The era that humanity is currently experiencing is an era of judgment and collapse. All nations, without exception, are coming to judgment; some earlier, others later. Collapse threatens each of them; each must see his own unsatisfactoriness or failure before the face of God - in his turn, in his own way, with his own special outcome and in the fulfillment of his special destiny. Years have passed when it might have seemed to us that “we collapsed, while others stood.” Now we don’t think so for a long time. The prophetic word is coming true that we are all subject to the judgment of the eternally living fire - of course, spiritual fire, scorching, cleansing and renewing. And, understanding this, we, Russians, must not lose heart and not be faint-hearted, but firmly believe in God and faithfully serve our homeland, Russia, from which this spiritually fiery scorching, cleansing and renewal began.
How can we serve her? What are we called to do? What should we do? To answer this means to say the main thing; to begin this service means to carry out this main thing.
Russia needs a new Russian man: tested by the fires of temptation and judgment, cleansed of the weaknesses, delusions and ugliness of the past and building himself in a new way, from a new spirit, for the sake of new great goals... This is the main thing. By doing this, we are building a new Russia. For it is blind and blasphemous to think that Russia has “died”; let foreigners who are hostile to her and traitors who are thinking about her dismemberment believe this. Yes, Russia was the first to go to trial; she was the first to enter the fire zone, the first to resist temptation, the first to lose her former appearance in order to suffer a new one. The first, but not the last. And other countries are already engulfed in the same fire, each in its own way. There will be no former Russia. There will be a new Russia. Still Russia; but not the old one that collapsed; but a new, updated one, for which dangers will not be dangerous and disasters will not be terrible. And so we must prepare for it; and we must prepare it - forge in ourselves, in all of us, a new Russian spirit, still Russian, but not the old Russian (that is, sick, not rooted, weak, confused). And this is the main thing.
To do this, it is necessary, firstly, to cope with temptations. There are a whole series of them.
And the first of them is the temptation of Bolshevik “freedom”, freedom from God, from the Spirit, from conscience, from honor, from national culture, from the homeland. This temptation is not of Russian origin. In recent centuries it has been manifested by materialism and spread by the French Revolution and German philosophy (from the left Hegelians to Friedrich Nietzsche inclusive). Freedom is necessary for man and sacred to him. But this freedom is gained through God, in spirit, in conscience, in a sense of one’s own spiritual dignity, in serving one’s half-blooded people. Bolshevik “freedom,” which frees man from the third (spiritual) dimension, leaving him with a hungry body and a depraved and passionate soul, is not freedom, but the arbitrariness of violence, fornication and sin.
The second temptation is the temptation of a totalitarian state and communist hard labor, a temptation that promises predatory "greatness" through enslavement and through the robbery of the rest of humanity and monkey “happiness” through the renunciation of personal origin, of creative initiative and of free inspiration. This temptation has been put forward in recent centuries by socialists, led by Karl Marx in the 19th century. You cannot take away the ideas of greatness and happiness from people. But true greatness is not achieved in the forms of national robbery, world conquest, and true happiness is not achieved through the enslavement of the individual. The deception of godless satiety imposed by the slave state on depersonalized slaves seduces people with the greatest vulgarity and the greatest lies; seduces in order to disappoint and destroy. And he must be overcome.
Whoever does not overcome these two temptations is not the builder of a new Russia. Whoever has not completely exposed the temptation of godless freedom and totalitarian statehood will not be given either the purification of the soul or its renewal. And if he establishes himself in the future Russia, then he will turn out to be a representative of unbridledness and slavery. A culture without God is the Tower of Babel. A state without God is earthly hard labor. And how many in emigration have no longer coped with this temptation, have not mastered the first stage and therefore have not uttered a single living word; for their path led them from the very beginning into the abyss of Bolshevism.
Our second task is to cleanse the soul of the weaknesses, delusions and ugliness of the past. A lot of them. Here are the main ones.
1. Lack of character, i.e. weakness and instability of spiritual will; the absence in the souls of a spiritual backbone and a sacred altar, for which they go to torment and death; lack of vision of the religious meaning of life and hence the tendency to all sorts of vacillations, convolutions and slippery actions; and in connection with this - a lack of spiritual self-government and volitional restraint.
2. Insufficient, unstrengthened sense of one’s own spiritual dignity, this life-restraining and life-directing force, and hence: the ease of seduction of our souls; their oscillation between despotism and groveling, between self-exaltation and self-abasement; inability to respect the subject of rights and obligations, unstrengthened sense of justice; a sick craving for blind imitative Westernism, for the idle and harmful borrowing of absurd or poisonous ideas from other peoples, a lack of faith in oneself, in the creative powers of one’s people.
3. Saturation of political life with hatred and craving for anarchy. We must overcome both. We cannot revive or build Russia on class, racial, or party hatred. We know that foreigners will support and incite all these types of hatred in us in order to weaken, undermine, dismember and conquer us. And we must cleanse and free ourselves from these destructive forces and extinguish and eradicate in ourselves this spirit of civil wars that threaten us. And we must do this because we are Christians; and also because this is required of us by state wisdom and a correct understanding of the historical and multinational destinies of our homeland. A great and strong Russia cannot be built on hatred, neither class (social democrats, communists, anarchists), nor racial (racists, anti-Semites), nor political party.
And here is our third, positive task - to renew the spirit in ourselves, to establish our Russianness on new, nationally-historically ancient, but updated foundations in content and creative charge. We must learn to believe differently, to contemplate with our hearts - whole, sincerely, creatively, so that we ourselves know and so that others know about us that this is not said about us: “he looks at the sky, rummages around the earth.” We must learn not to separate faith and knowledge, but to bring faith not into the composition or method, but into the process of scientific research and strengthen our faith with the power of scientific knowledge. We must learn a new morality, religiously strong, Christianly conscientious, not afraid of the mind and not ashamed of our imaginary “stupidity,” not seeking “glory,” but strong in true civic courage and strong-willed organization.
Globalization on the way to world conquest
We must cultivate in ourselves a new sense of justice - religiously and spiritually rooted, loyal, fair, fraternal, faithful to honor and homeland; a new sense of ownership - charged with the will to quality, ennobled by Christian feeling, meaningful by artistic instinct, social in spirit and patriotic in love; a new economic act - in which the will to work and abundance will be combined with kindness and generosity, in which envy will be transformed into competition, and personal enrichment will become the source of national wealth.
Russia needs a new Russian man, with an updated - religious, cognitive, moral, artistic, civil, property and economic - way of life. We must first of all cultivate and strengthen this way of life within ourselves. For only after this and as a result of this, we will be able to convey it to our gifted, kind and noble people, who are still in great helplessness and need a true, strong leading idea. Russia expects from us a new, Christian-social, strong-willed, creative education. But how can one educate others who has not educated himself?
This is the main thing. This is for centuries. Without this we will not revive and renew Russia. And on this path, we will cope with all troubles, dangers, difficulties and tasks. And whoever leads his renewal and self-education in this spirit, whoever does this and teaches others, will fulfill his historical and national calling.