Thank you for the invitation to speak to the students of the Donetsk People’s Republic within the framework of the Russian People’s World Council and to talk about such an important topic as the new ideology of Russia.

Today the ideology of Russia acquiring its own identity is being born in you, in the Russian Donbass. My daughter died for a great Russia at the hands of Ukrainian terrorists. Not long before, she had returned from her new territories (Daria had been to Mariupol, Kherson, Melitopol, Lugansk and Donetsk) and shared her impressions. In her lecture, she said: “Even we patriots, convinced supporters and champions of Russian Peace, ideologists and inspirers of the Russian Spring, think here in Moscow that Novorossia needs us. But in reality it does not. What can we teach Novorossia, when its sons and daughters, adults and children, have gone through such a crucible of historical trials to become a true Russian people. They are the Russian world.

So when we speak of the ideology of the new Russia, it is not so much an appeal from Moscow, even from those who with all their soul, with all their heart, with all their body, with all their life are with you, who are at the front, who die with you, who live with you, who win with you, who suffer with you, it is not a message from us to you, it is a question. So when we say ‘the ideology of the new Russia’, it is not a question for today’s conference, it is a question for you, for the people of Novorossi. You are the bearers of this ideology and the ideology of the new Russia will either be yours or it will not exist at all.

This is not just a routine greeting for those who have been through difficult times and have now entered Russia. You have not just become part of the current Russian Federation. You did not just become part of our country; you came to Russia to create it anew, to make it completely different. You are joining the wrong state, which is, and which has no ideology (as written in the Constitution). You are not joining the state that was built on the ruins of the USSR in ’91 on the basis of totally liberal western values, totally loyal to the world government and run by a group of criminal oligarchs who plundered our wealth. You do not join this state. You come to create a new Russia.

It is for this reason that in the Russia that will be created by the people of the front, by the people of Novorossia, you will play the main role, which is why we should listen to you instead of telling you. In principle, it would be correct if the people of the trenches, the people of Donetsk, Gorlovka and other eternally bombed territories told us what the ideology of Russia should be. And we would listen to you and agree with you.

This is how I believe we should build our relations with the Donbass. Look, true Russian culture is being born in the Donbas. Now there are no poets in Russia, there are, if anything, a few pretentious liberal impostors with infinite talent and huge ambitions, supported by a conspiracy of equally useless and inarticulate nobodies. The real poetry comes from you – it is your poets who create and set the tone for our Russian poetry. They are the ones in the trenches, at the front. In their telegraphs, these war correspondents, participants in hostilities, together with you are formulating the most important Russian meanings.

We simply have to understand them, interpret them, support them, pass them on to the rest of the Russian people. So it is mainly a question of what is happening in the new territories, what is happening on the front line. Everything will depend on the next victory, because without this new Russian ideology, without Russian peace, without the rebirth of the Russian spring, there will be no victory, and victory depends on the presence or absence of this ideology. Not just the Russian ideology, but your ideology, of the new Russia which will either be new, or it will collapse, it will not survive this historic test in the state it was in before Special Operation.

It is not just a question of whether or not to liberate certain territories. It is a question: to be or not to be the Russian people, Russian civilisation, the Russian world, Russians in general? That is why we live in extreme times. You know it better than I do, so I will say it again: ‘as you understand’, we are living in extreme times, ‘as you understand’, everything is at stake, ‘as you understand better than I do’, now the decision is being made, to be or not to be the whole of Russia.

We have reached the point where this ideology must be born out of pain. It must not be born on paper, it must not be born out of some reports, out of PR strategies of the presidential administration. It will be thrown away immediately; the winds of history will disperse these pieces of paper in an instant, like autumn leaves. All artificial constructs and ideologies, in whatever office and for whatever purpose they were written, have no chance of existing.

Ideology is born now in your country, it is born in Novorossia, it is born in the new territories and that is why we are not just talking ‘on equal terms’, but we are ready to listen to the birth of this ideology. Because ideology is a historical and very difficult process and the reuniting of our Russian world, of the Russian people with new territories, with territories that we have to liberate and then defend and then integrate – in this process Russia is born, and Russia this time without ideology cannot be, so Russia as an idea, if you like, Russia as an ideology is also born.

A new ideology and resistance against world evil

Now a few remarks on this new ideology, because if we understand the parameters of its creation, we will better understand what is happening in our country.

First of all, I want to say that Russia, of course, is not conducting a special military operation. We started with an SMO, which developed into a real fundamental war. A real war. A war in which Russia is taking on the entire collective West, as our President has said many times, and this is a very serious thing, this is not some kind of technical operation, this is not just a target that can be achieved by technological means, by launching missiles, by seizing point by point, as in anti-terrorist operations. This is full-scale, full-scale war.

Secondly, it is a war not only of states, not only of the Russian Federation as a nation-state, but also of a coalition of other nation-states that are now simply at war with Russia. This coalition includes the United States and Great Britain, as the main initiators of this war, and almost all the nation-states of the European Union (perhaps with the exception of Hungary and Serbia). Ukraine, if you recognise it as a nation-state, is also fighting against us, or everyone else is fighting at its hands. Their ranks are thinning, becoming more and more pathetic, but the strength of the resistance is not diminishing, because the collective West is throwing more and more forces into this war.

A nuclear conflict is an opportunity that could materialise at any time. The moment certain threats are perceived as critical by one side or the other, a pre-emptive strike may follow. Nobody is immune to this, so we are constantly, if you like, balancing on the edge of an abyss, and not just as DPRK or Russian inhabitants, but as humanity as a whole.

Consequently, we are living within the Apocalypse, the end of the world, which has become so close to us that it cannot be underestimated. In terms of the global scope of the conflict that has already manifested itself, we are in a world war and you are the frontier of this war. You are the trigger of this war. If you inhabitants of Donetsk and Lugansk had surrendered, perhaps all this would not have happened. But still, sooner or later, having been strengthened and joined NATO, Ukraine would have claimed Crimea and threatened Belgorod and Kursk, Rostov and Voronezh. Yet you, however, woke up earlier and became martyrs, you became the Christ of Russia. The Donbass is the Christ of Russia, which suffered for us, suffered and went to this resistance to evil, without any support, simply relying on its spirit, its will, its identity, its roots. This is a national feat of the people of the Donbass, which has not occurred in our history for a long time, I cannot even imagine what it can be compared to – so great is your mission.

Your mission is to perform the function of the guardian, of the Catechon. You are the vanguard of the awakened Russian people, holding the world and Russia back from certain death. We continued this ambiguous dialogue with the West, which was preparing a decisive blow against us by arming the Nazi regime in Kiev. The West was looking for an opportunity to put us to sleep with the Minsk agreements (something Hollande and Merkel are now openly admitting) and if we had not launched this pre-emptive military operation, Russia’s fate would probably have been sealed.

You saved our chance to be and not only saved yourselves, you saved the Russian people, the Russian state. Honour and praise to you, and eternal memory to all those who died for this great cause. It was not in vain. It is a religious undertaking.

So it is not just a war of nations, but a clash of civilisations.

The war of civilisations

Let us now look at the content of this conflict. One can imagine it as a clash of states: a Russian nation-state against a coalition of nation-states, but this will not bring us closer to the essence of what is happening. This is clearly not a fight over territory, resources, industrial potential, hydroelectric power stations, bread, etc. This time the war has a minimal material dimension.

It is a war of the spirit, a war of ideas, it is a real clash between two worlds, two civilisations. The same clash of civilisations that the American political scientist Samuel Huntington talked about in the 1990s.

The West is a civilisation that claims to be universal and believes itself to be synonymous with modernity, development and progress. This civilisation emerged in Europe in the New Age. Its main objective, as our philosopher Vladimir Soloviev said, was the idea of dismemberment, of atomisation, where the private becomes superior to the whole. Underlying it all is the desire to bring everything down to the atom, to the individual, to separateness, and every totality, traditional society, people, state, class, church, etc., is subject to fragmentation, to fragmentation. – is all subject to fragmentation, dissipation.

20th century liberalism defeated all other Western ideologies that tried to preserve at least some unity: class unity in socialism, national unity in fascism. That is, in the West itself, the complete separation of organic unity – it only finally prevailed at the end of the 20th century, when liberalism won irreversibly. Liberalism is today the main ideology of the West. It is its main vector and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, liberals, having won, thought they had definitively demolished their alternative socialist project – the last one left after the fall of Nazism in Europe. By virtue of the collapse of socialism as an ideology and the USSR as a state, the people of the Donbass found themselves in hostile territory controlled by extremists, by occupiers. Moscow betrayed them.

At the time of the collapse of the USSR and socialism, liberalism declared that it had finally and on a large scale won, that the end of history had come and that Western liberal civilisation was the only one left from now on. This is what globalisation is all about. Liberals proclaimed that this new liberal world order would henceforth be extended to all countries and all peoples, including Russia, and Russia in the 1990s accepted it.

The 1990s: not stupidity, but betrayal

This was the betrayal of the Russian world, of the Russian state, of Russian civilisation, by the Russian leaders of the 1990s. They did not simply abandon communism as an idea of civilisation. They did not simply abandon communism as an idea, socialism as a political and economic system. They betrayed Russian civilisation. That is why all those who participated in political power in Russia in the 1990s are historical criminals, who betrayed our sovereignty, our roots, our lands, knowingly or unknowingly, and will be cursed from century to century by Russian history, by the Russian people. Like Judas.

Now, let us wash away the sin of the 1990s with blood. This cursed era, which every Russian, like the Time of Troubles, should hate. Because everything that is happening today on our western borders, what is happening in the new territories, what is happening to Russia – is the result of that colossal geopolitical catastrophe, as our president said, that occurred in the 1990s. Subsequently, a traitorous Russophobic elite, not very different from the Ukrainian one, seized power in Russia and is trying not to relinquish it until the end, even today, despite the conditions in which Russia finds itself.

Western civilisation, which has reached the pinnacle of its individualism, has already degraded not only the nation states, the Church, and property, but has destroyed the family, claiming that the individual can choose his or her own sex. The liberation of the individual from all forms of collective identity is the meaning and main thesis of liberalism, but as soon as a person is stripped of all forms of collective identity, i.e. is no longer a citizen of Russia, is no longer a Russian, is no longer an Orthodox, is no longer an aristocrat or a peasant, when he is no longer a man or a woman, such a pure individual cannot exist. It is transformed into nothing, into zero. If all collective identity is completely removed from a person, that person will not even be a person. It will disintegrate.

And this is the next last phase of Western civilisation, which is post-humanism – the transfer of power to artificial intelligence, the advent of cyborgs, genetic engineering, the end of humanity. This is what liberal ideologues like Kurzweil are calling for, this is what Western technocrats are talking about. Replacement of humans by other species, chimeras, half-machines, cyborgs, immersion of human consciousness in cloud servers: welcome to the matrix. This is what the globalists call the Singularity.

The Matrix is not just science fiction, it is the blueprint of where modern Western civilisation is heading and what it has already approached.

The civilisation that has established itself in the West is the triumph of liberalism, technocracy and the end of history. Globalisation is a strategy to transform all peoples, all cultures, all civilisations into a single fabric of a liberal planetary society, where man, freed from all collective identities, is freed from the last collective identity: that of being human. Because the individual is also a collective identity.

In this situation, the Russia of the 1990s accepted these rules of the game and said: ‘We too are part of your postmodern liberal world’. Liberals came to power in our country. We introduced liberal principles into society and partially enshrined them in the constitution: market freedom, liberal democracy, human rights, elections, postmodern culture, individualism, careerism, integration into the West. Our oligarchs rushed to buy football teams in Europe to be accepted in this post-humanist western world and then liberal ideology completely prevailed in Russia. We have lost almost everything and are preparing to lose the last.

Putin’s early days: integration into the West while maintaining sovereignty

Just when we had already put our foot on the abyss, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin arrived and at least stopped the disintegration of the Russian Federation, which seemed almost inevitable. The more we integrated into the West, the more we absorbed liberalism, the weaker we became, the more separatist feelings arose, the faster our collective identity crumbled. Putin, on the other hand, focused on sovereignty, thus starting the process of gradually breaking this liberal dependence.

Sovereignty in the strict sense, however, only refers to the state. Therefore, in the first phase, Putin advanced the following thesis: yes, we want to be part of the West, we want to join the WTO, we want to participate in global processes, in the international division of labour, we will provide the West with cheap natural resources (gas, oil, aluminium, etc.), we are ready to develop cooperation at all levels. The West, in turn, requires only one thing: to recognise that we are a sovereign nation-state, albeit situated in the space of a Western-centric liberal world order, which we, in fact, do not contest.

It is precisely because of this attitude that Russia has not had an acute need for a national idea all these years. In the 1990s, the liberals who drafted our Constitution banned ideology altogether for fear of a return to communist power. But having rejected communist and orthodox-conservative (imperial) ideology, the liberal reformers of the 1990s (who collectively called their opponents by the derogatory term ‘red-brown’) made liberalism the dominant ideology by default. Anything other than liberalism was essentially banned, ridiculed, marginalised and demonised in the 1990s.

After Putin became head of state, since it was still a matter of integration into Western ideology, in the Western liberal world, even the authorities paid no attention to the Russian Idea, although the direct persecution of patriots weakened. However, as early as 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Putin directly criticised the Western world order that had become a unipolar world and planetary hegemony. The situation worsened in August 2008, during the clash with the pro-Western regime of Saakashvili, backed by George Soros. In 2014, when the West not only actively supported the Nazi coup in Ukraine against Russia, but in fact organised it, to which Russia responded by reuniting with Crimea and supporting the rebellious Donbass, relations with the West completely deteriorated, but even afterwards, after entering the format of the Minsk agreements, Russia did not give up on the increasingly unrealistic idea of integrating into the Western world on the condition of preserving its sovereignty. The idea itself contained an insurmountable contradiction – after all, liberalism in both theory and practice denies states the right to sovereignty, all the more so for states that are not fully controlled by global hegemony and where liberalism has not penetrated deeply into the public consciousness and political and social institutions.

Thus, step by step, responding to each challenge from a position of sovereignty, we came into conflict not only with other nation-states totally subservient to the West, but with Western civilisation itself, with globalism, with the dominant world order, with liberalism as a philosophy based on individualism, which is at the heart of the metaphysics of modern Western civilisation, and the more we were involved in this conflict, the more we realised that we were another civilisation, that Russian civilisation was not a part of Western civilisation, but an entirely original phenomenon.

This process happened very slowly: from time to time we remembered the Slavophiles, Putin quoted Ilyin, who was of the same opinion, even Solzhenitsyn (who, despite his betrayal, was also a Slavophile). As a result, more and more we began to realise that we are not part of western civilisation, that we have our own Russian Idea and, consequently, more and more we realised that we need an ideology for the new Russia.

The Special Military Operation as Exorcism

And so came the SMO. A year ago, Russia engaged in a full-scale frontal war against Western civilisation, against individualism, against the dismemberment of society and man, against globalisation, against all the foundations of liberal and globalist philosophy, politics, economics and culture of the modern West. In Ukraine, Russia challenged the artificial neo-Nazi construct that globalists and liberals had created to destroy Russia, the last obstacle on the road to their world domination. If Russia were to fall, even rich and efficient China would not be able to resist Western power for long.

The globalists purposefully created a state whose totalitarian ideology was a mixture of liberalism and Atlanticism on the one hand and Russophobic neo-Nazism on the other. A regime of liberal Nazism, which showed its most inhuman, racist and terrorist sides and to which the liberal West turned a blind eye and continues to do so. Indeed, it conceived and created it.

Thus a post-modern state was born, in which a Jewish clown simultaneously acts as leader and inspirer of radical neo-Nazi groups (often anti-Semitic, but above all Russophobic) and all this Tarantino-esque bloody masquerade is guided by the hand of the liberal West, which immediately punishes any hint of patriotism, or even protection of the traditional family, in the West itself, in the most brutal way, while any Nazi and extremist current and organisation thrives in Ukraine. Everything that is unacceptable on its own territory is on the contrary, for purely pragmatic purposes, supported and cultivated by this same liberal West in Ukraine. The goal is the same: to destroy us at all costs. Then, of course, there will be nothing left of this neo-Nazi rabble either, who will simply be dismissed as having done their dirty work, and will not even be talked about, but I am sure that we ourselves will be the ones to put an end to their existence.

All in all, Ukraine will either become nothing, a barren wasteland in the context of the liberal world, or it will be reborn as part of the great Russian Orthodox civilisation, which it always was and which it is even now. The liberation of Ukraine, which we are pursuing with all our might, is something akin to an exorcism, an exorcism of the devil. This is what the special operation we have been conducting for the past year has become.

Now, ideology. When we are in direct conflict with the West, as civilisation against civilisation, we are in an unequal position. Because the West knows the basis of its civilisation, its ideology is clear, it is written in all Western textbooks, it is present in all universities, in all curricula, and not only in the West. All over the world and, alas, even in our country. The entire contemporary humanities is built on liberal principles, wherever the individual is at the centre. This is the case in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, culturology, economics, psychology, political science, international relations, ethnology, etc. Wherever you look, whatever textbook you open, it will certainly be liberal propaganda.

In sociology, the dogmatic position of Max Weber and the Anglo-Saxon sociologists (starting with the liberal racist and Darwinist Spencer) is that society is created by individuals and therefore can always be dismantled and reconstructed, there is no wholeness in it, and the school of Durkheim, Moss, etc. in which, on the contrary, it is society as a whole, the collective consciousness that is predetermined for the content of individuals, is misunderstood or declared to be private opinion.

In international relations theory, the paradigm of liberalism with its direct appeal to world government and some postmodern additions (gender theory, constructivism, etc.) is evident. Other theories, especially realism, are mentioned in passing with implicit criticism.

Take psychology. Behaviourism, cognitivism, individualist psychoanalysis and postmodern theories of transgression dominate. Jung’s deep psychology, Durand’s sociology of the imagination or Boss/Binswanger’s Dasein-therapy exist only on the margins.

As far as economics is concerned, there is only the liberal market orthodoxy, and apart from that only a marginal ‘heresy’, in which not only Friedrich List or Silvio Gesell, but also Marx, Keynes and Schumpeter are inscribed.

Everywhere, in today’s dominant episteme, we find a celebration of the individual, but also a direct or indirect critique of any kind of wholeness, holism, hierarchy, a deconstruction of the collective into atoms, the elimination of everything that is in one way or another connected to traditional society. Gender studies, transhumanism, deep ecology, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering represent the vanguard of this trend: here the individual itself is already being decomposed, giving way to an exotic array of human, mechanical and animal components.

In science and education in the West, the main line is firmly established: emancipation from collective identity. This is practically the entire content of liberal education.

When Russia agreed to join the Western world, even desperately striving to do so, we embraced all this: modernisation, digitisation, post-modernisation. Thus we quickly lost what was peculiar to our Russian civilisation. This destructive process was also facilitated by the Soviet period in our history. Back then, science and education were dominated by materialism, atheism, blind worship of technical progress and disdain for religious foundations and basic identity. But all this was done in the name of society as a whole. Liberalism, while preserving materialism and atheism, also began to destroy society.

For 30 years, and taking into account another 70 years of Soviet materialism, which already gives 100 years of active eradication of traditional Russian episteme, classical and even real and applied education, this whole area is ashes.

It is a dead end. To integrate the new territories into Russia, the educational process must be standardised. But the textbooks and methodological manuals, plans and assessment criteria that come from Greater Russia are 90 per cent subversive liberal propaganda. The vast majority of textbooks in the humanities, under current conditions, should have been banned for censorship, because they reflect a predominantly liberal point of view, which is the ideology of our civilising enemy, with whom we are fighting a war to the death. The fragments of Soviet education left behind by inertia cannot serve as a point of reference. They were based on a Soviet ideology that no longer exists and cannot serve as the core of a civilisation alternative, as it is far from reflecting the deep identity of traditional Russian society, its foundations and values

There is nothing ‘Russian’ in the humanities, nothing that can strengthen, affirm our identity.

We are in a paradoxical situation where Russia is at war with a civilisation with a clear profile, with a clearly defined ideological identity, has a long history and clearly defined goals.

Yet we have not yet clearly formulated our ideology, we have not changed the article in the Constitution that prohibits ideas of statehood, we have not adopted the ‘fundamental principles’. We have not even begun to work on changing the content of our education system towards the Russian world. Our education remains colonial. We, as Indians, savages, are educated by the epistemological colonisers according to their principles and, of course, in their interest. To our great regret, so far we have not even begun the struggle for liberation in the cognitive intellectual sphere.

The traditional values of the Decree Destiny

The first swallow is Presidential Decree № 809 of 9 November 2022 ‘On the Approval of Basic State Policy to Preserve and Strengthen Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values’. These traditional values are what we, together with K.V. Malofeev and Father Andrey Tkachev, are discussing on Tsargrad TV. A separate booklet has been published in which they are systematically described and interpreted.

Explaining the Decree is a very demanding job. We give a detailed interpretation of it, translating some arid bureaucratic phrases into coherent theoretical constructs. By interpreting this Decree, value by value, we form the primary field of the national idea that we so badly need. The most important thesis is Tradition, the continuity of historical epochs, putting the spiritual before the material, the strong family, the diversity of peoples. All of these are characteristic values of a traditional society, and are therefore directly opposed to liberal ideology.

The values of Decree 809 are the backbone of this new ideology, but we are only taking the first steps towards the Russian Idea, which combines our independence, identity and identity with social justice, i.e. right and left-wing, conservative and socialist dispositions have found flesh and become the basis of a real ideology.

A paradoxical situation has thus arisen. We are already at war, but we have not yet fully understood our function in this war of civilisations. We cannot even talk about building a real epistemology on its basis, a whole range of scientific theories, which would then become a basis for the humanities. And yet, the West and liberalism fight us precisely in this capacity. They understand very well who we really are and they also strike at what has not yet been fully established. In a way, they understand us better than we understand ourselves. And that is why they hate us, not so much for the present as for the past and the future, for our deep and eternal.

Donbass – the spiritual centre of the Russian world

By the will of fate and the logic of history, the Donbass and the new territories have found themselves not on the periphery but in the heart of the Russian world. It is you who must begin the process of a genuine awakening. It is you who, being on the border with the real enemy, having endured so many trials, will be able to pave the way for the Russian Idea and Russian education much faster than the rest of Russia. Because it is not necessary to eradicate liberalism for a long time. Because it shoots at you. Liberalism is the ‘Chimera’ that falls on your heads, killing your children, women, the elderly, husbands, fathers. The short course of liberalism is the daily bombardment of Donetsk or Gorlovka. The inhabitants of the Donbass should genetically develop a negative reflex towards everything associated with the West, and especially liberalism, which is the instance that issued the death sentence for you and all of us. This will allow you to assimilate and establish a new ideology of sovereign Russia, of Russian civilisation, of the Russian world.

You are the vanguard of the Russian world, you are our vanguard, and it is at the forefront, under the most difficult conditions, that it is necessary to create, or rather recreate, the Russian Idea and, in parallel, it is necessary to eradicate liberalism from everywhere.

Technically, I can give you a hint on how to do this properly. Liberalism is an ideology that seeks to liberate man from all, but really all, forms of collective identity. Wherever you see a hint of criticism of holism, integrity, unity, solidarity, cohesion, social justice, as well as criticism of Tradition, including the Church, monarchy, family, morality, spirituality, heroism, sublimity, beauty – there is liberalism. Think of it as a petal-shaped landmine. All institutions, textbooks, curricula are dotted with it today. That is where our civilising enemies put them.

Healthier and openly liberal theories, grand narratives such as liberalism in international relations, the concept of the ‘open society’, the opposition of the individual to the state, Tradition and religion, the ‘sociology of understanding’: these are already ‘Chimeras’ that have flown to destroy us. They are the Tochka-U missiles with which our ideological adversaries are hitting us.

What is needed now is an enormous job of clearing the humanitarian sphere, with the identification of the liberal mines. The deliberalisation of the scientific and educational process is the task for the new territories, primarily the DNR and LNR. This is our task, and also yours. We will help you in this task as much as we can, but you must learn it today and we must teach it to you. You are the centre, we are the periphery, the rear. History is made where there is war.

Catechism in the Donbass

There is another important circumstance. I often refer to a figure like Catechon. There is an Internet portal called katehon.com. In Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, two terms are mentioned: τό κατέχον is a masculine participle meaning ‘restrained’, i.e. ‘power’, ‘kingdom’, ’empire’, and ὁ κατέχων is a masculine participle meaning ‘restrained’, i.e. ‘tsar’, ’emperor’. Thus, the Russian Tsar and the Russian Zardom, and together with the Tsar and the Zardom the Russian people themselves, are considered, since the end of the 15th century, in our Russian ideology, the beginning of Retention.

What does the Withdrawal withhold? The Second Letter to the Thessalonians says:

We ask you, brothers, concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our union with him:

Let not your sanity be shaken too soon, and let it not cause you to fear, either in spirit, or in word, or in message, which is supposed to come from us, as if the day of the Lord had come.

Let no one deceive you in any way, for soon the man of iniquity will fall and be revealed, the son of perdition,

he who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is holy, so as to sit in the temple of God, claiming to be God.

Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you this

And now you know that what he withholds will be revealed to him in due time.

For the mystery of iniquity is already at work; only now there is a restraint, until it is taken out of the way.

And then the unrepentant will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the spirit of his mouth and abolish with the manifestation of his coming,

the unrepentant, whose coming, by Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders

and with all unrighteous deceit, – for those who are perishing because they have not received the love of truth to be saved.

The emperor is thus not just a political figure. He is a religious, historical, eschatological and, if you like, spiritual figure. And the status of emperor, who prevented the son of perdition, the Antichrist, from coming into the world, after the fall of Byzantium was entrusted to the tsars of Moscow. On our power, on our Russian people, who prevented the world from the advent of absolute evil.

Even after the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks, being atheists and materialists, in their confrontation with western civilisation, by a historical paradox, assumed the same function. Perhaps this happened under the internal pressure of our deep Russian people. The Soviet system, socialism was opposed to western capitalism, the political and economic ideology of the Antichrist, and so, fighting the enemy of God, the Bolsheviks themselves, atheists and godless, did not clarify themselves as bearers of the function of the Container. Stalin, on the other hand, almost openly embodied the characteristics of the ‘Red Emperor’.

The fight against Western civilisation is a fight against the ‘son of perdition’ and is led by the Holder. And the Holder is the Russian kingdom, the Russian state, the Russian people.

The Donbass, in ’14, acted as the Holder. By waking up, it awakened Russia itself. It curbed the pressure of neo-Nazi Kiev, but also held the rest of Russia together. The Donbass prevented Russia from sliding into the abyss into which liberals and conciliators were dragging it.

I witnessed an absolutely heartbreaking moment in my life when I watched the videos of the beginning of the liberation of the Donbass from the Nazis in 2014. They were the very first demonstrations of the miners. I, a Muscovite and a philosopher, had never been to the Donbass. What idea did I have of it? Of course I understood that it was Novorossiya and had nothing to do with ‘Ukraine’ and the very concept of ‘Ukraine’ is untenable. However, it seemed to me that these inhabitants of the Donbass were mostly philistines, with their own peculiarities, but with hardly a broad outlook. Yes, they defend their language, their history and their land. And that alone is above praise.

But this is what I saw in that video. A monument, flags, mostly Soviet, and suddenly an ordinary worker, modestly dressed, probably straight from the mine, comes out onto the makeshift podium. It is not a masquerade, he is just dressed shabbily, aged, unattractive. He climbs the monument and shouts: ‘Freedom to the Donbass! Down with the Kiev junta! We are the catechumens. We are the faithful. We are the bearers of the last Orthodox kingdom. We are here with you called to carry out a great religious mission’.

As I watched this, I thought, ‘This is it’. Such a deep and penetrating understanding of what is happening in the Donbass, where it is leading and what it will lead to, was simply impossible to imagine. It was a true Donbass miracle. That is why I echo the words of my daughter Darya, who died at the hands of a Ukrainian terrorist, but essentially fell in battle with the son of perdition, on the front line. Dasha became a national hero. So, Daria, returning from a trip to Novorossia – Lugansk, Donetsk, Melitopol, Kherson, etc., said a profound truth: ‘We think that the Donbass needs us, that we need to teach its people… No, it is the Donbass that is vital for Russia. It needs to teach us’.

And how could we not remember this unnamed miner’s speech from back in 2014. There are times when, through the common man, God speaks. And He lets us know what this confrontation is, what the Novorossiya is not only for all of us, but also for humanity and even for Himself, what the DNR and LNR are.

A real victory in a real war

And the last thing I want to say. Many will be asking themselves: when will the Victory come? How will the war end? How will everything end? What will post-war Russia be like, where our ideology is destined to assert itself? Some express optimistic views, but they give rise to inflated expectations. They say we are going to win, that we are really going to get involved and win. Others, on the contrary, get angry and lose heart when they see how difficult it is for us to win this war, how slow our progress is, how we sometimes abandon our positions.

I would like to avoid extremes: both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism. This is what I think about this war. I think victory is highly problematic. Yes, we will win, but at what price – we cannot imagine. It is a hard war, a long war, and it will last a very long time. After all, we are fighting the entire West, so frankly, I don’t see the prospect of victory very close. The mission we are facing is almost impossible. Winning means defeating the West, defeating the civilisation of the Antichrist, the global world order, not just the Nazi regime in Kiev. This is a clash of civilisations, the final battle of humanity. It cannot be won this way

To achieve this victory, a real war must be started, and we have not yet started a real war. We are still in the phase of a special military operation. We are just recovering from the shock and we cannot understand what is happening, we cannot get to the bottom of what is already happening. Consequently, victory is not yet on the agenda. To win this last, perhaps the most terrible patriotic war, the war of all the people, the Russian war, it is necessary to involve all our people, all our state and all our society. Without exception of any kind. Just as in the Second World War, just as in the Great Patriotic War. The current war is the Third Patriotic War. It is already a people’s war and must become total. Only with all our forces, spiritual and material, with all resources and with all methods can we win.

Now not a single tractor, not a single truck, not a single wagon, not a single van, not a lorry, which does not bear the inscription “Z”, must cross Russia. Everything that crawls and flies, breathes, struggles, thinks, speaks must do so in the name of one Victory. Today the question of how much we should focus on the war is a matter of life and death. We must let the war enter, deep down, to the marrow. Everyone must experience their own tragedy and pain.

I see how huge masses are being dragged into the war. Millions of people in Russia are already with you in their hearts and souls in the new territories, in the war, but this is not enough. Everyone simply has to wake up. There must be total totality here. The war must reach every home, it must reach every person, to the core of their soul, and the pain, your pain, our pain, the pain of those who have lost loved ones and are losing them now, must become the pain of everyone. It is not the private grief of someone far away, somewhere out there. Some people have lost their loved ones and it is their business, it is their business and we have not lost. No, it is not your business, it is your business.

It is everybody’s business, everybody’s business, without exception. Whoever does not feel this way, whoever does not weep, whoever does not suffer with us, whoever does not stand in solidarity with our soldiers, whoever does not help them with all his heart, with all his soul, with all his actions – excludes himself from the Motherland, from Russia, from the Russian people. This man is no longer Russian, he opposes the historical existence of the Russian people, he takes the side of the enemy catechumens, he actually becomes our direct adversary, the minion of the son of perdition, and begins to serve him.

Today there is no longer any room for hesitation or neutrality. Either to the right or to the left. Either lambs or goats. We will be victorious when we are aware of ourselves and our enemy. This is the main condition for victory and victory starts with you, with the people of Donbass, with those who woke up first to the great battle.

Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini