"Russians" - A Product of the Third Rome Ideology

In effect, the Muscovite prince betrayed the Christian faith to please his Muslim tsar and master. And so it was, for Moscow was a tributary of Sarai, which had in turn sworn allegiance to the Ottoman Sultan. In other words, Moscow, to please its earthly tsar, betrayed God, placing itself in an extremely awkward position with Him.

Then again, it was hardly the first time. By that point in Moscow's history there was already no shortage of baseness, opportunism, and treachery.

And yet it was betrayal, too, that ended the relationship between Moscow and Sarai, only several decades later.

Ivan III, who took up the watch after the "prince of darkness," very pragmatically seized Novgorod, which opened Moscow's road to the Western markets.

The Tatars at that time had little love for the Rus population of Novgorod, and the slaughter was prodigious.

And it was then that the Pskov monk Filofei (in Greek, "God-loving"), after no great agony of conscience, decided to invent for the Muscovite prince a theory that would save the nation. A theory that would justify Moscow's betrayal and persuade the prince to spend less of his energy exterminating his new and old slaves.

Filofei took the good old Bulgarian legend of the Third Rome and carefully transplanted it from Tarnovo to Moscow.

He built an ideological justification for the Muscovite Kingdom's betrayal of Christianity by explaining that, in fact, everything had happened the other way around. It was not Moscow that had betrayed Christianity, but old Rome and the New Rome that had betrayed it! And Moscow had now acquired the glory of the Third Rome, the keeper of the right ("Russian") Christian faith!

According to the central tenets of this ideology, the Lord God personally granted Moscow the right to become the capital of the world, ruled by a "Russian" tsar (named after the faith), while the people of the "Russian" faith acquired the status of the chosen (since the Jews had sold Christ and the Romans had betrayed Him), and their mission became to convert the whole impious, heretical world to the true faith. The new imperium found meaning, justification, and the right to wage an endless war for the subjugation of the world, or of Rome.

"Russian" means Orthodox, and Orthodox means "Russian"

A crucial milestone in the history of Muscovy-Russia was the effectively "polite" seizure of Rus-Ukraine and of Kyiv, the cradle of the Rus faith. Possessing the sacred capital supposedly gave Moscow the right to strip away its sacredness and carry it off to its own swamps.

Under the official pretext that the see of the Kyivan (Rus) Metropolia had been evacuated to Moscow. In fact, officially, Moscow managed to drag it only as far as Vladimir. And later, having illegally created its own Moscow Patriarchate, which the Kyivan Metropolia did not belong to, Moscow became the capital of an Orthodox sect altogether.

For nearly 500 years the ideology stewed in the schizophrenic imagination of Moscow's rulers, and through the efforts of Peter I the Principality of Muscovy was turned into the Russian Empire. Or the "Russian" one, in the Greek manner, which defined the vector of the advance: toward Greece!

It was for this reason, and no other, that Moscow first made war on Crimea, which Catherine II called the "gates of Tsargrad," of Constantinople. Which, as Dostoevsky would later write, absolutely had to become "Russian," that is, conquered by Moscow!

The idea of recovering Tsargrad was so vividly real in the heads of these sick fanatics that in 1912 a special pseudo-national military uniform was sewn for the "army of the liberation of Tsargrad," crowned by a cap, the "bogatyrka," better known to us today as the "budenovka."

Over 500 years the idea of the Third Rome became, in effect, the idea of the "Russian world," the idea of an ignorant and destitute but highly spiritual country, where ruin and drunkenness reign.

The "Russian world," meanwhile, has, since the days of Ivan IV, also been a "nation of the pipe," for once the road to the Western markets had been hacked open and the British "Muscovy Company" entered Moscow, its economic model was essentially complete.

The authorities pump out of the country everything that can be sold on an industrial scale, importing in return the military technologies that make it possible to enlarge the territories one can plunder and to drive the people living there into slavery.

"Russian," the elder brother of the Slavs

The "Russian" was, by his very nature, both slave and colonizer at once. All the wars the "Russians" waged were always just and liberating.

After the "liberation" of Novgorod, of Rus-Ukraine, of Lithuania and Poland, in fact the enslavement of the "Russian" peoples, or the peoples of the "Russian" faith, Moscow took up the question of liberating the Slavs.

"The Russians call everything Russian Slavic, so that later they may call everything Slavic Russian," wrote the Czech nationalist Karel Havlíček Borovský. This is the best description of the essence of the imperial chimera of the Third Rome. It always finds just causes for war, pretending to be the "liberator" of a people fraternal for one reason or another.

And here is the crucial point! "Russians" is not a nationality but an anti-nationality, for in seizing, that is, "liberating" new lands, the "Russians" immediately cleansed away the local national culture, planting in its place their own surrogate, faith, and language.

The national factor first came into play in Russia's arsenal of just causes for war in the nineteenth century, when the question of liberating the fraternal Slavs arose ever more often.

Thus Russia created the "Panslavic myth," and the goal of the "Russians" within this myth was to "liberate" the Slavic Balkans from the Ottoman yoke, and Slavic Europe from the German yoke.

And no one was troubled by the fact that the "Russian," being in essence a slave, could in no way be a liberator, for he was the bearer of no opinion, rights, or freedoms of his own, and what he brought the "liberated" was not freedom but slavery. Which, in his understanding, was the highest form of justice.

"Russian" (Soviet) means communist, Bolshevik

The First World War, on which Russia had pinned such hopes, did not grant her Tsargrad. What is more, the fall of Peter's Empire (and on the foundation of the Third Rome he had tried to build a Second) made it possible to "return" the capital to Moscow. Where the new atheist regime set about recutting the ideas of the Third Rome to fit the new historical reality.

So if the "Russians" had tried to bring nearer the "kingdom of God" on earth, the Bolsheviks proposed to build communism, in essence and in form the very same mythical, utopian kingdom, only in the atheist manner.

The blaze of the world revolution of the Bolsheviks' Red empire proceeded under the slogans of liberating the exploited class, of decolonization and de-imperialization, but inside Russia itself slavery went nowhere. One might even say that, on the contrary, it took on industrial, state-run proportions. Slaves were herded into collective farms, mines, and factories, and whoever resisted did practically the same thing, only in chains, in specially built concentration camps inside the enormous concentration camp called the "USSR."

But this did not stop official propaganda from mounting the same donkey and hurling its slave-colonizers into battle against the whole world.

The destitute and wretched slaves, as a separate class, were summoned in their undoubtedly just "righteous wrath" and their hatred of the rich to sweep away the old world along with its attributes, among which fell the church too.

The Red Rome rejected the values of the Third Rome, and the churches, as an institution of propaganda and a source of money for kindling the "blaze of the world revolution," became its fuel and its victim.

One could even say that the Civil War, the battle for the inheritance of the Russian Empire between the white monarchists and the red Chekists, was won by the latter precisely because the monarchists abandoned their obsolete platform in favor of the new one. Having recognized its superiority in describing a just war for the right to rule the world.

"Russian" Orthodox communist, or national-Bolshevik

"Orthodox communists" and "national-Bolsheviks" are oxymorons in essence, for they unite currents that are opposite by nature. Opposite, because despite shared enemies, the non-Orthodox religions, peoples, and nations, and a shared goal, to rule the world, they hold opposite views on the church and its essence.

The "right-wing" anti-nationalist monarchists incline toward the excessive pomp of empire, pine for the time of the tsars, and dream of reviving the Black Hundreds in order to legitimize anti-national massacre.

The "left-wing" international Chekists, in spirit and in style, are closer to the Latin American juntas, with their punitive squads and acts of outright genocide.

Despite their visible "patriotism," in fact their outright fascism of outlook, these movements within Russia do not live in peace and mutual understanding.

The "right" need swagger more; the "left" need money.

These two independent ideological columns were set to collide during Prigozhin's "mutiny," and the Kremlin barely avoided the bloodshed that was about to begin.

Then again. The Chekists in power hardly achieved any understanding between the ideological factions. More likely they merely postponed the sentence of an imperial ideology false in its very essence and content. An empire built on a schizophrenic idea, governed by schizophrenics, and waging today an equally insane, schizophrenic war against Ukraine. A war with the loss of which they will never be able to make peace, for, as you will recall, it was sacred Kyiv with its institution of the Christian faith that gave their empire and their people their name.

Afterword...

What I really wanted to point out is that the "Russians," as the chief instrument of the Empire, passed through three stages of its maturation, and depending on the stage they matched the Empire's current stage.

Thus at the moment of the Empire's birth, "Russian" is a religious mark, a believer.

At the moment of the springtime of nations, the "Russian" (the elder brother of the Slavs) is supposedly a national mark.

At the moment of the rise of the communist, international, in fact anti-national star of ideology, the "Russian" is a Bolshevik, and later a communist.

The moment of the disintegration of the agonizing empire gave birth to a chimera that fused within itself the two principal currents of contemporary "Russian" ideological thought. This spawned terrible stillborn monsters, such as the Orthodox communists or the national-Bolsheviks. Sharing identical goals but torn apart by inner contradictions, they tear the empire to pieces. Although their holy aim is supposedly to preserve the integrity of the empire at any cost and to return it at least to its maximum borders.

Then again, "Malum se ipsum devorat," "Evil devours itself," said the ancients. And here our task is not to get in the way.

P.S. It occurred to me that today's "Russians" are akin to the Mule, the fruit of the love between a donkey and a mare. They are hardier and live longer, but they are utterly sterile. From this point of view it is clear why the fruit of ideological genetics turned out seemingly so strong that it provoked a war. But from another point of view it is clear why it has no future. It is sterile.