KGB, Church Find Common Ground
One of the siloviki's most effective allies in this cultural counterrevolution has been the Russian Orthodox Church. During the Soviet period, the Orthodox Church and other religious groups were under the KGB's direct control. As Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the original Soviet secret police wrote: "Leave the church to the chekisty. Only they, with their specific chekist methods, can control the clerics and undermine the church from within." That decision began the strange cohabitation of the church and the KGB, with the security agency using the church's authority to influence believers at home and abroad and the KGB using church foreign dioceses as fronts for operations abroad.
After Boris Yeltsin came to power, there was some discussion of exposing the clergymen who cooperated with the KGB, but that effort never got off the ground and was quickly shelved.
In Putin's Russia, the church plays a major ideological role. Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, who is the head of external relations for the Moscow Patriarchate, is a close Putin loyalist (and 'former' KGB agent). In a nationally televised sermon in 2005, Kirill said the reformers of the 1990s did not understand "that reform does not mean Westernization." A year later, the 10th World Congress of Russian People, an event organized by the Moscow Patriarchate, adopted a conception of a uniquely Russian vision of democracy and human rights, an idea that became a central tenet of the Kremlin's ideology of sovereign democracy. Speaking at the congress, Kirill said there are higher values than liberty and democracy and that the church rejects the idea that "human rights prevail over the interests of society." Patriarch Aleksy II repeated these ideas in October when he spoke from the pulpit of Notre Dame in Paris during his first-ever visit to a Catholic country.
Perhaps the biggest achievement of the church in the Putin era has been its unification with the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which was marked in Moscow in May (see video below). Putin personally played an active role in the reconciliation talks between the churches, which split during the Russian civil war of 1918-23.
Another significant achievement was the church's successful lobbying to create a new national holiday, People's Unity Day, which has been marked on November 4 for the last three years and replaces the old communist holiday of November 7, the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution. Before 1917, November 4 was a church holiday honoring the icon the Kazan Mother of God, which is a symbol of the end of the so-called Time of Troubles in 1612. That year, Russians liberated Moscow from Polish occupation and in 1613 a Land Assembly (Zemsky sobor) chose Mikhail Romanov as tsar and created the dynasty that would rule the country until 1917.
With resonance for Russia today, the new holiday celebrates the triumph of national unity over internal dissent and foreign intervention. The initiated, however, also know that the holiday has another significance: on almost the same day, November 2, 1721, the Senate proclaimed Peter the Great an emperor and transformed the country into the Russian Empire. That event came after Peter's victory over Sweden in the Northern War, when Russia took control of the area that is now the Baltic states and Finland.
The siloviki and the Russian Orthodox Church are natural allies in the drive to build a state-dominated, authoritarian capitalist system based on traditional Russian values. The siloviki are using the authority of the church to restore more and more elements of the country's 1,000-year monarchist tradition, to which many prominent siloviki have expressed unconcealed sympathy. One recent chekist manifesto, "Project Russia," quoted the revered 19th-century cleric St. Ioann of Kronstadt as saying, "Hell is a democracy; heaven is a kingdom."
Of course, no one is interested in knowing about the coming of the "Lawless One" at the current historical juncture because everyone is too busy having 'pleasure in unrighteousness', thus sealing a most tragic fate for this world.
"The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and with pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness." [2 Thessalonians 2:9-12]
"Today the Soviet system can no longer seriously strive toward the spectre of Communism - but at the same time it cannot yet abandon the grandeur of its tasks, for otherwise it would have to answer for fruitless sacrifices which are truly innumerable. But in what then can the Soviet system find its justification? Only in the consciousness that it was unconsciously in the past, as it is now quite consciously, God's instrument for constructing a new Christian world. It has no other justification, and this is . . . a genuine and great justification. By adopting it, our state will discover in itself a truly inexhaustable source of Truth, spiritual energy and strength, which has never before existed in history . . . The old pagan world has now finally outlived its era . . . In order not to perish with it we must build a new civilization - but is Western society, whose foundations have been destroyed, really capable of this? Only the Soviet sytem, having adopted Russian Orthodoxy . . . is capable of beginning THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION OF THE WORLD." (Passage written by Russian nationalist G.M. Shimanov quoted in Yanov's The Russian Challenge, p.236)
From outward appearances it would seem that the old Soviet Union has returned. A thing crucified, dead and buried has been resurrected. Four weeks after Vladimir Putin’s re-election, a procession led by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church arrived at the Church of Christ the Redeemer in Moscow. In keeping with ancient tradition the doors of the church were shut, symbolizing the sealed cave where Christ’s body was placed following crucifixion. “After midnight,” noted Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, “the Orthodox faithful taking part in the procession await the opening of the church doors. The patriarch stands on the steps at their head and is the first to enter the empty temple where the Resurrection of Christ has already occurred.” In due course the Patriarch offered up a prayer, the doors of the Church of Christ the Redeemer were opened and out stepped President Vladimir Putin. If any Christians were present for this ceremony they offered no protest to this blatant sacrilege. The woman who reported this event for the benefit of Western readers has since been assassinated. The KGB defector who was investigating the circumstances of her death has been poisoned (i.e., Litvinenko). [SOURCE]
Note that Vladimir Putin took power in Moscow on December 31st, 1999, at the turn of the Millenium. Given that a day is like a thousand years to the Lord, Putin's rise to power was supposed to symbolize how Christ rose on the third day, i.e., on January 1st, 2000, the holy (the term is used loosely here) Russian empire (i.e., the "Third Rome") and its 'tsar of tsars' (i.e., king of kings) "resurrected".
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