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Spiritual Heart — Religion of Unity/From the History of Ancient Russia

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From the History of Ancient Russia

Ideas of Jesus Christ about love as a method of self-development for the sake of cognition of Universal God-the-Father and Mergence with Him Who is Love, were first brought to the southern regions of Russia by the Apostle Andrew. And people did not have any reasons not to accept these Divine Teachings; they would get massively baptized by this Personal Disciple of Christ.

The second “baptist” of Russia was prince Ascold. He was baptized by the Greeks and himself baptized a certain number of Russians into the Judaic-Greek faith.

But the main tragedy of Russia began later. This is how the events unfolded.

The successors of Ruerick were: Oleg — the guardian of his son Igor, then Igor himself, and after Igor’s death — his widow Olga. It was a family of extremely cruel, treacherous, aggressive, and greedy rulers.

Having a strong fighting squad made up of scumbags devoid of any humane trait, whose favorite occupation was murder and brigandage, they used to undertake regular armed assaults against their neighbors.

After Oleg and then Igor had died, Olga took over as the head of the retinue, and as such she manifested an even more gruesome degree of cruelty and treachery: with Olga as the leader the squad not only would kill people for the sake of robbery, but also murdered in a sophisticated manner peace envoys from their neighbors and people of the captured settlements, burying or burning them alive [72,86].

Later on she was baptized in Constantinople, but it did not have any positive impact either on her temper or her behavior (we may understand now why).

The son of Igor and Olga — Svyatoslav — adopted the same kind of temper. He would pick a victim out of his neighbors and declare through a messenger: “I am willing to go against you!” — after which his ruthless squad would murder thousands of people for the sake of robbery or just for fun.

After Svyatoslav had died, his son Vladimir — the main “baptist” of Russia — started to reign.

When he grew up, he also became a bloodthirsty robber, like his ancestors. And following his grandmother’s example, he also accepted baptism from the Greeks.

Having learned the way the Church was operating in Byzantium, he realized that he could derive a great personal benefit in terms of robbing his subjects and neighbors from introducing this religious system in Russia and decided to “baptize” Russia into the faith of that grossly perverted pseudo-Christian sect, which existed at the time in the eastern part of the decaying Roman Empire. The “advantages” of the new faith for the atrocious ruler were evident: with its help he could totally suppress free-thinking, to “belittle” the people and to bend them to his will through “priests”…

Did Vladimir become a Christian himself after he had been baptized? — No: he continued with brigandage and mass murders.

…Some readers may ask: “What is the true Christian baptism?”

Normally by this word they denote a certain ritual. Today, baptized people most often regard it as a ritual of guarding magic, hoping that it will protect them from the forces of evil.

But reasonable people understand baptism as something different. For them it is an oath before God: I know and accept Your Teachings, I will live according to them, I will serve You by helping other people and ask Your help in this task!*

Such baptism is effective. All other variations are not: they are nothing but deceit and self-deceit. God regards as important here not bodily movements or words from people but their emotions and powers of their decisions!

… Another bloody crime of Vladimir was mass compulsory baptism of people, which was carried out by the same gang of murderers, who made up his squad.

Naturally, the population did not want to accept this devilish faith from the bloody executioner and the leader of gangsters. People would evade being baptized. Then Vladimir’s bandits started to give wooden crosses to those who had already been baptized, which they were supposed to wear around their necks, so as to make it easier to identify those who were evading this ritual, to catch, torture, or kill them.

And later Vladimir and then his son Yaroslav, with the assistance of Greek “monks”, began to establish in Russia the same order that existed at this time in Western Europe.

One should not think that in the “Christian” temples people were told about the Christ’s Teachings of love and methods of cognizing God-the-Father. Of course, not! Instead, people were instilled with the idea of their total sinfulness and insignificance, of “saving” power of prayers performed by “priests” who pray “for us” so hard, get tired and suffer so much because of this that they need to be rewarded by money and by other things for that.

Did such faith do any good to the Slavs, if the new “culture” and lifestyle were to be compared to those that existed before Vladimir’s “baptism”? — I am sure that it did not.

Even the legend that Constantine (his monastic name was Cyril) and Methodius, Greek envoys, created a written language for Russians is a lie. Even before the “baptism” there existed as many as two types of alphabets: the Glagolic alphabet and that which later was named the Cyrillic alphabet. Both were used for writing legends on coins, princes’ credentials to the merchants, and even books. The Book of Veles, for instance, was finished during the time of the “Ascold’s baptism”. It was written in the same Cyrillic alphabet that existed, as it turns out, a long time before Cyril.

The New Testament was also translated into the Slavic written language (the same old Cyrillic alphabet) before Cyril and Methodius arrived. And in this form it was found by Cyril in Khersones, which is recorded by him in his biography [51,54, 84].

But the Church that formed in Russia was reluctant to present the New Testament translated into Slavic to the believers. On the contrary, this scripture was unavailable to people for many centuries on the pretext that “laymen” could misinterpret it; only priests and their superiors had access to its text. Unauthorized reading of the New Testament was punished by death [22].

Instead of Christ’s preaching of tender love and lowliness of mind, efforts on developing oneself and helping others — this “Christianity” brought cruelty and violence to Russia along with the destruction of all good spiritual traditions of the ancient Slavs.

Those who were discontent with the activity of this sect and did not want to implicitly obey it began to be called “sectarians” (by analogy with “heretics” in Europe). They were tortured with fire, torn on the rack, burnt live, and impaled on sharp stakes.

As in Western Europe, anathema was declared on sexual love. The words that had sexual meaning were turned into a means of defiling other people — the “mat” (the Russian obscene language — the translator’s note).

Mass executions of “sectarians” and raskolniks (the Old Believers) had been performed for centuries and intensified in particular by the end of the XIX century. Those who had doubts in the truth of such “Christianity” would get caught and thrown into special prisons that existed in monasteries — without a court trial, just based on a suspicion. There executioners, following the example of the Inquisition, would torture them with fire and the rack, break their thighbones, crippling them, and burn them alive (not in public, though). Raskolniks had their right hands chopped off — so that they would not write. And their tongues torn out — so that they would not preach [18,22-23,35,57-59,64,79].

While doing this, the Russian inquisitors directly referred to the positive experience of their Byzantine colleagues in maintaining the stability of their faith [79].

Even when the Inquisition was abolished in the rest of Europe, the Russian Inquisition was still continuing — on the national scale and using the state power structures — the hunt for the “sectarians”, i.e. those people who understood Christianity differently.

Mass executions of “sectarians” and raskolniks were taking place until 1917. At that time the whole country was filled with detectives, who hunted their victims. The property of the victims was confiscated, a part of it passing to the informers. The victims were tortured, “smoked” slowly over fire, burnt in specially constructed wooden frames, or left to die hanging on the hooks stuck in between their ribs [57].

Policemen, various state officials, and mayors used to “feed” on priests. And priests were pulling money and other means of subsistence from people — for “praying for forgiveness of their sins” and for various chargeable rites…

If someone stopped attending Sunday service — this would instantly become a warning signal for the priests and their menials, an indication of a threat to their welfare. Such people would immediately become subject to police repression, or priests would stir a gang of the “faithful” against them. There are descriptions of cases of mass murders of “sectarian” families by crowds of such “faithful” [22,59].

Priests were turned into police detectives by special state decrees: they were obliged to inform the police of everything that their parishioners reported to them at the confession [35].

The “seduction from Orthodoxy” was persecuted as a criminal case [35].

Marriages of people who did not marry in an Orthodox church were considered illegitimate. Authorities would take children away from such parents, sometimes even from entire communities of non-Orthodox believers. Those children received the stigma of “bastards” (“illegitimate children”) for life and were deprived of all rights, even the right to have parents [59].

The persecutions went so far that it was not even allowed to bury dead raskolniks on the “land of Orthodox Russia”. Their corpses were appointed special guards and putrefied for weeks [23].

Priests forced people to drink hard. “Monks” drank hard as well [31,72,75,79]. If someone refused to drink, it was qualified as “sectarianism”, and this person would become an enemy and was persecuted by the police. [22]

S.M.Solovyov describes the Russian reality of that time as follows: “…You will not find such disgraceful drunkenness neither with Germans, nor with other Slavs, — nowhere, except for the Russian state: men and women, laymen and clergymen are wallowing in mud in the street, some die of alcoholism” [79].

An Englishman Richard Chansler, who visited Russia, describes his impression of the Orthodox priesthood as follows: “As for debauchery and drunkenness, there is not anything like this in the entire world, and in terms of extortion — these are the most disgusting people under the sun” [79].

Those horrible events of the Russian history produced many heroes-martyrs — true Christians, who preferred tortures and death to accepting — even on the outside — such a “faith”.

For example, there are descriptions of cases, when Orthodox soldiers or Cossacks surrounded a settlement of “sectarians”, who thus were doomed to prolonged tortures and burning alive, and the people would make fires themselves and enter into them by whole families… [58].

“Which apostles taught so? I do not know. My Christ did not order the apostles to teach like that, to bring people to faith with fire, with the whip, and with the gibbet!” — wrote archpriest Avvakum, who was later burnt alive together with his associates [18,58].

Some other clergymen would aslo rebel, for instance, Hesychasts Nil Sorsky and Maxim Grek, who attempted to initiate a movement of non-possessors among the priests and monks. They opposed the bloody atrocities that the Church was committing and the parasitism of priests and monks, and tried to bring them back to the Teachings of Jesus Christ. But they and their followers also got repressed by the Church as a result: some were burnt, some sentenced for life in monastic prisons… [79].

Does it resemble Christianity in any way? — No, not a bit.

During the “bloody Sunday” in 1905, when unarmed people (men, women, and children) marched carrying portraits of the tsar and icons in the capital of the Russian Empire in the direction of the Palace Square in order to address the tsar, — Orthodox Cossacks slashed them with sabers in all parts of the city, and then Orthodox soldiers shot the survivors. Children’s corpses alone were collected for many carriages. Thousands of innocent people died or were crippled that day… [31].

At that time the entire population was divided into two camps: priest-executioners with their “faithful”, headed by the tsar and supported by the punitive state machinery on one side, and on the other side — their victims, who either disguised themselves as the “faithful”, or did not put up with the regime and became heroic martyrs.

The “bloody Sunday” predetermined the destiny of the Russian autocracy and that “Christianity”. 1917 brought two coups. Bolsheviks shot the tsar together with his family and drowned and shot a lot of priests hated by people. The monastery on the Solovki islands and several others, where victims of Orthodoxy were tortured before, now were turned into jails for former priests [33].

The majority of people did not support the dominating Church, and it was totally destroyed together with its appendix — the autocracy.