The Vanished People -- Russians

Metropolitan Agafangel, First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad

September 1, 2025

 

It is well known that with the passage of time, epochs change, cultures change, life itself becomes different -- everything changes. Among these, peoples also undergo changes. Not only life and worldview change -- the very essence, the mentality of a people changes, which in time ceases to be the bearer of one culture and takes in something else, at times even opposite to what constituted its essence before. We are familiar with many ancient cultures -- Egypt, Greece, Rome, for example, which left no continuation after themselves, but were transformed into something entirely different.

Something similar happened also with Orthodox Rus’ -- which began in ancient Kiev and ended its existence in almost modern Petrograd -- in the historical period from the first Orthodox ruler of our people, the Grand Prince Vladimir, to the last Orthodox Emperor Nicholas II. This was truly a great and unique culture of one great Orthodox people -- which began with the acceptance of Orthodoxy, and with the loss of Orthodoxy ceased its existence.

In this historical period, the Orthodox Church was the main state-forming principle, both the spiritual component of the soul of the people -- its faith -- and the cultural one -- education and school (people learned to read from the Slavonic Psalter), church visual and applied art, chanting, architecture and construction -- in this royal Vladimir–Nicholas period of our spiritual flourishing, the Orthodox Church was the heart of the people. The liturgical Church Slavonic language was a common, understandable, and unifying language for all the nationalities that were part of the single Orthodox people. An enormous quantity of icons and church objects (crosses, lamps, etc.) -- far more than works of applied and visual art of other world cultures. But the most important fruit of this culture were the Orthodox believing people, who constituted what we call Holy Rus’. Of course, by far not all the people were holy, but quite a significant part of them was holy, and these pleasers of God precisely constituted the most precious gift to the Creator from our Slavic community. Rus’ -- this was the name precisely of the Orthodox people who lived in a certain geographical territory -- the peoples neighboring us called us Rus’, understanding by this word exclusively an independent Orthodox people.

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Of course, with the passage of centuries, numerous internal changes (more correctly -- apostasies from God) gradually prepared the sharp collapse of the Orthodox state. Our great history ended with a catastrophe, which came at the moment when God-fighters came to power in the Russian Empire, who with diabolical energy set about the destruction of entire classes of Russian society --- the estates, the intelligentsia, “priests and capitalists,” simply people who were at least a little well-to-do, but in reality -- all who believed in God. And they, to our great sorrow, achieved their goal -- instead of the Russian people, with the help of the devil and his servants, there was artificially bred a “new historical community” -- the embittered and impoverished Soviet God-fighting people, completely opposite to the Orthodox Russian people who once lived on this land.

The repressions of the God-fighters destroyed practically all the truly believing in our country, and those who attended the Soviet church of the MP were reduced to an obedient, controlled minimum. A multitude of Orthodox were pushed beyond the borders of the country. Moreover, genuine Orthodox believers in the USSR, after the dying out of the Catacomb Church, remained so few that after the fall of the USSR (for which many sincerely hoped) there was already no one and nothing left to be revived.

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I was born and raised in the USSR, went to school and institute. There we were taught that there are different nationalities, which in their totality constitute the Soviet people. About religion in school, they never spoke at all, and it was assumed by default that if one is a believer -- it means mentally retarded. At that time, I considered myself Russian only by language and by culture. We were not taught what it really means to be Russian or a representative of any other nationality. We lived in the times of the God-fighting International, the summit, the apotheosis of which was the phrase of a poet -- “by nationality I am Soviet.” We (my generation) were born in this, lived in this, and did not even suspect that there might be falsehood contained in it.

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When I first came to the USA I was truly struck -- I really encountered there representatives of an entirely different people -- I saw with my own eyes the remnant of the genuine Russian Orthodox people. I became acquainted with hierarchs of ROCOR, priests and laymen, I saw how greatly they differed from us, the Soviets. These truly were representatives of another people -- they spoke in a language that differed from ours, Soviets, they behaved in a completely different way with those around them, they had different values, they even wrote only in the old orthography. But most importantly, they differed by their inner integrity and steadfastness, by their Orthodox unfeigned faith -- which was directly opposite to what we, the Soviets, were inclined to -- with shifting eyes and efforts to adapt to surrounding circumstances, to please the necessary interlocutor, and everywhere to have in view one’s personal benefit. The people from abroad, without doubt, could not have lived and survived in the USSR; here, they would have been very “promptly” destroyed by the “Soviet organs,” or they would have had to degenerate, adapt, and become, for the sake of their survival, “like everyone else” -- there could not have been another option (characteristic examples of this -- the Soviet academicians Losev and Likhachov, who served time in the GULAG and adapted). It is entirely obvious: the USSR and the simple guileless Orthodox Russian person, even on the very lowest social levels, are incompatible.

Since true Orthodoxy can be transmitted only from person to person, I understood that I had met genuine Orthodox people, it somehow opened itself to me that Christ and the Truth abide with them, therefore I too want to be with Christ together with them. That is, I realized that the Lord had brought me here and that in the USA I had found the true Orthodox Church in the person of the old Orthodox émigrés.

Of course, the emigration was very diverse — in it there turned out to be even such monsters as, for example, defeated revolutionaries like Leyba Trotsky, Masons, and other godless people and heretics of various degrees and categories. But, in this case, I speak exclusively of the Russian Orthodox emigration.

This Orthodox emigration lived primarily by the hope of returning Orthodoxy to Russia (which they understood within the borders of the Russian Empire). But when they saw representatives of this contemporary Russia, who from the beginning of the 1990s began often coming to America with a great desire to remain there, to settle in, to forget their language, and to become as quickly as possible Americans, the old émigrés were horrified. For them the Soviet people, with whom they suddenly came face to face, were probably the greatest disappointment of their life -- it was an entirely different people, entirely unknown to them before, and incomparable with the genuine Russian people.

When Metropolitan Vitaly presented me to the Hierarchical Council, he said: “You know, one would never say that he came from there. He is like an old émigré.” At first, I was surprised at such a characterization. Only later did I understand that this was, probably, in their eyes the highest praise of all possible.

***

By the present time, the Soviet program “Russian World” launched by Putin has, unfortunately, achieved the original goal set before it: the destruction of the old anti-Soviet Orthodox Russian emigration and the creation of a Kremlin-loyal diaspora.

The émigrés (unlike the catacomb dwellers in the USSR) had no immunity against Sovietness, they believed everything from the Soviets and, unfortunately, were easily infected with this Sovietness (a vivid example — the metamorphosis that befell the ROCOR clerics who joined the MP). In this regard, prophetic was the warning of Metropolitan Anastasy, expressed by him in his “Testament”: not to have “even simply everyday communication” with representatives of the Soviet church. In the case of communication with the Soviets it always turns out according to the word of the Savior: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you traverse sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, you make him twofold more a child of hell than yourselves.” (Matt. 23:15). Such are the fruits of the preaching issuing from the former USSR to this day.

Of course, modern Soviet people, unfortunately, will continue “by inertia” to be called “Russians,” but it should be remembered that under this name now is an entirely different people, who no longer exalt this name, but only defile it. Remember this, for the sake of that departed Russian people, who served God so much and left behind a great culture of worldwide significance.

That the Soviet people rejected the Russian Church Abroad and everything that the old émigrés wanted to return to the Homeland -- above all, the Orthodox faith and tradition, which are very different from what is transmitted by the Moscow Patriarchate -- became a sorrowful testimony that at the beginning of the 1990s there were already no seeds of revival here, and our land turned out to be empty and barren. Now even a potential source of the revival of the Orthodox Russian people does not exist. To great sorrow, Orthodox believers who think objectively, in order not to deceive themselves, must accept this as a mournful reality.

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Our people have undergone radical changes even before the eyes of a single generation; one category of people died out and an entirely different one appeared. There are no longer true hierarchs, nor priests, nor laymen. Even among us, where once there was the USSR, the once numerous believing grandmothers have long since died out -- the last remaining representatives of a vanished people, whose white kerchiefs filled the churches and who with all their strength tried to instill the Orthodox faith in their grandchildren. They lived by God and by Orthodoxy. In their place have come the modern “consumers of virtual culture,” who no longer believe in anything and live for the most part exclusively by the lies and horrors offered by the internet.

Russians and Ukrainians today are entirely different peoples. It will be more correct to state: there no longer exists the Russian people, since the present inhabitants of the Russian Federation are not the Russian Orthodox people, just as the inhabitants of Ukraine are not the Russian Orthodox people. Just as the Russian Federation is not a Russian Orthodox state, so also Ukraine is not a Russian Orthodox state. The Russian Orthodox people and state no longer exist -- their remnants died out in the USSR, above all together with the Catacomb Church, and by today they have also died out in emigration. Only individual persons and small groups of this once great people have survived to our days. These are the ones who should have gathered together on the eve of the end of this world and the Second Coming of our Savior.

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A great mistake, even a tragedy, lies in the fact that the modern Russian Federation is perceived throughout the whole world not as a murderer (which it is in reality), but as the heir and successor of the once-existing Orthodox state on our land.

Now in the Russian Federation there emerges a category of people who consider themselves Russians and, at the same time, in their consciousness unite the Orthodox culture “that was before the revolution” with the Soviet culture that destroyed and desecrated it. Many of them resemble Russians and even resemble Orthodox. But they are deprived of the very essence of the Russian Orthodox person — the childlike simplicity of faith — and represent only an outward imitation of a Russian person. Even the slightest presence in a person of the Soviet element destroys in him the essence of the Orthodox person, turning him into a Soviet person.

The greatest falsehood is also that practically everyone in the world considers the president of the Russian Federation the head of the Russian state, and the patriarch of the MP the head of the Russian Orthodox Church -- while one gives commands to kill millions of people (including Orthodox), and the other calls this a “holy deed.” Both of them, as well as all their supporters, are not Russians, and murderers in equal measure, and directly about them Christ said to His disciples: “The time is coming when everyone who kills you will think that he offers service to God. And these things will they do to you, because they have not known the Father, nor Me” (John 16:2–3). Let the words of Christ be judgment upon all who have lost conscience, not Russian and not Orthodox people, “who have not known the Father, nor Me.”

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There remains for us only to await the Coming of Christ, guarding ourselves from the temptations of this world. According to the word of Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, spoken by him in the distant 19th century, when still many, many holy pleasers of God lived among people on our land: “The apostasy is permitted by God: do not attempt to stop it with your feeble hand. Withdraw, guard yourself from it: and this is enough from you. Familiarize yourself with the spirit of the times, study it, so that as far as possible you may avoid its influence.”

To defend ourselves from the spirit of the times and to await the Judgment of God upon this world and upon ourselves — help us, O Lord!

 

Russian source:

http://internetsobor.org/index.php/stati/avtorskaya-kolonka/mitropolit-agafangel-ischeznuvshij-narod-russkie