THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION Vladimir Moss Copyright © Vladimir Moss, 2008 Thus saith the Lord God: Remove the turban, and take off the crown; things shall not remain as they are; exalt that which is low, and abase that which is high. A ruin, ruin, ruin I will make it; there shall not be even a trace of it until he comes whose right it is; and to him I will give it. Ezekiel 21.26-27 2 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................5 I. THE THRESHOLD OF HEAVEN .......................................................................11 Tsar Nicholas II and the Collective Antichrist ..............................................11 The Sarov Days ....................................................................................................19 Peasant Russia ......................................................................................................21 Radical Russia ......................................................................................................31 The Roots of the Revolution..............................................................................40 Ferment in the Russian Church ........................................................................44 St. John of Kronstadt and Lev Tolstoy.............................................................47 Monasticism and Ecumenism............................................................................50 The New Theology ..............................................................................................56 The Nationalities Policy .....................................................................................59 The Jewish Question ...........................................................................................72 Unrest in the Army ..............................................................................................79 The Russo-Japanese War ....................................................................................82 The Role of the Press...........................................................................................89 Towards the Reestablishment of Symphony .................................................92 Bloody Sunday .....................................................................................................96 The October Manifesto .....................................................................................101 The 1905 Revolution..........................................................................................104 The Religion of Leninism ................................................................................115 The Pre-Conciliar Convention ........................................................................118 Georgian Autocephaly ......................................................................................120 The Counter-Revolution...................................................................................124 Archbishop Anthony (Khrapovitsky)............................................................126 The Stolypin Reforms .......................................................................................135 The Struggle against Rasputin ........................................................................139 The Bosnian Crisis.............................................................................................148 The Young Turks ...............................................................................................151 The Balkan Wars and Albanian Statehood...................................................155 The Beilis Trial ...................................................................................................162 The Name-Worshipping Heresy .....................................................................164 German Nationalism.........................................................................................170 Sarajevo, 1914......................................................................................................177 Russia and Serbia ..............................................................................................182 The First World War ..........................................................................................187 The Actors of the Revolution: (1) The Jews ..................................................190 The Actors of the Revolution: (2) The Freemasons .....................................195 The Actors of the Revolution: (3) The Christians........................................201 On the Eve of Victory........................................................................................203 The Case for the Monarchy..............................................................................206 The Plot ................................................................................................................210 The February Revolution .................................................................................218 The Abdication of the Tsar ..............................................................................223 The Church and the Revolution......................................................................239 3 4 INTRODUCTION We have no king, because we feared not the Lord. Hosea 10.3. “Terrible and mysterious,” wrote Metropolitan Anastasy, second leader of the Russian Church Abroad, “is the dark visage of the revolution. Viewed from the vantage point of its inner essence, it is not contained within the framework of history and cannot be studied on the same level as other historical facts. In its deepest roots it transcends the boundaries of space and time, as was determined by Gustave le Bon, who considered it an irrational phenomenon in which certain mystical, supernatural powers were at work. But what before may have been considered dubious became completely obvious after the Russian Revolution. In it everyone sensed, as one contemporary writer expressed himself, the critical incarnation of absolute evil in the temper of man; in other words, the participation of the devil – that father of lies and ancient enemy of God, who tries to make man his obedient weapon against God – was clearly revealed.”1 “The critical incarnation of absolute evil in the temper of man”, “not contained within the framework of history”: such a description of the Russian revolution would seem to discourage any historical, as opposed to theological, study. The bitterest of all the fruits of the world war was the Russian revolution… Now the roots of the Russian, as of the French, revolution have usually been seen in lack of freedom, economic poverty and social inequality. Poverty and inequality, of course, existed. But they were not markedly worse in the period before the revolution than in previous ages - in fact, most people were richer. As for freedom, it is a paradoxical but true fact that Russia in the last decades before the revolution was one of the freest countries in the world. Thus Duma deputy Baron A.D. Meyendorff admitted: “The Russian Empire was the most democratic monarchy in the world”. 2 This view was echoed by foreign observers, such as Sir Maurice Baring: “There is no country in the world, where the individual enjoys so great a measure of personal liberty, where the ‘liberté de moeurs’ is so great, as in Russia; where the individual man can do as he pleases with so little interference or criticism on the part of his neighbours, where there is so little moral censorship, where liberty of abstract thought or aesthetic production is so great.”3 1 Metropolitan Anastasius, Besedy so svoim sobstvennym serdtsem (Conversations with my own Heart), Jordanville, 1948, p. 123 ®; translated in Living Orthodoxy, № 101, vol. XVII, September-October, 1996, p. 9. 2 Lebedev, op. cit., p. 405. 3 Baring, in Eugene Lyons, Our Secret Allies, 1953. 5 Looking deeper, we may see the roots of the revolution in “the mystery of iniquity” foretold to reach fruition in the last times, the mystery of satanic rebellion against the order established in Church and State by God, which arises from within the People of God. In the early nineteenth century Joseph de Maistre wrote: “There have always been some forms of religion in the world and wicked men who opposed them. Impiety was always a crime, too… But only in the bosom of the true religion can there be real impiety… Impiety has never produced in times past the evils which it has brought forth in our day, for its guilt is always directly proportional to the enlightenment which surrounds it… Although impious men have always existed, there never was before the eighteenth century, and in the heart of Christendom, an insurrection against God.” 4 De Maistre was speaking, of course, about the French revolution, and for him the true religion was Catholicism. However, we know that Catholicism is only a heresy and schism from the true religion – Orthodox Christianity. It is therefore to the insurrection against God within the heart of Orthodox Christianity – that is, to the Russian revolution – that we must look for the summit of evil that the world has yet seen – always excepting, of course, the killing of God Himself by the Jews. The crime was the worse in that Tsar Nicholas was probably the most genuine Christian that has ever sat upon a Christian throne. Not only did he not exploit his people in any way: he brought them immeasurable benefits, both spiritual and material, building churches, canonizing saints, spreading the truth faith,