a letter to Tsar Boris, in
which he wrote: ‘Let us not commit abominations, for which our good-hearted
people will sometime have to feel shame, and perhaps other misfortunes.’ The
metropolitan promised that he himself would remain under house arrest until
the arrested Jews were released. For this he was accused by the local fascist
organizations of ‘betrayal of the race and treachery’. Rabbi Khamanel, whom the
police were hunting, was hidden by the metropolitan in his own podvorie. On
May 24, the day of the national feast of SS. Cyril and Methodius, thousands of
people came out onto the streets of the capital declaring that they would not
tolerate the murder of their fellow citizens. Another highly placed clergyman,
Metropolitan Cyril of Plovdiv, later patriarch of Bulgaria, also sent an epistle to
the tsar. In his letter he demanded that the tsar immediately revoke the barbaric
order. Otherwise, declared the metropolitan, he would not answer for the
actions of the people and clergy. According to the reminiscences of eye-
witnesses, he warned the local police authorities that he had said to the Jews of
one of the poorest quarters of the city: ‘I present you my house. Let us see
whether they will be able to get you out of there.’ And in a letter to Filov he said
that he would go with a cross in his hands to the death camp in Poland ahead of
the convoys with the Jews. These many protest actions attained their goal and
the deportation was stopped. Tsar Boris III invited the German consul, A.
Bickerle, and categorically declared: ‘The Jews of my country are its subjects and
every encroachment on their freedom will be perceived by us as an insult to the
Bulgarians.’ Prime Minister B. Filov wrote in his diary: ‘His Majesty completely
revoked the measures taken against the Jews.’ On returning from Hitler’s head-
quarters on August 28, 1943, Tsar Boris very soon died. There are grounds for
supposing that he was killed by the Hitlerites for refusing to carry out the will
of the Fuhrer.”1070
Romanian anti-semitism brought them voluntarily into the Axis camp. The
official church particularly emphasized the Jewish nature of Bolshevism. Thus
the new-calendarist metropolitan of Moldavia declared that God had “had
mercy on them [the inhabitants of the Soviet-occupied provinces] and sent his
archangels on earth: Hitler, Antonescu and [Finland’s] Mannerheim, and they

1070 Etinger, Spasennie v Kholokoste (The Saved in the Holocaust); Monk Benjamin,
op. cit., part 3, pp. 52-53. For more details on the bishops’ heroism, see Jim Forest,
“The Bishop who stood in the Way”, Pravmir, November 8, 2016,
http://www.pravmir.com/bishop-stood-way. And on Dimitr Peshev, see Greta
Ionkis and Boris Kandel, “Chelovek, kotorij ostanovil Gitlera” (The man who
stopped Hitler), Lekhaim, December, 2002, Teves 5763 – 12 (128).
583
headed their armies with the sign of the cross on their chests and in their hearts
a war against the Great Dragon, red as fire, and they defeated him, chased him
in chains, and the synagogue of Satan was ruined and scattered in the four
directions of the earth and in their place they erected a sacred altar to the God of
peace.”1071
Patriarch Nicodemus of Romania showed that the anti-semitic religiosity of

the Iron Guard had penetrated deep into his church’s consciousness: “God has
shown to the leader of our country the path toward a sacred and redeeming
alliance with the German nation and sent the united armies to the Divine
Crusade against destructive Bolshevism… the Bolshevist Dragon… has found
here also villainous souls ready to serve him. Let us bless God that these
companions of Satan have been found mostly among the sons of the aliens [the
Jews], among the nation that had brought damnation upon itself and its sons,
since it had crucified the Son of God. If by their side there had also been some
Romanian outcasts, then their blood was certainly not pure Romanian blood, yet
mixed with damned blood. These servants of the Devil and Bolshevism, seeing
that their master, the monster called Bolshevist Russia, will soon be destroyed,
are now trying to help him… they disseminate among our people all sorts of
bad new words…”1072
Hitler was preparing Operation Marita, the invasion of Greece, for which he
needed Bulgarian and Yugoslav support… The Bulgarians procrastinated, but
eventually agreed to join the Tripartite Alliance on the very first day of the
invasion, March 1, 1941. As for the Yugoslavs, they were negotiating a treaty
with the Germans in Vienna that was, according to Misha Glenny, “a diplomatic
triumph. The only real concession made to the Germans in the secret clauses
attached to the published agreement concerning the transport of war materials
through Yugoslavia. The Germans were not permitted to send troops across the
country; nor did the agreement burden Yugoslavia with any other military
obligations towards the Axis powers. Although a member of the Tripartite Pact,
Yugoslavia would keep her neutrality virtually intact.”1073
However, this judgment concerning the Vienna treaty was disputed by many
Yugoslavs, and on March 27 the government was overthrown in a coup led by
the head of the Yugoslav air force, General Dušan Simović. The new pro-Allied
government renounced the agreement with the Axis powers. This coup was
supported by the famous Bishop Nikolai Velimirović, who sent the following
telegram to the citizens of Kraljevo: “Grateful to God, thankful to the people, we
now look forward to a bright future without the stain of shame.”1074

1073 Glenny, op. cit., pp. 473-474.
1074 Velimirovic, Pastirski glas, no. 3, 1941; in The New Chrysostom, Bishop Nikolai
Velimirovic, St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2011, p. 141.
584
While the coup was morally admirable (and was acclaimed as such by
Churchill), the Yugoslavs were in no position to make an effective resistance.
The basic problem lay in the fact that Yugoslavia was no longer a centralized
state. For, as Glenny writes, “in August 1939 Cvetković, the Prime Minister, had
come to an agreement with Vladko Maček, the man who had assumed the
leadership of the Croatian Peasant Party after the murder of Stjepan Radic. The
Cvetković-Maček Sporazum (Agreement) had effectively split the country in two,
creating an autonomous area of Croatia which included roughly half of Bosnia
and Hercegovina. Most Serb opposition parties deeply resented the Sporazum”,
as did the Church in the persons of Patriarch Gavrilo and Bishop Nikolai
Velimirović…1075
“Simović was not in a position to establish control throughout the country

unless he could come to an agreement with the Croats, and with Maček, in
particular. He secured this agreement, but only under certain conditions. The
most important of these was a declaration to stand by the Vienna Agreement,
committing Yugoslavia to the Tripartite Pact. Belatedly recognizing that the
Yugoslav Army could not possibly resist a German onslaught, Simović and the
new government consented to Maček’s condition. So the very reason for
organizing a coup in the first place – resistance to the Tripartite Pact – was
thrown out by the new government almost as soon as it was formed.
“Yet before Simović persuaded the Croats to back his government, Hitler had
undergone a dramatic change of mood. Irritated by the intricacies of Balkan
politics, the Führer exploded in fury on receipt of the news from Belgrade.
Almost immediately, he tore up the Tripartite Agreement with Yugoslavia, and
ordered the Wehrmacht to invade the country. As Maček appeared to be
cooperating with Simović, Ribbentrop was persuaded by Mussolini to switch
German backing in Croatia to Ante Pavelić and his small gang of fascist thugs,
who numbered no more than 360 when they seized control of the government in
Zagreb in early April. They were brought to power solely by German guns and
Italian politicians, and not by popular sentiment in Croatia, which
overwhelmingly backed Maček. The installation of Pavelić’s brutal fascist
regime resulted in the single most disastrous episode in Yugoslav history,
whose consequences were still being felt in the 1990s…”1076
Hitler invaded on April 6. Deserted by Pavelić’s Croats, the Serbian

resistance was soon crushed… The surrender was so rapid that many Serbian
units, the so-called četniks, escaped and formed an anti-Nazi resistance
movement led by Draža Mikhailović that was loyal to Prince Pavle’s
government-in-exile in London. The Bulgarians occupied Yugoslav Macedonia,
the Hungarians – Vojvodina, the Italians - Kosovo, and the Croatian Ustaše –

1075 See Jovan Byford, “From ‘Traitor’ to ‘Saint’: Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic in
Serbian Public Memory”, Analysis of Current Trends In Antisemitism, 22(2004) pp. 1–

41.
1076 Glenny, op. cit., pp. 475-476.
585
much of Bosnia. Many bishops, priests and laity were killed in all these
occupied regions.
The Germans arrested Patriarch Gabriel and Bishop Nikolai; but although the
two hierarchs were to spend the whole war in prisons and concentration camps
(the last one was Dachau), they refused the Nazis’ suggestion that they
collaborate with them.1077 Once they were asked whether they would call on the
Serbian people to rise up against the partisan communists. They replied: “The
Serbian Church is not fighting against the communists. The Serbian Church is
fighting against the atheists and the atheist ideology, against the atheists on the
right and on the left, that is, against the German atheism from outside and our
atheism from within and with every other atheism. But the partisans are our lost
and deceived children and brothers. When the thunders of military conflict die
down, each of them will return to his own peaceful work.” The two hierarchs’
characterization of Fascism and Bolshevism as virtually equivalent forms of
atheism was important. Its truth was witnessed by the later development of
Serbian history, when Soviet-style communism easily developed into German-
style Fascism…
In neighbouring Czechoslovakia Bishop Gorazd of Moravia-Silesia, after

being cut off from the Serbian Patriarchate, to which he was canonically subject,
turned to ROCOR’s Metropolitan Seraphim (Lyade) in Berlin, asking him to take
his diocese under his protection. Metropolitan Seraphim agreed, and gave him
holy chrism and antimensia. However, in September, 1942 “after being tortured,
he was shot. The Orthodox Church in Bohemia and Moravia was shut down
and its priests sent to camps in Germany.”1078
But by far the worst atrocities were committed against the Serbs in Croatia
and Bosnia by the Ustaše and the Catholic Church.1079 On April 28, 1941, the
Catholic Archbishop Stepinac of Zagreb issued an appeal rapturously praising
the Ustaše regime and calling on all Catholic priests to collaborate with it. Three
days before, the government had issued a series of decrees banning the Cyrillic
script, closing all Orthodox schools, imposing a special tax on the patriarchate,
forcing all Serbs to wear coloured armbands with the letter “P” (for Pravoslovac
– Orthodox) and banning the use of the term “Serbian Orthodox religion”. On
June 22 the minister of education said that one third of the Serbs in Croatia
would be expelled, one third killed and one third converted to Catholicism. In
July the arrests of Serbs began. By the autumn over 15,000 Serbs had passed
through the camps, and by 1943 there were 300,000 Serbia refugees from Croatia
in Serbia.

1078 Monk Gorazd, "Sviashchenomuchenik Gorazd" (Hieromartyr Gorazd),
Pravoslavnaia Rus' (Orthodox Russia), N 12 (1465), June 15/28, 1992.
1079 See Sean Mac Mathuna, “The Role of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia’s Holocaust”,
http://churchandstate.org.uk/2015/12/the-role-of-the-catholic-church-in-yugoslavias-
holocaust/
586
On December 4, the Croatians passed a law ordering all Church feasts to be
celebrated according to the new calendar. The Russian émigrés were informed
of this, and were threatened with punishment if they did not obey. Metropolitan
Anastasy, however, immediately petitioned for an exception to be made for the
Russian parishes, and with the help of the German Evangelical Bishop Hackel,
on March 26, 1942, this request was granted. However, no Serb was allowed to
visit the émigré services.1080
Joachim Wertz writes: “In many villages the massacres followed a certain
pattern. The Ustashi would arrive and assemble all the Serbs. They would then
order them to convert to Catholicism. Those who refused, as the majority did,
were told to assemble in their local Orthodox parish church. They would then
lock them in the church and set it ablaze. In this manner many Orthodox men,
women and children perished in scores of Serbian settlements.”1081
According to Archbishop Stepinac’s report to the Pope on May 8, 1944,

240,000 Serbs apostasized to Catholicism. However, many of these returned to
Orthodoxy after the war. Hundreds of churches were destroyed or desecrated,
and vast amounts of property were confiscated from the Orthodox Serbs.
According to German Nazi figures, about 750,000 Orthodox Serbs were killed,
including five bishops and 177 other clergy. 200,000 of these perished in the
notorious camp of Jasenovac alone in conditions of appalling brutality, 40,000 of
them on the orders of the Franciscan Father Filipovich. Bishop Nikolai
Velimirovic inscribed these martyrs into the Church calendar for August 31:
“The 700,000 who suffered for the Orthodox faith at the hands of the Roman
crusaders and Ustashi during the time of the Second World War. These are the
New Serbian Martyrs.”1082
The Germans knew what was going on. Thus on February 17, 1942
Heindrich, who masterminded the Holocaust, wrote to Himmler: “The number
of Slavs destroyed by the Croats by the most sadistic methods has reached

1080 M.V. Shkarovsky; in Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, p. 35.
1081 Wertz, "On the Serbian Orthodox Martyrs of the Second World War", Orthodox
Life, vol. 33, N 1, January-February, 1983, pp. 15-26.
1082 However, more recent scholarship gives generally lower figures for those
killed. The SimonWiesenthalCenter calculated that 600,000 Serbs, 30,000 Jews and
29,000 Gipsies were killed (Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, p. 21). Mark Almond
writes: "Probably about 325,000 Serbs were killed by the Ustasha in the NDH
[Independent State of Croatia, which included Bosnia], including about 60,000 at
Jasenovac alone. In other words about one in every six Serbs in Pavelic's realm was
killed." (Europe's Backyard War, London: Mandarin, 1994, p. 137. See also Aleksa
Djilas, "The Yugoslav Tragedy", Prospect, October, 1995, p. 39). Again, the Serb
scholar Bogoljub Kocovic writes that 487,000 Serbs were killed during World War
II altogether, as opposed to 207,000 Croats, 86,000 Muslims and 234,000 others;
while the Croatian scholar Vladimir Zerjavic gives: 530,000 Serbs, 192,000 Croats,
103,000 Muslims and 202,000 others (Kocovic, Zrtve drugog svetskog rata u
Jogoslaviji, London: Libra Books, 1985, pp. 102, 174, 182; Zerjavic, Gubici
stanovnistva Jogoslavije u drugom svjetskom ratu, Zagreb: Jugoslavensko
Viktimolosko Drustvo, 1989, pp. 61, 82).
587
300,000… If the Serbs living in Croatia accept Catholicism they are allowed to
live without persecution.”1083
One of those martyred in Jasenovac was an old man called Vukashin. He was
standing “in an aura of peace and joy, softly praying to Christ. The executioner
was greatly angered by the old man’s peacefulness and saintly composure, and
he ordered that he be dragged to the place of execution.
“St. Vukashin was given the usual charge, ‘Accept the Pope or die a most
terrible death’.
“The old man signed himself with the honourable Cross and peacefully
intoned, ‘Just do your job, my son’.
“The executioner trembled with anger. He brutally slashed off one of the
saint’s ears, repeating his charge. The Holy Martyr again peacefully replied,
‘Just continue to do your job, my son.’ And so the irrational persecutor
continued: first the other ear, then the nose, and the fingers one by one. Like a
new James of Persia, St. Vukashin was ‘pruned as a sacred grapevine of God.’
With each grisly and bloody cut, the noble Vukashin, filled with peace and joy
by the Holy Spirit, calmly replied, ‘Just continue to do your job, my son.’
“At length, the vicious torturer gouged out the eyes of the martyr, and the
saint once more replied, ‘Just continue to do your job, my son.’ With that, the
executioner flew into a rage and slew the holy martyr. Almost immediately, the
executioner lost his mind and went completely mad.”1084
In February, 1942, Dr. Privislav Grisogno, a Croatian Catholic member of the

former Yugoslav cabinet, wrote in protest to Archbishop Stepinac: “I am writing
to you as a man to a man, as a Christian to a Christian. I have been meaning to
do this for months hoping that the dreadful news from Croatia would cease so
that I could collect my thoughts and write to you in peace.
“For the last ten months Serbs have been killed and destroyed in Croatia in
the most ruthless manner and the value of their property that has been
destroyed reaches billions. Blushes of shame and anger cover the faces of every
honest Croat.
“The slaughter of Serbs began from the very first day of the establishment of
the IndependentState of Croatia (Gospic, Gudovan, Bosanska Krajina, etc.) and
has continued relentlessly to this very day. The horror is not only in the killing.
The killing includes everybody: old men, women and children. With
accompanying barbaric torture. These innocent Serbs have been impaled, fire
has been lit on their bare chest, they have been roasted alive, burned in their

1083 Heindrich, in Karlheinz Deschner, With God and Fuhrer, p. 282; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part
3, p. 38.
1084 "Holy New Martyr Vukashin", Orthodoxy Canada, N 114, May-June, 1986, p. 3.
588
homes and churches while still living, covered with boiling water, then their
skin was peeled off, salt poured into their wounds, their eyes have been pulled
out, their ears, noses and tongues cut off, the priests have had their beards and
moustaches torn off from their skulls, their sex organs severed and put into their
mouths, they have been tied to trucks and then dragged along the ground, nails
have been pressed into their heads, their heads nailed to the floor, they have
been thrown alive into wells and over cliffs, and grenades thrown after them,
their heads smashed against walls, their backs broken against rocks and tree
stumps, and many other horrible tortures were perpetrated, such as normal
people can hardly imagine.
“Their rivers Sava, Drav, the Danube and their tributaries have carried
thousands and thousands of their corpses. Dead bodies have been found with
the inscription: ‘direction Belgrade – traveling to King Peter’. In a boat which
was found on the Sava river there was a heap of children’s heads with the head
of a woman (which could have been a head of one of the mothers of the children)
with the inscription: ‘Meat for the Jovanova Market in Belgrade’.
“Horrifying is the case of Mileva Bozinic from Stanbandza whose child was
removed from her womb. There was also the case of the roasted heads in Bosnia,
the vessels full of Serbian blood, the cases of Serbs being forced to drink the
warm blood of their slaughtered kin. Countless women, girls and children in
front of their mothers were raped or else sent off to Ustashi camps to serve the
Ustashi; rapes even took place on the altars of Orthodox churches. In the
Petrinje county a son was forced to rape his own mother. The slaughter of the
Serbs in the Glina Orthodox church and the murder of Serbs on the altar of the
Kladusa church is without precedent in history. There are detailed and original
accounts of all these horrors. Even the Germans and Italians were astounded by
these crimes. They photographed a large number of cases of such slaughter. The
Germans are saying that the Croatians did this also during the Thirty Years War
and that is why there has been a saying in Germany since then: ‘God save us
from plague, hunger and Croats.’
“The Srem Germans despise us because of this and behave in a more humane
fashion with the Serbs. The Italians photographed a vessel with 3.5 kilograms of
Serbian eyes, as well as a Croat who wore a necklace strung with Serbian eyes,
and another one who came to Dubrovnik with a belt on which severed Serbian
tongues were hanging!
“The horrors of the camps in which thousands of Serbs were killed or were
left to die from exposure, hunger and cold weather, are too terrible to mention.
The Germans have been talking about a camp in Lika where there were
thousands of Serbs; but when the Germans got there they found the camp
empty, drenched in blood and bloody clothing. In that camp it has been said a
Serbian bishop also lost his life. Thousands upon thousands of Serbs in the
camp of Jasenovac are still being tortured as they are spending fierce winter in
wooden Gypsy shacks with no straw or covering and with a ration of two
potatoes per day. In the history of Europe there have been no similar cases. One
589
would have to go to Asia at the time of Tamerlane, or Genghis-Khan, or to
Africa, to the countries of their bloodthirsty rulers to come upon similar
situations. These events have shamed the name of Croatia for centuries to come.
Nothing can absolve us fully from this ever again. We will not be able to tell
even the last wretched man in the Balkans about our thousand year old Croatian
culture, because even the Gypsies never perpetrated such cruelties. Why am I
writing this to you, when you are not a political personage and cannot bear
responsibility for all this. Here is why: in all these unprecedented barbarian
crimes which are more than Godless, our Catholic church participated in two
ways. A large number of clergy, priests, friars and organized Catholic youth
took an active part in all this. It has also happened that Catholic priests became
camp guards and Ustashi accomplices and so approved of the torture and
slaughter of Christians. A Catholic priest even slit personally slaughtered an
Orthodox clergyman. They could not have done all this without the permission
of their bishops, and if they did, they would have had to lose their jobs and be
taken to court. Since this did not happen, it means that their bishops granted
them permission.
“Secondly, the Catholic Church made us of all this to convert the surviving
Serbs. And while the soil was still steaming from the innocent victims’ blood,
while groans shuddered from the chests of the surviving victims, the priests,
friars, nuns carried in one hand the Ustashi daggers and in the other their
prayer books and rosaries. The whole of Srem is inundated with leaflets written
by Bishop Aksamovic and printed in his printing shop in Djakovo, calling upon
Serbs to save their lives and property by converting to Catholicism. It was as if
our church wanted to show that it could destroy souls just as the Ustashi
authorities destroy bodies. It is an even greater blot on the Catholic church,
since at the same time many Orthodox churches and all the Orthodox
monasteries have been confiscated, their property plundered as well as many
historical treasures. Even the Patriarchal church in Sremski Karlovci has not
been spared. All this violence against conscience and the spirit has brought even
greater disgrace to the Croat nation and name…
“I write this to save my soul and leave it to you (Archbishop Stepinac) to find
a way to save your soul.”1085
Although some have claimed that Stepinac tried to restrain the murderers,
there can be no doubt about his fanatical hatred of Orthodoxy. Thus on March
27 and 28, 1941, he wrote in his diary: “The spirit of Byzantium – that is, of the
Eastern Orthodox Church – is something so terrible that only the Omnipotent

1085 Quoted from Liudmilla Perepiolkina, Ecumenism – A Path to Perdition, St.
Petersburg, 1999, pp. 230-233, and "Stepinac's Hat is Blood-Red", The Christian
Century, January 14, 1953, pp. 42-43. See also the article by the Catholic writer
Richard West, "The War in Bosnia", Orthodox Christian Witness, September 11/24,
1995, and Marko Markovich, “La Responsabilité de l’Eglise Catholique dans le
Genocide des Serbes par les Oustachis au cours de la Seconde Guerre Mondiale”,
in G. Ivanoff-Trinadtsaty, Regards sur l’Orthodoxie (Points of View on Orthodoxy),
Lausanne: “L’Age d’Homme, 1997, pp. 173-190.
590
and Omniscient God could tolerate it… The Croats and the Serbs are from two
different worlds, two different poles; without a miracle of God they will never
find a common language. The schism of the Eastern Orthodox Church is the
greatest curse in Europe, perhaps even worse than Protestantism.”
In 1946 Stepinac was tried by the communist government, found guilty of

treason to the State and the murder of Serbs, and imprisoned for five years. On
coming out of prison he was awarded a cardinal’s hat by the Vatican, and in
1998 was beatified by Pope John Paul II!
Another creation of the Ustashi was the so-called “Croatian Orthodox

Church”. On June 8, 1942, the Romanian Patriarch Nicodemus raised ROCOR’s
Archbishop Hermogen (Maximov) to the rank of metropolitan of this
uncanonical church, whose main task was to “Croatize” the Serbs. It enjoyed the
full support of the Croatian authorities, but was rejected by the Serbian Church
and by ROCOR under Metropolitan Anastasy, who banned Hermogen.
However, the Germans did not allow this ban to be published. Moreover, on
July 27 the Ecumenical Patriarch, followed by most of the Orthodox Churches in
the German orbit, recognized the CroatChurch. But believers did not go to it.1086
Metropolitan Hermogenes was killed by Tito’s partisans in July, 1945.1087

However, according to another version, he was arrested and condemned
together with the Catholic Cardinal Stepinac. But while Stepinac received
sixteen years in prison, being released after only two years, Metropolitan
Hermogen was executed

1086 Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, pp. 43-44, 44-45; Bishop Gregory Grabbe, Zaviet
Sviatogo Patriarkha (The Testament of the Holy Patriarch), Moscow, 1996, p. 33.
1087 Ilya Goriachev, in Monk Benjamin, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 89-90.
591
64. THE NAZIS INVADE RUSSIA
Hitler and Stalin shared the same complete disregard for moral norms,
contempt for human life and liberty, and disregard of public opinion.
Paradoxically, it may have been this closeness in evil that made Stalin refuse to
believe the mountain of evidence that Hitler was going to invade Russia in 1941.
It was as if he felt he could trust Hitler because he was so close to him in
character, whereas his distrust of others, even his own followers, bordered on
the psychotic…
But there was also an important difference in character between the two men.
Stalin, for all his ruthlessness, was cautious and calculating. But Hitler was a
megalomaniac who scorned calculation, putting all his trust in sheer force of
will and destiny. Stalin thought that Hitler, still occupied as he was in mopping
up the West, would not dare to open up a second front against Russia. He knew
Hitler’s desire for land in the east, and he knew the intelligence reports pouring
in that said that Hitler was massing his troops in Poland. But he thought the
intelligence reports were fabricated by western agents – Hitler could not be such
a fool. But he was wrong. It was he, Stalin, who was shown to be a fool…1088
The former GRU agent Victor Suvorov has argued that Stalin was in fact
planning to attack Hitler, but Hitler “beat him to the punch”. This thesis
explains why Stalin’s army, which was the largest in the world and very well
equipped, collapsed so spectacularly. Thus according to V. Anfilov,
“Immediately, before the middle of July, 1941, we lost about a million soldiers
and officers, of whom 724,000 were captured. The enemy got as trophies 6,500
tanks, 7000 weapons and mortars, and huge reserves of fuel and
ammunition.”1089 Suvorov argues that the main reason is that Stalin’s army was
deployed for an offensive, not a defensive war, and so was caught unprepared.
Following Suvorov, Mark Solonin argues that Stalin was in fact preparing a
large-scale invasion of Europe, and that he changed the date twice. The initial
plan was set for the beginning of the summer of 1942, but later, under the
influence of the events in the Balkans and the increasing flow of intelligence
information concerning the deployment of the Wehrmacht in Poland, Stalin
decided to start the operation in July-August of 1941. And without knowing that
fact, Hitler made an anticipatory strike on June 22 - only a few weeks in advance
of Stalin.1090

1088 David Reynolds, in the film, “World War Two; 1941 and the Man of Steel”
(BBC).
1089 Anfilov, “Samie Tiazhkie Gody” (The Most Terrible Years), Literaturnaia Gazeta,
March 22, 1989.

1090 http://www.solonin.org/en/book_june-23-m-day.
592
However, Simon Sebag Montefiore doubts this: “It is now known that the
real view of the General Staff, including General Vasilevsky, was that they
would have to retreat much deeper into their territory – hence Vasilevsky’s
proposal to move airfields and infrastructure back to the Volga, a proposal
attacked as ‘defeatist’ by Kulik and Mekhlis. However, Stalin always kept an
offensive war as a real possibility as well as an ideological necessity.”1091 Again,
Anthony Beevor calls the Suvorov thesis “nonsense”. “It is based on a Soviet
contingency planning document from 11 May 1941 where General Zhukov and
others, who were well aware of the Nazis’ invasion plans, were examining
possible responses to this. One that he looked at was the idea of a pre-emptive
strike. However the Red Army at the time was totally incapable of carrying out
such an action.”1092
The most likely hypothesis is that put forward by Stephen Kotkin: that Stalin,
blinded by his hatred of Britain and admiration for Germany, clung onto the
belief that Germany would not invade Russia before it had defeated Britain.
Moreover, he was terrified that he would lose any war against Germany
because, as a result of his own decimation of the Red Army, “85 percent of the
officer corps was 35 or younger; those older than 45 constituted around one
percent. Fully 1,013 Soviet generals were under age 55, and only 63 were older
than that. Many had been majors only a short time earlier. Out of 659,000 Soviet
officers, only around half had completed military school, while one in four had
the bare minimum (a few courses), and one in eight had no military education
whatsoever.”1093 That is why he dismissed the many reports he received of a
German build-up on his western border as disinformation, and did everything
to avoid “provoking” Hitler.
From this point of view, Stalin was actually trying to appease Hitler. However,
writes Kotkin, “Stalin’s dealings with Hitler differed from British appeasement
in that Stalin tried deterrence as well as accommodation. But Stalin’s policy
resembled British appeasement in that he was driven by a blinding desire to
avoid war at all costs. He displayed strength of capabilities, but not will. Neither
his fearsome resolve nor his supreme cunning – which had enabled him to
vanquish his rivals and spiritually crush his inner circle – was in evidence in
1941. He shrank from trying to pre-empt Hitler militarily and failed to pre-empt
him diplomatically.
“In the end, however, the question of who most miscalculated is not a simple
one. ‘Of all the men who can lay claim to having paved the way’ for the Third
Reich, Hitler liked to say, ‘one figure stands in awe-inspiring solitude:

1091 Montefiore, Stalin. The Court of the Red Tsar, London: Phoenix, 2004, p. 359, note.
1092 Beevor, “Hitler’s Greatest Mistake”, BBC History Magazine, June, 2016, p. 23.
1093 Kotkin, “When Stalin Faced Hitler”, Foreign Affairs, November/December, 2017, p. 61.
593
Bismarck.’ But Bismarck had built his chancellorship on avoiding conflict with
Russia. When a bust of Bismarck was transferred from the old Reich
Chancellery to Hitler’s new Reich Chancellery, it had broken off at the neck. A
replica was hastily made and artificially aged by soaking it in cold tea. No one
shared this omen with Hitler…”1094
The holy Orthodox elders had prophesied both the war and its outcome. Thus
in 1911 Elder Aristocles of Moscow said: “You will hear that the Germans are
rattling their sabres on the borders of Russia… Only don’t rejoice yet. Many
Russians will think that the Germans will save Russia from the Bolshevik power,
but it will not be so. True, the Germans will enter Russia and will do much, but
they will depart, for the time of salvation will not be yet. That will be later,
later… Germany will suffer her punishment in her own land. She will be
divided…”1095 Again, in 1940 the holy Catacomb Elder Theodosius (Kashin) of
Minvody said: “There’s going to be a war, such a terrible war, like the Terrible
Judgement: people will perish, they have departed from the Lord, they have
forgotten God, and the wind of war will carry them away like ashes, and there
will be no sign of them. But if anyone will call on God, the Lord will save him
from trouble.”1096
The Nazis invaded on June 22, the feast of All Saints of Russia. Their reasons
were: Hitler’s long-term goal of Lebensraum in the East, the acquisition both of
land (for purposes of German colonization) and natural resources (for military
purposes); his hatred of the “Judaeo-Bolsheviks”; and his determination, as
noted above, not to allow Stalin to dominate the Balkans. The invasion gave
renewed impetus to that movement of Russian patriotism in a Soviet mould that
Stalin had been encouraging since 1934. Thus after he had recovered from the
shock of the invasion, Stalin spoke to the people by radio, calling them by the
traditional Orthodox title of “brothers and sisters”. Again, “Vyacheslav Molotov,
the Foreign Minister, gave a radio address in which he spoke of the impending
‘patriotic war for homeland, honour and freedom’. The next day the main Soviet
army newspaper, Krasnaia Zvezda, referred to it as a ‘holy war’. Communism
was conspicuously absent from Soviet propaganda in the war. It was fought in
the name of Russia, of the ‘family of peoples’ in the Soviet Union, of Pan-Slav
brotherhood, or in the name of Stalin, but never in the name of the communist
system.”1097

1094 Kotkin, op. cit., p. 71.
1095 Elder Aristocles, in Fomin, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the
Second Coming), Sergiev Posad, 1993, p. 237.
1096 Chernov, Tserkov' Katakombnaia na Zemle Rossijskoj (The Catacomb Church in the
Russian Land), MS, Woking, 1980.

1097 Oliver Figes, Natasha’s Dance, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 489.
594
Such patriotic appeals were necessary because, as Richard Overy writes, “by
1942 it was evident that the Communist Party alone could not raise the energies
of the people for a struggle of this depth and intensity. The war with Germany
was not like the war against the kulaks, or the war for greater production in the
1930s, although the almost continuous state of popular mobilization which these
campaigns produced in some ways prepared the population to respond to
emergency and improvisation. During 1942 the war was presented as a war to
save historic Russia, a nationalist war of revenge against a monstrous, almost
mythical enemy. The words ‘Soviet Union’ and ‘Communism’ appeared less
and less frequently in official publications. The words ‘Russia’ and ‘Motherland’
took their place. The ‘Internationale’, the anthem of the international socialist
movement played on state occasions, was replaced with a new nationalist
anthem. The habits of military egalitarianism ingrained in the Red Army were
swept aside. New medals were struck commemorating the military heroes of
Russia’s past; the Tsarist Nevsky Order was revived but could be won only by
officers. Aleksandr Nevsky, the Muscovite prince who drove back the Teutonic
Knights in the thirteenth century, was a singularly apt parallel. In 1938 Stalin
had ordered Sergei Eisenstein to produce a film on Nevsky. He interfered with
the script to make the message clear about the German threat (and the virtues of
authoritarianism). In 1939 the film was withdrawn following the Nazi-Soviet
pact, but in 1942 it again became essential viewing.”1098
However, there was no genuine revival of Russian patriotism. Nor could

there be. The people’s hatred of the Bolsheviks was so great that the Germans
were in general greeted with ecstatic joy. Thus "I can tell you,” wrote Reader
S.D. Pleskan to Metropolitan Alexis of Leningrad, “that the Russians completely
changed when the Germans appeared. The destroyed churches were erected,
church utensils were made, vestments were provided from where they had been
stored. Many churches were built and repaired. Everywhere they were painting.
The peasant women hung clean cloths, which they themselves had sown, on the
icons. Joy and consolation appeared. When everything was ready, they invited a
priest and the church was consecrated. There were such joyful events at that
time - I cannot describe them. People forgave each other offences. Children were
baptized. People were invited to each other's houses. It was a real feast. The
Russian peasants celebrated, and I felt that people were seeking consolation
here."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes: “Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia gave the

Germans a jubilant welcome. Belorussia, the Western Ukraine, and the first
occupied Russian territories followed suit. But the mood of the people was
demonstrated most graphically of all by the Red Army: before the eyes of the
whole world it retreated along a 2,000-kilometre front, on foot, but every bit as

1098 Overy, Russia’s War, London: Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 161-162.
595
fast as motorized units. Nothing could possibly be more convincing than the
way these men, soldiers in their prime, voted with their feet. Numerical
superiority was entirely with the Red Army, they had excellent artillery and a
strong tank force, yet back they rolled, a rout without compare, unprecedented
in the annals of Russian and world history. In the first few months some three
million officers and men had fallen into enemy hands!
“That is what the popular mood was like – the mood of peoples some of
whom had lived through twenty-four years of communism and others but a
single year. For them the whole point of this latest war was to cast off the
scourge of communism. Naturally enough, each people was primarily bent not
on resolving any European problem but on its own national task – liberation
from communism…”1099
These huge losses, writes Plokhy, “must have been one of the reasons why, in
his next highly publicized address, delivered on November 7, 1941, Great
October Socialist Revolution Day, on Red Square in front of troops leaving for
the front lines only a few dozen kilometres from Moscow, Stalin dropped all
references to the non-Russians. For him, the war was now a purely Russian
undertaking. ‘The war that you are waging is a war of liberation, a just war,’ he
declared. ‘May you be inspired in that war by the manly image of our great
ancestors – Aleksandr Nevsky, Dmitrii Donskoi, Kuzma Minin, Dmitrii
Pozharsky, Aleksandr Suvorov, and Mikhail Kutuzov! May you be shielded by
the victorious banner of the great Lenin!’ There was no mention of any non-
Russian hero, only glorification of the imperial ones who had often been
ridiculed by Soviet propaganda only a few years earlier. Even the reference to
Lenin had religious overtones, as the Russian verb oseniat’ (to shield) means ‘to
bless’ or ‘to make the sign of the cross’. With the regime’s back to the wall, Stalin
was invoking symbols and gods previously discarded and desecrated.
“It looked as if the emphasis on the Russian imperial tradition at the expense
of the primacy of Marxist-Leninist ideology was working. The transfer of fresh
Soviet divisions from the Far East helped Stalin hold on to Moscow in December
1941 and push the Germans back. In January 1943, in the middle of the furious
fighting at Stalingrad, Stalin resurrected military shoulder patches that had been
closely associated with the tsarist regime in Soviet pre-war propaganda. A less
ideological foreign policy allowed for building bridges with former adversaries,
Britain and the United States…”1100

1099 Solzhenitsyn, The Mortal Danger, London: The Bodley Head, 1980, pp. 39-40.
1100 Plokhy, op. cit., p. 270.
596
Hastings writes that “the ‘Great Patriotic War’ Stalin had declared became a
reality that accomplished more for the cohesion and motivation of his peoples
than any other event since the 1917 Revolution.”1101
However, this statement can be accepted only if the patriotism referred to is

acknowledged as Soviet, not Russian. For, as Anton Kuznetsov writes, “from the
very beginning the Bolsheviks showed themselves to be an anti-Russian power,
for which the concepts of Homeland, Fatherland, honour and duty do not exist;
in whom the holy things of the Russian people elicit hatred; which replaced the
word ‘Russia’ with the word ‘Internationale’, and the Russian flag with the red
banner; which even in its national composition was not Russian: it was
dominated by Jews (they constituted a huge percentage, and at first it seemed as
if it was a question of a purely ‘Jewish power’) and foreigners.
“During the 24 years of its domination the Bolshevik (‘Soviet’) power had
had enormous successes in the annihilation of historical Russia. All classes were
wiped out one by one: the nobility, the merchants, the peasantry, the clergy and
the educated class (including all the Russian officers), and all the state
institutions of what had been Russia were destroyed: the army, the police, the
courts, local administration, charitable institutions, etc. A systematic
annihilation of Russian culture was carried out – churches were blown up,
museums were robbed, towns and streets were renamed, Russian family and
everyday traditions were exterminated, Russian sciences and schools were
liquidated, the whole of Russian history was blotted out and spat upon. In the
place of the annihilated Russian element a red and Soviet element was created,
beginning with the Red army and the Red professors and ending with Soviet
orthography and Soviet sport. Our earthly Fatherland, Russia, was in fact
destroyed, by terror she was transformed into the Sovdepia, which was a
complete denial of Russia – it was anti-Russia. A Russian person has no right to
forget that a consistent denial of Russian statehood is that on which the Soviet
regime stood and on which it prided itself with emphasis. One has no right to
call such a regime a national power. It must be defined as an anti-national,
occupying power, the overthrow of which every honourable patriot can only
welcome.”1102
As the Bolsheviks retreated in August 1941 they blew up the Dnepropetrovsk

dam, killing 100,000 people, according to one account.1103 Again, “the NKVD
carried out a programme of liquidation of all the prisoners sitting in their jails.

1101 Hastings, op. cit., pp. 177-178.
1102 Kuznetsov, “O Sovietsko-Germanskoj Vojne” (On the Soviet-German War),
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=print page&pid=570, pp.
3-4, 7-8.
1103 http://bbcccnn.com.ua/archives/15823, August 18, 2015.
597
In the huge Lukyanov prison in Kiev thousands were shot in their cells. But in
Stavropol they still had time to take the ‘contras’, including several old priests
and monks, out of the city. They were led out onto the railway line from
Kislovodsk to Moscow. At the small station of Mashuk, where the poet
Lermontov had his duel, the wagons containing the prisoners were uncoupled
from the trains and shunted into a siding at Kamenolomnya. Then the priests
and monks were taken out with their hands bound and their eyes covered. In
groups of five they were led to the edge of a sheer cliff, and thrust over the edge.
Then the bodies were lifted up with hooks and covered with crushed stone and
sand before a tractor levelled the area for the next wagon-full...”1104
Another example of the Soviets’ hatred of their own people in the early
months of the war. On November 17, 1941 there appeared secret Order No. 0428
from the headquarters of the Supreme Commander (Stalin): "... Destroy and
burn to the ground all the inhabited areas in the rear of the German armies..."
From the Memoirs of Army General Lyashenko: "At the end of 1941 I was in
command of a regiment. We were in a defensive position. In front of us we
could see two villages: as I remember, they were Bannovskoye and Prishib. An
order came from the division: burn the villages that you can get to. When I was
in my dugout working out the details of how I was to carry out this order, an
elderly messenger unexpectedly burst it, violating all rules of subordination:
'Comrade Major! This is my village... There are my wife, my children, my sister
with her children... How is it possible to burn them?! They will all perish!...' The
messenger was fortunate: the hands of the Soviet army did not touch those
villages. The execution of order no. 0428 threw out into the cold not so much
Germans as peaceful inhabitants who had not managed to be evacuated.
Thousands of women, old men and children were deprived of a roof over their
heads in the savage winter of 1941/42."1105
“There is a myth that the only time Stalin ceased the war against his own
people was during 1941 and 1942; but during that period, 994,000 servicemen
were condemned, and 157,000 shot, more than fifteen divisions…”1106
Stalin also deported many non-Russian nationalities en masse to terrible

living conditions in Siberia on trumped-up charges of cooperating with the
Nazis. As Shaun Walker writes, “The Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and ethnic
Germans living inside the Soviet Union were deported to either Central Asia or
Siberia, as well as several other smaller nationalities… A decree published in

1104 Chernov, op. cit. See also, for those shot in the prisons of Lvov:
http://bessmertnybarak.ru/article/rasstrelnyy_spisok_lvov/
1105 http://bessmertnybarak.ru/article/prikaz_stavki_0428/
1106 Montefiore, Stalin, p. 401.
598
1948 stated that the Kalmyk people had been deported ‘forever, and with no
right of return to the previous place of habitation.’”1107
As for German atrocities, Timothy Snyder writes that the Germans “killed
civilians almost exclusively in connection with the practice of racial imperialism.
Germany invaded the Soviet Union with elaborate colonization plans. Thirty
million Soviet citizens were to starve, and tens of millions more were to be shot,
deported, enslaved, or assimilated.
“Such plans, though unfulfilled, provided the rationale for the bloodiest
occupation in the history of the world. The Germans placed Soviet prisoners of
war in starvation camps, where 2.6 million perished from hunger and another
half-million (disproportionately Soviet Jews) were shot. A million Soviet citizens
also starved during the siege of Leningrad. In “reprisals” for partisan actions,
the Germans killed about 700,000 civilians in grotesque mass executions, most of
them Belarusians and Poles. At the war’s end the Soviets killed tens of
thousands of people in their own “reprisals,” especially in the Baltic states,
Belarus, and Ukraine. Some 363,000 German soldiers died in Soviet captivity.
“Hitler came to power with the intention of eliminating the Jews from
Europe; the war in the east showed that this could be achieved by mass killing.
Within weeks of the attack by Germany (and its Finnish, Romanian, Hungarian,
Italian, and other allies) on the USSR, the Germans, with local help, were
exterminating entire Jewish communities. By December 1941, when it appears
that Hitler communicated his wish that all Jews be murdered, perhaps a million
Jews were already dead in the occupied Soviet Union. Most had been shot over
pits, but thousands were asphyxiated in gas vans. From 1942, carbon monoxide
was used at the death factories Chełmno, Bełz˙ec, Sobibór, and Treblinka to kill
Polish and some other European Jews. As the Holocaust spread to the rest of
occupied Europe, other Jews were gassed by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz-
Birkenau.
“Overall, the Germans, with much local assistance, deliberately murdered

about 5.4 million Jews, roughly 2.6 million by shooting and 2.8 million by
gassing (about a million at Auschwitz, 780,863 at Treblinka, 434,508 at Bełz˙ec,
about 180,000 at Sobibór, 150,000 at Chełmno, 59,000 at Majdanek, and many of
the rest in gas vans in occupied Serbia and the occupied Soviet Union). A few
hundred thousand more Jews died during deportations to ghettos or of hunger
or disease in ghettos. Another 300,000 Jews were murdered by Germany’s ally
Romania. Most Holocaust victims had been Polish or Soviet citizens before the

1107 Walker, The Long Hangover. Putin’s New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past, Oxford University
Press, 2018, pp. 28, 29.
599
war (3.2 million and one million respectively). The Germans also killed more
than a hundred thousand Roma Gypsies.
“All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a

figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation,
hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets
during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million
and nine million. These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very
unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the
opening of Eastern European archives in the 1990s. Since the Germans killed
chiefly in lands that later fell behind the Iron Curtain, access to Eastern
European sources has been almost as important to our new understanding of
Nazi Germany as it has been to research on the Soviet Union itself.”1108
Hitler’s plan, writes Beevor, “was to advance to what was called the ‘AA line’,
from Archangel to Astrakhan’. This would have taken them past Moscow and
more or less beyond the line of the Volga. This is why, when it came to the battle
of Stalingrad, many German troops felt that if they could only capture the city
and get to the Volga they would have won the war.”1109
But Hitler lost Stalingrad, and the consequent loss of the Battle of Kursk in
1943, doomed the Germans to a long and bloody retreat all the way to Berlin…

1108 Snyder, “Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?” New York Review of Books, March 10, 2011.
1109 Beevor, op. cit.
600
65. CHURCH LIFE DURING THE GERMAN OCCUPATION
The Nazi invasion had big consequences for Church life in Russia… By 1939
there were only four bishops, all sergianists, at liberty, and only a tiny handful
of Orthodox churches open, in the whole of the country. Stalin had silenced his
greatest enemy, the Church of Christ, and the Russian people were now
apparently defenceless against the most powerful and antichristian state in
human history… However, the Word of God is not bound, and from 1941,
thanks in part to the advance of the Germans deep into Russia, Orthodoxy
experienced a miraculous revival. Thus “in the years of the war,” writes Anatoly
Krasikov, “with the agreement of the German occupying authorities, 7547
Orthodox churches were opened (as against 1270 opened in 1944-1947 with the
permission of the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church).”1110
Even in fully Sovietized regions such as Pskov and the Eastern Ukraine, 95% of
the population, according to German reports, flooded into the newly-opened
churches.
In the Baltic region, the Germans were quite happy to deal with the MP’s
exarch, Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky), who quickly showed his loyalty to
them.1111 He immediately proceeded to bless the formation of an “Orthodox
mission in the liberated regions of Russia”, otherwise known as the “Pskov
Orthodox Mission”, whose official aim was the restoration of church life
“destroyed by Soviet power”. This mission included within its jurisdiction parts
of the Leningrad and Kalinin regions, as well as the Pskov and Novgorod
regions, with a population of about two million people. By 1944 it had 200
parishes and 175 priests. Lectures were read on Pskov radio, help was given to
Soviet prisoners of war, and a children’s home was created in a church in Pskov.
The mission, on the insistence of Metropolitan Sergius (who was, after all, an
NKVD agent), remained subject to the Leningrad diocese under Metropolitan
Alexis (Simansky), whose name was commemorated in each service. However,
while remaining formally within the MP, Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky)
carried out the commands of the Germans. For example, in the summer of 1943
he ordered that a thanksgiving service with the participation of all the clergy
should take place in Pskov to mark the Germans’ handing back of the land into
the hands of the peasantry.
The True Orthodox Church supported neither the Soviets nor the Germans.
The elders did not allow their spiritual children to fight in the Red Army, and
some Catacomb Christians were martyred for their refusal to do so.1112 They

1110 Krasikov, “’Tretij Rim’ i Bol’sheviki” (The Third Rome and the Bolsheviks), in
L.M. Vorontsova, A.V. Pchelintsev and S.B. Filatov (eds.), Religia i Prava Cheloveka
(Religion and Human Rights), Moscow: “Nauka”, 1996, p. 203.
1111 In Latvia, Metropolitan Augustine asked the Germans to allow him to re-
establish the Latvian Church within the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical

Patriarchate. But they refused…
1112 Chernov, op. cit. Soldatov (op. cit.) writes: “In the Catacomb Church a tradition has been
preserved about Schema-Monk Leontius (Mymrikov), who blessed True Orthodox Christians to
go to war against the communists”.
601
were also wary of the Germans, while taking advantage of the freedom of
worship they provided. Thus the Kiev-Caves Lavra was reopened, and
Catacomb Schema-Archbishop Anthony (Abashidze) returned to it with his
monks, staying there until his death in 1942.1113 Also in Kiev, Archimandrite
Michael (Kostyuk), together with Schema-Abbess Michaela (Shelkina), directed
a large community of catacomb monks and nuns. They were even able to build
an above-ground church with the permission of the Germans.1114 In the German-
occupied north-west, however, the True Orthodox Christians remained
underground.1115
M.V. Shkarovsky writes that “the activity of the True Orthodox Christians
seriously worried the higher leadership of the country. It received discouraging
reports about a significant rise in the influence of the catacomb movement in the
first years of the war. Thus the July, 1943 special communication of the head of
the NKVD Administration in Penza province spoke of the activity of more than
20 illegal and semi-illegal groups that arranged prayers in private flats. In some
region there were hundreds of these groups. In the report of the president of the
Council for the affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, G. Karpov, to V.
Molotov dated October 5, 1944, it was emphasised: ‘In the provinces with an
insignificant number of functioning churches, and in the regions where there are
no churches, a massive spreading of group worship in the homes of believers or
in the open air has been noticed… Moreover, in these cases, believers invite
clergy who are not registered to carry out the rite… A significant part of the
activists of these unregistered church groups, together with their clergy, are
hostile to the legal patriarchal church, condemning the latter for its loyal
relationship to Soviet power and for its patriotic stance…’”1116
On July 7, 1944, as the Red Army returned to the occupied territories, Beria
petitioned Stalin for the deportation of 1,673 Catacomb Christians from the
Ryazan, Voronezh and Orel regions to Siberia. He described the Catacombniks
as “leading a parasitical way of life, not paying taxes, refusing to fulfil their
obligations and service, and forbidding their children to go to school.”1117 As

1114 Chernov, op. cit.; A. Smirnov, “Ugasshie nepominaiushchie v bege vremeni”
(Extinguished Non-Commemorators in the Flow of Time), Simvol (Symbol), N 40,
1998, pp. 250-267.
1115 M.V. Shkvarovsky, Iosiflianstvo: techenie v Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi
(Josephitism: a tendency in the Russian Orthodox Church), St. Petersburg:
Memorial, 1999, pp. 187-188; Archbishop Ambrose (von Sievers), "Istoki i sviazi
Katakombnoj Tserkvi v Leningrade i obl. (1922-1992)" (Sources and Links of the
Catacomb Church in Leningrad and district (1922-1992), report read at the
conference "The Historical Path of Orthodoxy in Russia after 1917", Saint
Petersburg, 1-3 June, 1993; “Episkopat Istinno-Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi 1922-1997gg.”
(The Episcopate of the True Orthodox Church, 1922-1997), Russkoe Pravoslavie
(Russian Orthodoxy), N 4 (8), 1997, pp. 12-13.
1116 Shkvarovsky, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khruscheve (The
Russian Orthodox Church under Stalin and Khruschev), Moscow, 2005, pp. 250-
251.
1117 I.F. Bugayem, "Varvarskaia aktsia" (A Barbaric Action), Otechestvo (Fatherland),
N 3, 1992, pp. 53-73; text in Shkvarovsky, Iosiflyanstvo, pp. 262-263.
602
Bishop Irinarchus of Tula and Briansk writes: “In 1943, according to the
personal order of Stalin, several hundred Catacomb Orthodox Christians were
removed from Tula and Ryazan regions and sent to Siberia. Many of them
perished, but not all, glory to God. In Tula region they have been preserved to
this day [2004]. The Lord entrusted them to me, and with God’s help I am
spiritually caring for them… Before the war only a few Catacomb priests were
surviving in Briansk region. But when the region was occupied by the Germans,
several hundred churches were opened in it, where they commemorated, not
Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) as first hierarch, but Metropolitan
Anastasy, the head of ROCOR. In Briansk region the Catacomb Christians were
served by Bishop Stefan (Sevbo). Under the pressure of the red army Bishop
Stefan and many clergy and laity emigrated to Belorussia, and then to Germany.
Vladyka Stefan later ruled the Viennese diocese of ROCOR, and died in
1965.”1118
ROCOR welcomed the resurrection of Orthodoxy in the occupied territories.

Thus in his paschal epistle for 1942 Metropolitan Anastasy wrote: “The day that
they (the Russian people) expected has come, and it is now truly rising from the
dead in those places where the courageous German sword has succeeded in
severing its fetters… Both ancient Kiev, and much-suffering Smolensk and
Pskov are radiantly celebrating their deliverance as if from the depths of hell.
The liberated part of the Russian people everywhere has already begun to chant:
‘Christ is risen!’”1119
However, the Germans did not want was the resurrection of the Great
Russian people through the Church, and they hindered ROCOR’s attempt to
send priests into the occupied territories. Moreover, as the war progressed and
the behaviour of the Germans became steadily crueller, the attitude of the
Russian Orthodox to them changed. As Metropolitan Anastasy wrote in October,
1945, in response to Patriarch Alexis’ charge that ROCOR sympathised with the
Nazis: “… The Patriarch is not right to declare that ‘the leaders of the
ecclesiastical life of the Russian emigration’ performed public prayers for the
victories of Hitler’. The Hierarchical Synod never prescribed such prayers and
even forbade them, demanding that Russian people prayed at that time only for
the salvation of Russia. Of course, it is impossible to conceal the now well-known
fact that, exhausted by the hopelessness of their situation and reduced almost to
despair by the terror reigning in Russia, Russian people both abroad and in
Russia itself placed hopes on Hitler, who declared an irreconcilable war against
communism (as is well-known, this is the explanation for the mass surrender of
the Russian armies into captivity at the beginning of the war), but when it
became evident that he was in fact striving to conquer Ukraine, Crimea and the
Caucasus and other rich regions of Russia, and that he not only despised the
Russian people, but was even striving to annihilate it, and that in accordance

1118 “Interviu s episkopom Irinarkhom Tul’skim i Brianskim (RPATs)” (Interview
with Bishop Irinarch of Tula and Briansk (ROAC), Vertograd, N 440, 10 March,
2004.
1119 Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), 1942, N 4; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, p.
41.
603
with his command our prisoners had been starved to death, and that the
German army during its retreat had burned and destroyed to their foundations
Russian cities and villages on their path, and had killed or led away their
population, and had condemned hundreds of thousands of Jews with women
and children to death, forcing them to dig graves for themselves, then the hearts
of all reasonable people – except those who ‘wanted to be deceived’ - turned
against him…”1120
G.M. Soldatov writes: “It was suggested to the metropolitan that he issue an
appeal to the Russian people calling on them to cooperate with the German
army, which was going on a crusade to liberate Russia from the Bolsheviks. If he
were to refuse to make the address, Vladyka was threatened with internment.
However, the metropolitan refused, saying that German policy and the purpose
of the crusade was unclear to him. In 1945 his Holiness Patriarch Gabriel of
Serbia witnessed to Metropolitan Anastasy’s loyalty to Serbia and the Germans’
distrust of him…
”Referring to documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other

departments of the German government, the historian M.V. Shkarovsky pointed
out that Metropolitan Anastasy and the clergy of ROCOR were trying to go to
Russia to begin organizing missionary and charitable work there, but this
activity did not correspond to the plans of Germany, which wanted to see
Russia weak and divided in the future.”1121
Nevertheless, of the two alternatives – the Germans or the Soviets – ROCOR

quite understandably considered the latter the more dangerous enemy. For
Soviet power had been anathematized at the Russian Local Council in 1918, and
had subjected the Russian Church to a persecution that was unprecedented in
the history of Christianity. Thus in November, 1944 Metropolitan Anastasy
addressed the Russian Liberation Movement as follows: “In the name of the
Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit! From ancient times there has
existed such a custom in the Russian land; before undertaking any good work,
especially a collective work, they used to ask the blessing of God on it. And you
have gathered here, dear brothers and fellow-countrymen, you workers and
inspirer of the Russian national movement, thereby demonstrating the historical
link of the great work of the liberation of Russia with the actions of our fathers
and great-grandfathers… We are now all united by one feeling – a feeling of
deadly irreconcilability with the Bolshevik evil and a flaming desire to extirpate
it on the Russian land. For we know that as long as it reigns there, no rational
human life is possible, no spiritual movement forward; as long as this evil

1120 Poslanie k russkim pravoslavnym liudiam po povodu ‘Obraschenia patriarkha
Aleksia k arkipastyriam i kliru tak nazyvaemoj Karlovatskoj orientatsii’ (Epistle to

the Russian Orthodox people on the ‘Address of Patriarch Alexis to the
archpastors and clergy of the so-called Karlovtsy orientation), in G.M. Soldatov,
Arkhierejskij Sobor Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi Zagranitsej, Miunkhen (Germania)
1946 g. (The Hierarchical Council of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad at
Munich in 1946), Minneapolis, 2003, p. 13.
1121 Soldatov, op. cit., pp. 12, 13.
604
threatens both our fatherland and the whole of Europe, death and destruction
will be established everywhere. And insofar as you, dear brothers and sisters,
are striving to crush this terrible evil… you are doing a truly patriotic, even
more than that, universal work, and the Church cannot fail to bless your great
and holy beginning… Dear brothers and sisters, let us all unite around this
Liberation Movement of ours, let each of us struggle on this path and help the
common great work of the liberation of our Homeland, until this terrible evil of
Bolshevism falls and our tormented Russia is raised from her bed…”1122
In Belorussia and the Ukraine, the Germans encouraged the formation of

national Churches independent of the Moscow Patriarchate.A Belorussian
Autonomous Church was formed under Archbishop Philotheus of Slutsk (later
of Hamburg).1123Pressure from Belorussian nationalists to form a completely
autocephalous Church was rejected. The Belorussian Church had no contact
with the MP - the Germans forbade the commemoration of Sergius. So formally
speaking the Belorussians were not part of the MP. Moreover, in October, 1943,
the Germans for the first time allowed the convening of a Council of ROCOR
bishop at which the Belorussians were represented by a bishop and a priest at a
Council of ROCOR in Vienna. So de facto they were now in communion with
ROCOR.
Present at the council were Metropolitan Anastasy, Seraphim (Lukyanov),

Seraphim (Lyade), Benedict (Bobkovsky), Basil (Pavlovsky), Philip (von
Gardner), Gregory (Boriskevich)). On October 25 the bishops condemned the
election of the patriarch as unlawful and invalid, comparing Sergius’
compromises to the third temptation of the Saviour, to whom Satan promised to
give all the kingdoms of the world if He would worship him…
“The conference composed and sent to the German authorities a

memorandum which contained a series of bold demands. The memorandum is
the best proof of the fact that the Conference took decisions independently, and
not at the command of the Nazis. In it first of all should be highlighted the
protest against the Nazis’ not allowing the Russian clergy abroad to go to the
occupied territories of the USSR. The memorandum demanded ‘the removal of
all obstacles hindering the free movement of bishops from this side of the front’,
and the reunion of bishop ‘on occupied territories and abroad’. (A.K. Nikitin,
Polozhenie russkoj pravoslavnoj obschiny v Germanii v period natsistkogo rezhima
(1933-1945 gg.) [The Situation of the Russian Orthodox Community in Germany
in the Nazi period (1933-1945)], Annual Theological Conference PSTBI, Moscow,
1998). A vivid expression of this protest was the consecration by the participants
of the Conference of Bishop Gregory (Boriskevich). He was consecrated for the

1122 I.L. Solonevich, “Rossia v kontslagere” (Russia in the concentration camp),
Volia Naroda (The Will of the People), November 22, 1944; Monk Benjamin, op. cit.,
part 3, pp. 78-79.
1123 Michael Woerl, “A Brief Biography of Archbishop Filofei (Narko)”, Orthodox
Life, vol. 50, N 6, November-December, 2000.
605
Belorussian Autonomous Church and received the title of Bishop of Gomel and
Mozyr. At the Council an appeal to Russian believers was agreed. The
conference did not send any greetings to Hitler or other leaders of the Third
Reich. The third agreed point was unexpected for the Nazi institutions. De facto
it contained a critique of German policy in relation to the Russian Church and
included demands for greater freedom: ‘(1) The free development and
strengthening of the Orthodox Church in the occupied regions and the
unification of all Orthodox ecclesiastical provinces liberated from Soviet power
with the Orthodox Church Abroad under one common ecclesiastical leadership
would serve as an earnest of the greater success of these parts of the Russian
Church in the struggle with atheist communism… (3) It is necessary to give
Russian workers in Germany free satisfaction of all their spiritual needs. (4) In
view of the great quantity of various Russian military units in the German army,
it is necessary to create an institution of military priests… (6) A more energetic
preaching of the Orthodox religio-moral world-view… (9) Petition for the
introduction of apologetic programmes on the radio… (10) The organization of
theological libraries attached to the parishes… (13) Giving Orthodox
ecclesiastical authorities the possibility of opening theological schools and the
organization of pastoral and religio-moral courses.’”1124
At this council the election of Metropolitan Sergius as “Patriarch” was

condemned as uncanonical, and a bishop, George, was consecrated for the see of
Gomel and Mozyr by ROCOR.1125 And after fleeing to the West the entire
episcopate of the Belorussian and Ukrainian Autonomous Churches was
received into ROCOR “in their existing rank” on April 23 / May 6, 1946.1126 As
we have seen, another Belorussian hierarch, Bishop Stefan (Sevbo) of Smolensk,
had good relations with the Catacomb Church.1127

1124 Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, pp. 63-64, 64-65; M.V. Shkarovsky, RPTsZ na
Balkanakh v gody Vtoroj Mirovoj Vojny [ROCOR in the Balkans in the years of the
Second World War]; Bishop Gregory (Grabbe), Arkhierejskij Synod vo II Mirovuiu
Vojnu [The Hierarchical Synod in World War II].
1125 George later became bishop of Chicago and Detroit. See “Episkop Vasilij
Venskij – 1880-1945gg.” (Bishop Basil of Vienna – 1880-1945), Pravoslavnaia Rus’

(Orthodox Russia), N 18 (1663), September 14/27, 2000, p. 5.
1126 The whole of the Ukrainian Autonomous Church was also received into the
ROCOR at this time. See Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), N 20 (1545), October
15/28, 1995, p. 4; Alexeyev, W. and Stavrou, T., The Great Revival, op. cit., chapter
4.
1127 “Good, albeit also not unambiguous relations were established between the
True Orthodox Christians and the Belorussian Church. In particular, thanks

precisely to the katacombniki the Belorussian Church took a more anti-patriarchal
stand and entered into conflict with Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky), who
was trying to infiltrate his people into Belorussia. The most ardent relations were
with Bishop Stefan (Sevbo) of Smolensk (+1963), who even ordained several priests
for the True Orthodox Christians and of whom a good memory was preserved in
the ‘catacombs’. It was precisely in Smolensk province and Mozhaisk district in
Moscow province that the True Orthodox Christians became so active that they
regenerated and greatly increased their flock, which had become very thin on the
ground since the repressions of 1937” (Archbishop Ambrose (von Sievers),
“Istinno-Pravoslavnie Khristiane i Vojna 1941-1945gg.” (True Orthodox Christians
606
In Ukraine, the Germans allowed the creation of two Churches independent
of the MP. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Church was in essence a reactivation
of the Lypkivsky “self-consecrators’” schism, which had flourished in the
Ukraine in the 1920s before being eliminated by Stalin, via the Polish
Autocephalous Church. Thus on December 24, 1941, Metropolitan Dionysius of
Warsaw, at the request of Ukrainian political and social-ecclesiastical activists,
appointed Archbishop Polycarp (Sikorsky) of Lutsk as “Temporary
Administrator of the Orthodox Autocephalous Church on the liberated lands of
Ukraine”.1128 Into this Church, without reordination, poured the remnants of the
Lypkivsky schism, which soon led it onto the path of extreme Ukrainian
nationalism. About 40% of the Orthodox in the Ukraine were attracted into this
Church, which was especially strong in the West; but it had no monastic life,
and very soon departed from traditional Orthodoxy.
On August 18, 1941, a Council of Bishops meeting in the Pochaev monastery

elected Metropolitan Alexis (Gromadsky) as leader of the Ukrainian
Autonomous Church, which based her existence on the decision of the 1917-18
Local Council of the Russian Church granting the Ukrainian Church autonomy
within the framework of the Russian Church. Although the Germans tended to
favour the Autocephalous Church over the Autonomous Church, it was the
latter that attracted the majority of believers (55%) and opened the most
churches. It even attracted catacomb priests, such as Archimandrite Leontius
(Filippovich), who after his consecration as Bishop of Zhitomir restored about 50%
of the pre-revolutionary parishes in his diocese and ordained about two
hundred priests, including the future leader of the “Seraphimo-Gennadiite”
branch of the Catacomb Church, Gennadius Sekach, before he (Leontius)
himself fled westwards with the Germans and joined ROCOR.1129 Also linked
with the Autonomous Churches was the Georgian Schema-Archbishop
Anthony (Abashidze), who lived in retirement in Kiev.
Andrew Psarev writes: “The Ukrainian Autonomous Church was formally

subject to the Moscow Patriarchate, insofar as her leading hierarchs considered
that they did not have the canonical right to declare themselves an autocephaly.

and the War, 1941-1945), Russkoe Pravoslavie (Russian Orthodoxy), N 1 (15), 1999,
pp. 23-24)).
1129 Alexeyev & Stavrou, The Great Revival, op. cit., chapter 5; Friedrich Heyer, Die
Orthodoxe Kirche in der Ukraine (The Orthodox Church in the Ukraine), Koln:
Rudolf Muller, 1953 (in German); "Archbishop Leonty of Chile", The Orthodox
Word, 1981, vol. 17, N 4 (99), pp. 148-154; Bishop John and Igumen Elijah, Taynij
Skhimitropolit (The Secret Schema-Metropolitan), Moscow: Bogorodichij Tsentr,
1991; Andrei Psarev, "Zhizneopisanie Arkhiepiskopa Leontia Chilijskij (1901-1971
gg.)" (A Life of Archbishop Leontius of Chile (1901-1971)), Pravoslavnaia Zhizn'
(Orthodox Life), N 4 (556), April, 1996, pp. 9-14. With the blessing of Schema-
Archbishop Anthony (Abashidze), Leontius was consecrated on November 7, 1941
by Archbishop Alexis (Gromadsky) of Volhynia, Bishop Benjamin (Novitsky) of
Poltava) and Bishop Damascene (Malyuta) of Kamenets-Podolsky (Sviatitel’ Leontij
(Filippovich) Chilijskij”,
http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=print_page&pdi=707.
607
But since the Moscow Patriarchate was subject to the Bolsheviks, in her
administrative decisions the Autonomous Church was completely independent,
which is why her spiritual condition was different from that of the Moscow
Patriarchate.”1130 Thus in 1943 she sent a representative to ROCOR’s Council in
Vienna, which condemned the election of Sergius as uncanonical.1131
On March 30, 1942 the Autonomous Church declared that the newly formed
autocephalists were to be considered as “the Lipkovtsy sect”, and all the clergy
ordained by them – graceless. In consequence, and because the Autonomous
Church did not go along with the extreme nationalist politics of the
autocephalists, it suffered persecution in the German-occupied regions both
from the autocephalists and the Ukrainian nationalist “Benderite” partisans,
who had formed an alliance. Although the revival of ecclesiastical life in these
regions was brief, it had important consequences for the future. First, many of
the churches reopened in this period were not again closed by the Soviets when
they returned. Secondly, some of those bishops and priests who could not, or
chose not to, escape westwards after the war went underground and helped to
keep the Catacomb Church alive in the post-war period. And thirdly, ROCOR
received an injection of new bishops and priests from those who fled westwards
to Germany in the closing stages of the war.
Not only all patriotic and cultural forces, but also the Church was enrolled in
defence of the Soviet “motherland”. Thus on the very first day of the invasion,
Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) made an appeal to the nation to support
the Soviets. Then the Germans asked the MP’s exarch in the Baltic, Metropolitan
Sergius (Voskresensky), who had refused to be evacuated eastwards with the
Red Army, to react to it. His response was: “Soviet power has subjected the
Orthodox Church to an unheard of persecution. Now the punishment of God
has fallen on this power… Above the signature of Metropolitan Sergius of
Moscow and Kolomna, the patriarchal locum tenens, the Bolsheviks have
distributed an absurd appeal, calling on the Russian people to resist the German
liberators. We know that the blessed Sergius, a man of great learning and
zealous faith, could not himself compose such an illiterate and shameless appeal.
Either he did not sign it at all, or he signed it under terrible threats…”1132
Sergius Shumilo writes: “The hierarchs of the Moscow Patriarchate on the

territories that remained under the Soviets officially declared a ‘holy war’ and
unambiguously called on the people to fight on the side of the God-hating
regime of Stalin. Thus Metropolitan Sergius, who had usurped for himself the
title ‘patriarchal locum tenens’, already on the first day of the war, June 22, 1941,
appealed to ‘the Soviet people’, not only calling on them to ‘the defence of the
Soviet Homeland’, but also declaring ‘a direct betrayal of pastoral duty’ even

1130 Psarev, op. cit., p. 10.
1131 Woerl, op. cit.
1132 M.V. Shkarovsky, Pravoslavie i Rossia (Orthodoxy and Russia); Monk Benjamin,
op. cit., part 3, p. 31.
608
the very thought that the clergy might have of ‘possible advantages to be gained
on the other side of the front’. With the cooperation of the NKVD this appeal
was sent to all the parishes in the country, where it was read after services as a
matter of obligation.
“Not having succeeded in starting the war first, and fearing to lose the
support of the people, Stalin’s regime in desperation decided to use a German
propaganda trick – the cultivation of national-patriotic and religious feelings in
the people. As E.I. Lisavtsev affirms, already in July, 1941 unofficial negotiations
took place for the first time between Stalin’s government and Metropolitan
Sergius. In the course of a programme of anti-Hitlerite propaganda that was
worked out in October, 1941, when the German armies had come right up to
Moscow, Metropolitan Sergius issued an Epistle in which he discussed the
Orthodox hierarchs and clergy who had made contact on the occupied
territories with the local German administration. De facto all the hierarchs and
clergy on the territories occupied by the Germans, including those who
remained in the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, came under
Metropolitan Sergius’ excommunication.
“Having issued the Epistle, Metropolitan Sergius and all the members of the
chancellery of the MP, together with the Soviet government and the leadership
of the Soviet army and the NKVD, were evacuated from Moscow to Ulyanovsk
(formerly Simbirsk), where on November 24 Metropolitan Sergius delivered a
new appeal to the people, in which he called them to ‘a holy war for Christian
civilization, for freedom of conscience and faith’. In all during the years of the
war S. Stragorodsky delivered more than 23 similar addresses. Metropolitan
Nicholas (Yarushevich) also repeatedly called to a ‘holy war’; his appeals to the
partisans and the people in the form of leaflets were scattered in enormous
quantities by Soviet military aviation onto the territories occupied by the
German armies. However, such epistles only provoked the German command,
and elicited reprisals against the local clergy and population. Besides this,
Metropolitan Nicholas repeatedly appealed to the ‘erring’ Romanian and
Bulgarian Orthodox Churches, to the Romanian and Bulgarian soldiers who
were fighting on the side of Germany, and also to the population and Church in
Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Greece and other countries. Nicholas Yarushevich
himself was appointed a member of the so-called ‘Pan-Orthodox Committee’
created according to a decision of the communist party, and also of the
Extraordinary State Commission for the investigation of fascist crimes. And it is
precisely on Metropolitan Nicholas, as a member of this commission, that there
falls the blame for the lie and disinformation concerning Stalin’s crimes: he was
among those who signed the unprecedentedly mendacious declaration to the
effect that the shootings of thousands of Polish officers in a wood near Katyn
were carried out by the Germans, and not by Soviet punishment squads, as was
the case in actual fact. Moreover these were not the only such cases.
“It was for the same propagandistic aims that in 1942, in the printing-house
of the Union of Militant Atheists, which had temporarily been handed over for
the use of the MP, there appeared in several foreign languages a solidly
609
produced book, The Truth about Religion in Russia, the foreword to which was
composed by S. Stragorodsky. As it said in the foreword: ‘… This book is a reply
first of all to the “crusade” of the fascists undertaken by them supposedly for
the sake of liberating our people and our Orthodox Church from the Bolsheviks’.
The whole of the book, from the first page to the last, is overflowing with
outpourings of unreserved devotion to Stalin’s regime and with false assurances
about ‘complete religious freedom in the USSR’.1133
“The text of the telegram of Metropolitan Sergius of Moscow on November 7,

1942 addressed to Stalin on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Bolshevik
coup sounds like an evil joke, a mockery of the memory of hundreds of
thousands of martyrs for the faith who perished during the years of the Stalinist
repressions: ‘In your person I ardently and prayerfully greet the God-chosen
leader of our military and cultural forces, leading us to victory over the
barbarian invasion…’
“However, besides propagandistic and ideological support for the Soviet

regime, the clergy and parishioners of the MP also provided serious financial
help to the army in the field. Thus in a telegram of Metropolitan Sergius to I.
Stalin on February 25, 1943 we are formed: ‘On the day of the jubilee of our
victorious Red Army I greet you as its Supreme Commander in the name of the
clergy and believers of the Russian Orthodox Church, I prayerfully desire that
you experience the joy of complete victory over the enemy… The believers in
their desire to help the Red Army have willingly responded to my appeal: they
have collected money to build a tank column in the name Demetrius Donskoy.
In all about 6,000,000 roubles have been collected, and, besides, a large quantity
of gold and silver things…’”1134
In fact, all parishes in Soviet Russia were required to make contributions to

the Soviet war effort. Sergius – the “compatriarch” or communist patriarch, as
the Germans called him - announced huge contributions towards the equipping
of a tank unit. From November, 1941 even the last open church of the Josephites
in Leningrad began to contribute. However, helping the Soviet war effort and
remaining True Orthodox were clearly incompatible aims - in November, 1943
the Trinity parish applied to join the MP…1135

1133 Sergius wrote: “With complete objectivity we must declare that the
Constitution, which guarantees complete freedom for the carrying out of religious
worship, in no way constrains the religious life of believers and the Church in
general…” Concerning the trials of clergy and believers, he said: “These were
purely political trials which had nothing to do with the purely ecclesiastical life of
religious organizations and the purely ecclesiastical work of individual clergy. No,
the Church cannot complain about the authorities.”
1134 Shumilo, “Sovietskij Rezhim i ‘Sovietskaia Tserkov’’ v 40-e-50-e gody XX
stoletia” (The Soviet Regime and the ‘Soviet Church’ in the 40s and 50s of the 20 t h
Century), http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=page&pid=678.
1135 “Iosiflianskie obschiny v blokadnom Leningrade” (Josephite Communities in
Blockaded Leningrad), Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Russia), N 14 (1731), July

15/28, 2003, pp. 12-13.
610
Shumilo continues: “Taking into consideration this loyal position of the
leadership of the MP, and relying on the successful experiment of Nazi
Germany on the occupied territories, Stalin, after long hesitations, finally
decided on a more broadly-based use of religion in order to attain his own
political ends. The more so in that this would help the new imposition of
communist tyranny on the ‘liberated’ territories and in the countries of Eastern
Europe. ‘First of all,’ wrote the Exarch of the MP in the Baltic region,
Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky), in his report to the German occupying
authorities already on November 12, 1941, ‘for the Soviet state the existence of
legal ecclesiastical administration was very important for purposes of
advertisement and propaganda. In the foreign Jewish press, which wanted to
attract the hearts of its liberal readers to “Stalin’s constitution”, it was possible
to point to the existence of the “Patriarchate” as an indisputable proof that in the
Soviet state even the Orthodox Church, that support of tsarist reaction, had
complete religious freedom. On the other hand, if the patriarchal administration
and its members were annihilated, it would be difficult to bring the press
abroad to silence. This would elicit a particularly powerful and long-lasting
response among the Orthodox Balkan peoples… The existence of the patriarchal
administration was allowed, since its abolition, like any form of open
persecution of the Church, would not correspond to the interests of the subtle
atheist propaganda, and could elicit politically undesirable disturbances in the
broad masses of the Orthodox believers (their number is calculated at from 30 to
60 million) and arouse still greater hatred for the authorities.
“’The forcible disbanding of the officially recognized leadership of the

patriarchate would inevitably call into existence a secret leadership, which
would significantly increase the difficulties of police supervision… In general
there has existed in Russia a very lively secret religious life (secret priests and
monks; secret places for prayer; secret Divine services; christenings; confessions;
communions; marriages; secret theological studies; secret possession of the
Sacred Scriptures, liturgical vessels, icons, sacred books; secret relations
between communities).
“’In order to destroy the catacomb patriarchate also, they would have to
execute all the bishops, including the secret ones that would undoubtedly be
consecrated in case of need. And if we imagine the impossible, that the whole
ecclesiastical organization would be annihilated, then faith would still remain,
and atheism would not make a single step forward. The Soviet government
understood this, and preferred to allow the existence of a patriarchal
administration.’1136
“But there were other more substantial reasons: already at the end of
September, 1941 William Everell, the authorized representative of President
Franklin Roosevelt of the USA in Moscow, during negotiations with Molotov

1136 See also Fomin, op. cit., p. 125; Wassilij Alexeev and Keith Armes, "German
Intelligence: Religious Revival in Soviet Territory", Religion in Communist Lands,

vol. 5, N 1, Spring, 1977, pp. 27-30 (V.M.).
611
and Stalin with regard to drawing the USA onto the side of the USSR in the war
with Nazi Germany, raised the question of politics in relation to religion in the
USSR. For Roosevelt this was one of the key questions, on which depended the
final result of the negotiations and the possibility of giving military help to the
USSR.1137 In connection with this, on October 4, 1941 the Soviet deputy foreign
minister Solomon Lozovsky assured the delegation of the USA that religion
both in the USSR and outside it had a great significance for raising the patriotic
spirit in a country, and for that reason, if some faults and mistakes had been
admitted in the past, they would be corrected. So as to imitate so-called
‘freedom of conscience’ in the USSR and thereby win over the countries of the
West, Stalin began cautiously flirting with religion. But in the beginning not
with the Moscow Patriarchate, … but with the Vatican…
“Cardinal changes in the internal politics of Stalin in relation to the Moscow

Patriarchate… took place in the second half of 1943. At the beginning of autumn
the leaders of the allied countries in the anti-Hitlerite coalition were preparing
for their first personal meeting in Teheran. Stalin placed great hopes on the
Teheran meeting, and so he sought out various means of urging on the allies.
First of all, public movements in England and the USA for giving help to the
USSR were given the most active support. Among these organizations with
whose leaders Stalin carried out a personal correspondence, was Hewitt
Johnson, the rector of the cathedral church of Canterbury. The Soviet historian V.
Alexeev thinks that ‘this was a partner whom Stalin treasured, and who had no
small influence in an allied country, where the Anglichan church was the state
religion.’
“Besides Hewitt Johnson, other hierarchs of the Anglican church were

actively involved into the movement for the speediest provision of help to the
USSR, including Archbishop Cosmo Lang. More than a thousand activists of the
Episcopalian church of the U.S.A. addressed similar appeals to the president of
the USA Franklin Roosevelt. Moreover, by the autumn of 1943 the leadership of
the Anglican church had addressed the Soviet government through the embassy
of the USSR in Great Britain with a request to allow a visit of their delegation to
Moscow. As V. Alexeev remarks: ‘On the eve of the Teheran conference the visit
of the delegation was recognized as desirable and useful by Stalin. In this
situation it was extremely advantageous that the head of the delegation, the
Archbishop of York, should be received by the higher leadership of the Russian
Orthodox Church headed by the patriarch.’
“In connection with the above-mentioned political perspectives, Metropolitan

Sergius (from Ulyanovsk) and Metropolitan Alexis (from Leningrad) were very
quickly transported to Moscow on government planes. Together with

1137 See D. Volkogonov, Triumf i Tragedia (Triumph and Tragedy), Moscow: Novosti,
1989, book II, part 1, pp. 382-83; Shkvarovsky, Iosiflianstvo, op. cit., p. 185. Donald
Rayfield writes: “Stalin may also have listened to an American envoy, who had
pointed out that Congress would not hesitate to send the USSR military aid if
religious suppression stopped” (Stalin and his Hangmen, London: Viking, 2004, p.
405). (V.M.)
612
Metropolitan Nicholas (Yarushevich), they were brought late at night on
September 4, 1943 to Stalin in the Kremlin. Besides Stalin, the deputy president
of the Sovnarkom of the USSR. V. Molotov and NKVD General-Major G.
Karpov took part in the talks. As Alexeev witnesses, relying on G. Karpov’s
report, at the meeting ‘Stalin approved of the convening of a council, but
advised that a Hierarchical, not a Local council be convened at the given time…
The metropolitans agreed. When Sergius touched upon the question of the time
necessary for the preparation of the council, Stalin asked him: “Can we not
produce a Bolshevik tempo?” Then, turning to Karpov, he asked him to help the
leadership of the church to get the bishops to the council as quickly as possible.
For this he was to bring in aviation and other forms of transport. Karpov
assured Stalin that all the necessary work would be carried out and the council
could be opened already in three to four days. Immediately Stalin and
Metropolitans Sergius, Alexis and Nicholas agreed to set September 8 as the
opening of the council.’
“Here we must note that Karpov’s report 1138 sins through obvious
exaggerations, which create the deceptive impression that the initiative in these
‘negotiations’ came from the hierarchs, while Stalin spoke only in the role of a
‘kind magician’ who carried out all their demands. In actual fact the subject of
the so-called ‘negotiations’, and the decisions taken during them, had been
worked out long before the meeting. Stalin, Malenkov and Beria had examined
this question in their dacha already before the middle of the day on September 4.
Confirmation of this is given by the speedy transport of Sergius and Alexis to
Moscow, and also the spineless agreement of the metropolitans with Stalin’s
proposals – ‘the metropolitans agreed’, as it says in Karpov’s report. But the
delegation of metropolitans, being loyal to the authorities, could not act
differently in their meeting with the dictator, in connection with which Karpov
spiced up his report with invented initiatives of Sergius.
“Reviewing the question of the convening of the council, it was decided that
Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky) should, for political reasons, be proclaimed
‘patriarch of all Rus’’ and not ‘of Russia [Rossii]’, as it was under Patriarch
Tikhon (Bellavin). 1139 Turning to the metropolitans, Stalin said that the
government was ready to provide her with the necessary financial means to
support the international image of the Moscow Patriarchate, and also informed
them that for the accommodation of the chancellery of the MP he was giving

1138 According to Karpov’s report, Metropolitan Sergius brought up the question of
electing a patriarch right at the beginning of the meeting as being “the most
important and most pressing question” (Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, p. 53).
This report was published in full in Russian in Monk Benjamin, op. cit., pp. 53-60,
and in English in Felix Corbey (ed.), Religion in the Soviet Union: an archival reader,
New York: New York University Press, 1996. (V.M.)
1139 This was an important symbolic change. The pre-revolutionary Russian Church
was rossijskaia, that is, the Church of the whole of the Russian empire and of all
the Orthodox in it, whether they were Russian by race or not. By changing the title
to russkaia, Stalin emphasised that it was the Church exclusively of the ethnically
Russian people – that is, of the russkikh. Over half a century later, ROAC – the
Russian Orthodox Autonomous Church – resumed the title rossijskaia. (V.M.)
613
over to them a three-storey house with all its furniture – the past residence of
the German ambassador Schulenberg. Obviously, Stalin presented this gift to
annoy the Germans, who had opened Orthodox churches on the occupied
territories.
“At the end of the meeting Stalin declared that he was intending to create a
special organ for control of the Church – the Council for the Affairs of the
Russian Orthodox Church (SD RPTs). ‘… In reply the metropolitans thanked the
government and Stalin personally for the reception he had given them, his
enormous help to, and respect for, the Church, and assured the president of the
Sovnarkom of their patriotic position, noting that they looked very favourably
on the creation of a new state organ for the affairs of the Orthodox Church and
on the appointment of [NKVD Major-General] G. Karpov to the post of its
president… Turning to Metropolitan Sergius, Molotov asked him when it would
be better, in his opinion, to receive the delegation of the Anglican church in
Moscow… Sergius replied that since the council at which they would elect the
patriarch would be held in four days, the delegation could be received
practically at any time after that. On hearing this, Molotov concluded that it
would be appropriate to receive it in a month’s time [that is, on the eve of the
Teheran conference]. Stalin agreed.”1140
The three hierarchs also raised the question of opening more

churches. Stalin replied that the government had no objections. Then
Metropolitan Alexis raised the question of releasing certain hierarchs
who were in the camps. Stalin said: “Give me a list, and we shall look
at it.” 1141

Shumilo, op. cit.
1140
Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, p. 56. According to Anatolius Levitin-Krasnov,

1141
Molotov at one point “said that the Soviet government and Stalin personally
would like to know the needs of the Church. While the other metropolitans
remained silent, Metropolitan Sergius suddenly spoke up… The metropolitan
pointed out the need for the mass re-opening of churches… for the convocation of
a church council and the election of a patriarch… for the general opening of
seminaries, because there was a complete lack of clergy. Here Stalin suddenly
broke his silence. ‘And why don’t you have cadres? Where have they
disappeared?’ he said… looking at the bishops point blank… Everybody knew that
‘the cadres’ had perished in the camps. But Metropolitan Sergius… replied: ‘There
are all sorts of reasons why we have no cadres. One of the reasons is that we train
a person for the priesthood, and he becomes the Marshal of the Soviet Union.’ A
satisfied smile touched the lips of the dictator: ‘Yes, of course. I am a
seminarian…’ Stalin began to reminisce about his years at the seminary… He said
that his mother had been sorry to her very death that he had not become a
priest…” (Likhie Gody, 1925-1941 (The Savage Years, 1925-1941), Paris: YMCA
Press, 1977). Rayfield notes that the metropolitans went to the meeting “all
wearing ordinary suits” (op. cit., p. 405). The story (perhaps fictional) goes that on
seeing this, Stalin looked up to heaven and said: “Do you not fear Him? You fear
me more…” According to Archimandrite Ioann (Razumov), Sergius was enchanted
by Stalin. “How kind he is!… How kind he is!” he said in a hushed voice (in
Sergius Fomin, Strazh Doma Gospodnia. Patriarkh Moskovskij i vseia Rusi Sergij
Stragorodskij, (Guardian over the House of the Lord: Patriarch Sergius
Stragorodsky of Moscow and All Rus’): Moscow Sretenskij monastery, 2003, p.
614
According to Anatolius Levitin-Krasnov, Molotov at one point
“said that the Soviet government and Stalin personally would like to
know the needs of the Church. While the other metropolitans
remained silent, Metropolitan Sergius suddenly spoke up… The
metropolitan pointed out the need for the mass re-opening of
churches… for the convocation of a church council and the election of
a patriarch… for the general opening of seminaries, because there was
a complete lack of clergy. Here Stalin suddenly broke his silence. ‘And
why don’t you have cadres? Where have they disappeared?’ he said…
looking at the bishops point blank… Everybody knew that ‘the cadres’
had perished in the camps. But Metropolitan Sergius… replied: ‘There
are all sorts of reasons why we have no cadres. One of the reasons is
that we train a person for the priesthood, and he becomes the Marshal
of the Soviet Union.’ A satisfied smile touched the lips of the dictator:
‘Yes, of course. I am a seminarian…’ Stalin began to reminisce about
his years at the seminary… He said that his mother had been sorry to
her very death that he had not become a priest…” 1142
Donald Rayfield notes that the metropolitans went to the meeting

“all wearing ordinary suits”. 1143 The story (perhaps fictional) goes that
on seeing this, Stalin looked up to heaven and said: “Do you not fear
Him? You fear me more…”
And so, as Eugene Blum writes, “the Church structure called the
Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (ROC-MP) was
organized with the personal participation of the dictator Stalin in
September, 1943. Not one priest of this ‘church’, could LEGALLY carry
out servies and rites without the corresponding permission of the
‘competent organs’ – first of all, the secret police of the NKVD-KGB,
and was forced to cooperate with them. Every priest, or at least every
bishop had to give a signed promise that he would cooperate. He also
had to sign that he would not publicize this fact of his recruitment
under threat of the death penalty.” 1144
The new Soviet church was given the name of “The Russian
Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate” (under Patriarch
Tikhon the Church had been called “The Russian Rossijskaia)
Orthodox Church”); and it acquired a precarious, semi-legal existence
– the right to open a bank account, to publish The Journal of the Moscow
Patriarchate and a few booklets, to reopen some seminaries and

702). It was at about this time that Stalin is said to have “told the British
ambassador that, in his own way, ‘he too believed in God’. The word began to
appear in Pravda with a capital letter.” (Overy, op. cit., p. 162)
1142 Levitin-Krasnov, Likhie Gody, 1925-1941 (The Savage Years, 1925-1941), Paris: YMCA Press,
1977.
1144 Blum, LaSalle University Thesis, 2014.
615
churches, and, most important, to “elect” a new patriarch after the
release from prison of some of the most malleable bishops. In return, it
had to accept censorship and control of every aspect of its affairs by
the newly constituted Council for Russian Orthodox Affairs, which
came to be nicknamed "Narkombog" (People's Commissar for God)
and "Narkomopium" (People's Commissar for Opium).
Stalin’s new ecclesiastical policy was effective. Rayfield writes:

“Promoting Orthodoxy had been more effective in galvanizing the
nation than reiterating the slogans of Stalinism. Stalin may also have
listened to an American envoy, who had pointed out that Congress
would not hesitate to send the USSR military aid if religious
suppression stopped. Right until Stalin’s death Russian metropolitan
bishops were delivered in large black limousines to appear on
international platforms, such as peace congresses, in the company of
such stalwart atheists as Fadeev and Ehrenburg.” 1145
But from the Church’s point of view, the new policy, while it
ensured the Church’s physical survival, made it completely a slave of
the State. As Rayfield writes: “The Church was now… an arm of the
state.” 1146
As a result of this meeting, the Soviet church acquired the right to open a
bank account, to publish The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and a few
booklets, to reopen some seminaries and churches, and, most important, to
“elect” a new patriarch after the release from prison of some of the most
malleable bishops. In return, it had to accept censorship and control of every
aspect of its affairs by the newly constituted Council for Russian Orthodox
Affairs, which came to be nicknamed "Narkombog" (People's Commissar for
God) and "Narkomopium" (People's Commissar for Opium). At first, the
Council for Religious Affairs exerted its control downwards via the bishops in
accordance with the Church’s rigidly centralized structure. From 1961, however,
its control came to be exercised also from below, through the so-called
dvadsatky, or parish councils of twenty laypeople, who could hire and fire
priests at will, regardless of the bishops. Thus for all its increased size and
external power, the MP remained as much a puppet of Soviet power as ever. As
Vasilyeva and Knyshevsky write: “There is no doubt that Stalin’s ‘special organ’
and the government (to be more precise, the Stalin-Molotov duet) kept the
patriarch under ‘eternal check’. Sergius understood this. And how could he not
understand when, on November 1, 1943, the Council made it obligatory for all
parishes to submit a monthly account with a detailed description of their
activity in all its facets?”1147

1145Rayfield, op. cit., p. 405.
1146Rayfield, op. cit., p. 405.
1147 Vasilieva, O., Kniashevsky, P., "Tainaia Vecheria" (The Last Supper),
Liternaturnaia Rossia (Literary Russia), N 39, September 27, 1991.
616
Stalin’s new ecclesiastical policy was effective. Donald Rayfield writes:
“Promoting Orthodoxy had been more effective in galvanizing the nation than
reiterating the slogans of Stalinism. Stalin may also have listened to an
American envoy, who had pointed out that Congress would not hesitate to send
the USSR military aid if religious suppression stopped. Right until Stalin’s death
Russian metropolitan bishops were delivered in large black limousines to
appear on international platforms, such as peace congresses, in the company of
such stalwart atheists as Fadeev and Ehrenburg…”1148
Shumilo continues: “The so-called ‘hierarchical council’… took place on

September 8, 1943. In all 19 hierarchs took part in it, six of whom were former
renovationists who had been hastily consecrated not long before the ‘council’,
and also several loyal bishops who were specially freed from prison and sent to
Moscow in planes. At the given assembly there were no bishops from the
occupied territories, nor from the emigration, or, still more, those who did not
agree with Sergius and his ecclesiastical politics, who continued to languish in
Soviet concentration camps. As the patriarchal historian D. Pospelovsky notes:
‘… At that time there were at least some tens of bishops in exile and the
camps… Some of the imprisoned bishops refused to recognize the ecclesiastical
politics of Sergius after 1927 as the condition of their liberation. At that time the
Catacomb Church was still very active.’”1149
At the 1943 council, contrary to the rules laid down by the 1917-18 Council,
only one candidate for the patriarchy was put forward. “I think that this will be
made infinitely easier for us by the fact that we already have someone bearing
the patriarchal privileges, and so I suppose that an election with all the details
that usually accompany such events is not necessary for us,” declared
Metropolitan Alexis (Simansky), who put forward the candidacy of Sergius.
There was nothing for the delegates to do but submit to the will of “the father of
the peoples, Joseph Stalin”, and to the question of Metropolitan Sergius: “Is
nobody of another opinion?”, reply: “No, agreed”.1150
“At the end of the session the council accepted a resolution read out by
Sergius that was unprecedented in its amorality and uncanonicity. It said that
‘every person who is guilty of betraying the common work of the Church and of
passing over to the side of fascism is to be counted as excommunicated as being
an enemy of the Cross of the Lord, and if he is a bishop or cleric is deprived of
his rank.’ Thus practically the whole of the population and clergy of the
occupied territories – except, of course, the red partisans – fell under the
anathema of the Soviet church, including 7.5 million Soviet prisoners of war,
who had become prisoners of the Germans. According to Stalin’s ukaz № 260 of
September, 1941, all of them were declared traitors to their Homeland. ‘There
are no captives, there are only deserters,’ declared Molotov, commenting on this
ukaz.”1151

1149 Shumilo, op. cit.
617
Sergius was enthroned on September 12. Then the Council for the Affairs of
the Russian Orthodox Church was created, headed by Karpov. Since 1940 he
had been “head of the Fifth Department of the NKVD, whose assignment was to
combat ‘the counterrevolutionary clergy.’ In the NKVD Karpov’s duty was to
fight the church, in the council [-] to assist it…”1152
In this way and at this time was the organization now calling itself the
Moscow Patriarchate created – on the basis of a pact between the Church and
the bloodiest persecutor of Christianity in history. This pact between the
supposed representative of Christ and Belial had profoundly ungodly
consequences. However, church leaders round the world welcomed it.
“A week after the enthronement,” writes Shumilo, “on the orders of the
Sovnarkom, Sergius accepted the long-awaited delegation of the Anglican
church led by Archbishop Cyril Garbett in Moscow… In general, in the run-up
to the Teheran conference the politics of the Soviet regime was ‘reconstructed’
not only in relation to the Moscow Patriarchate but also in relation to the
Vatican. In October, 1943 support had been given to the official Georgian
Orthodox and Armenian-Gregorian churches. The regime cooperated with the
Muslims in convening in Tashkent a conference of loyal Muslim clergy and
believers, in the organization in Bujnaks of a legal spiritual administration of the
Muslims of the North Caucasus, in the opening of Muslim theological schools
(medrese) in Bukhara, Tashkent, etc. However, it is quite mistaken to think that
this ‘warming’ was a fully-fledged offering of freedom to the religious
organizations in the USSR. In spite of their external freedom, the religious
workers of the country, all without exception, remained hostages of the
totalitarian system and remained under the constant strict supervision of the
Soviet special services. But in relation to the so-called ‘unreliables’, the
communist repressive apparatus continued to operate as before, although the
religious workers themselves in all their official declarations categorically
denied this, insinuating into popular opinion abroad the false idea that complete
freedom of conscience and religious organizations had been re-established in
the USSR. As V. Alexeev remarks: ‘… The deeply religious [!] F.D. Roosevelt
was very satisfied with the new relationship of the authorities to the church in
the USSR. These steps undertaken by Stalin also received approval in England,
Canada and France, where the position of religious organizations in society was
very strong. The Russian emigration was also satisfied with them.’”1153
In an encyclical dated October 14, 1943, Metropolitan Sergius (Stragorodsky)

threatened all the clergy who were cooperating with the Germans with an
ecclesiastical trial. 1154 On October 27, 1943 he wrote to Karpov: “I ask you to

1152 Radzinsky, Stalin, p. 508.
1153 Shumilo, op. cit. Of course, not all of the Russian emigration – only that (large)
part that believed in the good intentions of the Soviet government.
1154 The Germans countered by confronting Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky)
with the acts of the Vienna conference of ROCOR, which condemned Sergius’
election as uncanonical, and demanded that he approve of them. In April, 1944,
618
petition the government of the USSR for an amnesty for the people named in the
attached list, whom I would like to draw into Church work under my
administration. I will not take upon myself to decide the question to what extent
these people deserved the punishment they underwent. But I am convinced that
clemency given them by the Government would arouse them (and give them
the opportunity) to apply all their energy to demonstrate their loyalty to the
Government of the USSR and to wipe out their guilt completely.” To this
declaration was attached a list of 26 clergy, including 24 hierarchs. Most of them,
as it turned out, had already been shot or had perished in the camps.1155
On October 31, after the Georgians congratulated Sergius on his election,

Sergius’ representative, Archbishop Anthony of Stavropol and Pyatigorsk,
concelebrated with Catholicos Callistratus of Georgia in Tbilisi. So eucharistic
communion was re-established without preconditions. Until 1990 the
Ecumenical Patriarch did not accept this act since it was carried out without his
agreement.1156
Sergius did more than place the MP in unconditional submission to

the God-haters. As Bishop Nectary (Yashunsky) wrote, he introduced
a heretical concept of the Church and salvation: “Metropolitan
Sergius’ understanding of the Church (and therefore, of salvation) was
heretical. He sincerely, it seems to us, believed that the Church was
first of all an organization, an apparatus which could not function
without administrative unity. Hence the striving to preserve her
administrative unity at all costs, even at the cost of harming the truth
contained in her.
“And this can be seen not only in the church politics he conducted,
but also in the theology [he evolved] corresponding to it.”
Thus in an article entitled “The Relationship of the Church to the

Communities that have Separated from Her” (Journal of the Moscow
Patriarchate), Metropolitan Sergius explained the differences in the
reception of heretics and schismatics, not on the basis of their
objective confession of faith, but on the subjective (and therefore
changeable) relationship of the Church’s first-hierarch to them. Thus
“we receive the Latins into the Church through repentance, but those
from the Karlovtsy schism through chrismation”. And so for Sergius,
concluded Fr. Nectarius, “the truth of Holy Orthodoxy is not

Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) was ambushed and shot, probably by Soviets
dressed in German uniforms. (Vasilieva, op. cit.; Bishop Tikhon of San Francisco
(OCA), “Truth/Consequences”, ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU, archives
for September 21, 1999)
1155 GARF, f. 6991, op. 1, d. 5, l. 1; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, p. 66.
1156 Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, pp. 61-63.
619
necessary for salvation, but it is belonging to a legal church-
administrative organization that is necessary”! 1157
This heretical transformation of the MP into an “eastern papacy”

was described by Fr. Vyacheslav Polosin: “If Metropolitan Sergius was
ruled, not by personal avarice, but by a mistaken understanding of
what was for the benefit of the Church, then it was evident that the
theological foundation of such an understanding was mistaken, and
even constituted a heresy concerning the Church herself and her
activity in the world. We may suppose that these ideas were very close
to the idea of the Filioque: since the Spirit proceeds not only from the
Father, but also from the Son, that means that the vicar of the Son…
can dispose of the Spirit, so that the Spirit acts through Him ex opere
operato…It follows necessarily that he who performs the sacraments
of the Church, ‘the minister of the sacrament’, must automatically be
‘infallible’, for it is the infallible Spirit of God Who works through him
and is inseparable from him… However, this Latin schema of the
Church is significantly inferior to the schema and structure created by
Metropolitan Sergius. In his schema there is no Council, or it is
replaced by a formal assembly for the confirmation of decisions that
have already been taken – on the model of the congresses of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
“The place of the Council in his Church structure is taken by

something lacking in the Latins’ scheme – Soviet power, loyalty to
which becomes in the nature of a dogma. This scheme became possible
because it was prepared by Russian history. But if the Orthodox tsar
and the Orthodox procurator to some extent constituted a ‘small
Council’, which in its general direction did not contradict the mind-set
of the majority of believers, with the change in world-view of those at
the helm of Soviet power this scheme acquired a heretical character,
since the decisions of the central ecclesiastical authorities, which were
associated in the minds of the people with the will of the Spirit of
God, came to be determined neither by a large nor by a small Council,
but by the will of those who wanted to annihilate the very idea of God
(the official aim of the second ‘godless’ five-year-plan was to make the
people forget even the word ‘God’). Thus at the source of the Truth,
instead of the revelation of the will of the Holy Spirit, a deadly poison
was substituted… The Moscow Patriarchate, in entrusting itself to the
evil, God-fighting will of the Bolsheviks instead of the conciliar will of
the Spirit, showed itself to be an image of the terrible deception of
unbelief in the omnipotence and Divinity of Christ, Who alone can
save and preserve the Church and Who gave the unlying promise that
‘the gates of hell will not overcome her’… The substitution of this

1157 Hierodeacon Jonah (now Bishop Nektary) (Yashunsky), "Sergianstvo: Politika
ili Dogmatika?" (Sergianism: Politics or Dogmatics?), 29 April / May 12, 1993, pp.
2-3, 5 (MS).
620
faith by vain hope in one’s own human powers as being able to save
the Church in that the Spirit works through them, is not in accord with
the canons and Tradition of the Church, but ex opere operato proceeds
from the ‘infallible’ top of the hierarchical structure.” 1158

1158 Polosin (Sergius Ventsel), "Razmyshlenia o Teokratii v Rossii" (Thoughts on
Theocracy in Russia), Vestnik Khristianskogo Informatsionnogo Tsentra (Herald of the

Christian Information Centre), N 48, November 24, 1989.
621
66. THE BIG THREE: (1) TEHERAN AND BRETTON WOODS
The enormous initial successes of the Germans in Russia came to an end on

December 6, 1941, when the Russians counter-attacked and saved Moscow. The
next day, the Japanese attacked the American fleet in Pearl Harbour, bringing
the United States into the war. Shortly after that, Hitler recklessly declared war
on the Americans. The linking of the European and Far Asian theatres, and the
entrance of the United States, the world’s greatest industrial power, into the war
against the Axis made it genuinely global and swung the pendulum slowly but
inexorably against the Axis powers…
The alliance of the three nations of Britain, the United States and the Soviet
Union was cemented when Churchill flew into Moscow in May, 1942. It was an
unequal relationship from the beginning. The Soviets insisted, often rudely and
sarcastically, that the Anglo-Saxons should open a second front in the West –
something the British and the Americans were not strong enough to do as yet.
Instead, recognizing the enormous importance of the Soviet-German front for
the ultimate outcome of the war, they sent vast quantities of arms and supplies
by convoy around the Northern Cape to Murmansk and Archangelsk.
Meanwhile, the Americans kept the British afloat with Lend-lease supplies from
across the Atlantic.
There could hardly have been a more paradoxical and contradictory alliance
than that between the aristocratic British lord and fierce anti-communist,
Churchill, and the leader of the communist world revolution, Stalin. There is a
Russian proverb that in certain situations one should be ready to use “even the
devil and his grandma” - Stalin once quoted this to the British and American
leaders.1159 But there is another, English proverb that the Anglo-Saxons could
have quoted: “When you go to dinner with the devil, use a very long spoon”.
Unfortunately, the Anglo-Saxons tended to follow the Russian proverb more
than their own, better one; for the tragic fact was that during the war, in order to
drive out one demon, Hitler, they decided to enlist the aid of another, bigger
demon, Stalin. Thus they repeated the mistake of the good King Jehoshaphat of
Judah, who was rebuked by God for allying himself with the wicked King
Ahaziah of Israel, and was told: “Because you have allied yourself with Ahaziah,
the Lord has destroyed your works” (II Chronicles 20.37). As an inevitable result,
while the smaller demon was defeated, the larger one triumphed…
One British sailor, who later became an Orthodox subdeacon, was on a

cruiser in the Mediterranean when he heard the news of the alliance between
Britain and the Soviet Union. Turning to a friend of his, he said: “Before, we
were fighting for God, king and country. Now we are fighting for king and

622
country.”1160 For, of course, in fighting alongside the devil’s Stalin, they could
not be fighting for God…
Demonology occupied the war leaders from the beginning. Thus when Hitler
invaded Soviet Russia in 1941, Churchill told the House of Commons that if
Hitler had invaded hell, he would have found it in himself “to make a
favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons”.1161 Again, when
Churchill met Stalin for the first time, in May, 1942, Stalin wished him success in
Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa.
“’May God help you,’ he added.
“’God, of course, is on our side,’ Churchill said.
“’And the devil is, naturally, on mine, and through our combined efforts we
shall defeat the enemy,’ Stalin chuckled.”1162
Very funny, no doubt, coming from the devil’s chief agent on earth… But the
joke obscured, while at the same time pointing to, a supremely important truth:
that God and the devil can never be on the same side, and that while God may
use the devil and his servants towards his ultimate, supremely good aim, no
human being can attempt to be so clever without destroying himself. For the
ends do not justify the means: if we use evil means towards a good end, the end
of it all will turn out to be evil…
Evidently, the deep meaning of this joke continued to occupy the minds of
the leaders, because they returned to it at the Teheran conference in 1943.
“’God is on our side,’ Churchill said. ‘At least I have done my best to make
Him a faithful ally.’
“’And the devil is on my side,’ Stalin chipped in. ‘Because, of course,

everybody knows that the devil is a Communist and God, no doubt, is a good
Conservative.’…”1163
“Ironically,” writes Niall Ferguson, “Hitler said the same about the Japanese
in May 1942: ‘The present conflict is one of life or death, and the essential thing
is to win – and to that end we are quite ready to make an alliance with the Devil
himself.’”1164

1160 Subdeacon Paul Inglesby, personal communication.
1161 Fenby, op. cit., p. 65.
1162 Fenby, op. cit., p. 152.
1163 Fenby, op, cit., p. 239. He repeated the point once more in Teheran. Nor were
the Big Three averse to some straight blasphemy. Thus in Moscow in October, 1944
Churchill spoke of “our three great democracies” which were “committed to the
lofty ideals of freedom, human dignity and happiness”. Later, “When somebody
compared the Big Three to the Holy Trinity, Stalin said Churchill must be the Holy
Ghost because ‘he is flying all over the place’.” (Fenby, op, cit., pp. 331, 333)
1164 Ferguson, The War of the World, London: Penguin, 2007, p. 511, footnote.
623
Stalin was now in a much more powerful position than he had been in 1941,
and so he was not afraid to point out the great gulf between Soviet Communism
and British Conservatism, even hinting that the two were not on the same side.
Churchill, of course, as an old anti-communist warrior, was well aware of this -
as Roosevelt, apparently, was not. Or if Roosevelt was aware, he chose to ignore
this difference, while increasingly highlighting, to Churchill’s great
embarrassment, the ideological differences between imperialist Britain and the
supposedly anti-imperialist United States. Moreover, he had a fatal pride in his
ability to do business with the communist dictator, and win him over through
charm alone. As he said to Churchill in 1942: “I know you will not mind my
being brutally frank when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin
better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the
guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will
continue to do so.”1165
Revel recounts how, during the Teheran Conference, Roosevelt “even went in
for elaborate jokes that rubbed Winston Churchill’s prejudices the wrong way.
After three days of talks during which Stalin remained icy, the President
recounted that, at last, ‘Stalin smiled’. A great victory for the West! It became
total when ‘Stalin broke out into a deep, heavy guffaw, and for the first time in
three days I saw light. I kept it up until Stalin was laughing with me, and it was
then that I called him Uncle Joe.’ Democracy was saved.”1166
Churchill was now in a much weaker position in relation to both Stalin and
Roosevelt, being almost entirely dependent on Stalin to defeat Hitler on land,
and on Roosevelt to supply his island with arms and food by sea. And so he was
afraid to highlight any ideological differences between the three. In fact, by this
time both Churchill and Roosevelt were well on the path towards full
appeasement of the bloody dictator – an appeasement that was even worse than
that of Munich, and which had a much profounder, longer and more degrading
influence on the behaviour of the western democracies…
This abandonment of principle was especially striking in the case of

Churchill – and not only in relation to Stalin’s Communism. A.N. Wilson writes
perceptively: “Churchill suffered almost more than any character in British
history from watching his most decisive acts have the very opposite effect of the
one intended. He who so deplored communism saw Eastern Europe go
communist; he, who loved the British Empire lost the Empire; and he who
throughout his peacetime political career had lambasted socialism presided over
an administration which was in many ways the most socialist government
Britain ever had. While Churchill directed the war he left domestic policy to his
socialist colleagues Attlee and Bevin. The controlled wartime economy,
rationing, propaganda newsreels, austere ‘British restaurants’ for food, and the
tightest government control over what could be bought, sold, said, publicly

1165 Roosevelt, in Reynolds, op. cit., p. 376.
1166 Revel, op. cit., p. 220.
624
worn, produced what A.J. P. Taylor called ‘a country more fully socialist than
anything achieved by the conscious planners of Soviet Russia’.”1167
It all began very differently, with the agreement known as the Atlantic
Charter in August, 1941. Britain and America agreed then that they would seek
no territorial gains in the war; that territorial gains would be in accordance with
the wishes of the peoples concerned; that all peoples had the right to self-
determination; that trade barriers were to be lowered; that there was to be
global economic cooperation and advancement of social welfare; that the
participants would work for a world free of want and fear; that the participants
would work for freedom of the seas; and that there was to be disarmament of
aggressor nations, and a postwar common disarmament. In September a
number of other western and Asiatic nations signed up to these principles. And
on January 1, 1942 the Soviet Union and China, among other countries, also
signed up.1168
But of course the Soviets had no intention of granting self-determination to

the countries they had first conquered during their alliance with the Nazis (the
Baltic States, Eastern Poland, Bukovina and Bessarabia). As Norman Stone
writes, “Churchill did not have the strength to resist Stalin, and the Americans
did not have the will.”1169 Already by the time of the Teheran Conference in
November, 1943 they had effectively given in. “’Now the fate of Europe is
settled,’ Stalin remarked, according to Beria’s son. ‘We shall do as we like, with
the Allies’ consent.’”1170 Or, as Churchill put it in October, 1944: “[It’s] all very
one-sided. They get what they want by guile, flattery or force.”1171
Indeed, already on February 20, 1943, Roosevelt wrote to the Jew Zabrousky,
who acted as liaison officer between himself and Stalin, that the USSR could be
assured of control of most of Europe after the war with full equality with the
other “tetrarchs” (Britain, America and China) in the post-war United Nations
Security Council: “You can assure Stalin that the USSR will find herself on a
footing of complete equality, having an equal voice with the United States and
England in the direction of the said Councils (of Europe and Asia). Equally with
England and the United States, she will be a member of the High Tribunal
which will be created to resolve differences between the nations, and she will
take part similarly and identically in the selection, preparation, armament and
command of the international forces which, under the orders of the Continental
Council, will keep watch within each State to see that peace is maintained in the
spirit worthy of the League of Nations. Thus these inter-State entities and their
associated armies will be able to impose their decisions and to make themselves
obeyed…

1167 Wilson, After the Victorians, p. 403.
1168 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_Charter;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_by_United_Nations.
1169 Stone, The Atlantic and its Enemies, London: Penguin, 2010, p. 5.
1170 Fenby, op. cit., p. 211. My italics (V.M.).
1171 Fenby, op. cit., p. 331.
625
“We will grant the USSR access to the Mediterranean [overriding the
territorial claims of Turkey]; we will accede in her wishes concerning Poland
and the Baltic, and we shall require Poland to show a judicious attitude of
comprehension and compromise [i.e. surrender to all Stalin’s demands]; Stalin
will still have a wide field for expansion in the little, unenlightened [sic!]
countries of Eastern Europe – always taking into account the rights which are
due to the fidelity of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia – he will completely
recover the territories which have temporarily been snatched from Great
Russia.”1172
The essential truth of the Zabrousky letter was confirmed by Cardinal

Spellman in a book by R.I. Gannon, SJ, The Cardinal Spellman Story. Describing a
long talk he had had with Roosevelt on September 3, 1943, he wrote: “It is
planned to make an agreement among the Big Four. Accordingly the world will
be divided into spheres of influence: China gets the Far East; the US the Pacific;
Britain and Russia, Europe and Africa. But as Britain has predominantly
colonial interests it might be assumed that Russia will predominate in Europe.
Although Chiang Kai-shek will be called in on the great decisions concerning
Europe, it is understood that he will have no influence on them. The same thing
might become true – although to a lesser degree –for the US. He hoped,
‘although it might be wishful thinking’, that the Russian intervention in Europe
would not be too harsh.
“League of Nations: The last one was no success, because the small states were
allowed to intervene. The future league will consist only of the four big powers
(US, Britain, Russia, China). The small states will have a consultative assembly,
without right to decide or to vote. For example, at the armistice with Italy, the
Greeks, Jugoslavs and French asked to be co-signers. ‘We simply turned them
down.’ They have no right to sit in where the big ones are. Only the Russians
were admitted, because they are big, strong and simply impose themselves.
“Russia: An interview with Stalin will be forced as soon as possible. He

believes that he will be better fitted to come to an understanding with Stalin
than Churchill. Churchill is too idealistic, he [Roosevelt] is a realist. So is Stalin.
Therefore an understanding between them on a realistic basis is probable. The
wish is, although it seems improbable, to get from Stalin a pledge not to extend
Russian territory beyond a certain line. He would certainly receive: Finland, the
Baltic States, the Eastern half of Poland, Bessarabia. There is no point to oppose
these desires of Stalin, because he has the power to get them anyhow. So better
give them gracefully.
“Furthermore the population of Eastern Poland wants to become Russian [!].

Still it is absolutely not sure whether Stalin will be satisfied with these
boundaries. On the remark that Russia has appointed governments of
communistic character for Germany, Austria and other countries which can

1172 Roosevelt, in Count Léon de Poncins, State Secrets, Chulmleigh: Britons
Publishing Company, 1975, pp. 77, 78.
626
make a communist regime there, so that the Russians might not even need to
come, he agreed that this is to be expected. Asked further, whether the Allies
would not do something from their side which might offset this move in giving
encouragement to the better elements, just as Russia encourages the
Communists, he declared that no such move was contemplated [!!]. It is
therefore probably that Communist Regimes would expand, but what can we
do about it. France might eventually escape if it has a government à la Leon
Blum. The Front Populaire would be so advanced, that eventually the
Communists would accept it. On the direct questions whether Austria, Hungary
and Croatia would fall under some sort of Russian protectorate, the answer was
clearly yes. But he added, we should not overlook the magnificent economic
achievements of Russia. Their finances are sound. It is natural that the European
countries will have to undergo tremendous changes in order to adapt to Russia,
but in hopes that in ten or twenty years the European influences would bring
the Russians to become less barbarian.
“Be that as it may, he added, the US and Britain cannot fight the
Russians...”1173
The eventual post-war outcome, though very bad, was not quite as bad as
Roosevelt envisaged. But no thanks to him! His attitude of defeatism and
surrender in relation to Stalin, his plans, in spite of his democratic ideals and his
acceptance of the Atlantic Charter, to surrender most of Europe to the worst
despotism in human history (while trying to break up the far milder tyranny of
Britain over her colonies 1174 ), involuntarily makes one think that he was
somehow bewitched by Stalin! What is certain is that, as the American
ambassador to Moscow, Averill Harriman, said: “Roosevelt never understood
communism. He viewed it as a sort of extension of the New Deal.”1175
Roosevelt’s claim that the Russians could take everything they wanted
anyway was false. The Allies’ shipments of all kinds of supplies (suffering huge
losses along the North Cape route) were vital to the Soviet war effort1176, and

1173 Spellman, in de Poncins, op. cit., pp. 89-90.
1174 Roosevelt wanted Britain to give India her independence even before the end of the war, and
to give Hong Kong to China. His officials also wanted Britain to give up the system of Imperial
Preference, the tariff system which protected British exports to the Empire.
1175 Revel, op. cit., pp. 219-220.
1176 Ferguson writes: “All told, Stalin received supplies worth 93 billion roubles,
between 4 and 8 per cent of Soviet net material product. The volumes of hardware
suggest that these official statistics understate the importance of American
assistance: 380,000 field telephones, 363,000 trucks, 43,000 jeeps, 6,000 tanks and
over 5,000 miles of telephone wire were shipped along the icy Arctic supply routes
to Murmansk, from California to Vladivostok, or overland from Persia. Thousands
of fighter planes were flown along an ‘air bridge’ from Alaska to Siberia. Nor was
it only hardware that the Americans supplied to Stalin. Around 58 per cent of
Soviet aviation fuel came from the United States during the war, 53 per cent of all
explosives and very nearly half of all the copper, aluminium and tyres, to say
nothing of the tons of tinned Spam – in all, somewhere between 41 and 63 per cent
of all Soviet military supplies. American engineers also continued to provide
valuable technical assistance, as they had in the early days of Magnitogorsk” (op.
627
they could have threatened to stop these in exchange for concessions. But the
Americans seemed determined to allow the Soviet maximum freedom to do
what they liked without regard to the Atlantic Charter or the rights of smaller
nations… This was true not only of Roosevelt but also of his Foreign Secretary,
Cordell Hull. “What he wanted from the conference was a grand declaration on
the post-war international organization. The future of smaller European nations
was of no concern to him – ‘I don’t want to deal with these piddling little things,’
he told Harriman, adding that Poland was a ‘Pandora’s box of infinite trouble’
best left unopened.”1177
But the British could not easily give up on Poland, for whose sake they had
entered the war in September, 1939, and which contributed many tens of
thousands of soldiers and airmen to the British Armed Forces. So Churchill
continued to support the Polish government-in-exile and its underground army
in Poland while Stalin built up another, communist underground army and
government (the Lublin Committee). One of the reasons why he stopped on the
eastern side of Vistula and did not allow the Red Army to aid the Warsaw
uprising in August, 1944 was his desire to winkle out the Polish royalists and
have them destroyed – whether by the Germans or his own men.
In September, writes Fenby, “though Stalin now claimed that he had been
misinformed about the reasons for the rising, the Red Army still did not
advance as anti-Communist Polish forces in the city were reduced to a handful.
The deadly inaction had done the Lublin Committee’s work for it. Reporting to
Washington, Harriman concluded that Stalin did not want the Poles to take
credit for the liberation of Warsaw, and wished the underground leaders to be
killed by Nazis or stigmatised as enemies who could be arrested when the
Russians entered. ‘Under these circumstances,’ he added, ‘it is difficult for me to
see how a peaceful or acceptable solution can be found to the Polish
problem…’”1178
But Churchill, too, made unacceptable compromises. Thus he, like the
Americans, turned a blind eye to Stalin’s slaughter of 20,000 of Poland’s elite at
Katyn, accepting the lie that the Germans had done it. Again, when Foreign
Minister Sir Anthony Eden visited Stalin in October, 1943, he “carried a note by
Churchill recognising that Moscow’s accession to the Atlantic Charter had been

cit., p. 529). The general value of aid amounted to 12 billion dollars in 1941 prices, or 200
billion in contemporary terms. Russia repaid just 7% of this sum, and that only at the
beginning of the 1990s. The rest of the debt was written off by the allies
(http://peaceinukraine.livejournal.com/2901882.html).
74% of the tanks employed by the Russians at the battle of Moscow in
December, 1941 were imported from Britain. However, Norman Davies argues that
Western supplies were less important to the Soviets in the early stages of the war.
“British tanks were not what the Red Army needed, and British Army greatcoats
(like German greatcoats) were totally unsuited to the Russian winter. The Soviets
had already gained the upper hand on their own account before Western aid began
to reach them in quantity” (Europe at War, London: Pan Books, 2006, p. 484)
1177 Fenby, op. cit., p. 208.
1178 Fenby, op. cit., p. 301.
628
based on the frontiers of June 11, 1941, and taking note of ‘the historic frontiers
of Russia before the two wars of aggression waged by Germany in 1914 and
1939’”.1179 In other words, Germany’s conquests in Poland after the shameful
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact were not to be recognised, but Russia’s were!
The difference between Roosevelt and Churchill was that the latter, unlike
the former, sometimes got angry with the dictator and did wrestle some
concessions from him. Thus his famous percentages agreement with Stalin in
October, 1944 over spheres of influence in Eastern Europe was firmly adhered to
by Stalin, enabling Greece to escape the communist yoke. And yet this
concession could have been greatly improved on if only the Americans had
accepted the British plan, put forward at Quebec in August, 1943, of attacking
Hitler in the Western Balkans. In the next month, Italy surrendered; so the time
was right. The implementation of such a plan would not only have saved the
Balkans from communist domination: it would have shortened the war with
Germany considerably.
But the Americans were always irritated by the British insistence on the
Mediterranean theatre of operations. Earlier in the war Churchill had
concentrated British forces on North Africa and the defence of Egypt, because if
the Germans had conquered the Suez Canal they would have cut off the British
from the oil of the Persian Gulf, on which they were critically dependent, as well
as from India and their Far Eastern colonies. Later, after the Germans had been
expelled from North Africa, he favoured an attack on the “soft underbelly” of
the Axis powers in Italy because he feared that an attack on the “hard snout” of
the German defences in Northern France might lead to a disaster on the scale of
Gallipoli or Dunkirk. In this he was probably right, as the disastrous Canadian
assault on Dieppe in 1942 proved. However, the battle for Italy proved tougher
than expected – more like the “tough guts” of the underbelly, as the American
General Mark Clark put it – and the Allies conquered Rome on June 5, 1944,
only one day before D-Day and the invasion of Normandy – to which Churchill
was by this time grudgingly reconciled.1180
Another strategic error of the Americans was their rejection of Churchill’s

idea of invading Yugoslavia and helping the powerful Yugoslav resistance to
drive the Germans out of the Balkans. Instead, as Misha Glenny writes, they
insisted “instead on driving up through difficult Italian terrain in preparation
for Operation Dragoon, the seaborne assault on southern and western France. ‘I
still don’t understand,’ noted General Rendulic, the man coordinating the
Wehrmacht’s struggle against Tito, ‘why the Allies gave up their drive across
the Balkans after they had taken Sicily in August [1943]. Instead, they sustained
many losses over a period of months as they squeezed their way through the
narrow roads of the Italian peninsula before finally landing on the West coast of
France, far away from all the strategic theatres of war. I am convinced that by

Fenby, op. cit., p. 207.
1179
David Reynolds, “1942 and Hitler’s Soft Underbelly”, BBC4 documentary, September 18,
1180
2016.
629
giving up an assault on the Balkans in 1943, the Allies might have postponed the
end of the war by a year.’”1181
Churchill raised the idea of a joint Anglo-American thrust into the Balkans at
the famous conference of the Big Three at Yalta in February, 1945. But neither
Stalin nor Roosevelt responded. Stalin’s resistance was understandable – he
wanted the Red Army, not the Anglo-Americans, to dominate the Balkans.
Roosevelt’s resistance was less clear; probably he simply wanted to demonstrate
to Churchill that he was very much the junior partner in the Anglo-American
alliance now, and that “the Big Three” were now, as one American put it, “the
Big Two-and-a-Half”... In any case, the idea was dead…1182

1181 Glenny, The Balkans, 1804-1999, London: Granta Books, 2000, p. 519.
1182 S.M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace, London: Penguin, 2010, p. 85.
630
67. THE BIG THREE: (2) YALTA
Although Yalta has been seen as the decisive meeting of the Allies,
as Tony Judt rightly says, “nothing was decided at Yalta that had not
already been agreed at Teheran and elsewhere”. 1183 By then, Stalin
already held all the cards. Not only was the Red Army already in
effective control of most of Eastern and Central Europe (its forward
units were 70 kilometers from Berlin while the Western Allies were
600 kilometers away). Through his listening devices at Yalta and his
spies in the West – especially Guy Burgess in the British Foreign
Office, Donald Maclean in the British Embassy in Washington, Alger
Hiss in the State Department, Harry Dexter White at the US Treasury
and Klaus Fuchs at the Manhattan Project in New Mexico – he knew
exactly what the plans of the western leaders were, what they wanted
in their negotiations with him, what they wanted to hid from him (for
example, the building of the atomic bomb) and what their
disagreements amongst themselves were. 1184
Indeed, Roosevelt did everything he could to demonstrate to the

Soviets that he was not in agreement with the British on many points,
and sabotaged all attempts to establish a joint Anglo-American
position before the beginning of the conference. He appeared to prefer
the role of mediator between the Soviets and the British perhaps
because this gave him more flexibility in his negotiations with Stalin,
over whom he counted on being able to work his charm. 1185 Or perhaps
he was deliberately aiming at giving the Soviets the very large sphere
of influence as envisaged in the Zabrusky letter (though formally he
rejected the idea of “spheres of influence”). In any case, his behavior
annoyed the British and definitely strengthened the Soviet negotiating
position.
“Roosevelt was even forthcoming enough,” writes Jean-François

Revel, “to tell Stalin he did not think American troops could remain in
Europe for more than two years after Germany’s surrender. Besides,
he said, he did not believe in maintaining strong American forces in
Europe. He couldn’t have been more obliging. By informing Stalin in
advance that American troops would be withdrawn and when,
Roosevelt was behaving like a home owner who put up posters to tell
local burglars when he planned to take his vacation and leave the
apartment unguarded.
“Armed with this assurance, Stalin could calmly lay his postwar
plans. First he demanded that the Allies grant him full control over
the areas Germany had promised him in the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact,

1183 Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Paladin, 2007, p. 101.
1184 Plokhy, op. cit., pp. 78-79.
1185 Plokhy, op. cit., pp. 101, 35.
631
the only real agreement to divide up territory signed in the twentieth
century. He was instantly granted the Baltic states and chunks of
Finland and Romania – in other words, everything Hitler had awarded
him in 1939. But Poland… was not delivered over to Stalin in any of
the accords reached in February, 1945. He took it by trickery and
force…” 1186
For Poland was the one question on which both the Americans and
the British dug their heels in – for a time. They, like almost all Poles,
recognized only the London government-in-exile, while the Soviets
recognized only their puppets, the Lublin Committee. However, after
Roosevelt had obtained two of his goals from Stalin (albeit with major
concessions) – the foundation of the United Nations and the Soviet
entry into the war with Japan – his resistance effectively collapsed.
The British conducted a spirited rearguard action, but effectively the
battle was lost: it was the Lublin regime that was recognized, albeit
“reorganized” and with the promise of “fair” elections in which non-
communists could take part.
The British had some victories to make up for this, their greatest
defeat. One was the inclusion of the French in the Allied Control
Commission and the creation of the French occupation zone. Stalin
had opposed this, but he surrendered after Roosevelt changed his
mind and swung behind the British position.
Another British victory was over the question of reparations from

Germany. Stalin demanded $20 billion in reparations, with $10 billion
going to the Soviets. Churchill and Eden argued that such an
enormous demand would jeopardize Germany’s economic recovery,
which was vital to the economy of the whole world; it would mean
that they would have no money to pay for imports, which would
hinder other countries’ export trade; and it would threaten mass
unemployment and starvation in Germany, not to mention the
resurrection of that resentment which had played such an important
part in the rise of Hitler after the First World War. They were
supported by a letter from the British war cabinet which said that this
huge sum could not be paid “by a Germany which has been bombed,
defeated, perhaps dismembered and unable to pay for imports”.
Molotov mocked the British: “The essence of Eden’s statement comes
down to taking as little from Germany as possible”. Stalin employed
the same tactic, asking Churchill whether he was “scared” by the
Soviet request. But Churchill held his ground. And then Roosevelt
once again changed course and backed the British. “Under pressure
from the State Department and seeking to placate the media, Roosevelt
had abandoned the Morgenthau plan, but could easily return to some

1186 Revel, How Democracies Perish, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985, pp. 270-271.
632
of its provisions in spirit if not in letter, to placate the Soviets.” 1187
With great reluctance, the Soviet dictator accepted that the amount
and nature of reparations should be decided by the Reparations
Commission, to which both sides would present their proposals. Here
was another demonstration of how how much more could have been
achieved if the western allies had always worked together…
If at the top of Stalin’s wish-list was his complete control over

Poland, German reparations and the return of all Soviet prisoners of
war (about which more in a later chapter), Roosevelt’s main desires
were for the Soviets’ entry into the war against Japan, and the
establishment of the United Nations. Stalin agreed to enter the war
against Japan three months after a German surrender, but extracted a
high price – mainly at the expense of China, but also at the expense of
Roosevelt’s loudly proclaimed principles of political behaviour. For in
a secret agreement, to which even the British were not party,
Roosevelt agreed that the Soviets should take control of the Kurile
islands, southern Sakhalin, Port Arthur, the Manchurian railroads, and
that outer Mongolia should become an independent country (under
Soviet control, naturally).
Thus were the worst fears of the Chinese nationalists realized. They
naturally wanted to free their country not only from the Japanese but
also from the Chinese Communists, whose allies, of course, were the
Soviet Communists. But Roosevelt wanted not only to hand large
chunks of China to the Soviets, but also to appease the Chinese
Communists. However, as Fenby writes, “Despite US efforts, Chiang
Kai-shek and Mao Zedong were intent on renewing their civil war.
The Generalissimo remarked pointedly to Patrick Hurely, who had
become the US ambassador, that he did not want a repetiion in his
country of what had happened in Poland and Yugoslavia. His
perennial concern about the reliability of American support was
deepened by the discovery of an OSS plan to train and equip the
Communists…” 1188
The Far Eastern agreement, together with other, less important

agreements on Iran, the Dardanelles and the Balkans, demonstrate in a
fascinating way how the foreign policy aims of Stalin in 1945 and of
Tsar Nicholas over thirty years earlier were very similar – except, of
course, that the means they chose to their ends were completely
different, and that Stalin’s end was to strengthen the kingdom of Satan
over these territories, whereas the Tsar’s end had been precisely the
opposite, to strengthen Orthodoxy. The Yalta conference took place in
the Tsar’s former villa in Livadia, and Stalin arrived in the Crimea in
the Tsar’s former railway carriage. Nothing demonstrated more clearly

1188 Fenby, op. cit., p. 347.
633
the essence of the situation: the temporary triumph of evil over good,
of the enemies of Russia over Holy Rus’, of the Antichrist over
Christ…
As was to be expected, the Soviet press lauded the Yalta

agreements. The Western press also lauded it, and all the members of
the American and British delegations to Yalta thought it had been a
success and “Uncle Joe” a most pleasant and cooperative negotiator.
Roosevelt and his adviser Hopkins were in “a state of extreme
exultation”, according to Hopkins’ biographer, 1189 , and Roosevelt
expressed his firm faith in Stalin in Congress. He had seen through
Hitler early on, even before he had embarked on his worst crimes. But
he completely failed to understand Stalin and the essence of
communism – even after he had proved himself the greatest murderer
in history… Only in the very last days of his life (he died on April 12,
1945) did he express distrust of Stalin… 1190As for Churchill, he was as
always a mass of contradictions. On the last day at Yalta, as the other
leaders left, he said to Eden: “The only bond of the victors is their
common hate”. 1191 And he continued to express fears about the future –
especially, and with good reason, in regard to Poland. But he did so
only in private. 1192
In public he joined in the general dithyrambs to the collective

Antichrist. As he said in the House of Commons: “Most solemn
declarations have been made by Marshal Stalin and the Soviet Union
that the sovereign independence of Poland is to be maintained, and
this decision is now joined in both by Great Britain and the United
States… The impression I brought back from the Crimea, and from all
my other contacts, is that Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to
live in honourable friendship and equality with the Western
democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond. I know of no
Government which stands to its obligations, even in its own despite,
more solidly than the Russian Soviet Government. I decline absolutely
to embark here on a discussion about Russian good faith…” 1193

1189 Fenby, op. cit., p. 381.
1190 Victor Sebestyen, 1946: The Making of the Modern World, London: Pan, 2014, pp.
88-89.
1191 Fenby, op. cit., p. 379.
1192 Thus on March 8 he wrote to Roosevelt: “The Russians have succeeded in
establishing [in Eastern Europe] the rule of a communist minority by force and
misrepresentation… which is absolutely contrary to all democratic ideas… Stalin
has subscribed on paper to the principles of Yalta which are certainly being
trampled down.” And again he wrote on March 13: “We are in the presence of a
great failure and utter breakdown of what was agreed at Yalta” (Paul Ham,
Hiroshima Nagasaki, London: Doubleday, 2010, p. 10).
1193 Plokhy, op. cit., p. 335. As he said to his doctor Moran during the conference:
“’I don’t think he [Stalin] is unfriendly to us. Chamberlain had been wrong to trust
Hitler, he reflected, but he did not think he was wrong to trust Stalin” (Fenby, op.
cit., pp. 381-382).
634
Perhaps the most important agreement at Yalta was the Declaration
on Liberated Europe: “to foster the conditions in which the liberated
peoples may exercise those [democratic] rights, all three governments
will jointly assist the people in any European liberated state or former
Axis satellite state in Europe” to form representative governments and
facilitate free elections. But Stalin had no intention of keeping this
pledge, as the western leaders soon discovered to their fury. However,
their protests fell on deaf ears. It could not have been otherwise. The
Allies supped with the devil at Yalta, although they knew all about his
demonism, and returned fatally poisoned. As Ferguson puts it: “The
wartime alliance with Stalin, for all its inevitability and strategic
rationality, was nevertheless an authentically Faustian bargain…” 1194
And it immediately involved lying: lying, for example, about

Stalin’s slaughter of the Polish elite at Katyn, lying about the
abandonment of Eastern Europe in general. For if “totalitarianism
probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth”
(George Orwell), those who cooperate with it are bound to become
infected with its mendacity.
This brings us back to the question: could the Allies have acted differently?
Plokhy’s conclusion is: no. “There were of course other possibilities, but they
had the potential of leading to a new war before the old one was over. Joseph
Goebbels nourished high hopes as he followed the coverage of inter-Allied
tensions in the Western media from his hideout in Berlin. If one were to take
Stalin’s fears as a guide to policy alternatives, then a separate peace with the
dying Nazi regime or, more realistically, an armistice leading to the end of
hostilities on the western front, could have been adopted instead of the policy
that Roosevelt and Churchill followed at Yalta. These options could only be
perceived as dead ends by the two Western leaders, who were committed to
leading their nations and the long-suffering world toward peace. As Charles
Bohlen wrote to George Kennan [the architect of the western policy of
containment in the Cold War] from Yalta, regarding his proposal to divide
Europe in half: ‘Foreign policy of that kind cannot be made in democracy.’”1195
It is this last point that is the most important. There are always alternatives,
and kow-towing to Stalin was by no means inevitable. However, a successful
war against apocalyptic evil – for that is what the war against the Soviet
Antichrist was in reality – could only be undertaken by a leader who truly led
his people and was not led by them, who could inspire them to “blood, sweat
and tears” not only in defence of their own sovereignty but for the sake of some

635
higher, supra-national ideal – in essence a religious ideal in obedience to God
and for the sake, not of earthly survival only, but of salvation for eternity.
But democracy, as has been noted many times in this Universal History, is a
mode of political life that is centred entirely on secular, earthly goals. An
exceptional democratic leader may briefly be able to raise his people to a higher
than usual level of courage and personal self-sacrifice, as Roosevelt did America
in 1933 and Churchill did Britain in 1940. But the aim remains earthly – in
Roosevelt’s case, economic recovery, and in Churchill’s, national survival.1196
Moreover, even an exceptional leader cannot run far in front of his people, by
whom he is elected and to whom he remains answerable; and so far no
democratic nation has voted for a leader that will sacrifice earthly survival for
some heavenly ideal. That is the lesson of Churchill’s defeat in the British
elections in 1945. The people were tired of war (as they had also been in 1919,
when Churchill again tried to inspire them to continue fighting against the
Soviets after defeating the Germans), and certainly did not want to undertake
another war against Soviet Russia. So an inspirational leader of the Churchillian
type was not what they wanted, and in a democracy the people gets what it
wants, whether it is good for them or not. They wanted a new leader who
would concentrate once again on earthly matters – tax rates, redistribution of
wealth, a National Health Service, etc. A despot like Stalin can do more than a
democratic leader in propelling his people to feats of self-sacrifice – as Stalin did
the Soviet people in 1941-45. But they are compelled to such feats by fear, and if
they have a love which is stronger than their fear, it is nevertheless inevitably
for an earthly, secular ideal.
Only an Orthodox Autocrat can inspire his people to sacrifice themselves for
a truly heavenly ideal, even if that spells the end of all their earthly hopes. St.
Lazar was an Orthodox Autocrat who inspired the Serbs to sacrifice everything
for the Heavenly Kingdom on Kosovo field. Tsar Nicholas II was a man of
comparable quality who also looked to heavenly rather than earthly crowns
(even if the great mass of his people did not). But by 1945 there were no more
Orthodox Autocrats; Stalin’s victory in 1945 consolidated Lenin’s in 1917.
Autocracy, the only truly God-pleasing form of political life, was – temporarily -
no more…

1196 As he put it in parliament in May, 1940: “What is our aim?... Victory, victory at all costs,
victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without
victory, there is no survival.”
636
68. THE BALKANS AND THE COMMUNISTS
The Allies’ decision, confirmed at Yalta, not to invade the Western Balkans,
sealed the fate of the Balkan nations: with the exception of Greece, they were all
to become communist in the post-war world, as Churchill had predicted in
January, 1945. And yet the victory of communism, and its near-victory in Greece,
did not take place on an empty space. The roots of this victory go far back into
the pre-war years, when Communism had been a growing problem.
Until the war the communists were held at bay In Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and
Greece by Orthodox kings who had freed themselves from parliamentary
control – King Alexander of Yugoslavia from 1929, and King Boris of Bulgaria
from 1934. In Greece, “the Communist party made a small but significant
showing in Parliament for the first time in 1935. That same year the monarchy
was restored and King George II returned to Greece. In 1936 Communist
agitation disrupted the country, and to forestall civil war John Metaxas imposed
martial law with the consent of the King and the senior politicians, and became
dictator.”1197
Only in Romania were the communists not a major problem – the danger
there was from the fascists. But there, too, the king took control. King Carol,
writes Mark Mazower, “had the popular fascist leader Codreanu arrested and
shot, created his own new Party of the Nation which struck observers as ‘a
complete flop’, and presided over a Government of National Union.
“Thus despite the region’s early experience of democratic politics, mass

parties of left and right failed to survive. By the end of the 1930s, the
parliamentary system and political parties had disappointed the hopes invested
in them by liberal intellectuals. Few mourned their passing…”1198
However, growing ethnic tensions (especially in Yugoslavia) combined with

worsening economic conditions and unemployment on the land undermined
the authority of the kings. Tsar Boris of Bulgaria remained in power, keeping his
country out of military alliances with either the fascists or the communists by
cleverly playing them off against each other. But in 1945 the Bulgarian
monarchy fell to the communists. King Michael of Romania survived until 1947,
but then had to flee.
During the war, Nazi occupation elicited guerrilla resistance movements of

both royalist and communist kinds. In Yugoslavia at first, as John Fine writes,
“attempts were made by the two to co-operate against the common enemy.
However, action, whether ambushes of German units or acts of sabotage, led to

1197 Lardas, “The Old Calendar Movement in the Greek Church”, Holy Trinity
Monastery, Jurdanville, 1983 (unpublished thesis).

1198 Mazower, The Balkans, London: Phoenix Books, 2001, p. 130.
637
violent German reprisals: 100 Yugoslavs (since the action was then chiefly in
Serbia, this meant Serbs) were shot for each German killed, and the number
executed continued to rise. [The royalist leader] Mikhailović was a Serb, and his
goal was the restoration of pre-war royalist Yugoslavia… He could see that the
resistance was too weak to do serious damage to the Germans, and that the only
result of actions against the occupiers was the murder of thousands of Serbs. He
therefore decided that it would be best to stop an active policy, build up his
forces, and then conserve them to act when the time was propitious, i.e. when
the Allies invaded. He also feared Tito’s Partisans since he knew Tito was a
Communist and disliked the idea of a Communist revolution as much as the
German occupation or even more. So he took a passive policy toward the
Germans.”1199
Tito, on the other hand, was not deterred by massive reprisals against Serbs.
Moreover, his partisans, though mainly Serbs, were able to recruit more
volunteers from non-Serb nationalities because of their more internationalist
ideology. And so the British transferred their support from the četniks to the
partisans – a terrible betrayal, understandable though it was from the point of
view of cynical realpolitik1200 - while the two Serbian resistance movements
turned against each other… Moreover, in spite of receiving support from the
West, towards the end of the war Tito was determined to resist any
encroachment on Yugoslavia from British troops in Italy. This drew a sharp
rebuke from Stalin, who had agreed a 50-50 split with Churchill in Yugoslavia.
And so, as Glenny writes, “the leadership of the new [communist]

Yugoslavia made some formal concessions to the Big Three. They invited Ivan

1199 Fine, “Strongmen can be beneficial: the exceptional case of Josip Broz Tito”, in
Berndt Frischer (ed.), Balkan Strongmen, London: Hurst, 2006, p. 275.

1200 The British change in position was probably influenced by a Stalinist spy in
their ranks. Thus Nikolai Tolstoy writes that “at SOE in Cairo a Major James
Klugman did not neglect opportunities to injure Mihailovich’s cause and boost
Tito’s. Klugman was a fanatical Communist who played a large part in the 1930s in
recruiting youths at Cambridge and other universities to the Soviet cause.”
(Stalin’s Secret War, London: Jonathan Cape, 1981, p. 342). Again, Fr. James
Thornton writes: “Tragically, America and Britain were deceived by communists
agents within their own ranks, who sought to besmirch the reputation of
Mihailovich by circulating the outrageous lie that he was collaborating with the
Germans, while assuring everyone that the rival communist Partisan leader, Josip
Broz Tito, was the true friend of the West. This was confirmed beyond question in
1997 when, as [Gregory Freeman, the author of The Forgotten 500] shows,
declassified British documents revealed that a Soviet agent, James Klugman, “was
principally responsible for sabotaging the Mihailovich supply operation and for
keeping from London information about how much Mihailovich forces were
fighting the Germans and how much successes they were having.” Upon reaching
America, that disinformation was amplified by Soviet agents in key positions
within our own government. Because of Klugman's activities, supplies were
recounted to Tito, thus assuring the post-war communist takeover of Yugoslavia.
Yet, despite this horrifying volte-face, General Mihailovich remained faithful to
his Western Allies, not only assuring the safety of the 500 airmen, but assisting in
“Operation Halyard,” the extremely perilous airlift operation that returned all the
men to Allied-controlled Italy.”
638
Šubašić, Prime Minister in the royal government in exile, to become Foreign
Minister, to show that the new regime enjoyed a broad democratic base. On the
ground, however, they imposed a harsh revolutionary justice. As German
troops streamed out of Yugoslavia, the Croat fascist leader, Ante Pavelić, and 1-
200,000 Ustaša troops and civilians set off for the Austrian border on 7 May 1945,
with Partisan forces in hot pursuit. They got as far as Bleiburg, a small Austrian
border town, before being surrounded by British troops to the north and
Partisans to the south. With RAF Spitfire buzzing overhead, about 30-40,000
soldiers, including Pavelić, managed to disappear into the surrounding woods
and then deep into Austria. But the remainder were taken prisoner by Partisan
forces amid scenes of carnage. Some 30,000 Ustaše were killed on the four-day
march towards the Slovene town of Maribor. On 20 May, near the village of
Tezna, ’50,000 Croat soldiers and about 30,000 refugees, mainly women and
children, were executed over a five-day period… A macabre end to the
‘Independent State of Croatia’.
“In Serbia, the Chetniks fared little better even though many had fought
bravely against the Germans. Mihailović, the Chetnik leader, led a small band of
fighters into the mountains of eastern Bosnia. He was eventually caught, tried
and executed in 1946 as an alleged war criminal. But thousands of Chetniks
became fugitives in a twilight world. Many were secondary-school pupils when
they joined the resistance. Now, they were hunted in villages and towns
throughout Serbia. Thousands hid from the secret police in Belgrade, moving at
dusk from one safe place to the next. Occasionally, they would risk capture by
visiting their families. In place of the bright adolescent who had left three or
four years before, mothers and fathers now saw a ‘tall, grim-looking young
man… who appeared… on their doorstep with one hand always clutching
something in the pocket of his raincoat and whose eyes were ringed with dark
circles.’
“Arrested by the Gestapo during the war, Dimitrije Djordjevic, a young

Chetnik leader, survived Mauthausen only to fall into the hands of the
Gestapo’s communist successor when he returned to Belgrade. ‘Both
[organizations] had in common the violence with which they imposed their
authority. The Gestapo destroyed the body; Ozna [the Yugoslav equivalent of
the KGB] raped the soul. The Gestapo killed by shooting and by imprisonment
in death camps; Ozna engaged in brainwashing, demanding repentance for sins
not committed and self-abnegation. ‘The difference was one of physical as
opposed to spiritual annihilation.’
“OZNa, Odsek za zaštitu naroda (Department for the Protection of the People),
modelled itself on the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. But during the war, under
the dour leadership of Aleksandar Rankovic, the Communist Minister of the
Interior, it matured independent of Soviet control. Rankovic built a network of
informers and a devoted political police whose efficiency gave birth to the
popular Orwellian rhyme, Ozna sve dozna (Ozna finds out everything). He
aimed to make OZNa omnipresent, recruiting ‘in every block of flats, in every
street, in every village and in every barrack room’. The Nazi and Ustaše camps
639
throughout Yugoslavia were turned over for use by the communists. Tens of
thousands of people were executed in 1946-7 while hundreds of thousands were
interned. In 1947, there were so many men in camps or prisons that the penal
system started to buckle under the strain. The mass arrests had removed so
many young men from the labour market that the economy was being disrupted.
Against Rankovic’s better judgement the Party was forced to declare amnesty
for tens of thousands.
“Thanks chiefly to OZNa, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunisticka

Partija Jugoslavije – KPJ) was able to neutralize all political opposition soon after
the elections of November 1945, which were comprehensively rigged. The
communist monopoly on power took hold in Yugoslavia much earlier than
anywhere else in eastern Europe…”1201
Churchill had foreseen this a long time before. As he wrote to Stalin on April
28: “I must say that the way things have worked out in Yugoslavia certainly
does not give me the feeling of a fifty-fifty interest as between our countries.
Marshal Tito has become a complete dictator. He has proclaimed that his prime
loyalties are to the Soviet Union. Although he allowed members of the Royal
Yugoslav Government to enter his government they only number six as against
twenty-five of his own nominees. We have the impression that they are not
taken into consultation on matters of high policy and that it is becoming a one-
party regime…”1202
After the Greeks had been conquered by the Germans in April, 1941, they
saw their country divided between the Bulgarians (in the north), the Germans
(in the centre, Athens and Salonika) and the Italians (in the rest of the country).
Hunger and disease stalked the land – hundreds of thousands died. Many
priests perished at the hands of the German, Italian and Bulgarian forces during
the occupation of 1941-1944.
The situation was particularly bad in the Bulgarian zone, where the
Bulgarians wanted revenge for their defeats in 1913 and 1918. “In September
1941,” writes R.J. Crampton, “the local Greek population staged a rising, and
committed atrocities against Bulgarians; the latter took fearsome revenge in an
effort, some believe, to drive the Greeks out of the region.”1203
“Hitler had sanctioned Bulgaria’s occupation of Western Thrace, not its

annexation. The Bulgarians disregarded this fine point. They had just emerged
as the most powerful country in the Balkans and saw that possession was nine-
tenths of the law. The Bulgarian administration in western Thrace was arguably
one of the harshest occupational regimes in all Europe. Up to 100,000 Greeks

1201 Glenny, op. cit., pp. 530-532.
1203 Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.
172.
640
were expelled from the region, and many thousands imprisoned in the island of
Thasos. The smallest manifestation of Greek culture was persecuted. The
Bulgarians also seized Greek-owned land and distributed it to tens of thousands
of Bulgarian peasant colonists…”1204
In September, 1944, as the Germans retreated from Greece, the communist

partisans of ELAS (Ellenikos Laikos Apeleutherotikos Stratos) with their two
political sponsors, EAM and KKE (the Communist Party), and OPLA (KKE’s
nascent secret police), poured down from their mountain strongholds in the
north and were soon in control of four-fifths of the country. They caused great
suffering to the people, and more than 200 Orthodox priests were murdered by
Communist partisans during the civil conflicts of 1943-1949, often with a bestial
cruelty worthy of their Soviet counterparts. The only non-communist resistance
movement, EDES, which was loyal to King George II, was esconced in north-
western Epirus in much smaller numbers.
Among the hieromartyrs of this period was Hieromonk Joseph Antoniou. In

1938 he was imprisoned by the new calendarists. On his release he was sent by
the True Orthodox Bishop Germanos of the Cyclades to Xylocastron, near
Corinth. Once installed in Xylocastron, he brought his parents there and
continued his apostolic activity. During the German occupation, communist
guerrillas entered the area and occupied several of the villages. Fr. Joseph
fearlessly denounced their false teaching and terrible cruelties against the
people. Two or three times they warned Fr. Joseph to stop speaking against
them. But he replied: “You are waging the anti-Christian communist struggle,
but I am waging the opposite struggle, the Christian struggle.”
Soon the decision was taken by the communists to execute the troublesome
priest… Shortly after Pascha, 1944, an unknown old man entered the church
where Fr. Joseph was serving, and told him that throughout the service he had
seen blood flowing from under this cassock. From that time, Fr. Joseph prepared
himself for martyrdom. Attacks on priests were increasing at this time. Only
three months before Fr. Joseph was killed, he invited Bishop Germanus of the
Cyclades to baptize the son of his spiritual son John Motsis. The local
communist chief ordered the bishop to leave immediately.
On July 20 Fr. Joseph celebrated the Liturgy in the village of Laliotis. Then
the communists entered the house where he was staying, arrested him and
threw him into prison, where he was tortured. On July 22, he was taken out of
prison with another young man by three guerillas. On seeing the youth of the
executioners, Fr. Joseph sadly shook his head and urged them not to commit the
crime. The communists forced their victims to dig their own graves, killed the
young man, and then turned to Fr. Joseph.
He was allowed to sing his own funeral service. Then one thrust a knife into
his back, but the blade broke. While another knife was being fetched, the

641
executioners smoked and watched Fr. Joseph’s death agony. He said: “I will be
the last victim of this knife, but the one who kills me will be the first to die from
this knife.” After killing the martyr, as the executioners were returning, they
quarrelled and the one who had killed Fr. Joseph was killed by his comrades,
while the first one was later executed by the Germans… In September, 1945, Fr.
Joseph’s father and brother, with the help of his donkey, found and exhumed
his body. It was fragrant. A heavenly light was often seen over the tomb of the
hieromartyr during the evenings.1205
However, atheism never gained a strong foothold in Greece – in a poll

carried out in 1951 only 121 out of 7,500,000 people declared themselves to be
atheists.1206 It is this fact, together with the strength of the True Orthodox Old
Calendarist movement, which probably saved the Greeks from the horrors of a
permanent communist yoke. But it came close to that, nevertheless…“By the
end of 1944, membership of EAM has been estimated at about two million, an
astonishing figure in a country of seven million. They had been drawn to the
movement because it established rudimentary health and education facilities,
food supplies where necessary and, above all, a sense that for the first time the
peasantry actually mattered to the men and women of the cities. The stage was
set for victory in Athens where the KKE held enormous popular appeal. But the
order to march on the city was never issued…”1207
Nevertheless, by mid-December most of Athens was in communist hands:

only the very centre, “Scobia”, named after the British General Scobie, was
outside their control. What saved Greece were the real influence that the Greek
government-in-exile had through their coalition with the resistance1208, and the
informal alliance between the British and the Soviets based on Churchill’s
agreement with Stalin allowing him 90-10 dominance in Greece. The
communists also made two major mistake: first, KKE’s order to ELAS forces in
the north to attack the royalists of EDES in the north-west, and secondly the
consequent abandonment by ELAS troops of the siege of Salonika, allowing its
defenders, the British India division, to sail to Piraeus and reinforce Scobie’s
hard-pressed soldiers in Athens.
Then, on December 26, 1944, Churchill and American and French

representatives arrived in Athens and met with the warring sides. The new
calendarist Archbishop Damascene also tried to mediate. Churchill eventually
persuaded the Greek king to make Archbishop Damascene the temporary head
of the government on condition that the communists did not form part of it.1209

1205 The above account is taken from Metropolitan Kalliopios of Pentapolis, Saint
Joseph de Desphina (St. Joseph of Desphina), Lavardac: Orthodox Monastery of St.

Michael, 1988. In 2015 Joseph was canonized by the True Orthodox Church of
Greece under Archbishop Kallinikos of Athens.
1206 Bishop Kallistos (Ware); Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 4, p. 14.
1208 Fine, op. cit., p. 279.
1209 Churchill, Road to Victory; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., part 3, p. 79.
642
This, the Varkiza Agreement of February 9, 1945, “led to the disarmament of
ELAS. In exchange, the provisional government headed by General Plastiras
promised an amnesty for political crimes and the disbanding of the right-wing
formations that had collaborated with the Nazis. EAM/ELAS continued to
control the Greek interior and much of Macedonia. Plastiras’s government
enjoyed little support and the General was unable to administer the entire
country; yet in Attica and the Peloponnese, the Government was at least the
nominal power. As the communists receded, the brutal killers of χ, a right-wing
paramilitary organization, and other anti-communist groups, roamed the
Athenian walkways and the mountains and coasts of the Peloponnese. White
Terror was eager to prove that it was more than a match for Red Terror.
“Popular support for the communists waned after the Varkiza Agreement.
Their behaviour during the December uprising had alienated many ordinary
Greeks, not only because of the murder of hostages. In Aegean Macedonia, they
had fought with the SNOF, the Titoist Liberation Front representing tens of
thousands of Slav Macedonians still living in Greece. EAM had permitted the
publication of Slav newspapers and encouraged cultural autonomy for the Slavs
which many Greeks considered a real threat to the country’s sovereignty.
“The Right was in contrast bolstered by the Varkiza Agreement. Over the
next twelve months, the National Guard, the police and the army expanded
rapidly to a strength of almost 200,000 well-armed men. In areas like the
Peloponnese and Epirus, where monarchists and rightists drew their traditional
strength, these forces were swift to exact revenge on the communists. The
authorities were unable to prevent the lumpen fascists of χ from infiltrating the
security forces. Inside the Army’s officer corps a new conspiracy, the Sacred
Bond of Greek Officers (IDEA), disseminated its anti-communist and
expansionist philosophy. With their allies in the government, IDEA members
weeded out suspected liberal or left-wing sympathizers from the officer corps.
“The absence of war improved the material circumstances of most Greeks,

who benefited from a heroic effort made by the United Nations Refugee and
Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). The British presence curbed the more extreme
political violence in the major towns and introduced a greater professionalism
into the police force. But as one bumbling administration after another fell, it
was hard to disguise the fact that British troops were propping up a sordid
coalition of unforgiving nationalists and businessmen intent on reviving the
hugely exploitative interwar economy. The elections called under American and
British pressure in March 1946 were boycotted by the KKE [against Stalin’s
advice]… The populist administration which was swept into office redoubled
the repression against communists and their sympathizers. Pressure for actions
mounted in the ranks of ELAS, emboldened by the return of veteran fighters
from Yugoslav camps. When King George was welcomed back in September
1946 after a dubious plebiscite restoring the monarchy, chaos was come
again…”1210

1210 Glenny, op. cit., pp. 540-542.
643
Although the British intervention in Greece was in accordance with
Churchill’s percentage agreement with Stalin, and in the long run saved the
country from the terrible fate of the rest of Eastern Europe, it formally
contradicted the “Declaration on Liberated Europe”, agreed in Yalta, which
decreed that the Allies should not interfere with the free choice of the liberated
countries as to their post-war government. The Soviets later seized on this
formal violation (only formal, because interference to prevent a violent
communist takeover was absolutely necessary in order to guarantee truly free
elections). But they themselves had, of course, violated the principle not only
formally but in essence both in Poland and in every other country they occupied.
The Declaration also contained a reference to the need to eliminate vestiges of
Fascism and Nazism in liberated Europe – which gave the Soviets the
opportunity, as Churchill foresaw, of calling any politician they disliked a
“fascist” and so getting him removed from government…1211
Romania and Bulgaria were directly in the path of the Red Army, and had in
any case been given up by Churchill to Stalin’s tender mercies, so they had no
chance. The only difference was that the Romanians were relatively worse
treated because of their Russophobia, while “there was less looting, rape and
expropriation in Bulgaria than elsewhere. In general, Bulgarians welcomed the
liberating troops with polite enthusiasm. The Soviets found the local
Communist Party larger and better-organized than its Romanian
counterpart.”1212
At the beginning, the Romanian communists under Ana Pauker had only
1000 members. However, “on February 13,” writes Plokhy, “two days after the
end of the Yalta Conference, the Romanian communists organized a mass
demonstration in Bucharest demanding the removal of the coalition government
of General Nicolae Radescu and its replacement by a communist-controlled
cabinet. When the American and British representatives on the Allied Control
Commission for Romania requested a meeting of the commission on February
24, Stalin sent Andrei Vyshinsky to Bucharest. Judging by the short biography
prepared by the State Department on the eve of the Yalta Conference, the
Americans regarded Vyshinsky as relatively liberal [!]. They credited him with
the Soviet recognition of the Marshal Pietro Badoglio government in Italy and
with their conciliatory approarch to the Radescu government in Romania. They
were soon to be bitterly disappointed.
“Vyshinsky arrived in Bucharest on February 27 and immediately requested

a meeting with the king. There, he demanded the dismissal of the Radescu
government, claiming that it was unable to maintain order. He wanted it to be
replaced by a government based on ‘truly democratic forces’, meaning the

1211 Plokhy, op. cit., pp. 263-266.
644
communists and their allies. The next day Vyshinsky accused the existing
government of protecting ‘fascists’ and gave the king two hours to dismiss the
government. ‘In leaving,’ wrote James Byrnes on the basis of a report from the
American representative in Bucharest, ‘he slammed the door so hard that the
plaster around the door frame was cracked badly. It has never been fixed; it
remains to testify to the strength of his feeling and his arm.’ Through a
combination of threats (to abolish Romanian statehood) and promises (to attach
Hungarian Transylvania to Romania), Vyshinsky eventually managed to install
a new government led by the communist Petru Groza.
“The Soviet-engineered coup d’etat alarmed London and Washington. Since

Churchill, given his percentage deal, was in no position to protest diretly, he
appealed to Roosevelt. He told the president that ‘[t]he Russians had succeeded
in establishing the rule of Communist minority by force and misrepresentation.’
Roosevelt agreed but refused to act, believing that ‘Romania is not a good place
for a test case’. The Soviets had been in complete control there since the fall of
1944, and given the country’s strategic location on the Red Army supply and
communications lines, it would be difficult to challenge Soviet claims
concerning the military necessity of their actions. Roosevelt knew about
Churchill and Stalin’s deal on the Balkans and apparently decided to avoid
involvement in a potentially embarrassing situation.
“In Washington there was a growing realization that something had to be

done, but given the president’s silence, Stalin felt it safe to ignore the efforts of
American diplomats to remedy the situation. On March 17, 1945, Molotov
turned down an American request for consultations on the Romanian situation
in keeping with the provisions of the Declaration on Liberated Europe – the
approach Churchill had suggested to Roosevelt. The Romanian crisis was
resolved, Molotov told Harriman, and there was thus no need to invoke the
provisions of the declaration, which required joint Allied consultation in case of
a crisis…”1213
In the end there was little to choose between the sufferings of the different
Balkan countries. Thus Bulgarian royalty was treated with even more contempt
than the Romanian king. After the death of Tsar Boris, his brother, Prince Cyril,
was arrested by Soviet troops and shot on “Bloody Thursday”, February 3, 1945.
Again, as in all communist countries, the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria was

persecuted: so-called associations of priests controlled by the communists were
infiltrated into the Church of Bulgaria, as into neighbouring Serbia. “After
assuming power,” writes Ivan Marchevsky, “the communists began to destroy
the clergy: a third of the 2000 members of the clergy was killed. Then they began
to act in a different way: Vladykas appointed ‘from above’ ordained obedient
priests...”

1213 Plokhy, op. cit., pp. 346-347.
645
And so, after the horrors of fascist occupation, most of the Balkans fell under
the even worse horrors of the communist yoke. Only Greece escaped – but only
after the Civil War between the royalists (supported by Britain and the United
States) and the communists (supported by Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria)
ended in 1949, leaving one hundred thousand dead and one million homeless.
Greece was left bitterly divided and in ruins…
646
69. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH IN 1945
“Patriarch” Sergius died on May 15, 1944. “They say that not long before his
death [he] had a vision of Christ, after which he sobbed for a long time over the
crimes he had committed.”1214 It would be good to know that this Judas had
really repented of his terrible crimes; but there is no evidence that he ever tried
to mitigate, let alone reverse, their impact on Church life…
The former renovationist Metropolitan Alexis (Simansky) of Leningrad

became patriarchal locum tenens. His first act was to send a telegram on May 19
to Stalin, in which he thanked him for the trust he had showed him, promised to
continue the politics of Stalin without wavering and assured him of his love and
devotion to the cause of the party and Stalin. He kept his promise…
In the period from the Stalin-Sergius pact of September, 1943 to the

enthronement of the new “patriarch” Alexis in January, 1945, the 19 bishops of
the MP (they had been only four at the beginning of the war) were more than
doubled to 41. Catacomb Bishop “A.” wrote: “Very little time passed between
September, 1943 and January, 1945. Therefore it is difficult to understand where
41 bishops came from instead of 19. In this respect our curiosity is satisfied by
the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate for 1944. Looking through it, we see that
the 19 bishops who existed in 1943, in 1944 rapidly gave birth to the rest, who
became the members of the 1945 council.
“From the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate we learn that these hasty
consecrations were carried out, in the overwhelming majority of cases, on
renovationist protopriests.
“From September, 1943 to January, 1945, with a wave of a magic wand, all
the renovationists suddenly repented before Metropolitan Sergius. The
penitence was simplified, without the imposition of any demands on those who
caused so much evil to the Holy Church. And in the shortest time the ‘penitent
renovationists’ received a lofty dignity, places and ranks, in spite of the church
canons and the decree about the reception of renovationists imposed [by
Patriarch Tikhon] in 1925…
“As the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate informs us, the ‘episcopal’
consecrations before the ‘council’ of 1945 took place thus: the protopriest who
had been recommended (undoubtedly by the civil authorities), and who was
almost always from the ‘reunited’ renovationists or Gregorians, was
immediately tonsured into monasticism with a change in name and then, two or
three days later, made a ‘hierarch of the Russian Church’.”1215

Shumilo, op. cit.
1214
"Pis'mo 2-oe Katakombnogo Episkopa A. k F.M." (The Second Letter of

1215
Catacomb Bishop A. to F.M.), Russkij Pastyr' (Russian Pastor), N 14, III-1992;

Russkoe Pravoslavie (Russian Orthodoxy), 1996, N 2 (2), pp. 10, 11.
647
This acceptance of the renovationists was dictated in the first place by the
Bolsheviks, who now saw the Sergianists as more useful than the renovationists.
Thus on October 12, 1943 Karpov wrote to Stalin and Molotov: “The
renovationist movement earlier played a constructive role but in recent years
has lost its significance and base of support. On this basis, and taking into
account the patriotic stance of the Sergiite church, the Council for Russian
Orthodox Church Affairs has decided not to prevent the dissolution of the
renovationist church and the transfer of the renovationist clergy and parishes to
the patriarchal, Sergiite church.”1216
On October 16 Karpov sent secret instructions to the regions not to hinder the
transfer of renovationists to the sergianists. 1217 Since he wanted the
renovationists to join the state church, the rules for their reception were relaxed.
Thus in 1944 Metropolitan Alexis (Simansky) severely upbraided Bishop
Manuel (Lemeshevsky) for forcing “venerable” renovationist protopriests to
“turn somersaults”, i.e. repent, before the people, in accordance with Patriarch
Tikhon’s rules.1218
As Roslof writes: “The relaxation of rules by the patriarchate reflected the

needs of both church and state. The patriarchal synod had full backing from the
government and expected to emerge as the sole central authority for the
Orthodox Church. So it could afford to show mercy. At the same time, the
patriarchate faced a scarcity of clergy to staff reopened parishes and to run the
dioceses. Sergii’s bishops had problems finding priests for churches that had
never closed. This shortage of clergy was compounded by the age and poor
education of the candidates who were available. The patriarchate saw properly
supervised red priests as part of the solution to the problem of filling vacant
posts.”1219
Stalin now needed to convene a council to elect a new patriarch. He

convened it “at the beginning of 1945, that is, in time for the official meeting of
the heads of the governments of the USSR, USA and Great Britain from
February 4 to 12 in Yalta, which had for Stalin a strategically important
significance. With this aim, already at the end of November, 1944 a congress of
bishops had been carried out in Moscow at which they were given special
instructions and commands on the order in which the council was to be carried
out and the role of each of them in it. It was here that the projected conciliar
documents were drawn up, and the order for the election of the new Soviet
patriarch was drawn up. The former Catacomb Archbishop Luke (Vojno-

1216 Karpov, in Edward E. Roslof, Red Priests: Renovationism, Russian Orthodoxy, and
Revolution, 1905-1946, Indiana University Press, 2002, pp. 194-195.

1217 Roslof, op. cit., p. 195.
1218 See Metropolitan John (Snychev) of St. Petersburg, Mitropolit Manuil
(Lemeshevsky) (Metropolitan Manuel Lemeshevsky)), St. Petersburg, 1993, p. 185.
Of course, a guilty conscience may also have had something to do with it: both
“Patriarch” Sergius and his successor, “Patriarch” Alexis, were themselves
“repentant renovationists”.
1219 Roslof, op. cit., p. 196.
648
Yasensky), who had been freed from a camp during the war and united to the
MP, reminded the gathered bishops of the resolution of the Local Council of
1917-1918 to the effect that the patriarch had to be elected by secret ballot from
several candidates. But none of the sergianist bishops decided to support this
resolution and the single candidate, as had been planned, remained
Metropolitan Alexis (Simansky). Since Archbishop Luke did not agree with this
violation of the conciliar norms, he was through the efforts of Protopriest
Nicholas Kolchitsky and Metropolitan Alexis not admitted to the council and
took no part in it.”1220
The council consisted of four Russian metropolitans, 41 bishops and 141

representatives of the clergy and laity. Also present were the patriarchs of
Alexandria, Antioch and Georgia, and representatives of the Constantinopolitan,
Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian and other Churches. In all there were 204
participants.
”A significant amount of money,” writes Shumilo, “was set apart by Stalin

for its preparation. The best hotels of the capital, the “Metropole” and “National”
were placed at the disposal of the participants of the council gratis, as well as
Kremlin government food reserves, government “ZIS” automobiles, a large
government house with all modern conveniences and much else. Stalin was also
concerned about the arrival in the USSR of representatives of foreign churches,
so as to give an international significance to the given action. As V. Alexeev
notes: ‘… By having a local council Stalin forestalled possible new accusations of
the council’s lack of competency and representativeness, etc. for the election of a
patriarch from the foreign part of the Orthodoxy clergy… So that the very fact of
the election of a new patriarch should not elicit doubts, the patriarchs of the
Orthodox churches and their representatives from Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia
and the Middle East were invited for the first time to Moscow.’ And although in
the actual council only three patriarchs – those of Georgia, Alexandria and
Antioch – took part, representatives from other local churches also arrived; they
were specially brought to Moscow by Soviet military aeroplanes.
“The council opened on January 31, 1945 with a speech of welcome in the
name of the Soviet Stalinist regime by the president of the Council for the
Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, NKVD Major-General G. Karpov. He
noted that the council ‘was an outstanding event in the life of the Church’,
whose activity was directed ‘towards helping the Soviet people to secure the
great historical aims set before it’, that is, the construction of ‘communist
society’.
“In its turn the council did not miss the opportunity yet again to express its
gratitude and assure the communist party, the government and Stalin
personally of its sincere devotion. As the address put it: ‘The Council

1220 Shumilo, op. cit.; Fr. Sergius Gordun, "Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov' pri
Svyateishikh Patriarkhakh Sergii i Aleksii" (The Russian Orthodox Church under

their Holinesses Patriarchs Sergius and Alexis), Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo
Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian Christian Movement), N 158, I-1990, p. 92.
649
profoundly appreciates the trusting, and to the highest degree benevolent and
attentive attitude towards all church undertakings on the part of the state
authorities… and expresses to our Government our sincerely grateful feelings’.
“As was planned, the sole candidate as the new Soviet patriarch was
unanimously confirmed at the council – Metropolitan Alexis (Simansky).
Besides this, a new ‘Temporary Statute for the Administration of the Russian
Orthodox Church’, composed by workers at the Council for the Affairs of the
Russian Orthodox Church and the chancellor of the MP, Protopriest Nicholas
Kolchitsky, was accepted at the council. This Statute radically contradicted the
canonical principles of Orthodoxy. ‘This Statute turned the Moscow patriarchate
into a certain likeness of a totalitarian structure, in which three people at the
head with the so-called “patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’” received greater
power than a local council, and the right to administer the Church in a still more
dictatorial fashion than Peter’s synod. But if the emperors up to 1917 were
nevertheless considered to be Orthodox Christians, now the official structures of
the Church were absolutely subject to the will of the leaders of the God-fighting
regime. Church history has not seen such a fall in 2000 years of Christianity!’ By
accepting in 1945 the new Statute on the administration of the Russian Orthodox
Church that contradicted from the first to the last letter the conciliar-canonical
principles of the administration of the Church confirmed at the All-Russian
Local Church Council of 1917-1918, the Moscow patriarchate once more
confirmed its own Soviet path of origin and development, and also the absence
of any kind of link or descent from the canonical ‘Tikhonite’ Church, which
legally existed in the country until 1927.”1221
After the enthronement of Alexis, Stalin ordered the Council to congratulate

him and give him “a commemorative present. The value of the gift was
determined at 25-30,000 rubles. Stalin loved to give valuable presents. It was
also decided to ‘show gratitude’ to the foreign bishops for their participation in
the Council. The commissariat was told to hand over 42 objects from the
Moscow museums and 28 from the Zagorsk state museum – mainly objects used
in Orthodox worship – which were used as gifts for the Eastern Patriarchs. Thus,
for example, Patriarch Christopher of Alexandria was given a golden panagia
with valuable stones…
The patriarchs were expected to reciprocate, and they hastened to express the
main thing – praise… Patriarch Christopher of Alexandria said: ‘Marshal
Stalin,… under whose leadership the military operations have been conducted
on an unprecedented scale, has for this purpose an abundance of divine grace
and blessing.’”1222 The other Eastern Patriarchs also recognised the canonicity of
the election, “hastening,” as Shumilo says, “to assure themselves of the support
of the head of the biggest and wealthiest patriarchate, which now, moreover,
had acquired ‘the clemency [appropriate to] a great power’”.1223

1222 Alexeyev, "Marshal Stalin doveriaet Tserkvi" (Marshal Stalin trusts the
Church), Agitator, N 10, 1989, pp. 27-28.
650
The price they paid for the favour of this “great power” was an agreement to
break communion with ROCOR. As Karpov reported: “The Council was a clear
proof of the absence of religion in the USSR [!] and also had a certain political
significance. The Moscow Patriarchate in particular agreed with Patriarch
Christopher of Alexandria and with the representatives of the Constantinople
and Jerusalem patriarchates to break links with Metropolitan Anastasy, and on
the necessity of a joint struggle against the Vatican.”1224
The MP, having meekly submitted to the rule of the totalitarian dictator
Stalin, was now in effect a totalitarian organization itself. All major decisions in
the Church depended on the single will of the patriarch, and through him, of
Stalin. And this critical dependence on the atheist state continued throughout
the Soviet period (and after).
For, as Fr. Sergius Gordun writes: “For decades the position of the Church
was such that the voice of the clergy and laity could not be heard. In accordance
with the document accepted by the Local Council of 1945, in questions requiring
the agreement of the government of the USSR, the patriarch would confer with
the Council for the Affairs of the Orthodox Church attached to the Council of
People’s Commissars of the USSR. The Statute did not even sketchily outline the
range of questions in which the patriarch was bound to agree with the Council,
which gave the latter the ability to exert unlimited control over church life.”1225
The power over the Church that the 1945 council gave to the atheists was
revealed in the secret 1974 Furov report of the Council for Religious Affairs to
the Central Committee: “The Synod is under the control of the Council for
Religious Affairs. The question of the selection and placing of its permanent
members was and remains completely in the hands of the Council, and the
candidature of the non-permanent members is also agreed beforehand with
responsible members of the Council. All issues which are to be discussed at the
Synod are first discussed by Patriarch Pimen and the permanent members of the
Synod with the leaders of the Council and in its departments, and the final
‘Decisions of the Holy Synod’ are also agreed.”1226
“Soon after the council, on April 10, 1945, Stalin personally met [Patriarch
Alexis]. At the meeting, besides Stalin, there took part the people’s commissar
for foreign affairs V.M. Molotov, and from the MP Metropolitan Nicholas
(Yarushevich), who soon became president of the newly created Department of
External (i.e. international) Church Affairs (OVTsS), and Protopriest N.
Kolchitsky – chancellor of the MP, in charge of questions of international

1224 RTsKhIDNI.F.17.Op.132.D.111.L.27; Monk Benjamin, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 81.
1225 Gordun, op. cit., p. 94.
1226 Jane Ellis, The Russian Orthodox Church, London: Croom Helm, 1986, p. 215.
651
relations. This is how Patriarch Alexis later recalled this meeting: ‘… Full of
happiness at seeing face to face him whose name alone is pronounced with love
not only in every corner of our country, but also in all the freedom-loving and
peace-loving countries, we expressed our gratitude to Joseph Vissarionovich…
The discussion was a completely unforced conversation of a father with his
children.’ As V. Alexeev affirms, citing the correspondence between [Patriarch
Alexis] Simansky and G. Karpov, at the meeting ‘besides discussing intra-
ecclesiastical problems, the conversation first of all concerned the tasks of the
Russian Orthodox Church in the field of international relations… The Church,
according to Stalin’s conception, had to play a significant role in facilitating the
international contacts of the USSR, using its own channels’. Soon after this
meeting, on May 28, 1945, Patriarch Alexis unexpectedly set off on a ‘pilgrimage’
to the Middle East, where he met not only prominent religious personalities, but
also the heads of governments and other influential politicians…”1227
This foreign trip was to have important consequences for the

Russian Church Abroad (ROCOR), which now represented the last
public, organized, institutional voice of Russian Orthodoxy and
Russian anti-communism.
During the Second World War, ROCOR had had its headquarters in
Belgrade. However, the approach of the Red Army forced its
leadership to flee to Munich. ROCOR Archbishop Seraphim (Ivanov)
of Chicago recalled: “The Second World War came to an end. Germany
was in dust and ashes. The USSR was at the height of its glory and
might. After all, nobody judges the victors. The West was frightened
and servile. Europe, you could say, was at the feet of the Bolsheviks. If
they had only wanted it, they could have seized Europe within a few
weeks. However, something incomprehensible held them back.
Chekist bloodhounds were roving around everywhere. All the more
prominent anti-communists were being liquidated or seized (the
handover of Vlasov and Lienz), while the rest were terrified and in
fear and trembling. It was a terrible time.
“ROCOR was going through a terrible crisis. There had been no

news about the Synod for many months. At the same time Bolshevik
agents were spreading rumours that the President of the Synod,
Metropolitan Anastasy, had been killed during a bombing raid, or that
he had been taken to Moscow, where he had recognized the Soviet
patriarch.
“Many began to believe in the evolution of Soviet power. After all,

there were marshals, generals and colonels with almost tsarist
epaulettes, orders of Alexander Nevsky, Suvorov and Kutuzov, and

652
finally, by the will of Stalin… ‘his All-Holiness the Patriarch of All
Russia’. The unification of the whole Slavic world under the aegis of
Moscow. While for the emigres there was, supposedly, a complete
amnesty and calls to return to the Homeland, which was opening her
motherly embrace to her erring children. It was enough to make your
head spin.
“In Russian émigré circles there was great disturbance. With rare
exceptions, the anti-communists were in hiding, fearing to speak out.
The disturbance also penetrated Russian church circles. Metropolitan
Evlogy recognized the Moscow patriarch, and left his Greek
jurisdiction. He took a Soviet passport and publicly declared his
intention to return to Russia. After him, alas, there followed our
Parish metropolitan Seraphim, who previously had spoken out sharply
against the communists. Soviet agents gave him to understand that he
did not recognize the Moscow patriarch, he would put on trial as a
war criminal.
“Having surrendered to the communists, Metropolitan Seraphim

sent orders to the abroad churches that were subject to him, and also
to those that were not subject to him, informing them of his
submission to Moscow and demanding that they follow him in
commemorating the Soviet patriarch during Divine services. In North
America Metropolitan Theophilus also issue an order on the
commemoration of the patriarch. Something similar took place also in
South America and the Far East.
“At this time our Vladimirovo monastic brotherhood in the name of

St. Job of Pochaev succeeded in extracting ourselves from Germany
and settling in Geneva. Already as we were approaching the Swiss
border we were fortunate enough to receive the news that
Metropolitan Anastasy was alive and was with the Kursk
wonderworking icon in the German town of Füssen…
“On arriving in Geneva, we immediately wrote to all the Russian

ecclesiastical centres that Metropolitan Anastasy was alive and in
Germany. This news encouraged and delighted many. In particular,
after receiving our happy news, Archimandrite Anthony [in the future
archbishop of Los Angeles], the head of our spiritual mission in
Palestine, found the strength in himself to push away the patriarch of
Jerusalem and the Soviet patriarch who arried there, and who
promised the archimandrite the title of metropolitan if his mission
moved into the jurisdiction of Moscow.
“The same thing happened in Shanghai. There they had already

begun to commemorate the patriarch, because Bolshevik agents had
managed to convince the Orthodox clergy that Metropolitan Anastasy
653
was in Moscow and recognized the patriarch. But immediately our
news came from Geneva, they reversed course.
“Together with the rector of the Geneva church, the present Bishop
Leonty, we began to make urgent representations for an entry visa for
Metropolitan Anastasy into Switzerland. With God’s help, all obstacles
were overcome, and two years before the feast of the Exaltation of the
Cross in 1945, to our great joy Vladyka arrived in Geneva with the
Kursk wonderworking icon.
“Vladyka used his time in Switzerland, that is, about six months, to
consolidate the position of the Russian Church Abroad. From Geneva
it was easy and convenient for him to communicate with the whole of
the free world, which it was impossible to do from Germany at that
time.
“Vladyka sent telegrams and letters to all the bishops of our

Church Abroad, informing them that the Hierarchical Synod existed
and was in Germany and that it had been joined by hierarchs of the
Ukrainian Autonomous Church led by Archbishop Panteleimon and
the Belorussian Church led by Metropolitan Panteleimon. The
communications also said that the Synod did not recognize the Soviet
patriarch, and for that reason there could be no thought of submitting
to him or of commemorating him in Divine services. All this had a
sobering effect on many.” 1228
A telegram from Metropolitan Anastasy confirmed the great

wonderworker, St. John, Bishop of Shanghai, in his loyalty to ROCOR.
But within a few years he was organizing the evacuation of his flock –
thousands in number – from China to the small Philippine island of
Tubabao in order to escape Mao’s communists. From there (after
praying for a change in the law on the steps of the Capitol) he
managed to get most of them transferred to the United States. 1229
In 1945 it was not only the Red Army and the Soviet Communist
Party that triumphed. On their backs the Moscow Patriarchate –
already completely controlled by the KGB – was proving its value to
its masters, both inside and outside Russia. Ivan Andreev writes: “The
Underground or Catacomb Church in Soviet Russia underwent her

1228 Bishop Seraphim, in Count A.A. Sollogub (ed.), Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ Zagranitsej.
1918-1968 (Russian Orthodox Church Abroda), Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem. New
York: Rausen Language Division. 1968. vol. 1, pp. 200-205
1229 Ajay Kamalakara, “When the Philippines Welcomed Russian Refugees”, Russia Beyond the
Headlines, July 7, 2015.

http://rbth.com/arts/2015/07/07/when_the_philippines_welcomed_russian_refugees_47513.h
tml.
654
hardest trials after February 4 th , 1945, that is, after the enthronement
of the Soviet Patriarch Alexis. Those who did not recognize him were
sentenced to new terms of imprisonment and were sometimes shot.
Those who did recognize him and gave their signature to that effect
were often liberated before their terms expired and received
appointments… All secret priests detected in the Soviet zone of
Germany were shot.” 1230 “This fact,” comments M.V. Shkarovsky, “is
partly confirmed by documents in the archives of the security police.
In 1944-45 in the camps a whole series of cases on counter-
revolutionary organizations was fabricated. In these, many clergymen
were sentenced to an increase in their sentence or were shot.” 1231
The NKVD GULAG administration made the following decisions:

“1. To enrol qualified agents from among the prisoners who are
churchmen and sectarians, ordering them to uncover the facts
concerning the anti-Soviet activity of these prisoners. 2. In the process
of the agents’ work on the prisoners, to uncover their illegal links with
those in freedom and coordinate the work of these links with the
corresponding organs of the NKVD.” As a result of these instructions,
many catacomb organizations among the prisoners were liquidated.
For example, “in the Ukhtoizhemsky ITL an anti-Soviet group of
churchmen prisoners was liquidated. One of the leaders of this group,
the priest Ushakov, composed prayers and distributed them among
the prisoners. It turned out that he had illegal links with a [Catacomb]
Bishop [Anthony] Galynsky.” 1232
Vitaly Shumilo writes: “An internal result of the Moscow council of

1945 that was positive for the Soviet regime was the fact that, thanks
to the participation in it of the Eastern Patriarchs, the appearance of
‘legitimacy’ and ‘canonicity’ had been given to this Stalin-inspired
undertaking, which led into error not only a part of the Orthodox
clergy and hierarchy in the emigration, but also many of the True
Orthodox Catacomb pastors in the USSR, who naively did not suspect
that there might have been any anti-canonical crimes.” 1233
“And again, as in the 30s, repressions were renewed against the

clergy who did not accept the ‘Soviet church’. Thus in Moscow
province alone, where there had been more than ten Catacomb pastors
in 1941, none were left at liberty by the beginning of 1945.” 1234

1230 I.M. Andreev (Andreevsky), "The Catacomb Church in the Russian Land".
1231 Shkarovsky, Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov’ pri Staline i Khruscheve (The Russian
Orthodox Church under Stalin and Khruschev), Moscow, 2005, p. 205.
1232 Irina Osipova, Khotelos' by vsiekh poimenno nazvat' (I would like to call all of
them by name), Moscow: Fond "Mir i Chelovek", 1993, pp. 161, 193.
Century), http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=page&pid=678
655
“As was to be expected,” continues Shumilo, “thanks to the
massive arrests of priest and active parishioners of the Catacomb
Church and the opening of churches for the Moscow Patriarchate
(MP), the government succeeded in obtaining a reduction in the
number of ‘headless underground groups’, the passive members of
which began to turn to the legal clergy, while the ‘stubborn fanatics’
‘isolated themselves’ from the external world. Besides this, for the
more successful ferreting out of the illegal communities of the
Catacomb Church the MP, too, was drawn in, beginning a ‘struggle
with sectarianism’ with the cooperation of the MGB and the Council
for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church. Many instances are
known in which monks or priests of the MP, recruited by the MGB,
were sent into catacomb communities and informed against their
members, in connection with which the most active among them were
arrested. The creation of such a system of informing was not slow in
producing the results that the regime needed: already by the middle of
the 50s Soviet state security had succeeded in revealing and
‘dissolving’ more than 50% of the Catacomb communities and
monasteries in the USSR, thereby stopping both the growth in
numbers and the influence of the Catacomb Church on the
population.” 1235
Stalin treated the Catholics much as he did the Catacomb Church –

as enemies of the state that had to be exterminated. For Pope Pius XII
was a fervent anti-communist, and led the attack on the Yalta
agreements in the West. Undoubtedly the MP’s “international
obligations” included cooperation in the suppression of the Roman
Catholics, especially the Ukrainian uniates; and so the NKVD arrested
Metropolitan Iosif Slipy of the Ukrainian uniate church in Lvov,
together with all his bishops; very few survived their imprisonment in
the Gulag. Meanwhile, their flocks were forced to join the Moscow
Patriarchate. 1236 Those who refused went underground. Similar

Shumilo, op. cit.
1235
1236Raphael Lemkin wrote in 1953: “Only two weeks before the San Francisco
conference [of the United Nations], on 11 April 1945, a detachment of NKVD
troops surrounded the St. George Cathedral in Lviv and arrested Metropolitan
Slipyj, two bishops, two prelates and several priests. All the students in the city’s
theological seminary were driven from the school, while their professors were told
that the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had ceased to exist, that its Metropolitan
was arrested and his place was to be taken by a Soviet-appointed bishop. These
acts were repeated all over Western Ukraine and across the Curzon Line in Poland.
At least seven bishops were arrested or were never heard from again. There is no
Bishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church still free in the area. Five hundred clergy
who met to protest the action of the Soviets, were shot or arrested.
“Throughout the entire region, clergy and laity were killed by hundreds, while
the number sent to forced labour camps ran into the thousands. Whole villages
were depopulated. In the deportation, families were deliberately separated, fathers
to Siberia, mothers to the brickworks of Turkestan and the children to Communist
homes to be ‘educated’. For the crime of being Ukrainian, the Church itself was
656
persecution of the Uniates took place in Romania and Czechoslovakia.
However, towards the end of the Cold War, in 1989, the Uniates took
advantage of the more liberal atmosphere, emerged from the
underground and seized most of the MP churches in Western Ukraine.
In this connection his words on the Catacomb Church to the

American Polish Catholic priest, Fr. Stanislav Orlemanski, are
interesting: “We are not cannibals,” he told the priest. “We Bolsheviks
have a point in our program that provides for freedom of religious
convictions. From the first days of the existence of Soviet power, we
set ourselves the goal of implementing this point. But the rebellious
conduct of activists of the Orthodox Church deprived us of the
possibility of implementing that point, and the government had to
accept battle after the church laid a curse of Soviet power [in 1918].
Misunderstandings arose on that basis between representatives of
religion and the Soviet government. That was before the war with the
Germans. After the beginning of the war with the Germans, people
and circumstances changed. War eliminated the differences between
church and state, the faithful renounced their rebellious attitude, and
the Soviet government renounced its militant attitude with regard to
religion.” 1237
The penetration of the patriarchate by “red priests” – both former

renovationists and new recruits to the KGB - meant that the new, post-
war generation of clergy was quite different from the pre-war
generation. The former renovationists had, of course, already proved
their heretical cast of mind, and now returned to the neo-renovationist
Moscow Patriarchate (MP) like a dog to his vomit (II Peter 2.22),
forming a heretical core that controlled the patriarchate while being in
complete obedience to the atheists. Their obedience was illustrated a
few years later, when the MP sharply reversed its attitude towards
ecumenism, from strictly anti-ecumenist in 1948 to pro-ecumenist only
ten years later.
A still clearer sign of their total submission to the atheists was the
cult of Stalin that began to take root during the war. Thus Fr. Gleb
Yakunin writes: “From the beginning of the war and the church
‘renaissance’ that followed it, the feeling became stronger in the
leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate that a wonderful act of Divine
Providence in the historical process had happened in Russia. God’s

declared a society detrimental to the welfare of the Soviet state, its members were
marked down in the Soviet police files as potential ‘enemies of the people’. As a
matter of fact, with the exception of 150,000 members in Slovakia, the Ukrainian
Catholic Church has been officially liquidated, its hierarchy imprisoned, its clergy
dispersed and deported.” (“Soviet Genocide in the Ukraine”, in L.Y. Luciuk (ed),
Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Soviet Ukraine (Kingston:
The Kashtan Press, 2008)
1237 S.M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace, London: Penguin, 2010, pp. 374-375.
657
instrument in this process was, in their opinion, the ‘wise, God-
established’, ‘God-given Supreme Leader’.” 1238 And yet Stalin never
changed his basic hostility to the Church. In 1947 he wrote to Suslov:
“Do not forget about atheistic propaganda among the people”. And
the murder of True Orthodox Christians, uniates and others in the
camps continued… 1239

1238 Yakunin, op. cit, p. 190.
1239 Nikolai Savchenko, in Vertograd-Inform, September, 1998, Bibliography, pp. 1, 2.
658
70. VICTORS’ JUSTICE
Every year the Allied victories over Nazi Germany and Japan in
World War II are celebrated in both East and West (VE Day,
significantly, is on a different day in Russia). But how good and how
real were those victories? And to what extent was justice done?
Wars are to be judged by their aims, by the resources expended in human

lives and suffering in order to attain those aims, and by their results. Let us
apply these criteria to the Second World War.
The war aims of the western victor nations were largely good: they were to
crush three undoubtedly evil regimes – those of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s
Italy and Hirohito’s Japan – and liberate the populations enslaved by them. The
resources they expended were, of course, great – but proportionately not greater
than those expended in other wars, such as the First World War (for Britain and
France) or the American Civil War (for the United States). But the results were
very mixed. In Europe, Fascism was crushed and Western Europe saved. But
Poland was not liberated – although this had been the casus belli for Britain and
France. Moreover the whole of Eastern Europe except Greece was deprived of
their Orthodox rulers and came under totalitarian rule. In Asia, the liberation of
the Pacific was accomplished; but China soon (in 1949) came under the power of
Mao…
The war aim of the Soviets, if we count the war as starting from 1939, was
undoubtedly evil: to divide up Poland with Hitler and take over the Baltic States
and Finland. Their aim was largely achieved, with the addition of Bessarabia
and Northern Bukovina; only Finland slipped from their grasp (although she
was attacked again in June, 1941). 50,000 prisoners from the Polish elite were
killed by them at Katyn – a fact admitted only many decades later. Moreover,
they acted with an unprecedented savagery even against their own people. Thus
the NKVD killed many Gulag prisoners as they retreated in June, 1941; they
executed 157,000 of their own soldiers (the figures for the Wehrmacht were 15-
20,0001240) and arrested almost a million more.1241 From June, 1941, when the
Nazis invaded, the Soviet war aim changed to a defensive one and was
therefore morally less dubious. (However, the former GRU agent Suvorov has
argued that Stalin was about to launch a western offensive when Hitler
anticipated him a few weeks earlier. 1242 } The further Soviet war aims of
subduing Germany with the utmost savagery, pillaging its wealth to the
maximum and bringing as much of Europe as possible under communist rule,
were undoubtedly evil.

1240 Ferguson, The War of the World, London: Penguin, 2007, p. 539.
1241 Alexander Yakovlev, A Century of Russian Violence in Soviet Russia, Yale
University Press, 2003.
1242 See Suvorov’s interview, “Nikakoj Velikoj Otechestvennoj vojny ne bylo”
(There was no Great Fatherland war), http://faraj.com.tj/opinion/2616-viktor-

suvorov-nikakoy-velikoy-otechestvennoy-voyny-ne-bylo.html.
659
In 1945, the Red Army conquered Eastern Germany and Berlin, leaving
behind an unparalleled path of murder and rape. As Richard Evans writes:
“Women and girls were subjected to serial rape wherever they were
encountered. Rape was often accompanied by torture and mutilation and
frequently ended in the victim being shot or bludgeoned to death. The raging
violence was undiscriminating. Often, especially in Berlin, women were
deliberately raped in the presence of their menfolk, to underline the humiliation.
The men were usually killed if they tried to intervene. In East Prussia,
Pomerania and Silesia it is thought that around 1,400,000 women were raped, a
good number of them several times. Gang-rapes were the norm rather than the
exception. The two largest Berlin hospitals estimated that at least 100,000
women had been raped in the German capital. Many caught a sexually
transmitted disease, and not a few fell pregnant; the vast majority of the latter
obtained an abortion, or, if they did give birth, abandoned their baby in hospital.
The sexual violence went on for many weeks, even after the war formally came
to an end. German women learned to hide, especially after dark; or, if they were
young, to take a Soviet soldier, preferably an officer, as a lover and
protector…”1243
The Soviets justified themselves on the grounds of their right “to have a bit of
fun”, as Stalin put it, at the expense of the Germans, who had been so cruel to
them both on their own territory (about three million Russian POWs died in
Nazi labour camps) and in the Soviet Union (where most of the twenty seven
million who died were civilians killed by one side or the other) 1244. But if
vengeance has to be the law, then it can only be against the guilty, not against
the innocent, and not against innocent women and children. However, the
Soviet beast, being a hater of all men, spared nobody…
The main result of the Soviet victory, therefore, apart from the crushing of
Fascism, was unequivocally evil: it brought the whole vast area from Berlin and
Belgrade to Vladivostok and Peking under the power of communist
totalitarianism, a Eurasian empire that exceeded all its historical predecessors in
cruelty against man and blasphemy against the Most High God…

1243Evans, The Third Reich at War, London: Penguin Books, 2009, pp. 710-711.
1244The question of Soviet losses in World War Two is contentious. Pavel Gutiontov writes:
“Stalin, on the basis of considerations inadmissible to a normal person, personally defined the
USSR’s losses as 7 million people – a little less that those of Germany. Khruschev – as 20 million.
Under Gorbachev there came out a book prepared for the Ministry of Defence under the
editorship of General Krivosheev, The Seal of Secrecy Removed, in which the authors gave this
very figure of 27 million, justifying it in all sorts of way. Now it has become clear: this also was
not true.” For in 1917 the Duma Deputy Nikolai Zemstov, referring to declassified data of the
USSR’s Gosplan, declared: “The general losses of the population of the USSR from 1941 to 1945
were more than 52 million, 812 thousand people. Out of these, irreplaceable losses as a result of
war-related factors were more than 19 million soldier and about 23 million civilians. The general
natural mortality of soldiers and civilians in this period can be put at more than 10 million, 833
thousand people (including 5 million, 760 thousand children who died before they reached four
years of age). Irreplaceable losses of the population of the USSR as a result of war-related factors
were almost 42 million people.“ (“Pobeda prediavliaet Schet” (The Victory Presents its Bill),
Novaia Gazeta, March 21, 2017)
660
*
The post-war division of Germany largely reflected what had been agreed at
the Yalta Conference. As Bernard Simms writes: “Germany was divided into
four occupation zones: Soviet, American, British and French. She was to pay
extensive reparations, mainly in kind of such items as ‘equipment, machine
tools, ships, rolling stock… these removals to be carried out chiefly for the
purpose of destroying the war potential of Germany’. The British, Americans
and Russians promised to ‘take such steps, including the complete disarmament,
demilitarization and dismemberment of Germany as they deem[ed] requisite for
future peace and security’. A joint Allied Control Council of Germany would
administer the country after victory had been achieved.”1245
The terms dictated to Germany, unconditional surrender, were tough

(Churchill was unpleasantly taken aback by them when Roosevelt first
mentioned it in Morocco in 1943). In 1919 justice had not really been done:
Germany had not really paid for starting the First World War, for invading
neutral countries, for inventing the killing of civilians by aerial bombardment
(from zeppelins), for wiping out whole nations (the Herero of South-West
Africa), above all for destroying Orthodox Russia and releasing the revolution.
After all, although Germany had lost millions of men, her own territory had not
been touched… And, most importantly, she had not repented of her sins, but
insisted, on the contrary, that a great injustice had been done to her… But in
1945 it was a different matter: after still greater sins, including the murder of
“six million Jews (two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe), 3 million
Russians, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 750,000 Slavs, 500,000 Gypsies, 100,000 of
the mentally ill, 100,000 Freemasons, 15,000 homosexuals and 5000 Jehovah’s
Witnesses”1246, the German homeland was devastated, much of it occupied by
the most barbarian army in history – that of the Soviet Union. This time it
seemed that justice had been done.
But did the Germans repent? At the beginning (in fact, until the
1960s) – hardly. In May, 1945 there were eight million Nazi Party
members, and if all top Nazis had been put on trial and purged, as the
Allies wanted, the whole country would have ground to a halt.
Moreover, the Allies simply did not have the personnel to conduct a
thorough denazification. So most former Nazis were removed from
their posts for a short while and then returned to them. Moreover,
many scientists and engineers were whisked away to America where
they lived a good life working for the American military. This
manifest injustice caused resentment and mockery among the Germans
themselves, which did not encourage repentance.

Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, London: Allen Lane, 2013, p. 385.
1245
Montefiore, Titans of History, London: Quercus, 2012, p. 545. For a good account
1246
of the Jewish Holocaust, see Paul Johnson, History of the Jews, London: Phoenix,
1987, part 6.
661
As Max Hastings writes: “Among Germans in the summer of 1945, self-pity
was a much more prevalent sensation than contrition: one in three of their male
children born between 1915 and 1924 were dead, two in five of those born
between 1920 and 1925. In the vast refugee migrations that preceded and
followed VE-day, over fourteen million ethnic Germans left homes in the east,
or were driven from them. At least half a million – modern estimates vary
widely – perished during their subsequent odysseys; the historic problem of
Central Europe’s German minorities was solved in the most abrupt fashion, by
ethnic cleansing.”1247
Tony Judt writes that “throughout the years 1945-49 a consistent majority of
Germans questioned in a survey of the American zone took the view that
‘Nazism was a good idea badly implemented’. In November 1946, 37 per cent of
Germans questioned in a survey of the American zone took the view that the
extermination of the Jews and Poles and other non-Aryans was necessary for the
security of Germans’.
“In the same poll of November 1946, one German in three agreed with the
proposition that ‘Jews should not have the same rights as those belonging to the
Aryan race.’ This is not especially surprising, given that respondents had just
emerged from twelve years under an authoritarian government committed to
this view. What does surprise is a poll taken six years later in which a slightly
higher percentage of West Germans – 37 percent – affirmed that it was better for
Germany to have no Jews on its territory. But then in that same year (1952) 25
percent of West Germans admitted to having a ‘good opinion’ of Hitler…”1248
Nevertheless, however imperfect the process of denazification was, in the

longer term it – and/or the experience of living under a very different regime -
had a good effect. Later generations of Germans, even though they were born
only during or after the war, felt a certain collective guilt for the sins of their
fathers. And the extraordinary success story that is Germany since the war
surely witnesses to the fact that they had learned their lesson and that God had
withdrawn His chastening hand…
The Nuremburg war trials have been condemned as “victors’ justice”. If this
is taken to mean that the legal process was often unwieldy, that it proved
difficult for the victors to obtain completely convincing evidence in all cases,
that they invented new crimes unknown to jurisprudence, and that they applied
these definitions retrospectively to deeds committed before the definitions had
been made, then this is true, but relatively trivial. After all, nobody doubts that
the accused were guilty as charged, and that trials of this kind, however
impromptu their juridical basis, were far better than no justice at all or the
summary execution of 50,000 Germans as Stalin once demanded.

1247 Hastings, All Hell Let Loose, London: HarperPress, 2011, pp. 653-654.
1248 Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Pimlico, 2007, p. 58.
662
As A.T. Williams writes, although the justice obtained at Nuremburg may
have been “symbolic, shambolic, illusory… it was essential for all that.”1249
For the desire for truth and justice is one of the ineradicable elements of
human nature: it can be despised or overlooked only at great cost for future
generations. A.N. Wilson writes, “The Nuremberg trials of the twenty-two
surviving movers in the Third Reich made it clear, beyond any doubt, that this
was a regime founded upon the idea of aggressive war, sustained by banditry,
theft and the abolition of morality and justice, and glutted like some blood-
feeding ogre on mass murder. The catalogue of crimes, the abuses of science by
doctors, the systematic use of slave labour, and the detailed programme to
eliminate the Jews, could not, after the trials, be in any doubt…
“The first stage of the trials, then, the hearings about the twenty-two chief
Nazis, was a purgative experience, for Germany, for the Allies, and for the
world. The trial tried to set the precedent, alas too optimistic, that any future
tyrant would know that one day he would stand answerable for his crimes
before the bar of justice and the law.
“Clearly, when it came to dealing with all the tens of thousands of underlings
who had done the dirty work in the Third Reich, and, even more complicated,
with the numberless thousands who had somehow or other colluded in the
crimes while not actually perpetrating murder or theft, what was to be done?
For several years after the war, many of the nastier individuals involved in
labour and death camp atrocities and so on had escaped to South America. Most
of them escaped justice altogether…”1250
The Germans, not unnaturally, were in general punished more severely than
collaborators of other nationalities in the occupied territories1251, where the
process of justice varied greatly from country to country and involved many
compromises. As Judt points out, “such compromises were probably inevitable.
The very scale of destruction and moral collapse in 1945 meant that whatever
was left in place was likely to be needed as a building block for the future. The
provisional government of the liberation months were almost helpless. The
unconditional (and grateful) cooperation of the economic, financial and
industrial elites seemed vital if food, clothing and food were to be supplied to a
helpless and starving population. Economic purges could be counter-productive,
even crippling. But a price for this was paid in political cynicism and a sharp
falling away from the illusions and hopes of the liberation…”1252

1249 Williams, A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II, London: Jonathan
Cape, 2016.
1250 Wilson, op. cit., pp. 482, 483.
1251 Willing collaborators in the Holocaust in occupied countries included Poles, Ukrainians,
Latvians, Croats, Vichy Frenchmen and others. See Judt, “The ‘Problem of Evil’ in Postwar
Europe”, in When the Facts Change, London: Vintage, 2015, p. 131.
1252 Judt, op. cit., p. 51.
663
71. VICTORS’ INJUSTICE
“In 1945,” writes Protodeacon Christopher Birchall, “there were some 4

million Russians in the former territory of the Third Reich. About 6 million
Russian prisoners of war fell into German hands, most of them soon after the
invasion of Russia in 1941. The Russian prisoners of war were kept in appalling
conditions; some were simply herded into open fields in the winter and left to
die of exposure. This treatment, so different from that accorded to British
prisoners by the Germans, was explained largely by the fact that Joseph Stalin
had renounced them, stating that anyone who allowed himself to be taken
captive, rather than die fighting, was a traitor. As a result, most Russian
prisoners died and only about 1 million survived by May 1945. Understandably
most of these ‘traitors’ were terrified at the prospect of returning to the Soviet
Union. In addition, there were the Ostarbeiter (“workers from the east”) –
Russians who were brought to Germany to work in the war industries. Some
had volunteered but most were conscripts. They were treated poorly and
humiliated by the Nazis, who regarded them as Untermenschen (“subhumans”),
close to the bottom of the racial hierarchy they devised. Whenever outside the
camps, these workers were required to wear a badge with the OST (EAST)
written on it to display their origin.
“When the war ended, there were some 3 million Ostarbeiter in Germany.
These formed the majority of the vast numbers of Russians liberated by the
Allies in 1945. In addition, there were refugees who had decided to leave Soviet
territory with the retreating German armies. Some were terrified of Soviet
reprisals meted out to anyone ‘contaminated’ by contact with the invaders;
others, especially those in areas where the Germans had behaved with a degree
of restraint, simply seized the opportunity to escape from communist rule. The
populations of entire districts, particularly Cossacks from the Caucasus, piled
their possessions into wagons and evacuated to the west. Finally, there were
those who agreed to fight with the Germans in the hope of overthrowing
communism in Russia, approximately 800,000 in all. The largest group was the
Russian Army of Liberation (ROA – Russkaya Osvoboditel’naya Armiya),
nominally led by General Andrey Vlasov, who was taken from a prisoner of war
camp by the Germans and made head of this organisation. However, the ROA
existed more on paper than in the field because Vlasov had very little control
over the units, most of which had German officers. The Germans distrusted
these brigades of Slavic Untermenschen and sent many to the western front after
the Normandy invasions. In addition to the ROA, Cossack units were formed
under the German General Helmuth von Pannwitz.
“At the infamous Yalta Conference of February 1945, Winston Churchill and
Franklin D. Roosevelt reached an agreement with Stalin to hand over any
‘Soviet Nationals’ who fell into British or American hands. A Soviet National
was defined as anyone who had lived in Soviet territory before September 1,
1939. Thus excluded were the old émigrés as well as inhabitants of western
parts of Russia and Ukraine, which had been annexed to Poland during the
664
Civil War. On arrival in the Soviet Union, the displaced persons were either shot
or sent directly to labour camps, most in the Far North of Siberia. Alexander
Solzhenitsyn described graphically the fate of many such people in his book The
Gulag Archipelago.
“One might wonder why the Soviet authorities were so determined to secure
the return of these people. The explanation largely lies in the personal paranoia
of Stalin, which infected the rest of the Soviet power apparatus. Another
significant factor was the Soviets’ genuine fear of the existence of a strong, anti-
Soviet emigration or even scattered groups of exiles. As one Soviet leaders
observed, ‘That’s the way we got our start!’ Only thirty years previously, the
émigré Russians were not ‘White’ Russian exiles but rather various groups of
Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and anarchists who were plotting the overthrow of
Imperial Russia…”1253
Shortly after D-day, large numbers of Russian soldiers in German uniform

began to be captured by the Allies. Of these, some had put on German uniform
involuntarily, forced to it by the threat of death or the terrible conditions in the
German POW camps. Others, the “Vlasovites”, had volunteered to fight in the
German army, not out of love of Nazism, but simply in order to help in the
destruction of the hated Soviet regime. Among the Vlasovites, some had been
Soviet citizens, but others were former White soldiers who had fled from Russia
after the Civil War and had never been Soviet.1254 Most of them did not want to
be repatriated, but pleaded to stay in the West.
This created a major problem for the British government. Lord Selborne,
Minister for Economic Warfare, who was also in charge of secret espionage and
sabotage (SOE), argued passionately that they should be allowed to stay because
they had not voluntarily donned German uniforms, they had suffered terribly
already, and would probably be shot if returned to Russia. Churchill was for a
time inclined to listen to Selborne, but the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden,
who had already made a verbal agreement with Molotov, argued that they had
to return the prisoners if Stalin insisted on it, that to anger the Soviets would be
dangerous for the war effort, that the British had “no legal or moral right” to
interfere in the way they were treated in Russia, and that if they did not accede
to Soviet demands British and American prisoners liberated from German
camps by Soviet forces might not be repatriated to the West.
Unfortunately, by September, Eden had won the argument, and thousands of

Russians began to be deported from Britain to Murmansk and Odessa, in
accordance with the Yalta Conference agreement.

1253 Birchall, Embassy, Emigrants, and Englishmen: The Three Hundred Year
History of a Russian Orthodox Church in London, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity

Publications, 2014, pp. 321-323.
1254 The following account is taken mainly from Nicholas Bethell’s The Last Secret
(London: Futura, 1976) and Sebastyen, op. cit., ch. 13.
665
However, well into 1945, writes S.M. Plokhy, the State Department
“continued to resist Soviet requests for the extradition of those Soviet citizens
who had been captured in German uniform and claimed the protection of the
Geneva Convention until the end of hostilities in Europe. But then the
department’s position suddenly changed. As Joseph Grew explained in a a letter
to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, he did not object to extradition ‘now
that Germany has unconditionally surrendered, that all American prisoners of
war held by the German armed forces have been liberated and that therefore
there no longer exists any danger that the German authorities will take reprisals
against American prisoners of war.’
“On June 29, after learning of the decision to extradite them to the USSR, 154
Soviet prisoners of war in Fort Dix, New Jersey, shut themselves in their
barracks and attempted to commit mass suicide. The American guards fired
tear-gas grenades into the building, forcing the prisoners to break out of their
quarters. Seven POWs were gunned down by the guards as they rushed at them.
In the barracks they found three men hanging from the rafters next to fifteen
nooses prepared for the next group. News of the revolt of Soviet prisoners who
preferred death to extradition leaked out to the press, aborting the next attempt
to ship POWs to the USSR. In August, however, James Byrnes, who succeeded
Stettinius as secretary of state, authorized extradition ‘in conformity with
commitments taken at Yalta’…”1255
A particularly tragic case of mass repatriation took place in May-June, 1945,

in Lienz in Austria, when “the English occupying authorities handed over to
Stalin to certain death some tens of thousands of Cossacks who had fought in
the last months of the war on the side of Germany. Eye-witnesses of this drama
recall that the hand-over began right during the time of the final liturgy, which
Smersh did not allow to finish. Many Cossacks tried to hurl themselves into the
abyss so as not to be delivered to the communists, and the first shots were heard
from the Soviet occupational zone already a few minutes after the hand-
over.”1256
Many of the British soldiers involved in the handover had come to like the
Cossacks and were deeply distressed that they had to lie to them about the
handover and that they had to use force against them. Some confessed that they
had been wrong; but most justified themselves on the grounds that they were
following orders. It is interesting to note, however, that in the Nuremburg trials
this excuse, in the mouth of Nazi defendants, was not considered sufficient…

Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace, London: Penguin, 2010, p. 304.
1255
Archbishop Savva (Raevsky), “Lienz”, Orthodox Life, vol. 56, N 4, 2005, pp. 2-8.
1256
The head of ROCOR, Metropolitan Anastasy, blessed the Cossacks who had
formally ended their lives through suicide because they did not want to fall into
the hands of the Reds, to be given a church burial. ‘Their actions,’ he wrote, ‘are
closer to the exploit of St. Pelagia of Antioch, who hurled herself from a tall tower
so as escape desecration [rape].’…”
666
Another aspect of the tragedy is that among the Cossacks handed over were
men who had never been Soviet citizens, including the famous White Generals
Krasnov and Shkuro (who were hanged in Moscow in 1947). So the British
“over-fulfilled” their “duty” according to the Yalta agreement, which specified
only “Soviet nationals”…1257
The British were also involved in the handover of thousands of Croats and
Slovenes to Tito’s Partisans. At Kocevje and Maribor in Slovenia between 50 and
65,000 were shot by the Partisans without any kind of trial.1258
Plokhy summarises the difference between the western and Soviet attitudes
to prisoners of war: “There was no higher priority for soldiers of the Western
democracies at the end of the conflict than to save their prisoners of war. There
was no greater crime in the Soviet code than that of falling into enemy
hands…”1259
Alexander Soldatov writes: “The memory of the ‘Vlasovites’ is dear to many

children of the Russian Church Abroad (ROCOR)… In the memorial cemetery
of ROCOR in Novo Diveyevo near New York there stands an obelisk which
perpetuates the memory of all the officers and soldiers of the Russian Army of
Liberation, who perished ‘in the name of the idea of a Russia free from
communism and fascism’...”1260 The slogan, “Russia free from communism and
fascism” is as relevant now as it was in 1945…
And so “from 1945 to 1947, 2,272,000 people were handed over by the Allies
to the USSR. Of these more than 600,000 had served in the ‘eastern forces’ of the
German army. About 200,000 managed to remain in the West.”1261
According to Sergius Shumilo, however, “more than 6 million ‘Soviet’

prisoners of war, ‘Osty’ workers, refugees and émigrés were forcibly repatriated
to the U.S.S.R. up to 1948. The majority of them perished within the walls of
Stalin’s NKVD.”1262
Protopriest Michael Ardov writes: “I remember quite well the years right
after the war, 1945, 1946, and how Moscow was literally flooded with cripples,
soldiers who were missing arms and legs, returning from the war, and then,
suddenly, they all disappeared. Only later did I learn that they were all picked

1257 Protopresbyter Michael Polsky, Novie Mucheniki Rossijskie (The New Martyrs of Russia),
Jordanville, volume 3, chapter 26, in http://cliuchinskaya.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/iii-xxvi-

1944-1946.html.
1258 Sebastyen, op. cit., p. 150. Tony Judt gives a figure of 40,000 Croats killed and
10,000 Slovenes handed over (op. cit., pp. 23, 30, notes).
1259 Plokhy, op. cit., pp. 305-06.
1260 Soldatov, “Radosti Paskhi i Skorb’ Pobedy” (The Joys of Pascha and the Sorrow
of Victory), Moskovskie Novosti (Moscow News) and Vertograd, N 520, May 14, 2005.
1261 Soldatov, op. cit., p. 11, footnote 6.
Century), http://catacomb.org.ua/modules.php?name=Pages&go=page&pid=678.
667
up and packed off to die on the island of Valaam, in order not to spoil the view
in the capital. There was no monastery there then. You can just imagine for
yourselves the conditions that they had to endure there while living out their
last days. They were so poor, and were reduced to begging in order to survive.
This is how they were treated, just so that the capital should not be spoiled by
their presence! This I remember quite well. Besides this, as we all know that,
because of Stalin and his military leaders, an enormous number of Soviet
citizens were taken out of the country as prisoners. The government
immediately disowned them; they were immediately branded traitors. And the
consequences of this were that when they, for some reason or another, came
back to our country, most of them were whisked off to Stalin’s labour camps.
This is how they treated the veterans then…
“Under the pretext of restoring ‘socialist legality’ whole families, and even
settlements, were sent to Siberia, mainly from Western Ukraine, Belorussia and
the Baltic region. By the end of the 40s, Soviet Marshal Zhukov had ordered the
forcible removal from Western Ukraine to Siberia, Kazakhstan and other regions
of more than 600,000 people.”1263
Sister Tatiana (Spektor) writes: “With the help of the English and
American military authorities, by January 1, 1953 5 million, 457
thousand and 856 Soviet and ‘equated’ with them citizens had been
repatriated. Of these 2 million 272 thousand were prisoners of war and
their families. The cruellest of these repatriations were the handovers
of the Cossack camp in Lienz (24 thousand military and civilians), the
Caucasians in Oberdrauburg (4 thousand 800) and the Cossack cavalry
corpus in Feldkirchen (about 35 thousand). All these people had been
given the status of prisoners of war and were assured that the English
would not hand them over to certain death. But their hopes were not
realized.
“What was their fate in the homeland? 20% of the prisoners of war
returned to the USSR received the death penalty or 25 years in the
camps; 15-20% - 5-10 years in the camps; 10% were exiled to distant
regions of Siberia for a minimum of 6 years; 15% were sent to forced
labour in regions destroyed by war, of whom only 15-20% returned to
the places of their birth after their labour. Of the remaining 15-20%,
some were killed or died on the road, while others fled…” 1264
Norman Davies writes: “The Strategic Bombing Offensive, which killed

perhaps half a million civilians, has long been the subject for charges of
‘excessive force’, and if the German raid on Coventry, which killed 380 persons,
is judged a crime, it is hard to see why the British raids on Cologne, Hamburg,

1264 Spektor, Facebook communication, June 2, 2016.
668
Kassel, Berlin and Dresden should not be classed in the same way. In morality,
two wrongs do not make a right, and pleas of justified response do not wash. If
a criminal kills another man’s brother, the injured party is not entitled, even in
the middle of a just war, to go off and kill all the criminal’s neighbours and
relatives. And there are further matters to be examined. One of them would be
the forcible and large-scale repatriation of Soviet citizens in 1945 to near-certain
death at the hands of Stalin’s security organs. Another would the joint decision
that was reached at Potsdam to expel by force several million German civilians
from lands newly allotted to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. To
contemporary sensitivities, the Potsdam decision put into motion a campaign
that looks suspiciously like ‘ethnic cleansing’.”1265
The Allies condemned the Germans for bombing civilians at Guernica in the
Spanish Civil War and Coventry in 1940, and the Japanese for bombing the
Chinese in 1937. However, Churchill himself had ordered such bombing in the
Iraqi rebellion in 1920. 1266 And already from May, 1940 the British began
drawing up plans to send bombers to targets that could not be called military.
Thus in October, Churchill declared: “The civilian population around the target
areas must be made to feel the weight of war.” Throughout 1941 he “repeatedly
emphasized the need for Bomber Command to target the morale of ordinary
Germans.” 1267 In March, 1942 it was decided to adopt the plan of the
government’s scientific advisor Lindemann to bomb working-class German
homes with the final aim of destroying 50 percent of all houses in the larger
cities.1268 With the Americans in full agreement, this paved the way for the
horrific Allied bombings of Hamburg (45,000 killed, 250,000 homes destroyed in
July, 1943), Lubeck, Cologne, Berlin and, finally, Dresden (35,000 killed, 95,000
homes destroyed in February, 1945). In all, writes Hastings, “between 1940 and
1942, only 11,228 Germans were killed by Allied bombing. From January 1943
[the month in which Roosevelt declared the “unconditional surrender” policy in
Casablanca] to May 1945, a further 350,000 perished, along with unnumbered
tens of thousands of foreign PoWs and slave labourers. This compares with
60,595 British people killed by all forms of German air bombardment including
V-weapons between 1939 and 1945.”1269
Of course, military targets were also hit, together with munitions factories; by
the spring of 1943 this forced 70 per-cent of the German fighter force to be
diverted from the east to the west, thereby helping the Soviet advance
considerably. And by D-Day most of those had been shot down, thereby helping
the Anglo-American advance. Speer called the air war “the greatest lost battle
on the German side”. 1270 However, the killing of soldiers and military
equipment was not the main aim of the bombing campaign: it was civilian

1265 Davies, Europe at War 1939-1945, London: Pan, 2006, pp. 67-68.
1266 Ferguson, The War of the World, London: Penguin, 2007, p. 558.
1268 Count Léon de Poncins, State Secrets, Chulmleigh: Britons Publishing Company,
1975, p. 57.
1269 Hastings, op. cit., p. 480.
669
casualties that were seen, not as inevitable, albeit regrettable “collateral
damage”, but as essential to the main purpose of the bombing, which was, in
Churchill’s words, “the progressive destruction and undermining of the morale
of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is
fatally weakened”.1271 But, as Bishop George Bell of Chichester said in 1943: “To
bomb cities as cities, deliberately to attack civilians, quite irrespective of
whether they are actively contributing to the war effort, is a wrong deed,
whether done by the Nazis or by ourselves.”1272 Notwithstanding, on February
16, 1945, just after the Dresden bombing, the Allies announced that the new plan
was to “bomb large population centres and then to attempt to prevent relief
supplies from reaching and refugees from leaving them – all part of a
programme to bring about the collapse of the German economy”…1273
After Dresden, even Churchill began to have doubts: “The moment has come
when the question of the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of
increasing the terror… should be revised… The destruction of Dresden remains
a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.” However, Sir Arthur
Harris, the head of Bomber Command, “remained impertinent and
uncomprehending. ‘In Bomber Command we have always worked on the
assumption that bombing anything in Germany is better than bombing
nothing.’…”1274
“The crux of the case at Nuremburg,” writes Niall Ferguson, “as agreed by
the victorious powers in London in the summer of 1945, was that the leaders of
Germany and Japan had premeditated and unleashed ‘aggressive war’ and ‘set
in motion evils which [had left] no home in the world untouched’. They were
accused, firstly, of the ‘planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of
aggression, or war in violation of international treaties, agreements and
assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the
accomplishment of any of the foregoing’. Yet whose side had the Soviet Union
been on in 1939?”1275
The American policy of “unconditional surrender” probably contributed

more to the prolongation of the war in the west - as in the east - than any other
single factor. This policy in relation to Germany became known as “the
Morgenthau plan” after Roosevelt’s Jewish Secretary to Treasury, Henry
Morgenthau, who, with his deputy, Harry Dexter White, formulated it in detail.
Count Leo de Poncins writes that, according to Dr. Anthony Kubek, the editor
of the Morgenthau Diaries, “the objective of the Morgenthau Plan was to de-
industrialize Germany and diminish its people to a pastoral existence once the

1272 Ferguson, op. cit., p. 570. Bishop Bell was a friend both of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
and Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich.
1273 De Poncins, op. cit., p. 41.
1274 Wilson, After the Victorians, London: Hutchinson, 2003, p. 418.
670
war was won. If this could be accomplished, the militaristic Germans would
never rise again to threaten the peace of the world. This was the justification of
all the planning, but another motive lurked behind the obvious one. The hidden
motive was unmasked in a syndicated column in the New York Herald Tribune
in September 1946, more than a year after the collapse of the Germans. The real
goal of the proposed condemnation of ‘all of Germany to a permanent diet of
potatoes’ was the Communization of the defeated nation. ‘The best way for the
German people to be driven into the arms of the Soviet Union,’ it was pointed
out, ‘was for the United States to stand forth as the champion of indiscriminate
and harsh misery in Germany’ (issue of 5th September 1946). And so it then
seemed, for in a recent speech Foreign Minister Molotov had declared the hope
of the Soviet Union to ‘transform’ Germany into a ‘democratic and peace-loving
State which, besides its agriculture, will have its own industry and foreign trade’
(10th July 1946). Did Russia really plan on becoming the saviour of the prostrate
Germans from the vengeful fate which the United States had concocted for them?
If this was indeed a hidden motive in the Morgenthau Plan, what can be said of
the principal planner? Was this the motive of Harry Dexter White? Was White
acting as a Communist but without specific instructions? Was he acting as a
Soviet agent when he drafted the plan? There is no confession in the
Morgenthau Diaries in which White admits that he was either ideologically a
Communist or actively a Soviet agent. But it is possible, given an understanding
of Soviet aims in Europe, to reconstruct from the Diaries how White and certain
of his associates in the Treasury worked assiduously to further those aims. From
the Diaries, therefore, it is possible to add significant evidence to the testimonies
of J. Edgar Hoover [head of the CIA] and Attorney General Herbert Brownell
that Harry Dexter White was ideologically a Communist and actively a Soviet
agent from the day he entered the service of the United States Government.”1276
The State Department had a very different plan, which was that there was to
be no “large-scale and permanent impairment of all German industry”; instead
it called for “eventual integration of Germany into the world economy”.1277 On
hearing of it, Morgenthau flew to England in August, 1944 and managed to get
General Eisenhower on his side. Finally, after strong opposition from State and
War, Roosevelt came down on the side of Morgenthau, and at the Quebec
Conference in September, an initially angry Churchill (he did not want to be
“chained to a dead Germany”) was won over with the promise of a $6.5 billion
loan…
Foreign Secretary Hull wrote in his Memoirs: “The whole development at

Quebec, I believe, angered me as much as anything else that had happened
during my career as Secretary of State. If the Morgenthau Plan leaked out, as it
inevitably would – and shortly did – it might well mean a bitter German
resistance that could cause the loss of thousands of American lives.

1276 Kubek, in de Poncins, op. cit., p. 100.
671
“… I still feel that the course proposed by the Treasury would in the long run
certainly defeat what we hope to attain by a complete military victory, that is,
the peace of the world, and the assurance of social, economic and political
stability in the world… I cannot believe that they (the Treasury proposals) will
make for a lasting peace. In spirit and in emphasis they are punitive, not, in my
judgement, corrective or constructive. They will tend through bitterness and
suffering to breed another war, not to make another war undesired by the
Germans or impossible in fact… the question is not whether we want Germans
to suffer for their sins. Many of us would like to see them suffer the tortures
they have inflicted on others. The only question is whether over the years a
group of seventy million educated, efficient and imaginative people can be kept
within bounds on such a low level of subsistence as the Treasury proposals
contemplate. I do not believe that is humanly possible… Enforced poverty…
destroys the spirit not only of the victim but debases the victor… it would be a
crime against civilization itself.”1278
Fortunately, the Morgenthau Plan was never fully realised; and after the war
the generous Marshall Plan helped to place Western Europe back on its feet and
prevent it from going Communist…1279 However, the Plan was leaked, and “as a
result German resistance was strengthened. The Nazi radio was shouting day
and night that the Germans would become starving peasants if they
surrendered. General Marshall complained to Morgenthau that the leakage to
the press was disastrous to the war effort, for nothing could have been greater
in its psychological impact upon Germany than the news of Morgenthau’s coup
at Quebec in September 1944. Until then there was a fair chance, according to
intelligence reports, that the Germans might discontinue resistance to American
and British forces while holding the Russians at bay in the east in order to avoid
the frightful fate of a Soviet occupation. This could have shortened the war by
months and could have averted the spawning of a malignant Communism in
East Germany which has plagued Europe for the past twenty years. According
to Lt.-Col. Boettiger, the President’s son-in-law, the Morgenthau Plan was worth
‘thirty divisions to the Germans’.”1280
The decisions of the Yalta Conference, with Morgenthau in attendance,

turned out to be quite compatible with his Plan. However, there was still strong
resistance from the Departments of State and War. And so, on March 21, the
Jews wheeled in their biggest gun – the New York financier and close friend of
the President, Bernard Baruch.
In a meeting with the War Cabinet, he “was asked where he stood on the
German problem. According to Morgenthau’s report to his staff, Baruch replied
that his recent trip to Europe had made him much stronger for the
decentralization of Germany than when he left. The Treasury Plan was much
too soft, Baruch said, and its author practically ‘a sissy’. He would ‘cut his

1278 Hull, in De Poncins, op. cit., pp. 113, 114.
1279 See Jan Fleischhauer, “The Thirty Years’ War: How Peace Kept WW1 Alive”,
Spiegel Online International, February 7, 2014.
672
(Clayton’s) heart out if he doesn’t behave himself’, the financial wizard declared,
adding ominously: ‘he won’t be able to stay around Washington after I get
through with him.’ Clayton had either to get ‘right’ on this German ‘thing’ or
‘leave town’. Baruch was adamant. ‘All I have got to live for now,’ he said, ‘is to
see that Germany is de-industrialized and that it’s done the right way, and I
won’t let anybody get in my way’. He became so emotional that tears came to
his eyes. ‘I have never heard a man talk so strongly as he did,’ exulted
Morgenthau, adding that he ‘got the feeling from Baruch that he realizes the
importance of being friendly with Russia…’”1281
Indeed, the Jews around Roosevelt were now working hand-in-glove with
the Soviets (and their numerous spies in the administration), determined to
dismember, deindustrialize and communize Germany, extract huge reparations
and make her workforce virtual slaves of the victors. This was a Carthaginian
peace to make the “Carthaginian peace” of 1918 look like a picnic… However, in
April Roosevelt died, and the new president, though a 33-degree Mason, did not
like the Jewish plan. When Morgenthau asked to be joined to the delegation to
Potsdam, and threatened to resign if he was not, Truman accepted his
resignation. Jewish vengeance stalled…
However, there were still 140 of “Morgenthau’s boys” from the Treasury in
the military government in Germany, and during the surrender negotiations in
May, the Allied Commander Eisenhower showed where his true sympathies
lay …
Admiral Doenitz, Hitler’s successor, was desperate that as many Germans

soldiers and civilians as possible should escape to the British and American
zones of occupation – he knew about the Morgenthau Plan, but still considered
the Anglo-Saxons a safer bet than the rampaging Bolsheviks in the east.
However, the Morgenthau-influenced order of Joint Chiefs of Staff JCS 1067
ordered Eisenhower to stop at the Elbe, leaving the whole area to the east,
including Berlin and Prague, to the Red Army. Doenitz’s conclusion, as he
proclaimed on the radio on May 1, was that “as from this moment, the British
and the Americans are no longer fighting for their own countries, but for the
extension of Bolshevism in Europe”.
It is hard to quarrel with this conclusion – though this was certainly not the
conscious intention of any British or American commander on the ground.
In his Memoirs Doenitz explained that “the latest operations which

[Eisenhower] had ordered showed that he was not in the least aware of the turn
taken by world politics at that moment. After his troops had crossed the Rhine
at Remagen, America had achieved her strategic object of conquering Germany.
From this moment the paramount objective should have become political,
namely, the occupation of the largest possible area of Germany before the
arrival of the Russians. Thus it would have been judicious for the American

673
commander to have pushed rapidly east in order to be the first to seize Berlin.
But Eisenhower did not do this. He kept to the military plan which had been
drawn up for the destruction of Germany and its occupation in collaboration
with the Red Army, and so he stopped at the Elbe. Thus the Russians were
enabled to take Berlin and conquer whatever they could of eastern Germany.
Perhaps this policy had been dictated by Washington, but he did not
understand how radically the world situation was to be transformed from this
moment…”1282
On May 5 Doenitz succeeded in negotiating a partial capitulation with the

British General Montgomery. However, when his envoy flew on to see
Eisenhower, the latter demanded immediate, unconditional surrender on all
fronts, including the Russian. But the Germans were terrified to fall into Russian
captivity, and Doenitz knew that his men would simply refuse to do it.
Fortunately, however, General Jodl found a more understanding attitude in
General Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, who extracted a delay of 48
hours. And so “between 5th of May, the date of the armistice concluded with the
British, and 9th May, the date of the general capitulation, Admiral Doenitz, by
means of all the resources at his disposal, succeeded in rescuing three million
German soldiers and civilians, who thus escaped Russian slavery owing to the
understanding of Field-Marshal Montgomery.”1283
But many were left behind to be captured. And so “obviously,” wrote

Eisenhower in his Memoirs, “the Germans sought to gain time in order to bring
back into and behind our lines the maximum number of men who were still
fighting in the East. I began to have had enough. I ordered Bedell Smith to tell
Jodl that if he did not immediately stop dragging out the negotiations, we
would go so far as to use force in order to prevent the refugees from
crossing.”1284 “This,” writes De Poncins, “in fact is just what the Americans did.
Thus by his obstinate intransigeance, Eisenhower handed over hundreds of
thousands, and perhaps even millions, of innocent Germans to the appalling
Bolshevik tyranny – which, for the majority, meant either death or the
concentration camps and, for the women, the prospect of certain violation.”1285
Civilians were the biggest losers in the war. Hastings writes: “Combatants
fared better than civilians: around three-quarters of all those who perished were
unarmed victims rather than active participants in the struggle.”1286 And so, as
St. Cyprian of Carthage put it in the third century: “The whole world is wet
with mutual blood. And murder, which in the case of an individual is admitted
to be a crime, is called a virtue when it is committed wholesale. Impunity is
claimed for the wicked deeds, not on the plea that they are guiltless, but because
the cruelty is perpetrated on a grand scale.”1287

1287 St. Cyprian, Epistle 1.6.
674
“What all this reminds us,” writes Ferguson, “is that in order to defeat an
enemy they routinely denounced as barbarian the Western powers had made
common cause with an ally that was morally little better [in fact worse] – but
ultimately more effective at waging total war. ‘The choice before human beings,’
George Orwell observed in 1941, ‘is not… between good and evil but between
two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can
overthrow them by war, which is also evil… Whichever you choose, you will
not come out with clean hands.’ Orwell’s Animal Farm is nowadays revered as a
critique of the Russian Revolution’s descent into Stalinism; people forget that it
was written during the Second World War and turned down by no fewer than
four publishers (including T.S. Eliot, on behalf of Faber & Faber) for its anti-
Soviet sentiments. Nothing better symbolized the blind eye that the Western
powers now turned to Stalin’s crimes than the American Vice-President Henry
Wallace’s visit to the Kolyma Gulag in May 1944. ‘No other two countries are
more alike than the Soviet Union and the United States,’ he told his hosts. ‘The
vast expanses of your country, her virgin forests, wide rivers and large lakes, all
kinds of climate – from tropical to polar – her inexhaustible wealth, [all] remind
me of my homeland… Both the Russians and the Americans, in their different
ways, are groping for a way of life that will enable the common man
everywhere in the world to get the most good out of modern technology. There
is nothing irreconcilable in our aims and purposes.’ All were now
totalitarians…”1288
This most evil of all wars defiled everybody involved in it at anything other
than the lowest level. Apart from the well-documented atrocities of the Axis
powers, the Soviets enormously extended their utterly evil empire at the
expense especially of God’s people, the peoples of the Orthodox Church –
Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Serbian, Romanian and Bulgarian. Even the
western democracies, which came into the war to fight the undoubted evil of
Nazism, were defiled by their alliance with the still greater evil of Communism
and imitated the God-haters in their evil. They forgot the apostolic word: “Be ye
not unequally yoked with unbelievers” (II Corinthians 6.14). And they forgot
the last recorded words of Tsar Nicholas II, that evil is not overcome by evil, but
only by good…

675
72. JAPAN AND THE BOMB
The other Axis power that was mightily punished in 1945 was, of course,
Japan, whose appalling treatment especially of the Chinese, who suffered fifteen
million dead1289, but also of Allied prisoners of war and Korean women, merited
severe punishment. And they got it… But their repentance was more superficial
than that of the Germans, perhaps because they lacked the Germans’ Christian
heritage.
“In the aftermath of the war,” wrote Kazutoshi Hando in 2007, “blame was
placed solely on the Japanese army and navy. This seemed just, because the
civilian population had always been deceived by the armed forces about what
was done. Civilian Japan felt no sense of collective guilt – and that was the way
the American victors and occupiers wanted it. In the same fashion, it was the
Americans who urged that no modern Japanese history should be taught in
schools. The consequence is that very few people under fifty have any
knowledge of Japan’s invasion of China or colonisation of Manchuria…”1290
As regards Japanese war crimes trials, Sebestyen writes: “In the Asian
countries that Japan had occupied during the war, 984 Japanese had already
been executed, many without proper trials, including 236 by the Dutch, 223 by
the British, 153 by the Australians, 140 by the Americans. Nearly all were
Japanese soldiers who had mistreated and killed prisoners of war. The trials of
the Japanese leaders charged with ‘waging a war of aggression’ were an
altogether more complex matter. The primary issue, as two of the judges noted,
was that the greatest war criminal was not in the dock. The Australian judge Sir
William Webb said: ‘The leader of the crime, though available for trial, was
granted immunity. The Emperor’s authority was required for war. If he did not
want war, he should have withheld his authority.’
“The French judge Henri Bernard stated that the entire proceedings were
flawed and he couldn’t pass judgement at all. The absence of the Emperor in
court was ‘a glaring inequity… Japan’s crimes against peace had a principal
author who escaped all prosecution. Measuring the Emperor by different
standards undermines the cause of justice.’
“Many of the Americans who organised the trial later said that it backfired.
MacArthur was doubtful about the hearings in the first place. He told Truman
that it was ‘comparatively simple’ where the Nazis were concerned to prove
genocidal intent and apportion guilt, but in Japan ‘no such line of demarcation
has been fixed.’ One of the officers who interrogated the defendants to decide
who should face trial, Brigadier-General Elliot Thorpe, told MacArthur that the
entire proceedings were ‘mumbo-jumbo… we made up the rules as we went
along.’ Later, Thorpe wrote that ‘we wanted blood and by God we got blood’.

1290 Hando, in Hastings, op, cit., p. 673.
676
“For many others, the trials were not only victor’s justice; they were white
man’s justice. People in the occupied countries had suffered the most, but not
one was represented on the panel of judges. A British judge represented the
Malays, a French judge acted for the Vietnamese and the Cambodians. Korea
had been colonised with brutal rapacity by Japan for nearly fifty years; there
was no Korean judge. Among the charges faced by the two dozen defendants
was that they ‘engaged in a plan or conspiracy to regain their colony in Vietnam
against an independence movement led by Ho Chi Minh; the Dutch fought the
nationalists in an attempt to repossess their Indonesian territories, and the
British fought guerrillas seeking independence in Malaya.
“Only one of the judges, the Indian Radhabinod Pal, pointed out the double
standard involved. He agreed that the Japanese had committed vile crimes
during their invasion and occupation of various countries but, he argued, they
were neither unique nor without precedent. ‘It would be pertinent to recall…
that the majority of the interests claimed by the Western prosecuting powers in
the Eastern hemisphere were acquired by such aggressive methods.’ They
claimed ‘national honour’ or ‘the protection of vital interests’ or concepts of
‘manifest destiny’ similar to the Japanese. The Japanese conquerors were guilty
of crimes, but those crimes should be set in context. For much of Asia, the end of
the Pacific war was only the beginning of the process of liberation, not the end.
The trials opened up the entire question of how long the old European powers
could maintain their empires. This was not the message the Allies wanted to
hear – or to send to the world – when, in 1948, they executed seven military
chiefs of the former Japanese empire, including the Prime Minister Hideki Tojo,
who had earlier tried, and failed, to commit suicide…”1291
And then there were the victors’ crimes… Early in 1945 the American
General MacArthur “liberated” Manila in the Philippines at the cost of 100,000
civilian dead, together with 1000 Americans and 16,000 Japanese. And yet after
the Marianas, the Japanese could have been starved into submission with no
further bombing. That would at least have given them the option to end the war
at a time of their choosing. “’The Philippines campaign was a mistake,’ says
Hando, who lived through the war. ‘MacArthur did it for his own reasons.
Japan had lost the war since the Marianas were gone.’ The Filipino people
whom MacArthur professed to love paid the price for his egomania in lost lives
– something approaching half a million perished by combat, massacre, famine
and disease – and wrecked homes.”1292
“On March 9, 1945,” writes Ferguson, “Tokyo suffered the first of a

succession of raids that claimed the lives of between 80,000 and 100,000 people,
‘scorched and boiled and baked to death’, as [the American commander] LeMay

1291 Victor Sebestyen, 1946: The Making of the Modern World, London: Pan, 2014, pp.
363-365.
677
frankly put it. Within five months, roughly two fifths of the built-up areas of
nearly every major city had been laid waste, killing nearly a quarter of a million
people, injuring more than 300,000 and turning eight million into refugees.
Besides Tokyo, sixty-three cities were incinerated. Japan’s economy was almost
entirely crippled…
“Why, then, was it necessary to go further – to drop two atomic bombs on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki? LeMay could quite easily have hit both these targets
with conventional bombs. As if to make that point, Tokyo was scourged with
incendiaries one last time on August 14 by a horde of more than a thousand
aircraft; it was the following day that the Emperor’s decision to capitulate was
broadcast, not the day after Hiroshima. In all probability, it was the Soviet
decision to dash Japanese hopes of mediation and to attack Japan that convinced
all but the most incorrigible diehards that the war was over. Defeat in the Pacific
mattered less to the Japanese generals than the collapse of their much longer-
held position in Manchuria and Korea. Indeed, it was the Soviet landing on
Shikotan, not far from Japan’s main northern island of Hokkaido, that forced the
military finally to sign the instrument of surrender. Historians have sometimes
interpreted Harry Truman’s decision to use the Bomb against Japan as a kind of
warning shot intended to intimidate the Soviet Union; an explosive overture to
the Cold War. Others have argued that, having seen $2 billion spent on the
Manhattan Project, Truman felt compelled to get a large bang for so many bucks.
Yet if one leaves aside the technology that distinguished the bombs dropped on
August 6 and August 9 – and the radiation they left in their wakes – the
destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was simply the culmination of five
years of Allied strategic bombing. Roughly as many people were killed
immediately when the bomb nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ exploded 1,189 feet above
central Hiroshima on the morning of August 6 as had been killed in Dresden six
months before, though by the end of 1945 the Japanese death toll had risen
much higher, to as many as 140,000 in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki… ”1293
On the other hand, it has been argued that the Bomb saved many lives that
would have been lost in an invasion of the Japanese mainland. “What Truman
did not know,” writes Antony Beevor, “and which has only been established
quite recently, is that the Imperial Japanese Army could never contemplate
surrender, having forced all their men to fight to the death since the start of the
war. All civilians were to be mobilised and forced to fight with bamboo spears
and satchel charges to act as suicide bombers against Allied tanks. Japanese
documents apparently indicate that their army was prepared to accept up to 28
million deaths.”1294 Again, Richard Frank writes: “The fact is that there was no
historical record over the past 2,600 years of Japanese surrendering, nor any
examples of a Japanese unit surrendering during the war. This was where the
great American fear lay.”1295

1294 Beevor, “Yes, Truman had little choice”, BBC History Magazine, August, 2015, p.
58.
1295 Frank, “Yes. It saved millions of lives in Japan and Asia”, BBC History
Magazine, August, 2015, p. 59.
678
However, we now know that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender
long before the bombs were dropped. Thus MacArthur told Roosevelt as early
as January, 1945 that the Japanese were ready to surrender on terms very similar
to those eventually accepted. Some flexibility in the terms offered to the
Japanese then would have saved hundreds of thousands of American and
Japanese lives later. Moreover, it would have obviated the need to ask the
Soviets to intervene in the north – with massive consequences for the future of
the Far East. For, as John J. McLaughlin asks: “Was Roosevelt's curt dismissal of
MacArthur's warning the ‘nail’ that cost us the loss of not only thousands of
soldiers and sailors at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but also the Communist victory
in the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War, and Vietnam?..”1296
Daniel Goldhagen writes: “Supreme Allied commander of the forces in

Europe and soon to be American president, Dwight Eisenhower explained:
‘During his [Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s] recitation of the relevant facts
[about the plan for using the atomic bomb], I had been conscious of a feeling of
depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my
belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was
completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country
should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose
employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save
American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking
some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’…”1297
Again, as A.N. Wilson points out, “in May, the first of the war crimes
tribunals had begun in Germany, and there was talk of hanging the Japanese
emperor. This rumour undoubtedly encouraged many Japanese troops to
continue fighting. It was [Secretary of State James] Byrnes, at the Potsdam
Conference of 17 July to 2 August 1945, who insisted upon removing any
assurance about the future of the emperor. After the Russians invaded
Manchuria, the Japanese knew that their war was over, and they privately
approached the Russians, asking for a negotiated peace. This was rejected by
America. Byrnes was effectually the architect of the Cold War. He wanted no
cooperation with Russia. And he did not want a messy negotiation with Japan
which would lead to Versailles-style repercussions. An outright Japanese
surrender, without condition; a Russian government left in no doubt that
America was if necessary prepared to kill tens, hundreds of thousands of
civilians if it did not get its way. This was the lure for Truman and Byrnes as
they reached their decision.
“In the light of all that we now know about the decision, we can safely lay
aside the myth fed to, and believed in by, generations of Americans and British:
namely that the Bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to

1296 McLaughlin, “The Bomb was not Necessary”, History News Network,
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/129964.
1297 Goldhagen, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing
Assault on Humanity, London: Abacus, 2012, pp. 3-4.
679
shorten the war (it was more or less over anyway); to save the lives of American
troops; or to force the Japanese warriors to lay down their arms. (If that
argument is used, why was it necessary to bomb two cities, and add the
incinerated and radiated corpses of 70,000 more people, those of the citizens of
Nagasaki, to the obscene death figures of the Second World War?)
“There is a strong element of racialism in the beliefs of many of those

involved in the decision-making process, a sense that the Japanese were
somehow ‘different’ from Americans or Europeans; or that their culture made
them impermeable to reason. This perhaps flavoured the atmosphere of the
crucial meeting at the Pentagon on 31 May 1945 when Secretary of State Byrnes
– did ever a politician have a more horribly apt ‘Happy Families’ nomenclature?
– met Robert Oppenheimer, James B. Conant and Secretary for War Henry
Stimson, and they all agreed, having heard the scientific evidence, that ‘we
could not give the Japanese any warning’.
“Albert Einstein, as early as 1946, stated the true reason for dropping the
Bomb, namely that it was ‘precipitated by a desire to end the war in the Pacific
by any means before Russia’s participation…’”1298
The invasion of the Japanese mainland was not the only alternative to
dropping the bombs. A powerful argument against the invasion of Japan not
known to decision-makers at that time was that “the Japanese had sent out an
instruction to all prison commanders that in the event of an Allied landing on
the home islands, all PoWs were to be killed. A copy was found in a vault in
Taiwan (then Formosa) after the war and the original is now in an American
archive.” (C.E.C. Lowry, letter to The Daily Mail, August 10, 2015, p. 58). The
existence of such an order was confirmed in a book published in 1970 by
Laurens van der Post, The Night of the New Moon. It would seem to indicate that
the bomb saved perhaps a million lives of Allied PoWs in South-East Asia.” 1299
Another, less costly alternative, as we have seen, was a blockade by sea that
would very likely have starved the Japanese into surrender quite quickly. A
third alternative was a combination of a Soviet invasion of Manchuria combined
with a formula amounting to slightly less than unconditional surrender that
enabled the Emperor to remain as the formal head of the Japanese government.
His retention as the figurehead was necessary since the Army would have
surrendered only at his command. These were the factors that eventually did
elicit surrender – and the evidence, as we have seen, is that the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, played no significant part in the Japanese decision to
surrender when they did.

Wilson, op. cit., pp. 471-472.
1298
Christopher Booker, “The terrible Bomb really saved millions of lives”, The
1299
Sunday Telegraph, August 9, 2015, p. 20).
680
So was justice done at the end of the Second World War? Could the savage
vengeance carried out on the Germans by the Soviets, with the connivance of
the Americans and the British, or on the Japanese by the Americans with the
connivance of the British and the Soviets, be justified on the basis of the defeated
states’ undoubted criminality? By no means. If this was justice, it was terribly
partial and flawed: some of the criminals were condemned, many went scot-free
(like the Emperor of Japan).
Still more important, it was also grossly hypocritical: almost every crime that
the Germans committed, except the wholesale slaughter of Jews, was imitated
by the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans. For, as Niall Ferguson writes, “the
charges against the Japanese leaders who stood trial in Tokyo included ‘the
wholesale destruction of human lives, not alone on the field of battle… but in
the homes, hospitals, and orphanages, in factories and fields’. But what else had
the Allies perpetrated in Germany and Japan in the last months of the war?”1300
However, the victors were the judges, and so could not be brought to justice;
they were above the law. True justice for the atrocities of the war was not done
in 1945…
Schiller said: “World history is the World’s court (of judgement)” (Die
Weltgeschichte ist Weltegericht). But this cannot be true unless history includes
the very last moment of history, the Last Judgement. True justice will have to
wait until then, until the verdict of the only Just Judge…

1300 Ferguson, The War of the World, p. 579.
681
73. THE NEW ECONOMIC ORDER: BRETTON WOODS
Already before the end of the Second World War the western
leaders were planning new economic and political institutions that
would be appropriate for the new globalizing world…
America came out of the war, writes Yanis Varoufakis, “as the
major (indeed, if one excludes Switzerland, the only) creditor nation.
For the first time since the rise of capitalism, all of the world’s trade
relied on a single currency (the dollar) and was financed from a single
epicenter (Wall Street). While half of Europe was under the control of
the Red Army and Europeans generally were openly questioning the
merits of the capitalist system, the New Dealers who had been running
Washington since 1932 realized that history had presented them with a
remarkable opportunity: to erect a post-war global order that would
cast American hegemony in stainless steel. It was an opportunity that
they seized upon with glee.
“Their audacious scheme sprang from the two sources that lie
behind every great [secular] achievement – fear and power. The war
endowed the United States with unprecedented military and economic
might. But, at the same time, it acted as a constant reminder of
America’s failure properly to come to terms with the legacy of 1929
before the Japanese navy unleashed its bombs and torpedoes on Pearl
Harbor. The New Dealers never forgot the unexpectedness of the
Great Depression and its resistance to ‘treatment’. The more power
they felt they had in their hands, the greater was their fear that a new
1929 could turn it into ash that trickled through their fingers.
“Even before the guns had fallen silent in Europe, and even before
the Soviet Union emerged as a dragon to be slain, the United States
understood that it had inherited the historic role of reconstructing, in
its own image, the world of global capitalism. For if 1929 nearly ended
the dominion of capital at a time of multiple capitalist centres, what
would a new 1929 do when the larger game, global capitalism,
revolved around a single axis, the dollar?
“In 1944, the New Dealers’ anxieties led to the famous Bretton
Woods conference. The idea of designing a new global order was not
so much grandiose as essential. At Bretton Woods a new monetary
framework was designed, acknowledging the dollar’s centrality but
also taking steps to create international shock absorbers in case the US
economy wavered. It took fifteen years before the agreement could be
fully implemented. During the preparatory phase, the United States
had to put together the essential pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of the
Global Plan, of which Bretton Woods was an important piece.
682
“While the war was still raging in Europe and the Pacific, in July
1944, 730 delegates converged on the plush Mount Washington Hotel
located in the New Hampshire town of Bretton Woods. Over three
weeks of intensive negotiations, they hammered out the nature and
institutions of the post-war global monetary order.
“They did not come to Bretton Woods spontaneously, but at the

behest of President Roosevelt, whose New Deal administration was
determined to win the peace, after having almost lost the war against
the Great Depression. The one lesson the New Dealers had learned
was that capitalism cannot be managed effectively at the national
level. In his opening speech, Roosevelt made that point with
commendable clarity: ‘The economic health of every country is a
proper matter of concern to all its neighbours, near and far.’
“The two issues that were ostensibly central to the conference were
the design of the post-war monetary system and the reconstruction of
the war-torn economies of Europe and Japan. However, under the
surface, the real questions concerned (a) the institutional framework
that would keep a new Great Depression at bay, and (b) who would be
in control of that framework. Both questions created specific tensions,
especially between the two great allies represented, in the US corner,
by Harry Dexter White and, in the British corner, by none other than
John Maynard Keynes. In the aftermath of the conference, Keynes
remarked: ‘We have had to perform at one and the same time the tasks
appropriate to the economist, to the financier, to the politician, to the
journalist, to the propagandist, to the lawyer, to the statesman – even,
I think, to the prophet and to the soothsayer.’
“Two of the institutions that were designed at Bretton Woods are

still with us and still in the news. One is the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the other the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (IBRD), today known simply as the World Bank. The
IMF was to be global capitalist system’s ‘fire brigade’ – an institution
that would rush to the assistance of any country whose house caught
(fiscal) fire, handing out loans on strict conditions that would ensure
that any balance of payments deficit would be fixed and the loans
repaid. As for the World Bank, its role would be that of an
international investment bank, with a remit to channel productive
investments to regions of the world devastated by the war.” 1301
The Bretton Woods system is “a system of fixed exchange rates,

with the dollar at its heart. The main idea was that each currency
would be locked to the dollar at a given exchange rate. Fluctuations
would be allowed only within a narrow band of plus or minus 1 per
cent, and governments would strive to stay within this band by buying

1301 Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur, London: Zed Books, 2013, pp. 57-59.
683
or selling their own dollar reserves. A renegotiation of the exchange
rate of a particular country was only allowed if it could be
demonstrated that its balance of trade and its balance of capital flows
could not be maintained, given its dollar reserves. As for the United
States, to create the requisite confidence in the international system, it
committed itself to pegging the dollar to gold at the fixed exchange
rate of $35 per ounce of gold and to guarantee full gold convertibility
for anyone, American or non-American, who wanted to swap their
dollars for gold.” 1302
The essence of the Bretton Woods system was a mechanism for the
recycling of surpluses that would keep trade going and prevent the loss
of confidence and “freezing up” that had led to the Great Depression.
“Keynes’ blueprint for the surplus recycling,” writes Varoufakis,

“was wonderfully grandiose. It included the creation of a new world
currency, a system of fixed exchange rates between the world currency
and the national currencies, and a world central bank that would run
the whole system.
“The purpose of this system would be to maintain monetary

stability everywhere, to keep both surpluses and deficits in check
throughout the Western world and, at the first sign of a crisis in a
troubled nation, speedily recycle surpluses into it so as to prevent the
crisis spreading. An international fund would be created to play the
role of the world’s central bank and issue its currency – the bancor, as
Keynes provisionally named it. The bancor would not be printed, just
as the digital crypto-currency bitcoin does not exist in material form
today, only as numbers on some spreadsheets or digital device. But it
would function as the world’s currency nevertheless. Every country
would have a bancor account with the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), from which to draw when it bought goods from other countries,
and into which other nations would deposit bancors when their
citizens or corporations bought goods and services from it. All
international trade would thus be denominated in the global currency,
with the national currencies continuing to oil the cogs of the national
economies.
“Crucial to this system was a fixed exchange rate between each

national currency and the bancor, and thus between all participating
national currencies. The board of the IMF, on which all nations would
be represented, would decide these rates centrally and by negotiation.
They would be adjusted whenever necessary, so that countries with
stubborn surpluses would see their currencies buying increasingly
more bancors (to make their exports more expensive and their imports
cheaper), and vice-versa for nations in persistent deficit.

1302 Varoufakis, op. cit., p. 60.
684
“Even more radically, Keynes’s IMF, recognizing that one nation’s
deficit is another’s surplus, would levy a tax on a nation’s bancor
account if its imports and exports diverged too much. The idea was to
penalize both types of imbalance (excessive surpluses as well as
excessive deficits; the Germanys of the world as well as the Greeces)
and in the process build up a war chest of bancors at the IMF so that,
when some crisis hit, deficit nations in trouble could be propped up
and prevented from falling into a black hole of debt and recession that
might spread throughout the Bretton Woods system.
“White certainly understood the importance of political surplus

recycling within the global system they were setting up, but Keynes’s
proposals sounded ludicrous to his American ears. Is this wily
Englishman, he might have asked, seriously proposing that the
Europeans have a majority say in how our surpluses are recycled? Is
he for real?
“As a good Keynesian, White agreed that Bretton Woods should do

more than merely dollarize the Western world. He recognized the
need for a politically administered (extra-market) surplus recycling
mechanism, which of course meant the recycling of America’s
surpluses to Europe. Nevertheless, the idea that bankrupt Europeans
who had put the world through the wringer of two world wars in less
than three decades and still yearned for the reconstruction of their
repulsive empires would now control America’s surplus was anathema
to an anti-imperialist patriotic New Dealer like White. Quite
understandably, he was going to have none of it. America was the
only surplus nation, and America alone would decided how, when and
to whom it would recycle it.
“White listened respectfully while Keynes presented his grandiose

scheme but then immediately rejected two of its key features. First on
the chopping block was the idea of a new shadow global currency (the
bancor) to be managed by an IMF governing committee in which the
United State would be one of many. The second idea White vetoed was
that of taxing the surplus nations – namely the United States. For
White, the die had already been cast. Europe was to be dollarized and
the dollar would be the world currency. The bancor was a great idea
in the multilateral world but a joke in one where the dollar had
already been crowned king and queen. Moreover, the idea that the
IMF’s governing committee, with the Europeans in the majority,
would tax America’s surpluses seemed to him too ludicrous for words.
America owned its surpluses and would recycle them herself, without
petitioning a group of bankrupt Europeans for their permission to do
so.
685
“By the end of the Bretton Woods conference, White had cherry-
picked Keynes’s proposal so eclectically that its multilateralist spirit
had vanished. Yes, the IMF would be created, but its purpose would
not be to issue a new world currency. The loss of the bancor and the
official elevation of the dollar to world currency statues meant that the
IMF could not function as the world’s central bank. That role was now
assigned de facto to America’s central bank, the Fed…” 1303
The success of the “Bretton Woods system”, writes Liam Halligan,

has meant that the world since then “has traded relatively freely, with
the short-term protectionist instincts of politicians being kept in check
by WTO [World Trade Organization] rules”, with the result that there
was “a 12-fold expansion in global trade between 1950 and 2010 – and
a huge increase in global prosperity”. 1304 As we shall see, there was an
important change in the Bretton Woods system in 1973. Nevertheless,
the “spirit of Bretton Woods” survived into the twenty-first century.
Varoufakis appears to favour Keynes’ truly globalist and

internationalist solution to the solution proposed by White which
eventually triumphed, preservING the hegemony of one country, the
United States, in the post-war period. From a purely economic point of
view, he may well be right. But economics is never entirely divorced
from politics and even religion; and we may be grateful that Keynes
did not prevail and that the spectre of single world government was
put off for several generations. For there is no doubt about it: as the
head of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, said many years later in the context
of the creation of the euro, a single currency area can only be
effectively governed by a single government. It was largely the
hegemonic political and economic power of the United States that kept
the world free, not only from that other globalist project, Soviet

1303 Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? London: Vintage, 2017, pp. 25-
27. Richard Horowitz writes: “The US assumed that a formal identification of their
own currency as the official world reserve would be too aggressive a position
diplomatically… The US proposed instead a vague euphemism: ‘gold-convertible
currency’. It fooled no sophisticated observer and Keynes called it ‘idiocy’. Given
its uniquely vast gold holdings, the US had the only currency realistically
convertible into bullion. But the US delegation feared diplomatic disaster by trying
to codify this fact.
“Handling the issue at the conference for Britain would be Dennis Robertson, the Cambridge
economist to whom Keynes delegated many key negotiations, admiring his intellectual subtlety
and patience of mind and tenacity of character to grasp and hold on to all details and fight them
through. Robertson was present during the final discussion of the IMF’s charter when the
delegation representing British India demanded that the US define exactly what ‘gold-
convertible currency’ meant. To the amazement and delight of the Americans, Robertson rose to
propose its replacement with ‘gold and United States dollars’, effectively crowning the dollar
supreme. A giddy White stayed up until three o’clock in the morning incorporating Robertson’s
proposal into the draft articles. The rest is monetary history…” (“How a Briton Created the
Almighty Dollar”, History Today, January, 2017, p. 6)
1304 Halligan, “We should be tearing down barriers, not putting them up”, The Sunday Telegraph,
Business section, September 4, 2016, p. 4.
686
Communism, but also from the project of world rule by the IMF that
was first proposed at Bretton Woods in 1944…
687
74. THE NEW POLITICAL ORDER: THE UNITED NATIONS
World War Two destroyed more lives and property than any
conflict in history. This fact convinced many that the only way to have
peace on earth was to create a supra-national government that would
restrain national rivalries and impose its will on aggressive states.
Such an ideal goes back at least to Dante’s De Monarchia in the early
fourteenth century. However, the origin of its modern, secular
expression must be sought in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,
and Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795),
which contained the following axiom: "The law of nations shall be
founded on a federation of free states". 1305
The first attempt at incarnating such a federation was the Congress

System erected by Tsar Alexander I and the monarchs of Prussia and
Austria after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. This came to a bloody
end during the Crimean War of 1854-56. The idea was revived in a
limited form by Tsar Nicholas II when he founded the International
Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899. This Court had very little
practical impact and did not prevent the outbreak of World War One
in 1914. However, the unparalleled destruction wrought by the war
that was supposed to end all wars forced the politicians to return to
such ideas…
“The first outline of the United Nations,” writes S.M. Plokhy, “was
drafted by Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles on the basis of the
covenant of the League of Nations. A creation of the Paris Peace
Conference [of 1919], the League convened its first general assembly
in Geneva in November 1920 and its last in April 1946, when
representatives of its member nations voted to dissolve it. The
League’s activities had in fact come to a virtual halt in 1939, the first
year of the war that it had failed to prevent and for whose outbreak it
was universally blamed. The problem was that the League could
neither adopt nor enforce its decisions: all resolutions had to be
passed with the unanimous approval of its council, an executive body
that included great powers as permanent members and smaller powers
as temporary ones, as well as its assembly. The principle of unanimity
was enshrined in the League’s covenant, whose fifth chapter stated
that ‘decisions at any meeting of the Assembly or of the Council shall
require the agreement of all the Members of the League represented at
the meeting.’ This was virtually impossible to achieve, especially
when matters under discussion involved the great powers.
“The United States did not join the League. Woodrow Wilson
received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919 for his role in its creation, but
he failed to overcome Republican opposition and persuade an

1305 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_Peace:_A_Philosophical_Sketch.
688
increasingly isolationist Congress to ratify the Treaty of Versailles,
which would have led to American membership in the League. The
American drafters of the United Nations Charter were mindful of the
inevitable opposition that any international organization whose
decisions would be binding on the United States would encounter in
Congress. They also had to overcome a baleful precedent – the
League’s inability to influence the conduct of Germany and Japan after
their departure from the organization in 1933. Italy would follow suit
in 1937. The formation of the Axis by these three countries in 1940 met
with no effective response.
“If the new organization was to do better, it would have to learn

from its predecessor’s mistakes. The drafters of its charter had the
daunting task of reconciling what struck many as irreconcilable. Since
August 1943, the principal drafter of the document at the State
Department had been Leo Pasvolsky, the head of the department’s
Informal Agenda Group and Hull’s former personal assistant. A fifty-
year-old Jewish émigré from Ukraine, Pasvolsky was no stranger to
the subject of international peace organizations. Back in 1919 he had
covered the Paris Peace Conference for the New York Tribune, and later
he had campaigned for the admission of the Soviet Union, whose
brand of socialism he rejected, to the League of Nations.
“Pasvolsky’s appointment as principal drafter of the charter was a

testament of the triumph of Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s vision
over an alternative model championed by Sumner Welles. Hull
favoured a centralized structure, while Welles wanted the great
powers to bear primary responsibility for security in their respective
regions. Welles’s model followed FDR’s thinking of the role of the
‘four policemen’ – the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, China –
in the postwar peace arrangement. By the fall of 1943, with Welles
resigning in the midst of a homosexual scandal, Roosevelt had opted
for the centralized model. FDR’s decision was guided by the fact that
his ‘four policemen’ would be permanent members of the UN Security
Council…” 1306
After much argument with both the Russians and the British,
Roosevelt finally achieved his principal goal at Yalta, the founding of
the United Nations. He had been forced to concede to the Soviets that
Ukraine and Belorussia should have seats in the General Assembly
alongside Soviet Russia, which violated the principle that only
sovereign states should sit there. But he more or less got his way with
the most important of the six major organs of the United Nations, the
Security Council. It was composed of fifteen members with five
permanent members - the Big Three, China and France, - any of which
could veto decisions of the Security Council, although unanimous

1306 Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace, London: Penguin, 2010, pp. 118-119.
689
decisions of the “Big Five” were deemed to be binding on other
members. In this way Victors’ Justice continued to operate in the
adjudication of international disputes in the post-war era.
The Security Council convened for the first time on January 17,
1946. However, in the atmosphere of the Cold War that developed
very soon thereafter (Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech was
delivered on March 5, 1946), it showed its virtual impotence to achieve
justice and peace when the interests of one of the Great Powers was
affected. The old politics continued; the world was divided into two
vast spheres of influence, the Communist East and the Capitalist West;
and with the explosion of two atomic bombs over Japan in the summer
of 1945 the very real prospect beckoned of world war between the two
blocs leading to the annihilation of mankind. Never before in the
history of mankind had it been so urgently necessary to find a solution
to the problems of international relations, peace and justice. But
clearly the plan of locking the most evil power in history into a quasi-
world government in which it had the power of veto not only did not
solve the problem, but made the task of taming and neutralizing that
power far more difficult...
This potential strangle-hold exerted over the United Nations by the

Soviets was revealed right as early as May, 1945, when the foreign
ministers of the victor powers gathered in San Francisco to establish
the organization’s ground rules. Molotov, as Martin Gilbert writes,
“told his American and British opposite numbers – Edward Stettinius
and Anthony Eden – that sixteen members of the all-Party Polish
Government in Warsaw, who had gone to Moscow at the request of the
American and British governments to negotiate a peace treaty, were all
in prison. In the Daily Herald a future leader of the British Labour
Party, Michael Foot, who was in San Francisco as a journalist,
described the impact on the conference of Molotov’s announcement.
The distressing news, wrote Foot, came ‘almost casually’ towards the
end of an otherwise cordial dinner, Molotov ‘could hardly have cause
a greater sensation if he had upset the whole table and thrown the
soup in Mr. Stettinius’s smiling face.’” 1307
Churchill and Truman exchanged urgent telegrams; Truman wrote

that if they did not hold the line against the Soviets, “the whole fruits
of our victory may be cast away and none of the purposes of World
Organization to prevent territorial aggression and future wars will be
attained.” 1308 Churchill, of course, agreed…

1307 Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 2: 1933-1951, London:
HarperCollins, 1998, pp. 682-683.

1308 Gilbert, op. cit., p. 686.
690
“In San Francisco, on June 26, the United Nations Charter was
signed. Even as bloody battles were being fought in the Pacific and the
Far East, a blueprint for avoiding future war had been agreed upon by
the victorious powers. But the power of the gun and the tank was still
determining territorial change. Three days after the Charter was
signed the new Czechoslovak government signed a treaty with the
Soviet Union, ceding its eastern province of Ruthenia. The citizens of
Ruthenia, having been annexed by Hungary during the war, became
Soviet citizens, subjected overnight to the harsh panoply of Soviet
Communism…” 1309
The United Nations did much valuable humanitarian work for

many decades after the war. Particular important for its work in
Europe after VE Day was UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and
Rehabilitation Administration). In fact, as Tony Judt writes, “there are
actually many UNs, of which the political and military branches
(General Assembly, Security Council, Peacekeeping Operations) are
only the best known. To name but a few: UNESCO (the Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization, founded in 1945); UNICEF (the
International Children’s Emergency Fund, 1946); WHO (World Health
Organization, 1948): UNRWA (the Relief and Works Agency, 1949);
UNHCR (the High Commission for Refugees, 195), UNCTAD (the
Conference on Trade and Development, 1963), and ICTY (the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, 1993). Such
international units don’t include intergovernmental programs under
the UN’s aegis; nor do they cover the many field agencies established
to address particular crises. These include UNGOMAP (the Good
Offices Mission to Afghanistan and Pakistan that successfully oversaw
the Soviet withdrawal there), UNAMSHIL (the Mission in Sierra
Leone, 1999), UNMIK (the Mission in Kosovo, 1999) and many others
before and since.
“Much of the work done by these units is routine. And the ‘soft’
tasks of the UN – addressing health and environmental problems,
assisting women and children in crisis, educating farmers, training
teachers, providing small loans, monitoring rights abuse – are
sometimes performed just as well by national or nongovernmental
agencies, though in most cases only at UN prompting or in the wake
of a UN-sponsored initiative. But in a world where states are losing
the initiative to such nonstate actors as the EU or multinational
corporations, there are many things that would not happen at all if
they were not undertaken by the United Nations or its representatives
– the UNICEF-sponsored Convention of the Rights of the Child is a
case in point. And while these organizations cost money, we should
recall that UNICEF, for example, has a budget considerably smaller
than that of many international businesses.

1309 Gilbert, op. cit., p. 694.
691
“The United Nations works best when everyone acknowledges the
legitimacy of its role. When monitoring or overseeing elections or
truces, for example, the UN is often the only external interlocutor
whose good intentions and rightful authority are acknowledged by all
the contending parties. Where this is not the case – at Srebrenica in
1995, for example – disaster ensues, since the UN troops can neither
use force to defend themselves nor intervene to protect others. The
reputation of the UN for evenhandedness and good faith is thus its
most important long-term asset. Without it the organization becomes
just another tool of one or more powerful states and resented as
such.” 1310

1310 Judt, “Is the UN Doomed?”, in When the Facts Change, London: Vintage, 2015, pp. 257-258.
692
75. THE NEW MORAL ORDER: HUMAN RIGHTS
In one area, the United Nations has exercised an influence in one

area that is enormous and, arguably, enormously equivocal. Through
its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was approved on
December 9, 1948, it provided in essence a new moral code for the
world, a code that has no religious base - unless atheism is considered
to be a religion. However, this has not prevented the pseudo-Christian
West from embracing it enthusiastically, considering it to be the
culmination of Christian Capitalist culture.
According to Martin Gilbert, “the voice of the individual as

enshrined in 1948 in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights,
became the voice of dissent. The scrutiny carried out by organizations
like Amnesty International brought the focus on human rights to a
global public. Meeting in Geneva, the United Nations Commission on
Human Rights, and the Non-Governmental Organizations which
represent specific minority interests at the Commission, cast a strong
spotlight on human rights abuse. Two areas in which it was
particularly active in the 1970s and 1980s were the inequalities and
indignities of apartheid in South Africa, and the struggle of the Jews
to emigrate from the Soviet Union without harassment or
imprisonment…” 1311
The philosophy of human rights goes back a long way in western

history – at least to Grotius in the seventeenth century and perhaps as
far as the medieval scholastics. The French Declaration of Human
Rights of 1789 located the source of human rights in the sovereign
power of the nation. However, most human rights are universal, that
is, they are framed in perfectly general terms that apply to all men and
women; so to locate their obligatoriness, not in some supra-national or
metaphysical sphere, but in particular nations or states that may, and
often do, disagree with each other, would seem illogical.
The problem, of course, is that if we pursue this argument to its

logical conclusion, it would seem to entail that all national states must
give up their rights and hand them over to a world government, which
alone can impartially formulate human rights and see that they are
observed. This logic was reinforced by the first two World Wars,
which discredited nationalism and led to the first international
organizations with legal powers, albeit embryonic, over nation-states –
the League of Nations and the United Nations.
One of the first to formulate this development was the Viennese

Jew and professor of law, Hans Kelsen, in his work, A Pure Theory of

1311 Gilbert, Challenge to Civilization: A History of the Twentieth Century, 1952-1999, London:
HarperCollins, 1999, p. 924.
693
Law. “The essence of his theory,” according to Michael Pinto-
Duschinsky, “was that an obligation to obey the law does not stem
from national sovereignty but from a fundamental norm. In practical
terms, this led after the First World War to his advocacy of an
Austrian constitutional court as part of the Austrian constitution and,
after the Second World War, to support for the idea of an international
court with compulsory jurisdiction as a key part of the framework of
the United Nations.” 1312
Another Austrian Jewish academic in the same tradition was

Hersch Lauterpacht. His dissertation “combined his interests in
jurisprudence and Zionism with an argument about mandates granted
by the League of Nations which implied that the mandate given to
Britain to govern Palestine did not give Britain sovereignty. Rather,
this rested, argued Lauterpacht, with the League of Nations…
“Despite the failure of the League of Nations to prevent Nazi

aggression, the Second World War and the murder of his family in the
Holocaust, Lauterpacht remained attached to notions of an
international legal order. Before his early death in 1960, he served as a
judge on the International Court at the Hague. Lauterpacht was
devoted to the view that fundamental human rights were superior to
the laws of international states and were protected by international
criminal sanctions even if the violations had been committed in
accordance with existing national laws. He advised the British
prosecutors at Nuremburg to this effect. Together with another Jewish
lawyer from the Lviv area, Raphael Lemkin, Lauterpacht had a major
role in the passage by the United Nations General Assembly of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Lauterpacht’s
publication in 1945, An International Bill of Rights, also had a formative
influence on the European Convention of Human Rights drawn up in
1949 and ratified in 1953.
“Lauterpacht’s public philosophy was based on the conviction that

individuals have rights which do not stem from nation states. He was
an internationalist who had a lifelong mistrust of state sovereignty
which, to him, reflected the aggression and injustices committed by
nation states and the disasters of the two world wars.” 1313

1312 Pinto-Duschinsky, “The Highjacking of the Human Rights Debate”, Standpoint,
May, 2012, p. 36. “Central to the Pure Theory of Law is the notion of a 'basic norm
(Grundnorm)' - a hypothetical norm, presupposed by the jurist, from which in a
hierarchy all 'lower' norms in a legal system, beginning with constitutional law,
are understood to derive their authority or 'bindingness'. In this way, Kelsen
contends, the bindingness of legal norms, their specifically 'legal' character, can be
understood without tracing it ultimately to some suprahuman source such as God,
personified Nature or a personified State or Nation”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Kelsen).
1313 Pinto-Duschinsky, op. cit., pp. 36-37.
694
However, as Pinto-Duschinsky rightly points out, while
“international arbitration may be a practical and peaceful way to
resolve disputes between countries,.. international courts which claim
jurisdiction over individual countries do not coexist comfortably with
notions of national sovereignty…” 1314
In spite of that, and in spite of the terrible destruction and blood-

letting caused by the idea of positive freedom in the period 1917 to
1945, in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared:
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They
are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one
another in a spirit of brotherhood… Recognition of the inherent
dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human
family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
While this is anodyne enough, even a superficial reading of history
since 1789 should have convinced those who drew up the Declaration
to be more specific about the meaning of the words “freedom” and
“rights” here. They should have known that very similar statements
had served as the foundation of the French revolution, and almost
every other bloody revolution right up to the Russian revolution,
which at that very moment was still destroying millions of souls in the
name of “the spirit of brotherhood”… In any case, the Communists
interpreted human rights in a very different way from the Capitalists.
They saw in the theory merely a means of imposing the capitalist
world-view. And there was some justification for this: the United
Nations was, after all, the child of Roosevelt and his very American
(but also leftist) world-view.
As John Gray writes, speaking of human rights in the context of

global capitalism: “The philosophical foundations of these rights are
flimsy and jerry-built. There is no credible theory in which the
particular freedoms of deregulated capitalism have the standing of
universal rights. The most plausible conceptions of rights are not
founded on seventeenth-century ideas of property but on modern
notions of autonomy. Even these are not universally applicable; they
capture the experience only of those cultures and individuals for
whom the exercise of personal choice is more important that social
cohesion, the control of economic risk or any other collective good.
“In truth, rights are never the bottom line in moral or political
theory – or practice. They are conclusions, end-results of long chains
of reasoning from commonly accepted principles. Rights have little
authority or content in the absence of a common ethical life. They are
conventions that are durable only when they express a moral

1314 Pinto-Duschinsky, op. cit., p. 37.
695
consensus. When ethical disagreement is deep a wide appeal to rights
cannot resolve it. Indeed, it may make such conflict dangerously
unmanageable.
“Looking to rights to arbitrate deep conflicts – rather than seeking

to moderate them through the compromises of politics – is a recipe for
a low-intensity civil war…” 1315

1315 Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, London: Granta Books,
1999, pp. 108-109.
696

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What are some of the quotes about Russia and the Tsar?

What are some of the quotes about Russia and the Tsar?

What did Lenin say about terror?

What did Lenin say about terror?

THE AGE OF CATASTROPHE

VOLUME V OF AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY

© Copyright: Vladimir Moss, 2018. All rights reserved.

St. John of Kronstadt, (1905).

St. John Maximovich.

We [the IRA] adopted political assassination as a principle. We turned the whole

I. WAR AND REVOLUTION (1914-18) 12

1. THE FIRST YEARS OF WAR 13

2. THE ACTORS IN THE REVOLUTION: (1) THE BOLSHEVIKS 23

3. THE ACTORS IN THE REVOLUTION: (2) THE CHRISTIANS 33

4. THE ACTORS IN THE REVOLUTION: (3) RASPUTIN 40

7. THE ABDICATION OF THE TSAR 66

10. THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION 99

11. THE BALFOUR DECLARATION 106

II. THE NEW WORLD DISORDER (1918-1925) 118

12. THE SPIRIT OF LENINISM 119

13. THE CHURCH AND THE REVOLUTION 131

14. THE JEWS AND THE REVOLUTION 150

15. 1918: THE FALL OF GERMANY AND AUSTRIA 158

16. WHITE TSAR AND RED TERROR 168

17. VERSAILLES: (1) DEMOCRACY AND SELF-DETERMINATION 186

18. VERSAILLES: (2) REPARATIONS AND DEBT-RELIEF 197

19. FROM SERBIA TO YUGOSLAVIA 205

20. THE SECOND GREEK REVOLUTION 209

21. THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR 221

22. FROM WAR COMMUNISM TO NEP 231

23. SELF-DETERMINATION IN THE RUSSIAN BORDERLANDS 243

25. FROM THE VOLGA FAMINE TO THE “LIVING CHURCH” 263

26. GREEK ECCLESIASTICAL IMPERIALISM 279

27. THE INTRODUCTION OF THE NEW CALENDAR 287

28. THE FALL OF RENOVATIONISM 308

29. GERMAN HYPERINFLATION 315

30. THE RISE OF STALIN 324

31. THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS 335

32. THE RISE OF CHINA 342

33. THE RE-LAUNCH OF ECUMENISM 347

III. THE RISE OF THE DICTATORS (1925-1933) 351

34. LIBERALISM, COMMUNISM AND FASCISM 352

35. TOTALITARIANISM AND RELIGION 368

36. CHINESE NATIONALISTS AND COMMUNISTS 383

37. TURKS, ARABS, PERSIANS AND OIL 386

38. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH DECENTRALIZED 394

39. THE DECLARATION OF METROPOLITAN SERGIUS 398

40. THE BIRTH OF THE CATACOMB CHURCH 405

41. STALIN’S WAR ON RUSSIA 415

42. STALIN’S WAR ON UKRAINE 430

43. KING ALEXANDER I OF YUGOSLAVIA 437

44. THE OLD CALENDARIST MOVEMENT 453

45. THE FIRST PROJECT FOR A EUROPEAN UNION 465

46. THE RISE OF HITLER AND THE PEACE MOVEMENT 469

47. THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM 473

48. THE VATICAN AND RUSSIA 481

50. THE REVOLUTION IN PHYSICS 494

IV. THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1933-1945) 500

51. HITLER’S IDEOLOGY 501

52. THE JAPANESE INVASION OF CHINA 506