Ukrainian nationalism is a varied and unstable entity. The so-called “Greek Catholic” Uniats, while remaining the most national-minded of all Ukrainians, have the rather dubious background of being subservient to a foreign power, the equally unstable novus ordo papacy. Their origin is to be found, not merely at the behest of the Polish army in 1595-6, but, importantly, in the schools of Vienna, who fostered a brand of Ukrainian nationalism that was non-Orthodox and hence, anti-Moscow. The Austrian state created a “Ukrainian consciousness” foreign to that of the Ukrainian Orthodox and its Cossack witness. They sought to create a “nationalism” that can be used as a weapon against Russia rather than a legitimate nationalism that sought to create a unified identity out of what was best in Ukrainian culture, and there is much of this. This is the real reason why the Tsars could not countenance it. But this brand of nationalism, ironic as it is, is one that is shrill and dominant in the western diaspora. It is a distortion, and unrepresentative of both Ukrainian history and a true and rational Ukrainian nationalism. Ukrainian nationalism, especially in the diaspora, is a shrill, neo-conservative reaction to the occupation of Ukraine by the radically multi-national USSR. Today, oil firms and the American republic party seek to weaken Russia by the appeal to this distorted form of Ukrainian nationalism.

There is a brand of Ukrainian nationalism that is healthy and solid, and that derives from the legitimate Patriarchate of the late and venerable Patriarchs +Mystyslav and +Volodymyr of Kiev, itself stemming from the Old Rite Cossack communities that helped define Ukrainian Orthodoxy. Both of these men derive their orders, not from the “dead hand” synod of 1921 (so beloved of the fraudulent “UAOC” In America, connected to Sen. John McCain), but from the creation of the Polish Orthodox church under the Venerable +Dionysii of Poland. Unfortunately the criminal “Filaret,” so called “patriarch of Kiev” has taken over this movement and twisted it into ecumenical and pro-Uniate and pro-Roman faction, far more of a political than a religious entity. It is likely that Filaret had the legitimate Patriarch +Volodymyr murdered, and that patriarch was actually concerned with the power, wealth and aggression the KGB hack was developing behind the scenes. The fall of the Kievan patriarchate is a sordid story, one that benefitted only the Vatican and Ukraine’s enemies. The anti-patriarch Filaret, in an interview, said his primary theological priority was “to secure the independence of Ukraine.” For the record, the current “patriarch of Kiev” was anathematized and defrocked by the Venerable +Mystyslav, and is no bishop in the Orthodox church. The Milan Synod remains the only canonical part of the old Patriarchate left in the world.

But despite the divisions in Ukraine, there remains a kernel of truth within the nationalist movement. The Ukrainian church is a separate part of Orthodoxy, and should be treated as such. The trouble and division that the fallen patriarchy of Moscow (Nikonian MP) has caused in Ukraine is incalculable, and the sins of that patriarchy reach far beyond the destruction of the church in the Soviet era, but the destruction of two churches, that of Moscow and that of Kiev. The Soviet patriarchate, currently under the execrable ecumenist, billionaire capitalist, materialist, and pro-USSR activist Cyrill, seeks to impose a unity on Ukraine that will lead the UAOC to “world Orthodoxy,” which is at root the branch office of the WCC in the east. The proof that the Nikonian Church of Russia had no interest in Orthodoxy other than that which served their political interests in their repression and destruction of Orthodoxy in Ukraine, and also the Old Rite. Orthodoxy in the Petrine era meant solely the political interests of the Russian state, Orthodoxy was a tool and a tool only.

There can be no question that the Ukrainian idea is radically separate from the Russian, as the Old Rite is from the Nikonian. It is not better or worse, but it is different, and reflects the radically different course of Ukrainian history through the formation of Halich-Volhynian principality, to the unfortunate consequences of centuries of Polish and Austrian domination. The Tsars, afraid of Austrian influence in Ukraine, anathematized Ukrainian nationalism, and as such, destroyed whatever legitimacy they had gained in their own wars against Poland. Like the war against the Old Believers, the Petrine approach to politics was ham handed and violent. The Tsars would have been better served by sponsoring and controlling a truly Orthodox Ukrainian movement, rather than suppressing Ukrainian literature, this making it, ipso facto, a subversive doctrine. The Nikonian tsars dug their own grave by reducing the church to an appendage of the state after the suppression of the patriarchate, a patriarchate never to be revived until recent years, when the Old Rite elected +Alexander and restored the ancient patriarchate.

The Muscovite destruction of most of the Old Belief forces the historian to reconsider that country’s dedication to Orthodoxy. The Muscovite Tsars, for all their good, committed many sins against traditional Orthodoxy, and their purported successors, the rump-ROCOR(MP), continue in this course. Both the Orthodox churches of Kiev and the Old Rite, or the genuine Russian rite, were violently suppressed by the Muscovite church, a church that, under Peter and Catherine, was demolishing its monasteries and rewriting its own history and tradition. Western music and icons took over the Muscovite consciousness and a faux-Roman pagan architecture took hold of Peter and his successors. The fact remains that True Orthodoxy did not develop as a response to ecumenism (though that is evil enough), but began its long career for an independent Ukrainian and Old Rite church, churches based on sobornost, while the Petrogradian sect was based on bureaucratic control, a control that cannot be denied by even the most ardent supporter of that system. The two movements, that of Ukrainian autonomy as well as the Old Belief, truth be told, flourished in Ukraine. Both the Old Rite and the Ukrainian church were peasant and agrarian, while the Petrogradian became that of the urban an bureaucratic nobility.

The ROCOR developed as a reaction against the Bolshevik revolution by members of the Russian nobility. Here were laid the seeds of its eventual decimation. It was a class movement as well as a religious one, and their religion was of the noble and bureaucratic sort. Hence, the Ukrainian and Old Rite churches could never make peace with a haughty and noble-dominated exile Russian institution. Their class basis doomed the ROCOR to irrelevance. Today, the ROCOR contains a tiny fraction of its original organization in the 1930s and 40s and its current legitimacy is based on its being part of the Masonic Phanar and its hangers on. It is a shell of its former self, where self-righteousness and that old noble haughtiness and condescension masquerade as “canonical regularity.” The ROCOR was an is a class based institution, and hence, contained, like the 18th century tsardom it is based on, the seeds of its own destruction.

The Ukrainian autocephalous movement and that of the Old Rite are similar in many ways. Though beginning from two different points–ancient Kiev and Halych on the one hand, and Josephite Russia, on the other–they merged into a single True Orthodox movement. Today, we have the happy addition of the True Orthodox Church of Russia under Metropolitan +Valentine of Suzdal, have maintained the truly canonical, i.e. traditional, form of Orthodoxy in Russia itself. The Catacomb church of Russia learned a great deal from the Old Rite, and operated underground by adopting the identical strategies of survival that their forebears forced on the Old Rite.

The Old Rite found fertile soil in Ukraine, as they both sought the reclamation of pre-Petrine tradition. True Russia is Old Russia, the Russia prior to Peter and his bureaucratic reforms imposed on the country in a revolution just as violent as the one in 1921. Both used folktales and folkmusic as a sacred art, and both retained the ancient art of iconography. Both saw ancient Kiev and early Russia as the archetype of the Orthodox life. Both viewed the memory of the people, particularly the village elders, as the respsitory of wisdom, and both openly subscribed to the idea of sobornopravan,’ or the popular control over church property and the election of priests and bishops. The noble-based ROCOR retains the top-down bureaucratic system of the Petrine era, an era, given their vague political pretensions, they are not free to reject, though the church suffered tremendous indignity and attack in the 18th century Russia. Both were opposed to increasingly Muscovite/Petrogradian centralization over both chruch and state, broken only by the Old Rite movement and the Optina movement of St. Paisii and the rediscovery of the hesychastic struggle. Keep in mind that monasticism in the Petrine era, that prior to OPtina, was purely ideo-rhythmic, and cells were bought by monks, not given. Optina and Sarov, following the lead of St. Paisii, resurrected a moribund and state-controlled church. It is not hard to go from the Old Rite to Ukrainian nationalism, but it is a form of nationalism that demands that all ethnic groups remain on their historical ethnic territory and not seek to expand at the expense of others. That is the nationalism of both Ukraine and the Muscovite Old Ritual.

Hence, in the 18th and much of the 19th century, healthy Orthodoxy existed mainly in the Old Rite and the underground Ukrainian movement. This is because the state in the Petrograd era was openly hostile to the an ancient tradition, and sought “enlightenment” by the development of a central state regime, rejected by both the peasant commune, the Cossacks, the Ukrainian church and the Old Rite. This is far from condemning Russian Orthodoxy as such, of course, but it is an open condemnation of the Petrine state and its relation to the church. Petrinism sought the destruction of the old ways and the Europeanization of society. It sought the eradication of the national and ethnic ideal in Orthodoxy, and the creation of an “official” creed. Nicholas I rejected the Greek independence movement because it was anti-legitimist and pro-nationalist. For him, Turkey was the legitimate sovereign of the Balkans. This is the result of true Petrinism, the veneration of the bureaucracy and the imposition of a oligarchic, top-down approach to government, both ecclesial and civil. Medieval monarchy is superior to the modern version because the latter was based, for all its flaws, on personal loyalty and the council of warrior nobles and the church. The latter, while it purports to organized all control to itself, it actually disperses it into any number of alienated, urban bureaucratic centers where, then as now, promotion is based on patronage.

Ukraine retains an identity different from that of Moscow and the north in general. Ukraine is the successor of Old Kiev and Halych, while Moscow is the sucessor of Andrew of Suzdal and the centralist movement deriving from Vladimir and Moscow as Russia threw off the Mongol yoke. The destruction of Kiev at the hands of Andrew was an attempt to destroy Kiev’s memory, not to take it for himself. The destruction of Kiev, as told by wittnesses, was identical to the Crusader’s attack on the Holy City in 1204: the city was torched, its treasures, secular and religious, were either destroyed and stolen, taken to the northern part of the land. Andrew and Yuri’s movement was to destroy, not to take over, Kiev. The fact remains that Andrew’s entourage from Vladimir was considered “foreign” and “not of Rus” by the local Kevian population, and Andrew’s movement south was multi-ethnic, rather than purely Slavic, in character. He helped create a new civilization that was to end up in the violence and arrogance of St. Petersburg, while the Kievan and Old Rite destiny was underground, in the forests, the Cossack hetmanate, and suffering under Polish control. The north was to fall to the Mongols, the south, to the Poles. Russia, True Rus, was to survive precariously in the swamps, forests, bandit gangs, various Cossack hetmanates, and in exile though must of Russia’s history.

The older notion that the Kievites moved north and eventually became absorbed by the north is false. There was no “north” for the Kievites to move, the Tartars had destroyed it. There was nothing to move to. Instead the Novgorodian and later Lithuanian and Belarusian territory was the destination of Old Kiev. An entirely new tradition was to develop from Andrew of Suzdal onward, one multiethnic, with a church whose primary function was to assist in the administration of state affairs. From the historical point of view, the move was towards the strong and large kingdom of Halych-Voliynya rather than towards Suzdal. Daniel and Roman were the successors to Yaroslav, not Simeon and Ivan Kalita. Or, if they are all considered successors, than the destiny of the north was radically different from that of the south, ultimately creating two ethnic groups with different ways of life, but united by the Orthodox faith, at least until Peter.

The entire period from 1140, the reign of Volodimirko to the death of Daniel was developing the Halichnyan state as an alternative to both Suzdal and Moscow, and as against the development of the early Polish state, predatory and papal in its orientation. It was the destination of the Kievan tradition, though soon to be absorbed into the new Lithuanian commonwealth. This was done at the same time the Muscovite princes were forces to present themselves to Sarai, and had become the chief tax collectors of the Mongol hordes. Moscow, though no fault of its own, developed in this context. Hence, a very different political traditions developed than what was to develop in the south, within Lithuania and the Cossack host. One cannot deny that there are two different Slavic civilizations here, though neither civilization was freely involved in the development of its destiny. Destiny rather, was placed upon it, and for true Orthodoxy, that destiny was one of near constant suffering.

Russia’s economic boom in the late 19th century was based on the exploitation of Ukraine. In my earlier writings I had attributed this to the talent of the Russian Tsars, but my view has softened as of late. All railroads in Ukraine were built to move north, and they were meant to empty Ukraine and enrich the Petrogradian realm. Ukraine was fertile far beyond the Great Russian lands, and her mines fed Russian industry. Ukraine’s literacy was higher than in Russia, and Ukrainians played a disproportionate role in Russian history. Russia’s food and her minerals were brought from Ukraine, stripping her of the economic ability to develop a separate Orthodox civilization. The entire purpose of Peter’s extending serfdom to Ukraine after the defeat of Mazeppa (and even before) was to begin stripping her of her national treasures and resources. While Byzantium and Serbia never knew serfdom, it became the primary means whereby Baal was worshiped in Russia: Israelites were enslaved to the new gentiles. This is why Razin and Pugachev, holding the Old Rite and economic communitarianism as their standard, electrified the Orthodox peasantry, and created an uprising on the scale of a major world war. The core of the Petrogradian state was exploitation and violence. The true Orthodox of the Old Rite and Kievans was driven underground as incompatible with the new authoritarian model. Unfortunately, the ROCOR is the successor of this model, and with some notable exceptions such as Metropolitan +Philaret and Archbishop +Averky, maintain this “institutional” and “statist” model of Orthodox life.

It should be noted that the Ukrainian patriarchy not only is allied with the Old Ritualists of Bela Krinitsia (in Ukrainian speaking territory), but that Patriarch +Volodymyr accepted the Synod of +Auxentios (d. 1994) as the only legitimate Synod in Greece. Partially though his opposition to ecumenism and partially because of the True Orthodox hostility to the Moscow Patriarchate and the WCC, the Kievan patriarchy deriving from +Mystyslav supported the True Orthodox movement of Greece and, as of today, the True Orthodox Church of Russia decided to receive consecration from the remnants of that synod, now in the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church of +Mefodii. Patriarch +Volodymyr himself is a venerable New Confessor, spending 7 years in the GULAG for both his Ukrainian nationalism and his Orthodox faith. It should be noted that the Old Rite Patriarchate under +Alexander of Moscow has recently visited the Auxentian Synod of +Makarios of Greece. While the results were purely informal, the visit clearly shows that the remnants of true orthodox are joining forces: slowly but discernibly.

Hence, since the Ukrainian patriarchy recognized +Auxentios of Athens, and the remnants of the patriarchy assisted the RTOC (Vech) in its own development, the Ukrainian tradition has found its home: the leader of the anti-ecumenist and Old Ritualist movement, as well, though the absorption of the Old Catholic parishes of Poland, the western rite. All of this has been rejected by the anti-patriarch Filaret, of course. Ukraine, once the patriarchy is restored, will be in the position of leading the ethnic, national and anti-ecumenist Orthodox movement in the face of the arrogance of the WCC-tied Moscow Patriarchy of Alexei. The true confession of Orthodoxy has a bright future, once the execrable Filaret and his stooges buys the farm. Ukraine and the Old Rite will be in the forefront of unifying the Greek synods and building a truly nationalist, anti-globalist and Orthodox resistance movement worldwide.