On December 25, 1991, while the Americans were celebrating Western Christmas, the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin and the red, white and blue of Russia, which had also been Russia’s pre-revolutionary flag, was raised in its stead. “As the clock on the Kremlin’s Saviour Tower struck midnight at the turn of the New Year, 1992, the famous chimes were drowned out by the sound of fireworks. The champagne flowed and people sang; everyone believed they had a right, now, to what they had begun to call a normal life.

“What they got was hardship and uncertainty. The list of problems that the new republic faced would have challenged a far stronger and more deeply rooted regime. From environmental degradation and low productivity to the collapse of public infrastructures, the Soviet legacy was crippling enough on its own. But the new state’s headlong economic reforms added further stress, precipitating high rates of mortality and record levels of crime, hyper-inflation, and shortages of everything from food to anti-cancer drugs. The Russian Ministry of the Interior estimated that by 1993, 85 per cent of the new private banks had links to organized crime. So did almost half the country’s businesses, which was not surprising when even an honest trader could not survive without paying for protection (colloquially known as a ‘roof’) and following underworld rules. The official murder rate in Moscow increased eight-fold between 1989 and 1993; the true figure was probably blacker still. Unsurprisingly, almost no-one was prepared to gamble on the new republic’s future prosperity. The 1990s saw a massive haemorrhage of capital from Russia to safe havens such as London and New York. Since most of it was exported illegally, the figures are hard to establish, but estimates for the period 1990-1995 vary between 65 and 406 billion US dollars…”

In his State of the Union address, President Bush “referred to the implosion of the Soviet Union in a year that had seen ‘changes of almost biblical proportions,’ declared that ‘by the grace of God, America won the Cold War,’ and announced the dawning of a new world order. ‘A world once divided into two armed camps,’ Bush told the joint session of the US Senate and House of Representatives, ‘now recognizes one sole and preeminent power, the United States of America.’ The audience exploded in applause…”

For the third time in seventy-three years the United States bestrode the globe like a colossus. All three victories – those of 1918, 1945 and 1991 - can plausibly be claimed to have been victories of American democracy over one or another species of totalitarianism. But the differences between them were important. In 1918 the proto-totalitarian state of Germany had been defeated, but it had been the Europeans who had borne the main brunt of the war, while Germany herself had been neither occupied, nor purged of her totalitarian spirit, which went on to grow in fierceness under Hitler, necessitating a second world war. Moreover, a new totalitarian empire, that of Soviet Russia, had been growing with equal speed and ferocity… In 1945 America’s share in the final victory was much larger, and the demons of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were finally exorcised. But Germany’s loss had been the Soviet Union’s gain; and that empire was now at the height of its powers and more than ever dangerous, making the Cold War inevitable (the only alternative was a hot war, which thankfully was avoided). In that war, America’s share in the victory was larger still: the other western powers had contributed a much smaller share of the burden, and (with the exception of Britain) were not always faithful to the western alliance. Moreover, by 1991 none of the old totalitarian powers was left standing; only China, which had nipped the democratic virus in the bud on Tiananmen Square, appeared as a possible future rival of the all-conquering American colossus. A resurgence of Russia was arrogantly discounted. As the lawmaker Konstantin Zatulin said, “When the West thought the Cold War competition was over, they lost respect for their opponent. Now they are waking up to this again…”

But there were disturbing resemblances between 1918 and 1991. Once again, the defeated power had not been occupied, nor its totalitarian spirit exorcised. As in 1918, so in 1991, the defeated power felt that it had been “stabbed in the back”, betrayed by foreign and domestic enemies. To make things worse, it was still a nuclear power. In December, 1994 Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom signed “the Budapest Memorandum”, thereby guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine, Belarus’ and Kazakhstan in exchange for giving their nuclear weapons to Russia. This solved the problem of nuclear proliferation that had so worried the Americans. But it gave Russia still more power to blackmail its neighbours. And, as events in 2014 were to prove, Ukraine’s territorial guarantees (like Czechoslovakia’s in 1938) were not worth the paper they were written on…

Scott D. Sagan writes: “In 1947, the American diplomat George Kennan outlined a strategy for the ‘patient but firm and vigilant containment’ of the Soviet Union… He predicted that such a policy would eventually lead to ‘either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.’ He was right.”

But was he really right? The Soviet Union “mellowed” in its later years in that it killed and tortured fewer people (at home, if not abroad); but from the perspective of 2022 it is difficult to say that Sovietism has really disappeared. In fact, the evil spirit infused in it at its very foundation has not only not disappeared, but appears to have mutated into a new, but no less virulent power akin to Fascism. Nor could it be otherwise. For evil spirits do not “mellow”, nor can they be “contained” indefinitely: if they are not to break out again they must be exorcised…

This is symbolized by the failure of repeated efforts to get the central idol of the Soviet Union – the mummified body of Lenin in its pagan mausoleum – removed. In fact, the body should be not only removed, but also destroyed. For, as Demetrius Kolesnichenko wrote: "To this day the image of Lenin has a mystical link with the devil; for the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority (Revelation 13.2)... It is curious that the people's artist Shukin fell ill and died after performing the role of Lenin on the stage. Undoubtedly a demon entered into him because he shared the experiences of the image. It is not surprising that reception into the Octobrists, the Pioneers, the Komsomol, and the Party, and marriages, conferences and other Soviet enterprises are unfailingly carried out in front of the idol of the leader, and have a magical influence on the masses." These words were written thirty years ago. But today there are still many millions who worship Lenin - and the supposedly Christian government of Russia does nothing to stop it.

In the muted euphoria over 1991’s great, but incomplete and inevitably temporary triumph over evil, it was necessary to recall the words of the Apocalypse concerning the red beast: “And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wounded was healed. And all the earth marvelled and followed the beast” (Revelation 13.3).

The beast had been wounded, but it is not yet dead…

*

The Soviet Union appeared to be dead… But could “the Long War”, in Philip Bobbitt’s phrase, between democracy and totalitarianism really be over? Was there not a final battle still to be fought, whose consequences this time would surely be a nuclear holocaust wiping out most of humanity? As President Bush soberly noted, the prospects for such a war had dramatically receded, but they had not gone away completely…

They had not gone away, fundamentally, for two reasons: the wrath of God and the wrath of man. First, those still imbued with the spirit of Soviet Russia were burning to avenge its defeat in the Cold War. As “the Kremlin’s banker”, Sergei Pugachev put it: “The revolution was never complete.” “From the beginning, the security men had been laying down roots for revanche. But from the beginning, it seems, they’ve been doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.”

Secondly, because the wrath of God had not been expiated through repentance for the terrible, unprecedented sins of the Soviet period… Indeed, how could it have been expiated, when Lenin was still in his mausoleum for all to worship, when the official Church was still led by KGB “bishops”, when the patriarchate made no apologies for his church’s betraying the freedom of the Church to Stalin in 1927 and considered the barbaric victory of the Red Army in 1945 as a feast on a par with Pascha?!

There is a third reason why communism remains undefeated: because, as St. Aristoclei of Moscow (+1918) said, it is not an ideology, but an evil spirit that can only be defeated by a holy spirit. And so, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, "Before dying [communism] will yet find enough time to destroy and conquer the whole West and relish its blood. Communist ideology is. a metaphysical force that runs counter to nature. It acts in defiance of physical, economic and sociological laws. Instead of perishing, it is triumphant because of the West's weakness."

It could be even argued that the communist revolution, thanks to a radical image makeover since 1991 and especially since Putin’s coming to power in 2000, is now close to victory in the West. “Think about it,” writes J.R. Nyquist: “The Communists could never come to power in this country marching under a Communist flag. The trick was, on Christmas Day 1991, to take the Communist flag down from the Kremlin. That is what kicked things off. After that happened a new kind of ‘conservative’ appeared – of a different stripe: friendly to Russia and/or China, naïvely believing that America’s universities were ‘the last refuge of the Marxists.’

“The new post-Cold War conservative was, as Newt Gingrich explained in 1995, a ‘cheap hawk.’ And that is how our defense build-down began. We pulled apart our nuclear weapon industry. We stopped making warheads. Our hawks, no longer vigilant, joined the ranks of the economic optimists. At first, it was all about the ‘peace dividend.’ Then came 9/11 and our ‘diversionary wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

“The Communists were clever. They disguised themselves as liberals. They pretended to like capitalism. They pretended to help us after 9/11. They denied the value of socialism. They admitted the crimes of Communism, though almost no one was punished for those crimes. We should recall an old proverb: A tiger does not change its stripes. Why, after all, would Communism disappear of its own accord and admit defeat? The whole thing was too convenient by half, yet we were ready to believe it.

“After 1991 we lived through a time of unprecedented obliviousness and asininity, in which America was thought to be the ‘lone superpower.’ For three decades smart people talked like idiots. Our leading ‘statesmen’ proved themselves incompetent. Meanwhile, experts prattled on about the threat of climate change and the importance of letting children choose their gender. The mainstream media was clueless as it served up enemy disinformation time and time again. Our intellectuals mindlessly toadied to cultural Marxism. And now Russia and China have surpassed us militarily. Do you want to say all this was an accident? No. It was strategy – a thing our people know nothing about.

“To paraphrase a line from Senator Joseph McCarthy, the silence of the American establishment regarding the Communist conspiracy to rule the world has been deafening throughout. From 1991 to the present, we have seen nearly three decades of self-deception, self-congratulations and self-sabotage. How many years did we go without one official word about the communist threat? Did we really believe that Communism was gone?”

Certainly not when Donald Trump, who had almost certainly been blackmailed by the KGB, became president of the United States in 2016…

*

Final victory can never be defined in purely material terms or ascribed to purely material causes. In our materialist age, it is tempting to see economic or technological factors as the causes of victory in war. Certainly, there is no denying that technological factors have been important in past wars. We think of the “Greek fire” used so successfully by the Byzantines against the Persians and Muslims; the horsemanship displayed by the Mongols against the Russians in the thirteenth century; the long bow used by the English against the French in the Hundred Years’ War; the heavy cannon invented by the Hungarian Urban and equally successfully used by the Muslims against the Byzantines in 1453; the copper plating giving extra speed to the British ships in the Napoleonic Wars; the railways used so effectively by Bismarck against the French at Sedan; the Maxim gun used by the British to slaughter the Sudanese at Obdurman; the German use of tanks in World War Two; the British use of radar and Turing’s computer to crack the German enigma code in the same war; and finally, since 1945, “the H-bomb and the A-bomb, Agent Orange, the F-16 fighter, stealth aircraft, the ‘daisy-cutter’ bomb”. Not to speak of chemical and biological agents…

Nevertheless, material factors are never as important as spiritual or psychological ones – morale, patriotism and faith. For “some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we will call upon the name of the Lord our God” (Psalm 19.7). The Vietnamese, while lacking true faith and being far inferior in technological and economic resources, still defeated the Americans – as the Spartans defeated the Athenians - because they had superior discipline and morale.

The root of the American failure was hubris, pride. As Michael Howard puts it: “there was in the US… an enormous self-confidence and pride not unlike that of the Germans before 1914; a consciousness of national greatness seeking an outlet, a searching for an appropriate challenge to their powers, a refusal to believe that any problem was beyond their capacity to solve…” Closely related to this pride was forgetfulness of Kennan’s warning in 1947 that victory over the Soviets had to be won, not just on foreign battlefields or in foreign diplomacy, but also, and first of all, on the domestic front: “Every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow worth a thousand diplomatic notes and joint communiqués. If we cannot abandon fatalism and indifference in face of deficiencies of our own society, Moscow will profit - Moscow cannot help profiting by them in its foreign policies.”

The Americans might build their capital to look like ancient Rome; but they have neither the discipline of Old Rome, nor the faith of the New Rome. Against the supreme evil of Communism, only real morale - in the sense, not only of courage and determination, but also of morality and true faith – can prevail. As Carl von Clausewitz put it, “If you want to overcome your enemy you must match your effort against his power of resistance….” The incalculable element, said Clausewitz, was an enemy’s “strength of will.”

National victory in any war against a foreign enemy depends ultimately on the health and vigour of our own society. In the 1970s American faith, morality and patriotism flagged, allowing the Soviets to gain a series of victories in the Third World. But the West recovered confidence under Reagan and Thatcher, and in the late 1980s the Soviets began to lose faith in their own system…

So it was not that the Americans won in 1991: the Soviets lost; but they lost a battle, not the war, which has now, in 2022, been renewed on the battlefields of Ukraine.

World communism is like a malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue. God did not give the Americans victory in the 1970s in Vietnam, and it may be doubted that He gave them real, conclusive victory in 1991. Since then American morale and inner unity has declined at an alarming rate, and today, in 2021, the fall of America, the most powerful state the world has ever seen, is predicted by many…

Material advantages create the opportunity, which morale consolidates. But final victory in war is attained only in two ways: either by completely destroying the enemy’s military and/or economic resources, and together with that his will to continue fighting, or by converting him to your side. There is no third way: a victory attained in any other way is no real victory, but only a battle won, which may end in final victory – or in defeat. The victory of the West over the Soviet Union in the Cold War in 1989-91 was one such inconclusive victory, a battle won that may yet end in final defeat in the long war that began in 1917, but has not come to an end yet...

The victories won by annihilation of the enemy are many. One of the most famous in ancient times was Rome’s victory over Carthage. The Romans so respected their enemies, who had dealt them their worst ever defeat at Carrhae that they did not stop at reversing that defeat and defeating them at Zama in 202 B.C., but declared: Cartago delenda est, “Carthage must be destroyed”. And Carthage was destroyed – completely – in 146 B.C. It never rose again.

Another victory by annihilation was the Allies’ conquest of Germany in 1945. The victory over the Kaiser’s Germany in 1918 had been incomplete. No Allied army stepped foot in Germany; its economic and war-making potential, though damaged, was not destroyed. Most important, the Germans did not feel defeated; they felt they had been “stabbed in the back”. Reparations were insufficient to repay the losses suffered by the Western powers, especially France. By the time Hitler came to power, they had been remitted completely. So the still living snake was able to rise again because the seat of its power – its head – had not been crushed. That took place only in 1945, when Nazi power was crushed utterly, as was its capital. This was a real “twilight of the gods”.

This was a real victory because the false gods of German nationalism had been truly destroyed while the population was converted to a new god – democracy.

Victories by conversion are much rarer and, of course, much greater from a moral point of view. Such a victory was the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred the Great over the pagan Danes under King Guthrum in 878. Alfred defeated the Danes in battle at Ethandune; but, knowing that his victory could not be final, and that his enemy still occupied the whole of East Anglia, he offered him something quite different: baptism into the Orthodox Church (Alfred became Guthrum’s sponsor), followed by a twelve-day baptismal feast - and the present to the former pagan of the whole of East Anglia as a baptismal gift. Nor was this a superficial charade. The Danes remained Christian, and were fully integrated into an Anglo-Danish Orthodox England, even occupying the monarchical throne from 1016…

In the Cold War the enemy was neither crushed nor converted. It was a very long war, beginning soon after World War Two, in which many millions died around the globe. And yet the main antagonists – the United States and the Soviet Union – fired no shots against each other in anger except over the skies in Korea, preferring instead to fight by proxy and by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Nor did the supposed victors ever set foot on Soviet soil. The Communist enemy simply melted away…

Not having occupied the communist homeland, the victors were able to make only a feeble attempt to convert them. By contrast, the Germans after 1945 were subjected to a denazification programme which took time to produce the necessary good fruits – real repentance for the horrors of Nazism – but eventually did produce them. Moreover, they were given a vast sum of money in the Marshall Plan that helped them rebuild their economy and become again a prosperous and peaceful nation. By contrast, there was no decommunization programme in Eastern Europe after 1991, and the people, after making a fitful start at repentance for the unprecedented crimes of the Soviet period after the fall of communism, very soon began indulging in an orgy of self-justification, which allowed the establishment of neo-Sovietism under Putin. Not a single Communist leader or Gulag commandant was brought to trial for his crimes.

As for economic aid, there was some of it, but – with the exception of the aid given to the former East Germany by West Germany – it came nowhere near the levels needed or asked for – and so generously provided by the Americans in 1948.

Thus, as Simon Jenkins writes, “There was no lowering of tariffs or other barriers to trade with the east, and therefore little stimulus to growth in the post-communist economies. Brussels lobbyists opposed any inrush of low-cost produce, especially food, into the EEC’s protected markets. Despite initial pleas from Gorbachev, there was no new Marshall Aid, nor substantial inward investment, at least until former communist states joined the EU. At the same time there was a torrent of low-cost labour migrating westwards, bleeding the east of talent and further aiding the west’s economies.

“More dangerous was an instant NATO welcome to Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies. Those republics closest to Russia, such as Belarus, Ukraine and the central Asian ‘stans’, formed a Commonwealth of Independent State under Moscow’s aegis. But the Baltic states together with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary turned their backs on the east and began negotiations with NATO as guarantor of their future security. There is no doubt this is what these countries wanted, but the alacrity with which NATO seemed ready to advance its frontier eastwards rubbed salt into the gaping wound of Russia’s national pride. Yeltsin pleaded with the west to hold back, describing NATO’s expansion as ‘a major political mistake’. He warned that ‘the flames of war could burst out across the whole of Europe’. He was ignored…”

And rightly, for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showed that the Central and East European states had good reason to seek protection in NATO…

In 1991 the Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was granted access to the archives of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union. What he discovered there about Soviet penetration of the elites of the western world, together with his observations of contemporary life in the Union, convinced him that the victory of the West in the Cold War was illusory: “Thus has this war come to an end, the most terrible, probably, of all the wars in our history. It began without a declaration, and ended without fireworks. We do not even know the exact dates of its beginning and end, and although it may have swept away more lives than the Second World War, we do not want to calculate how many. No monuments were erected to it, no eternal flame was lit on the grave of its unknown soldier. Although the destiny of the whole of humanity was decided in it, its soldiers were not accompanied by orchestras or met with flowers. Evidently it was the most unpopular war of all that we know. At least, on the side that supposedly won. But there was no rejoicing even at its end. Those who lost did not sign a capitulation, those who won did not receive awards. On the contrary, it is precisely those who supposedly lost who are now dictating the terms of peace, it is they who are writing its history, while those who supposedly won are silent in embarrassment. Yes, and do we know who won and who lost?

“Every event in our life, even that which is not too significant, is unfailingly investigated by some kind of commission. The more so if people died. Whether a plane crashed, or a train-crash or some accident at an enterprise – and the experts are already quarrelling, and analyses are being conducted, and the degree of guilt of constructors, builders, service personnel, controllers and inspectors is being clarified, or else the government if it had the slightest relationship to it. And every armed conflict between states will unfailingly be investigated. But a conflict that lasted, at the very least, for 45 years (and perhaps all of 75), which affected practically all the countries of the world, and cost tens of millions of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and which, as has been asserted, brought us to the very of the destruction of the earthly globe, has not been investigated by a single state, or by a single inter-state organization.

“In our world, any crime, even the smallest, is subject to investigation, judgement and punishment. War crimes are no exception. I’m not talking about the Nuremburg tribunal and all the trials that followed it, right until our days, that were obliged to review the crimes of fifty years ago. But here is a fresher example: the war in Bosnia has not yet come to an end, and an international court has already been created to investigate the crimes committed in this war. And again the only exception is our strange war which you don’t understand whether it has come to an end or not, whether we won or lost.

“Meanwhile, in many cases there is not even the need to create a special court: let us say, the shooting of the Polish officers captured at Katyn had already been recognized as a crime against humanity in Nuremburg. But the man who signed the order for the shooting – the former head of one of the administrations of the NKVD Peter Soprunenko – lives out his life in great tranquillity in Moscow, receiving a good pension. Everybody knows about this very well, Muscovites will willingly point out for you the house on Sadovoj ring and the windows of the flat where he lives. The MGB investigator Daniel Koneliansky is also alive; he interrogated Raul Wallenberg. And the organizer of Trotsky’s murder, General Pavel Sudoplatov. But neither Poland not Sweden nor Mexico is demanding the giving up of these criminals. A fresher example is former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, who by his own admission, organized the murder in London of the political emigrant the Bulgarian Georgy Markov in 197; this was the famous murder by poisoned umbrella. In 1993 Kalugin even wrote about this in a mass-circulation English newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, in an article with the loud title, ‘I organized the execution of Markov’. He communicated some amusing details: it turns out that the grateful Bulgarian brothers gave him as a present a hunting rifle. Now he often goes abroad, advertising his book and giving interviews to the press. But it has never occurred to anyone to arrest him or interrogate him, although the case of the Markov murder has not yet been closed. (In 1994 General Kalugin came to England, was detained at London’s Heathrow airport, interrogated and released the following day.)”

The uncomfortable and disturbing fact is: too many people, in both East and West, not only made their peace with Communism but even cooperated with the Communists during the Cold War to make a thorough or even superficial investigation of the crimes of the period virtually impossible.

So when Bukovsky agreed with KGB chief Bakatin to undertake such an investigation, and Yeltsin gave an order to hand over the necessary materials, somehow they were spirited away or destroyed – and Bakatin himself remained only 107 days in office. At Nuremburg at least some of the crimes of the Nazis were investigated and the criminals punished, even if those of the victors were not. At the end of the Cold War no crimes were punished – which makes one wonder who won the war, or whether the question makes any sense…

One thing is clear: the refusal to investigate these crimes, with the collusion of many in both East and West, made a revival of Communism much more likely. Very soon the KGB, after some renaming and reorganizing, came back to power, after spending the 1990s in financially fruitful collaboration with the Russian Mafia.

And then “in 1999,” writes Simon Jenkins, “Yeltsin anointed a former Leningrad KGB boss, Vladimir Putin, as his successor. The contrast was total. Putin was the epitome of a tough, communist-era apparatchik. The ex-intelligence officer had no time for the niceties of democracy, but a keen sense of the need to restore Russian pride. He would issue pictures of himself hunting and bare-chested on horseback. His court of oligarchs made sure he secured as much overseas wealth as they had [Putin is now probably the richest man in the world]. Putin’s policies, endorsed at increasingly rigged elections, made no mention of civil rights or market economics. He was a populist and a nationalist, his pledge merely to restore Russia’s integrity and self-confidence. Opponents were bribed, imprisoned or killed. The west might have felt able to humour and torment Yeltsin. It now faced the pastiche tsar of a macho state. That Russia’s economy was debilitated was irrelevant. Dictatorship thrives on poverty.”

Putin has openly declared his intent to avenge Russia’s defeat in the Cold War, just as Hitler set out to avenge Germany’s defeat in World War One. He is able to say this because Communism was not truly defeated in the Cold War. Its leaders were not tried and punished, its land was not occupied, its ideology was not exposed for the fraud it undoubtedly is.

As for Putin’s new ideology of “Sovereign Democracy”, it is even admired in the West, including by many Orthodox Christians, who mistake his Communist Christianity mixed with neo-Soviet patriotism for the real thing and regard Putin himself as “the new Constantine”. Putin’s secret service agents have retained their stranglehold over the Orthodox Church and Russia’s foreign embassies and very many of her emigres. Thus the Church under Patriarch Cyril (KGB “Agent Mikhailov”) glorifies the victory of Stalin’s militant atheism in 1945 as something to be celebrated on a par with Christ’s Resurrection!

Just as the incomplete and mismanaged victory celebrated at Versailles in 1919 led to the rise of an avenging angel in the form of Hitler, so the incomplete and mismanaged victory over Communism in 1991 has given birth to another avenging angel in the form of Putin, whose murderous desires only a truly useless idiot can fail to see. But he knows that he can achieve final victory only by completely annihilating America. That is why he gives full rein to his propagandist, Alexander Dugin (who likes to say: “Putin is all!”), when he calls for “the closing down of America” as “our religious duty”. Dmitri Kiselev, another Putinist propagandist, appeared to rejoice on TV when speaking about the reduction of the West to ashes. These men know that their and their master’s goal – final victory over the West – can only be achieved by the West’s complete destruction; half measures will not do. Putin himself made it quite clear in 2007 that he was prepared to use the nuclear option if he felt threatened – although the real threat, of course, is he himself. The only way in which he could achieve final victory over the West without an annihilatory war is by destroying its last values (although, it must be admitted, there are few of those left) and the last remnants of its will to live through his hidden support for Cultural Marxism, that deadly mutant of Leninist Marxism which is well on the way to destroying America today (in 2022).

So we may well be witnessing the fulfilment of the prophecy of Elder Ignaty of Harbin (+1958): What began in Russia will end in America.

*

All this leads us to believe that the Cold War was only a phase in a long, still-uncompleted struggle, the final resolution of which is still in the future. And it is by no means certain who will win. For it is possible to win all the battles in a war while losing the last, ultimately decisive one… Even if Communism in its new, Fascist mutation under Putin loses the final battle of this war, a deep and long-lasting peace is guaranteed only if the whole Enlightenment philosophy that gave birth not only to Communism, but also to Fascism and Democracy, is renounced by both victors and losers. The only teaching which does not simply oppose this triple-headed monster but conquers and destroys it, providing a real, life-giving alternative, is the Orthodox Christian Faith. For “this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith” (I John 5.5).

It was the renunciation of that faith by Russia in 1917 that set in motion the long cycle of extremely bloody and inconclusive wars that we have witnessed over the last century. Only the resurrection of that faith, and the true repentance of the Russian people for having abandoned it, will bring the final victory and true peace on earth – that is, God’s good will among men… At the time of writing, we are still waiting for that resurrection. We must continue waiting; for “in your patience you will possess your souls” (Luke 21.19).

Augus 2/15, 2022.