*Editor’s note: This is not an endorsement of Lyndon H. LaRouche. Jr. or his publication Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).

By Lyndon LaRouche Jr.
June 14, 1983 Anno Domini

Early Russia was a group of Slavic subjects under rule of marauding Normans, and a persisting, endemic military nuis­ance to Byzantium. One of the counter-measures Constanti­nople deployed in the effort to bring these tribes under control was the manufacture of synthetic forms of nominal Christi­anity. According to a more or less credible account, the nominal conversion of a ruler of Kiev, Vladimir, in 988 A.D., brought Kiev Rus under more or less efficient control of Byzantium. The culture of Russia is “genetically ” Byzan­tine to the present day.

Authoritative accounts show that the particular form of Gnostic pseudo-Christianity cooked up for the Russians was manufactured by Hesychastic cults then based at the “Holy Mountain” complex of monasteries in the region of Greece known since ancient times as Mount Athos. [The Hesy­chasts, who have been hegemonic in the Russian Orthodox Church since the 14th century, taught that union with God could only be achieved by complete withdrawal from the world. Their practice included meditating in a bent-over po­sition contemplating their navels and hyperventilating to achieve the appropriate mental state.] The pagan-religious matrix used for this concoction is the most easily recognized by classical scholars as the “Great Mother” cult, of the type associated with Cybele and Dionysius—or with an early form of the Isis-Ishtar cult, the Shakti-Siva phallus cult of pre­ Vedic India. It is of the same general character as the “blood and soil” cult adopted by the Nazis.

The cult is an “earth-goddess” cult of worship of the Holy Soil of Mother Russia, and the collective will of the Russian people as an expression of a population sprung from this Holy Soil. This sort of pagan belief has had nasty consequences wherever it has occurred. It depicts mankind as a “child of nature” in approximately the same terms of reference as did Hesiod; today, we should term it radically Malthusian. What the Hesychasts superimposed upon this was their own con­templative mysticism.

The first recorded inklings of the appearance of the “Third Rome” prophecy appeared in Russia, according to EIR re­searchers, in the aftermath of the ecumenical Council of Florence (1439 A.D.), to which the Russian Orthodox Church responded with hateful rejection of the unification, denounc­ing both Roman Catholicism and Paleologue Constantinople. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the tendency toward a “Third Rome” doctrine by the Russian Orthodox Church increased, and the first explicit form of the prophecy that the Caesar (Czar) of Holy Rus would rule the Third and Final Roman Empire appeared in 1510, sweeping through Russia during the 16th century.

The title of “Czar” first appeared with the second period of the reign of Ivan IV (“The Terrible “), and was resumed on the orders of the Russian Orthodox Church with the creation of the Romanov dynasty.

Czar Peter I attempted to rid Russia of these Byzantine cults in the process of his ” Westernizing ” of Russia. As Czar, he could control the hierarchy of the Church, but not the hordes of Old Believers (Raskol’niki), who have continued to haunt Russia’s modernizing efforts to the present day (in one guise or the other). The revival of serfdom under Eliza­beth and Catharine, and the unleashing of the Pan-Slavic movement by the Venetian agent-of-influence, Prince Po­temkin, destroyed the greater part of Peter’s accomplish­ments.The fresh, large-scale work of Westenizing, by Czar Alexander II, was slowed by his assassination, and went up in flames in the 1905 Revolution.

Exemplary of the Mother Russia cult’s impact during the 19th century are Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, the Nihilists, the Russian Populists, the Pan-Slavic resurgencies, and much of the strata which went into the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.

The period of invasions and civil wars after 1917, the virtual civil war of the collectivization, the cordon sanitaire against Bolshevik Russia during the 1920s, the crisis of the Great Purges of the 1930s, the devastation of the new World War, and the postwar environment past the death of Stalin, not only cut Russia off from healthy Westernizing influences, but strengthened the adversary environment reinforcing Rus­sian xenophobia.

The reality, that churches and large sections of the pop­ulation had aided the Nazi invasion, impelled Stalin to make a pact with the Church, at the Moscow Cathedral of St. Basil’s, in 1943. Although the Church hierarchy (such as it was) had been integrated into the Soviet secret-police appa­ratus since 1927-28, Stalin’s program, from 1943 onward, made the Church and the symbology of the Mother Russia cult an instrument of state policy in a new way. From that point on, the war became a “Great Patriotic War” fought against the German transgressor of the soil of Mother Russia.

During the immediate postwar period, Stalin made the first overt effort to exploit the Third Rome mythology, by an effort to move the Patriarch of Constantinople to Moscow,­ an attempt blocked by strenuous efforts of President Harry Truman. On the surface, at least, it appears that this trend was opposed under Khrushchev, although EIR is not yet prepared to offer judgment on this period.

Over the middle 1960s, recognizably “Marxist” philos­ophy lost efficient grip in the shaping of Soviet policies, except as part of the institutions left over from preceding periods. Pragmatism took over, and it appears that the Rus­sian Church began to accelerate its influence over the popu­lation. By 1972, the drift toward a Third Rome policy-para­digm in Soviet foreign policy was sufficiently evident, that the author and his associates elaborated and published a re­view of these features of “detente”, which we entitled “The New Constantinople” hypothesis. During the 1970s, the in­fluence of the Church accelerated, together with increasing relative emphasis on the “cover” of the Church in foreign operations.

We of EIR do not believe that it is the KGB’s hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church which has caused the resurgence of the Old Russia mysticism within the Russian population. Rather, the Church has provided a religious form of socialized political expression for a deep, resurgent By­zantine mysticism transmitted from generation to generation over more than a thousand years. What Church officials of the KGB hierarchy represent as a base today is a portion of the population substantially more than double the numbers of the Soviet Communist Party.

Under the conditions shaped by the back-channel nego­tiations since 1957, this organized expression of the old Mother Russia culture not only increased its significance as a political force but, under conditions produced by back-channel oper­ations, forced the resurgence of Mother Russia ideology into the direction of reviving the Third Rome ideology as well.

Excerpted from Yuri Andropov: ‘Czar of Holy Mother Russia’?

By Timothy Fitzpatrick
Dec. 5, 2018 Anno Domini

As a second response to Father Michael Ruskin’s comments regarding my open letter The Russia Deception of Western Nationalists and the Church, let me start off by saying that Pat Buchanan is no competent analyst of geo-political affairs.

He has demonstrated this repeatedly, whether it’s ignoring the International Jewish elephant in the room or falling for long-range Soviet deceptions like Perestroika and Glasnost. His is nothing more than kosher konservatism in the spirit of Lenin’s Soviet Trust “monarchist” leagues honeypots.

Father Ruskin quotes Buchanan, “…Russia’s regime is no longer Communist. The ideology that drove its imperialism is dead.”

OK, Pat, I’ll agree with your first statement, partially. Sure, Russia is no longer “Communist”. It’s actually far worse than 1940s communist USSR, because now it uses far more sophisticated psychological propaganda (like hypernormalization) and has the technology to enforce it in a beyond-Orwellian fashion. Therefore, it’s a hybridized communism that appears democratic, as Golitsyn repeatedly warned us (Has Buchanan ever even read Golitsyn’s work?) As for his second statement, where does he conjure up that the ideology behind its imperialism is dead? Clearly, Buchanan, like most of the Western world, has fallen for the Perestroika Deception. Pat must have a miniature replica of the broken Berlin Wall on his mantlepiece. News for you, Pat. That was a staged incident designed to legitimize one of the greatest deceptions of our time.

“‘Perestroika’ is a great trap of the dark powers. They are preparing something new and more terrible. Russia is standing on the threshold of the Antichrist.” —Hieroconfessor Archimandrite Nektary (Chernobyl)

Someone please tell Buchanan that his failed 1980s analytical template is long due for an overhaul. Or perhaps he has no template but is just taking orders from the Soviet-infested establishment Right. Is he not also a diehard supporter of Jewish-Russian-controlled Trump, the biggest fake conservative  on the planet?

As for God’s work in Russia, we know that it’s taking place regardless of the Soviet-led Moscow Patriarchate and fake Christian Putin. That is what St. Tikhon’s Catacomb Church system was all about—keeping the true faith alive amongst the state-sanctioned presence of the anti-Christ Moscow Patriarchate. This is another area where it appears Buchanan, a so called Catholic, has no clue. If you want to understand the Eastern geo-political situation, you have to know about the complex Church history there, which includes the Catacomb Church or the Russian Church Abroad (colloquially known as ROCOR).

St. Philaret of New York addressed the situation thus:

“And here is something to which I would like to draw your attention to – something about which very many do not think about. Father Archimandrite Constantine, whom probably many of you know, the reposed editor of the journal “Orthodox Rus’”, a profound Christian mind, considered that the most terrible among all the achievements of the communists was that the communists created their own false-church, a soviet church which they shoved onto the unfortunate people in place of the genuine Church which went underground into the catacombs. Do not think that I am exaggerating or that Father Constantine was exaggerating!”

Regarding Father Ruskin’s acceptance of Putin’s mere words, Putin can trash talk communism all he wants. Talk is cheap. It means nothing to those who can see what is really taking place. Putin talks out both sides of his mouth, like all politicians do. They are all liars and deceivers.

“Russia is allowing for Christianity to affect the nation’s conscience,” Ruskin said.

The Kremlin is allowing a bastardized form of Orthodox Christianity to affect the nation’s cohesion…for the sake of geo-political strategy…and demoralization. This is also why homosexuality and feminism are restricted in Russia—not because they are immoral but because they have a detrimental effect on national unity and military camaraderie. In short, the crypto-Communists in Russia are using the vestiges of church and morality as a means to an end (Golitsyn also predicted this)—to foment their national Bolshevik aspirations, which will then be used to lead a Eurasianist world empire.

Ruskin goes on to question how I can condemn Russia while the West legislates overtly anti-God laws. Further to what I stated in the previous paragraph, it turns out that Russia actually has validated its first gay marriage. As far as the Vatican II conciliar Church and the Anglican Church are concerned, who do you think it is that is “dialoguing” with said homosexualized churches? None other than Tobacco Metropolitan Kirill and his Soviet Moscow Patriarchate.

“What does the claim Russia is deceiving Christians in the West actually mean? It’s a nothing-burger,” Ruskin writes.

How is it a nothing burger when it appears that most Western conservatives and Christians are so deceived about Putinist Russia that they would seemingly support a full-scale Russian invasion of America and the “evil” West? These sheep are now flocking to Russia in hopes of finding a white, Christian paradise. Good luck in multi-cultural Sharia Russia. They will be disappointed. Hopefully, those expats already living there have realized that Russia is not the land of milk and honey they thought it would be.

There is no reason to believe that either Kirill or Putin have repented of communism. For every seemingly anti-communist rhetorical statement from either of the two, I could find ten pro-communist statements and pro-communist manoeuvres. Don’t let confirmation bias convince you otherwise.

As for Soviet-infiltrated NATO, former Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen recently began working for a Russia-affiliated bank. Why, the current NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has a KGB past! It’s pretty obvious now that NATO is completely useless in terms of its original purpose. Why would NATO need to overthrow Ukraine’s so called president when NATO and the globalists are pursuing the same goals? It’s all theatre now, to make is think we have a choice and stand on one side. Pretty much every world power is in cahoots with all the others. That’s how the game works now. Nation states are long over. Now it is merely the world state, with the odd scuffle over who gets to lead it. Seeing as Russia was the pioneer of communism, it feels that it has the right to lead the world communist government that is forming before our eyes.

Tell me, how do you know Poroshenko is a CIA asset? The only source I have seen for this claim is Russian mainstream media, which has a long history of blaming their crimes on the West and its intelligence establishment. I am not saying he isn’t an asset, but we shouldn’t assume that the Russian mainstream media is telling us the truth. And the alternative media is no better, as it is generally pro-Russia and infiltrated by Russian trolls.

Ruskin said, “Putin merely helped the people of Crimea defend themselves against that overthrow.”

How do you know this? Again, it appears this is just regurgitated rhetoric from Kremlin state-controlled mainstream media. The same people are telling us that the Holodomor never happened and that Stalin was much nicer to prisoners than we are led to believe.

“Finally, you posted a picture of a Communist, perhaps from the 1930’s, secreted in a church and snaring a Russian civilian who was outside. The unfair implication is that this is happening now. Would it be any more truthful if you had shown another picture of a paedophile priest inside a Roman Catholic church, busily snaring a child who was in the vicinity? I think not.”

First of all, I am not Catholic. If you read under that picture, I wrote a description of that Soviet propaganda art suggesting it has dual meaning. On the one hand, the Soviets are saying that Christianity is a snare for the gullible.
On the other hand, they could be admitting, cryptically, that their Soviet-controlled Moscow Patriarchate is really the snare. Remember, Satanists have a history of bragging about their crimes in plain sight (it’s called “revelation of the method”). This macabre twist serves to demoralize the victim and empower the Satanists.

It’s important to realize that part of the Leninist strategy is to gain the trust and participation of nationalists and Western conservatives. To achieve this, the communists have to pretend to be nationalists and conservatives. That’s where we are today and one of the reasons Trump was selected by the establishment as president. He is a Judas Goat type rounding up all resisters to the NWO world takeover and there to discredit the last shred of credibility the Right had. What’s more, he was sent in to divide the populist. Divide and conquer.