The Bolshevik revolution did not fall from the sky. While it is true that they were well funded from western sources, they found a Russia adrift and amorphous, without intellectual or material resources to fight back. Russia was without identity and her Orthodoxy was contrived and controlled from above, itself without a strong sense of its own mission, and without any real vision for social reform and church life. Even at the height of the Civil War, royal Russia was not able to systematically defend itself: if she attempted to justify royal institutions on the basis of divine election, they were reminded that the Petrine state was based on utility; if they, on the other hand, attempted to defend Russia on Petrine grounds, they were reminded that the monarchy never existed in medieval times on this basis, but solely on divine election. The hybrid monarchy of Nicholas II was, therefore, indefensible on theoretical grounds, indefensible precisely because she was a hybrid.

Old Russia existed in dispersed peasant settlements, whose sons were to die in huge numbers in the needless and purposeless wars with Japan and with Germany. Regardless of the good intentions and Slavophilia of Nicholas II and his father, the moral legitimacy of the Romanov line was cast into extreme doubt given the sheer number of Russian corpses produced in these wars. If we rightly remember the new martyrs of the Bolshevik yoke, why do the Petrinists among us not commemorate the millions of Orthodox killed in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I? The fact is that by 1915, Russia was fertile ground for revolutionary movements. The Tsar was martyred because of the nature of the state that he inherited. By the time Nicholas II was able to restore some of the long lost tradition, it was too late, and the catastrophe of World War I will besmirch the Romanov name forever.

It causes pain to write such lines. But they are true. As a long time supporter of the Romanov line and its policies, it becomes harder and harder to defend her hybrid institutions in light of the historic facts: the exploitation of the regions, devastation of True Orthodoxy, the suppression of independent Orthodox opinion, the attacks on Ukraine and Ukrainian, Russification and increasing westernization. Far from an Orthodox line, it persecuted the stricter Orthodox of the Old Belief. The Romanov line strongly persecuted the native Orthodox of Ukraine, and, under Catherine II, destroyed the ancient Orthodox Ukrainian hetmanate. After hundreds of years of defending Russia from its southern enemies, Catherine repaid them with persecution, dispersal and serfdom, and her successors did nothing to alleviate the situation.

Programs for reform existed throughout the empire. Many sought to strengthen the commune, others sought to experiment with individual ownership and some communal ownership, as was common in Ukraine. One particularly interesting reform program sought to fully strengthen the commune, improve agriculture, while at the same time nationalizing all industry that was essential to the development of self-defense. Even the monarchy itself sought to reform its administration, though outside of the Orthodox population. For example, in the dark years of the 1760s, the Russian government gave Mennonites and Hutterites free land, tax exemption for 30 years, and a loan for each family settling in northern Ukraine amounting to 500 U.S. dollars. All this while actual Orthodox peasants struggled under serfdom.

The Russian monarchy only symbolically considered itself the anointed of God. For Peter, Catherine, Alexander and Nicholas I, the state was purely a utilitarian design, and his defenders sought to buttress monarchy not by religious sanction, but Hobbesian obscurantism. Only later in the 19th century was the more Orthodox vision of monarchy revived, but the monarchy itself was radically transformed, remote and subject to the career goals of the urban bureaucrats.

For their part, the 18th century monarchs spent millions of rubles on themselves and their lovers, while the peasants suffered in serfdom. Anne I alone possessed ten thousand dresses, each custom made from German and French designers. She gave gifts to her friends of tens of millions of rubles. This continued with Elizabeth and Catherine II. The church gave meek and peepish protests. The Old Faith was claiming the bulk of the peasants.

I had written in The Third Rome that, under Nicholas II, the Russian economy boomed, it was correct. But I was wrong about the extent to which such growth depended almost entirely on the colonial status of Ukraine. By 1912, Ukraine was responsible for over 90% of Russian grain exports, and about 60% of its coke, nearly 50% of its coal and a huge proportion of its beet sugar. It was colonial exploitation, not wise policy, that created the Russian boom. At the same time, the ancient native Orthodox church of Ukraine, the church that was fought for by the Cossacks for so many years, was banned, along with its language and traditions. Native Ukrainian Orthodoxy could have been revived under Russian protection, with its ancient tradition preserved and promoted; with this, the uniats would have been history under a strong, pro-Russian Patriarch in Kiev. Instead, the monarchy chose repression and serfdom.

This essay contends that the rejection of the Old Faith and the adoption of its polar opposite, Petrinism, was the tilling of the fields of revolution. Students of Russian history, regardless of their religious background, have completely failed to see the clear line that can be drawn from Nikon to Peter to Lenin. The existence of the Old Faith as something separate from Russian political life doomed the empire. Old Russia was banned, persecuted and slandered. By the end of the sordid reign of Catherine II, hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Cossacks were murdered, either in forced labor projects nearly identical to Stalin’s, or in purges or in dissolutions when the Hetmanate was destroyed.

When I wrote The Third Rome, I completely underestimated this struggle. This was not a schism in a religious sense, as it was a schism in a fully mental, and cultural sense. There were two Russias: the one isolated in Petrograd, the other, suffering in the fields and factories. The Romanovs simply did not comprehend the magnitude of this schism (though I believe Alexander III and Nicholas II had good intentions), and it was a schism that was taken advantage of by the Bolshiviki.

As much as I deny that the realm of serfdom was as evil as modern writers claim, I also do not sanction it as an institution on Biblical grounds. By the reign of Peter and, most certainly, of Catherine II, serfs were the private property of their owners. The reality is that, according to the Law of Moses in the second half of Exodus, no Israelite could own another, and, if one sold himself into bondage, he was to be released after 6 years. Hence, ownership of another Orthodox man was forbidden. It was this institution, more than any other, that destroyed the unity between church, tsar and people that had existed even as late as Alexis. Razin and Pugachev proved that poverty was rife, as was discontent. The Old Faith was strong and willing to take up arms against a distant (literally) and unresponsive monarchy.

The fact that, by the reign of Catherine, there were over 20 million Old Ritualists in and out of Russia is another testament to the lack of legitimacy of the Romanovs, even under their best of scions, such as Alexander III. By his time, the schism had hardened, and it was too late to reform. I’m also struck by the fact that, after the freedom of religion law of 1906, only 5% of the army then confessed and communed once a year (as reported by Popspielovskii). Prior to that, such confession was enforced as law. This proves that the church was isolated from what presumably is the most traditional part of the population, the peasant soldiers.

The shocks of Razin and Pugachev did nothing, apparently, to change royal policy relative to serfdom. If anything, these uprisings led to a firmer relationship between mid-level landowners and the tsar. Rather than attempt to mobilize the peasantry (who could have become a bulwark against modernism and liberalism), it instead wasted millions of rubles propping up the hopelessly irrelevant and indebted middle nobility. Kankrin, finance minister of Nicholas I, fully admitted that such expenditure was a waste, and such moneys were going to luxuries, foreign travel and gambling, not to repay debts or to improve agriculture. This betting on a dying class, and a class that all knew was dying, also helped doom the empire. If the peasants were as loyal as the monarchy thought, then why the refusal to mobilize them?

It reached at point to where the illegitimate “tsarina” Catherine II passed a law where peasants could no longer petition the crown for redress a policy continued after her. Even after the victory over Napoleon, won through the blood of thousands of Old Believer peasants, serfdom was not only not lifted, but strengthened. This became an injustice that could not be undone, and it was an injustice that led to the sordid murder of the Tsar Liberator, Alexander II, himself. Too much damage had been done to save the monarchy.

Like France and Germany, the crown gained strength due to the classic coalition of landlord and crown against peasant. The landlords were given full and untrammeled control over their serfs in return for loyalty to Petrograd. The Synod, captive of the state, gave licence to the Romanovs to engage in the ownership of Orthodox Christians, and irrelevancy and eventually, apostasy, was the result. For all the intellectual weapons of the synod, never was there released a full social teaching of the Orthodox faith, and even in exile, the ROCOR never sought to formulate a truly Christian social order. Such an endeavor was simply considered too dangerous. While the Orthodox in the past, such as St. John Chrysostom, attacked the rich, attacked the ownership of one man over another, the Imperial Synod permitted it. The synod did not have the loyalty of the population. Instead, local elders and monastics, of both Old Belief and Nikonian faith (sometimes both), engaged the population. Eldership at Optina, truth be told, was condemned by the synod, as was the practice of hesychasm, the larger monasteries in Russia charged entry fees, where cells were actually bought and sold under the Nikonian, Possessorist school of Official Imperial Orthodoxy. Hesychia was condemned by the Synod via the condemnation of non-possessorism, who were violently purged from the church, eventually culminating in the Old Ritualist movement rescuing the uncanonical persecution of the hesychastic method of struggle. Even in the realm of seminary education, no less than the great Antony Khrapovitskii condemned them for their lack of spiritual formation, a problem with Orthodox “seminaries” everywhere. The very existence of such schools shows the long departure of the Nikonian church into a vulgar and half-digested westernism, since Orthodox education occurs in monasteries, in the family and among the elders, not in a rationalized and bureaucratized “seminary” system. Ultimately, the seminarians became the most radial element fo the clerical population, and most of these did not take priestly orders.

It was only on the margins of the Nikonian faith that orthodoxy remained by the Revolution: Optina, Vaalam and the great staretsi, most of whom were attacked by the official Nikonites for their “independence” (consult the “Optina Elders Series” for the official attacks on eldership; attacks on St. Seraphim of Sarov and Elder Zosima are well known). By the middle of the 19th century the church had completely become westernized, from church architecture to icons to chanting. Just as she supported the violence of Peter and the violence of Serfdom, she, in turn, came to support the violence of Stalin. The sins of Sergii did not being with him, but the fallen faux-patriarch had generations of church servility behind him. By abandoning the Old Faith for the wealth of Petrograd, they sealed their own death warrant. I can no longer pretend that anything else was the case.

Rather than seeking to rejoin the Old Faith to the crown, under Nicholas I, they were slaughtered in larger numbers. Instead of providing Ukrainians and Belorussians with ecclesiastical autonomy, they banned all printing of Ukrainian Orthodox books, nearly single-handedly creating the Ukrainian independence movement. Rather than seeking to coax the uniats back to the faith, they sought only to destroy them. Persecution was the only means of dealing with dissent, including medievalist and Orthodox dissent, under the Petrograd era. The moderate agrarian populists could have been used to form a more rational, agrarian and communalist order, fully in accord with Orthodox teachings, but again here too, prison and the knout was the only form of communication.

After Peter, the church was unrecognizable. First of all, the synod swore an oath to a Freemason, and did his will thereafter. As a result, the precedent was laid for Sergii’s oath to the Soviets. Masonic “tsars” included Peter I, the Germans who ruled under Anna I, Peter III and likely, Alexander I. There is also some speculation of Paul, since he was the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta. As far as the new “synodal system” was concerned, one church historian put it this way: “As for the Spiritual Regulationit was neither regulation nor spiritual. It was an ideological manifesto of sorts, venomous and contemptuous of Church traditions, the Russian clergy and canon law.”

The church itself was decorated more and more with western paintings of Italian origin, and, at least for a time, the eight-bar cross was banned. New western devotions were introduced to the church via Ukraine, and most of the monasteries were closed by the time of Catherine. Had it not been for the revolution of Paisuis and the hesychastic revival from Athos, Russian would have abandoned the faith long before the Bolsheviki. By the middle of the 19th century, all seminary instruction in Russia was in Latin. Nevertheless, in scattered sketes, organized little different from the Old Faith hermitages, this revolution took shape. Nevertheless, it was more often than not opposed by Petrograd circles. Monasticism, outside of the Paisian revolution, was dying by 1800. The open suppression of the hesychastic method by the possessors is the true origin of the near death of monasticism. Hence, St. Paisius is truly the savior of Russian monasticism and hesychasm.

At the parish level, all was revolutionized. The synod controlled pastoral appointments, and the ancient idea of sobornost’ was eliminated in favor of bureaucracy in Petrograd. The finances of the synod were overseen by a lay procurator, often a secular man, and, in a few cases, a Mason. The Old Belief took its strength by preserving the old order of sobornapravan, the acentric idea of the bishop being an icon of Christ rather than a “ruler” in a secular sense. But with little protect, the old idea of unity was destroyed in favor of a papacy of committee. What few realize is that the Old Ritual was far more than a critical liturgical eccentricity. They opposed the new order in its entirety: bureaucracy, modernization, higher taxes, exploitation of peasants, destruction of parish and monastic life, and the dictation of parish life from Petrograd. All of the above are far from mere “administrative errors,” but doctrinal ones as well. The community of the faithful was rejected as the ruling body of the church, but rather that of the synod and the tsar. Sobornosti, however, was restored to some extent under Patriarch Tikhon, and, most severely, in the camps. The war slowly turned many of the Nikonian hierarchy against the state, and there were several attempts to help free the church from the shackles of Rasputin and the Petrograd bureaucrats. It was only after the slaughter in the far east that the church began to mandate preaching by its clergy. But even with the limited reforms of the post-Japan era, many formerly alienated intellectuals began to rejoin the church (though, admittedly, with their own agendas), but how mugh more would have returned had genuine sobornapravanist been restored? To what extent would a truly legitimate edinoverye had become a force to be reckoned with? After all the majority of the priested Old Ritualists (as I am one) accepted the sacraments of the Nikonians, while lamenting their errors. Union seemed only a matter of enlightened state policy. Rather, they received persecution in varying degrees until 1906.

The church, by the middle of the 19th century, was a department of state, and became jealous of its privileges. The faith of the peasant commune was anarchistic, agrarian and per-Nikonian. For, in the folk songs and ballads of the countryside, it was Ivan IV, Razin and Pugachev, all supporters of the Old Rites, who were praised. The free commune was dead, as was the popular monarchy. Instead, landlordism and bureaucracy was the “new Order” in Russia. The fact that the church had to “recommend” “regular soborny” shows to what extent the principles of truly traditional church governance had been abandoned.

The state too was unrecognizable. In the Petrograd era the state was less and less a monarchy than a bureaucratic status quo, a reality mocked and satirized by such diverse figures as Herzen, Gogol and Dostoyevskii. To use older Russian categories to describe the “19th century Russian monarchy” are hopelessly anachronistic, since the bureaucracy of the Enlightenment had run Russia from Catherine II to Nicholas II. The tsars were isolated and unworkably uninformed about the peasants and the church. This was typified in the state’s attitude towards World War I, where the deaths of 4 million Russian boys, the flower of that generation, did not phase the state until “total victory” was won. The same might be said about the war with Japan, where another million Russian soldiers and sailors died for a cause only a handful of historians can even speculate about. The huge strikes that came out of this war showed the bankruptcy of the system, the system that traded its medieval birthright for the pottage of the Enlightenment and European prestige. The Bolsheviks, given all the ammunition they needed, took advantage and forced the creation of yet anther bloody civil war.

The reality is that Nicholas II abdicated not from any conspiracy (though several existed), but because millions of Russians had died on the battle field. Russia had no interest in entering World War I. Though hindsight is often unfair, once it became clear that Russia was losing millions, rather than the thousands that were expected, Nicholas did not attempt to extricate himself from the war, placing troops only on the border. If such a policy was adopted, Germany would have immediately recognized Russian territorial integrity, due to its interest in removing men from the eastern front, propping up the decrepit Austrians, and sending them to the western front. Instead, royal policy was to watch while the cream of their manhood was eliminated on the battlefield, giving the revolutionaries all the rope to hang the crown with. Furthermore, the completely uncanonical manipulation of bishops and dioceses of the empire by Rasputin and Alexandra further alienated the loyal elements of the population from the crown. By the start of the civil war, both red and white armies were basically anti-royalist: the reds being communists and the whites being defenders of the Provisional state. Legitimate government in Russia was rendered impossible, the state was going to be usurped no matter who won.

Ultimately, the peasants were ignored, as always. Little was done to alleviate their condition, and their loyalty was taken for granted. In 1905, this could no longer hold. The main prop of the tsar’s peasant policy was Alexander III’s land bank, which definitely assisted many peasants. Nevertheless, the bulk of this class was either covert or overt Old Believers, and sought a free commune and a popular monarchy in Moscow. It was in the folk poetry that this mentality saw its only real expression. Taxes were low because of the exploitation of Ukraine. The currency was taken out of the hands of Nicholas by French bankers, who helped bankroll Russia while it became the primary investor and prime mover of Russian industry. By 1912, the majority of industry in Russia was owned by foreigners. Russia was deep in debt by World War I, and an argument can be made that Nicholas was forced to send millions to their deaths because they were fighting for French favor and French loans, not for Russia. Slowly, as the war wore on, even the right-wing was contemplating a coup against Nicholas.

The world of Old Russia was democratic in the best form. It was represented by strong local autonomy, in both ecclesiastical spheres, urban democracy, and the local worker’s artel. The state had no bureaucracy to speak of, and, at the parish level, priests were elected by the people and trained at local monasteries. The “absolutism” of Petrinism was borrowed from modern France and Austria, and has no place in Russian life. It was this radical disconnect of state, church and people that led to the destruction of 1905-6, and the destruction of World War I. All told, the bumbling Romanovs policies cost Russia 6 million lives, not including the civil war. While it is true that Nicholas’ death was martyric, it remains the case that his position was as much the fault of the state he inherited as any conspiracy against the crown.

Serfdom may have had some justification if, and only if, the nobility was placed under the same disabilities. Unfortunately, the ukaz of Catherine II freed them from this service. This left an indolent and indebted nobility, now increasingly made obsolete in their turn by the new Petrograd service chinoviki. Life was, for the upper classes, a constant struggle for prestige, and that prestige was solely to be found, not in the ancient piety, not in the soil, but getting a “generalship” at Petrograd. This left the Old Ritualists to take up the slack in merchant quarters, and it was only through this that the Old Ritual continued to propagate its ideas in a decadent ad quasi-orthodox Russia. By the beginning of the 20th century, Petrograd has ceased to be Orthodox, with spiritualism, Masonry and Kabbalah being the dominant creed of the upper classes.

For their part, the Old Faith had long predicted this. They predicted the expense incurred by Europeanization. They decried the foreign control over the army, making it into a modern fighting force for the New Age, the age where war casualties were counted in the millions rather than hundreds. After Peter, the Russian state was a monster, part German, part Swedish, part byzantine, part Roman, part Russian, with no real integral vision of government or society. The Old Faith and the Populists were the only groups in 19th century Russia with a vision of a decentralized Orthodox state, with local and village autonomy, with strict autonomy for the regions. Since th Russian economy was based 1) on foreign loans and 2) Ukrainian exploitation, the hands of Nicholas were tied. He inherited a monster and he was forced to ride it. He failed. Nicholas was a man of good intentions. He sought a final rapprochement with the peasants, and agreed with Stolypin that a strong cadre of peasant proprietors could save Russia. Nevertheless, these reforms were too little, too late, and World War I scuttled all of them.

Only the Priestly Old Faith functioned in a strictly canonical sense. Only they had a fully canonical hierarchy, elected according to the old methods and ruling in only a relative sense. In 1899, the Patriarchy of Constantinople gave +Amvrosii permission to consecrate bishops for the Old Faith, and the single handed consecration was permitted explicitly. The Old Ritual maintained a canonical hierarchy because they were properly elected without political interference and they remained at their sees, where in the Nikonian church, bishops were only given sees for a few years, shuffled around afterwards. According to Procurator Pobedonostyev, they were only permitted at their sees for a few years because they could not develop emotional attachments to their sees. This is the real reason why the great St. Theofan the Recluse retired from public life.

The reality of the Russian monarchy, and any attempt to fuse the bishops of the faith with the bureaucratic state (this is different from the dilettantish “church/state” issue), is that the patronage of worldly power is a double edge sword. While cooperation with the state often meant that the Orthodox life was favored, more often than not, it was attacked. The Byzantine state sided, at one time or another, with every heresy that the ecumenical synods later condemned. Many of the martyrs of Orthodoxy come from these very “Christian” states themselves. The state cares only about manipulation and the extension of its power. No state, in the modern sense, has ever cared about anything else. Hence, when high ranking prelates hitch their wagons to this Sirius star, disaster awaits, for the one thing they end up losing is their souls. Christian monarchy is not a state in the modern sense, it is not a collection of “rationalized” bureaucratic offices, all mystification aside. Rulership in the Christian world takes on iconic implications, rather than openly coercive ones. The apostles did not establish bureaucracies; the prophets were lone holy men attacking these very structures that have come to typify modernity. Ultimately, it is the local community, united in asceticism, that provides the grace and the office to their social betters. It is sobornopravanist’ at its very best: the communal and local organization of the church, which is the cellular structure of Orthodoxy.

In this age, the church is increasingly reliant on the tiny house chapel, the small skete and the local brotherhood. The larger bureaucratic organizations have all bowed before anti-Christ for the perpetuation of their positions and perks: academic recognition, global travel, substantial incomes, slick publications and access to international offices. What is left is the strict Old calendarists, hated by the world, driven underground, slandered and often, physically attacked by those who preach “ecumenical love” with the diabolical Janus double-talk of the Lodges. And yet, Christ promised us nothing less.