The Vanished Russia

Protodeacon Herman Ivanov-Treenadzaty | October 1, 2025

 

Faithful, profound thoughts are expressed by His Eminence Metropolitan Agafangel in the article "The Vanished People — Russians."

[English translation:

https://orthodoxmiscellany.blogspot.com/2025/09/the-vanished-people-russians.html]

At first glance, the title may surprise some, offend others, and be misunderstood, but in reality, the article is very balanced and correct. There is no other way to put it: Russia has fallen, and the Russian people have fallen as well.

It is not without reason that we always speak and write of "our" Russia, thereby emphasizing that when we speak of Russia, we mean "that" Russia, the one that vanished with the forced abdication of the Tsar of Russia. Yes, Russia is not the USSR and not all that was spawned by it. The Soviet Union is not Russia, as I.A. Ilyin wrote, leaving us all a legacy in his work of the same name. It was, after all, the Bolsheviks themselves who first agreed with this — in the era when they still believed in the victory of their satanic ideology throughout the world. Only now, after the complete collapse of this inhuman experiment, do those who yearn for that “lost paradise” begin to speak of a thousand-year continuity of Russian history, conflating Russia with something that in no way can be identified with her.

And this we shall never accept. For Russia is a country, a culture, a people, a language, a particular worldview, and—most importantly—it is the one Orthodox faith. Already at the beginning of the 19th century, V. A. Zhukovsky wrote: "Rus’ is not a state, but a family, where all had one fatherland, one faith, one language, common memories and traditions." To be Russian is to be Orthodox, said F. M. Dostoevsky a century and a half ago. No nationality or political borders—especially those inherited from the Bolsheviks—have any bearing here. Russia was and is triune, in the likeness—spoken of naturally only as an image—of the Triune Godhead. But this, of course, only holds as long as the peoples inhabiting Russia remain faithful to their roots. Therefore, the Soviet Union cannot in any way be called Russia, nor does it have anything in common with her. It is not only not Russia, but in the full sense, anti-Russia. Indeed, the Bolsheviks themselves expunged the very word Russia from usage. "We are not Russia, we are the Union, we are the grotesque, meaningless acronym USSR! We are not Russians, we are Soviets." And they achieved their goal. We have written more than once that when Western journalists speak of some contemporary figure, calling him a "Russian tsar," they are once again revealing their own Russophobia.

Soviet patriotism has nothing in common with Russian patriotism. Soviet culture—if one can even speak of such a thing—has nothing in common with Russian culture. Moreover, whatever cultural elements have remained in the Soviet and post-Soviet setting owe nothing whatsoever to the “achievements of October.” Professor Ivan Andreyevich Esaulov says it plainly: “Soviet culture is not a continuation of Russian Orthodox culture. Of the great Russian culture there remains perhaps only a small chapel—something indestructible.” Furthermore, a Russian person is not a Soviet-speaking commoner, for the Russian language is not the Soviet language. And thus, one could go on at length contrasting the concepts of Russian and Soviet. In reality—can one truly reconcile, as a unified whole, a Russian person and the homo sovieticus? His Eminence the Metropolitan is entirely correct in writing about one of the chief accomplishments of the Bolsheviks: “And they, to our great sorrow, achieved their aim—through the help of the devil and his servants, they artificially produced, in place of the Russian people, a ‘new historical community’: the embittered and impoverished Soviet God-fighting people, utterly contrary to the Orthodox Russian people who once lived on this land.” One cannot help but wish to illustrate this episcopal statement with a testimony from the life of the same Professor I. A. Esaulov. When his father died in the depths of Siberia, he made the effort to bring a priest for the funeral, and “some perceived this as my strange eccentricity. They said that I had studied myself to such an extent that I did not allow my father to be buried ‘properly’—because I brought a priest.” “Properly”—that is, with a bottle of vodka and a red flag, not with the Cross and prayer...

And this is stated not only by us, but also by the very best, rare individuals from contemporary Russia. Let us hearken to the ever-memorable Protopriest Father Lev Lebedev, who suddenly reposed in 1998 in the Synodal building in New York, where he had arrived for the Council in defense of the Russian Church Abroad and of the holy Metropolitan Vitaly: “Though I was born and raised under the Soviet regime, and in a number of traits am just as much a ‘sovok’ as all those now living in Russia, yet with my soul I have rejected everything Soviet (I hate it even within myself)... In Russia, the Russian People no longer exist,” and turning to the ecclesiastical question close to his heart and to the significance of the Church Abroad, he writes: “If even within the present-day RF (mistakenly called Russia), our Church succeeds in converting at least a few who are still capable of receiving the Truth, then even this is good!”

Father Lev is echoed by such a person—not a priest who joined the Church Abroad, but a renowned contemporary film director—Stanislav Govorukhin. Let us highlight a few thoughts from the introduction to his truly unique film Russia We Lost, released at the very beginning of the fateful 1990s: "Russia. A mysterious and unfamiliar country. It so happened that we know nothing about her. That is probably why we live so hard and so foolishly… The more you come to know this unfamiliar country, the more deeply you fall in love with her. It happens involuntarily… What we will show is, as it were, the impressions of a person who began to learn the history of his country in adulthood. And everything we learned during the filming shook the soul. How did it happen, why did God take away people’s reason, how could such a rich country be plundered and destroyed? And why, why did we know nothing about her—about our own Homeland?"

In the film, two Russias stand in stark contrast side by side—the one that existed before the Bolshevik invasion, and the one defiled by them. On the full screen, accompanying the footage, such bitter, truthful, and hopeless thoughts are heard: “Lenin succeeded for a long time in cleansing Russia of intelligent, educated, and thinking people. He not only carried out a state coup, but also a coup in the soul of the people. In Russia, a new anthropological type was established; a new expression appeared on the faces of Soviet people. Thus began the degeneration of the nation.” From time to time, one could hear sobs bursting forth from the hearts of the viewers, echoing throughout the hall. If anyone has not seen the film—go, without fail.

But let us return again to Father Lev Lebedev, with whom we had the blessing of being in friendly and like-minded correspondence. In a letter dated December 25, 1996, he writes to us about the content of his completed but as yet unpublished major book. As you will see, his thoughts fit precisely into the theme developed by His Eminence Metropolitan Agafangel: “And the content comes down to this: that the Russian People no longer exist in Russia; they were physically exterminated from 1917 to 1945. After that, a new, artificially cultivated ‘Soviet’ people live in Russia, who, in essence, are not even a people, but an unfortunate Russian-speaking rabble—which also applies to the believing parishioners of the MP. Although they wish to be Orthodox, and do not accept any heretical (ecumenistic) teachings, they nevertheless stubbornly believe the lie that the MP is the true Russian Church. Why? The general, average sentiment is roughly as follows: let there be Russians and Orthodox abroad in ROCOR as well, but they are not our people, not like us. Therefore, we will stay with our own hierarchs just as they are, since they are ours. And the ones Abroad—we do not know them, and do not want to know them! It is not difficult to see that in such reasoning, the primary factor is not a sense of unity in faith and in the Church, but a sense of unity by birth, upbringing, and life in the USSR, under the ‘Soviet’ regime... All this is one of the reasons (not the only one!) which allows us to affirm that if up until 1937, when many lawful bishops of the Russian Church were still alive—though in prisons and exile—and a significant portion of the true (not yet exterminated) Russian People was still alive, the position that ROCOR was a part of the Russian Church was entirely valid; and even if such a view could to some extent still be valid until the mid-1970s, then after that, and especially after 1990, such a position is no longer true. Now ROCOR is not a part, but is itself the one and only lawful Local Russian Orthodox Church. And we, who in Russia have joined it, are part of her. For the Local Church is not the Church of a geographic territory, but the Church of a people. Therefore, the Church of the Russian People must be recognized as that one which unchangingly preserves in unity the doctrinal, canonical, and liturgical order of church life which was from the beginning among the Russian People—up to 1917 and even until 1927—namely, the Russian Church Abroad. This is what our hierarchs—and indeed all of us Orthodox—must clearly understand,” Father Lev writes boldly.

Already then, in the year 1998, it was felt that in the consciousness of certain Hierarchs the understanding of the very essence of the Church Abroad had begun to waver, which ultimately led to our ecclesiastical tragedy, sealed by the signing of union with the Moscow Patriarchate in May of 2007. Father Lev, with convincing arguments, stated that the “Russian people” as such—that is, the “people-Church” (his favorite expression)—no longer exist: they finally disappeared 28 years after the satanic Bolshevik revolution.

But here again, as always, we add—if Russia no longer exists, if within the territory of the former, vanished Russia the Russian people, as such, are no more, yet without doubt there remain Russian individuals scattered throughout Russia, like foreign islands in their own land. And Father Lev, from personal experience, bears witness to how one born in the Soviet Union can become Russian—it is necessary to reject, with one’s soul, all that is Soviet within oneself, and not attempt to merge White with Red, as many today are trying to do. And how can one not bring forth here the testimony of His Eminence Metropolitan Agafangel: “When I first arrived in the United States, I was truly astonished—I really encountered there representatives of an entirely different people—I saw with my own eyes the remnant of the true Russian Orthodox people /.../ they spoke a language that differed from ours, the Soviet one, they behaved in a completely different way toward others, they had different values.” These words we can reinforce with yet another testimony. In the early 1990s, for several years, one of our zealous parishioners was a former Soviet officer who once confessed that he became Russian with us, in Lyon.

Such was the rightly understood “Mission of the Russian Emigration,” after the title of the book by M. V. Nazarov, about which we have written more than once. Whether this mission was fulfilled—it is not for us to answer, but it would be wrong to judge this only by the present day, rather than by examining the fruits it bore throughout the past century. To preserve the Russian Church, to preserve Russian values, to preserve Russian culture, to preserve the memory of Russia. To preserve and to transmit. This was the principal task of that Mission—but it was not within its power that there were so few to whom it could be transmitted.

Meanwhile, the hope for the resurrection and rebirth of Russia remains in full force, about which, at every Divine Liturgy, the touching “Prayer for the Salvation of Russia” is offered up in the churches of the Diaspora. And need it even be emphasized that this Prayer bears no political character that could be applied to contemporary events, and that it pertains neither to Putin’s RF nor to Ukrainian phantasmagorias, but precisely to Russia in that form and concept in which she was perceived throughout the centuries.

 

Russian source:

http://internetsobor.org/index.php/stati/avtorskaya-kolonka/protodiakon-german-ischeznuvshaya-rossiya