Bastions

CRIMEA, ON THE BLACK SEA, WHERE RUSSIA TOUCHES THE SOUTH
Resoluteness Leads to Holiness
Great questions arise before the observer here in Crimea, on the shore of this sea. About Russia, the Empire, Slavic Ukraine, identity, ideals. Great questions and great inspiration. This is not a battle for individual national and economic interests; it is part of the epochal war for the Continent and the Heart of the World. For divine law, against the demonism of money. We reject skepticism and renew our faith. Faith in our own strength inspired by the Lord. A great man with clear visions, a monarch who creates the Empire and returns the divine feeling of life into people, is the one people are waiting for. The wished one. The one being created

By: Dragan M. Ćirjanić
Photo: Royal Order of Knights’ archive

Taurida, Kherson, Sevastopol, Yalta, Oreanda, Alupka, Masandra, Koktebel, Feodosia, Bakhchisaray, Kerch, Simferopol... how intoxicating and familiar are the names of those places, full of beauty and drama. As if our being has already been here... And it has. Ever since the times of Kimbri, Cimmerians, who gave the peninsula its name. The beauty of nature in Crimea is a magnificent scene for the most wonderful and the bloodiest events of Russian history. Traveling through Crimea is an imaginary journey through Russian history and literature. It awakens great emotions and great questions. Crimea is a place where Russia touches the south, where it encountered the spirit of the Mediterranean and world of ancient history. Boldly moving down to the south, Russians built their castles-watchtowers on rocks hovering over the sea. There, in Crimea, thoughts are awakened about the Russian Empire, and the pulse of its monarchy is still strongly felt.
More than a shield, Crimea is a belvedere and place for thinking. It was a place of exile, the place where the border of the first Rome ended and where, a long time ago, the story about third Rome began, in Cherson, where Holy Prince Vladimir accepted Christianity.
We have Dimitry Kornilov in our company, descendant of Admiral Vladimir Kornilov, a hero who died during the in the Crimean War in 1854, defending Sevastopol. He was born and lives in Paris. We also have representatives of the Serbian Royal Order of Knights, dedicated guardians of the army in the shadow of Despot Stefan Lazarević, Zoran Mrđenović with his wife Anastasia, who translates what we don’t understand. Just the right company for visiting Crimea. We all agree that for Russia, Crimea is more than just a territory.

CLOSENESS OF BEAUTY AND TRADITION

The strategic importance and beauty of Crimea make it a very significant area in the southern part of Russia. The closeness of beauty and tragedy gives a magical aroma to life here. This is the meeting point of several worlds: Slavic, Mediterranean, Islamic, Ancient. This is where Europe and Asia meet and merge.
”Crimea is a great Russian cemetery”, says Kornilov, melancholically looking into the distance.
”But all of them, dead, are now here, with us, returned to where they belong”, I say making a toast. We toasted to Russian Crimea, Admiral Nahimov, Admiral Kornilov and the whites, Kolchak, Vrangel and heroes of the Patriotic War, Tolbukhin and many more, everyone added a name. We stopped listing names, because we would need more, many more drinks, and that is not what we wanted, since we were already intoxicated by the beauty of Taurida, as the peninsula used to be called before the revolution.
”Russia had many victims in the last century. Sixty million. Revolutionary terror, then World War II...” says Kornilov.
”But those victims are not privileged, not extraordinary”, I say. ”No one except Russia ever mentions them. They are not traded, not imposing to others.”
I’m thinking, only Russians still remember and respect them. Others have forgotten. Mentioning them is unpleasant. They are their deed to everything Russian. The dead still give them strength.
Whatever you think about, you cannot avoid history in Crimea. Strategy, politics, geopolitics, culture, sea and sun, all merge into one, into the fullness of life, something superhuman shining above our reality...
Russophobia is a plant growing in the countries of Western Europe and America and belongs to the group of parasite weeds. It has a tendency of spreading towards the east and includes certain Slavic countries as well. It is fed with pathological hatred and produces it in large quantities. There is a laboratory made with the purpose to cover the real intentions of its creator and his real nature. It inspires will for war and serves as fuel for the wavered military power. In short, it is necessary for the life of its creator...
Whether you like it or not, finding yourself in the whirlpool of contemporary events and tensions regarding Crimea, you cannot help thinking generally and widely, about Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Poland, the West and their fate today. The will for war is encouraged and found in vassal Slavic countries, which don’t recognize their immediate, let alone long-term interests. This shouldn’t soften and slow down Russian resoluteness. Cui bono? we should ask.

LANDMARKS IN THE EXPANSE

Wishing to break the prejudice about Russian politics towards Crimea, after its unification with the Russian Federation based on results of the referendum held in March 2014, and in order to announce its new politics, its reasons and historical right, the Government of this republic organized a tour in Crimea for reporters from several countries (France, Greece, Armenia, Sweden and Ecuador and Serbia), as well as a series of meetings with Crimean ministers. They were shown the directions of development and potentials of this central peninsula in the Black Sea.
After paying dearly its illusions in the XX century, Russia is again on the path of its centuries-long tradition. It has returned Crimea to Russia, where it has constantly been since Empress Catherine the Great. Her monument was again symbolically placed a year and a half ago in one of the squares of Simferopol, capital of Crimea.
In the early XVIII century, our Sava Vladislavić stayed here in Crimea, collecting intelligence data about the possibilities of building a port for the fleet of Peter the Great on the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. He gave his considerations, ”Secret Report about the Black Sea” to the emperor personally, after which their close cooperation began. Count Sava Vladislavić is our main Serbian landmark in the great expanse of Russia and its history.
The wooded slopes of Yalta, where the mountain descends steeply towards the sea, are homes of summerhouses of Russian emperors, aristocrats and artists, who left their traces in this city.
We are entering Livadia, the summer palace of the Romanovs. It was built by architect Nikolai Krasnov, who also indebted Serbia with the classical style of his edifices, after his emigration after the revolution. The evocation of the peace conference in February 1945 is on the ground floor of the palace. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill are sitting at a large round table, with polite cynicism on their faces. Except for the defeated, not many saw the direction Europe and Russia were taking then, forming what we now call the contemporary picture of the world. It all began twenty-seven years earlier, with the ritual and violent assassination of the host of this palace and his entire family. Selecting the place for signing the peace agreement also carries ritual symbolism. The participants of the joint secret endeavor stopped hiding their alliance in forming the future world. The second act of the drama was beginning.

BATTLE FOR THE HEART OF THE WORLD

There is a large screen in one of the Livadia salons with documentaries about that event, which meaning was possible to perceive only much later. Homo americanus entered Europe and stayed there till the very day. During his invasion, he created and defeated homo sovieticus, turning everything, entire Europe, into a large human porridge called homo economicus. And just as he thought that everything was going according to plan, authentic Russia began rising. So here we are today, on one of the battlefields of the conflict of planetary proportions, the war for the heart of the world. Only a stairway was separating us from the early XX century, where time seems to has stopped for the family of the last Romanovs. Without any traces of excessive requests, luxury or capriciousness, the imperial family lived a humble and religious life, dedicated to their duties to Russia and faith. The entire space in which their portraits and photos are watching us breathes with deep and tragic religiousness. They must have felt the pulse, the approaching and arrival of the unholy to Russia. It can be seen in their faces. They watched the demons up close with the persistence of saints. Many icons and photos are decorating the walls of their rooms. The angelic innocence of their portraits remains in our memory for a long time.
I remembered my Russian friend, Alexei Postnikov, who recited me a poem of the Crimean Cadet Corpus in Bela Crkva, where he was a cadet, about the emperor’s palace Orianda, near Livadia. He boarded a refugees’ ship in Crimea as a three year-old boy, with his parents, when he waved goodbye to his grandfather, who didn’t want to leave Russia and who was soon after, just like millions of other Russians, killed by the Bolsheviks. The legendary Orianda palace exists only in that poem. A sanatorium and Church of the Protective Veil of the Mother of God were later built on the ashes of that palace burned in a fire. I can still hear the sound of that song about the Orianda palace, which embraces its little cadets...

FATAL IMITATION OF THE WEST

After Livadia, we visit the palace of Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov, prince and warrior, and feel the style that shaped XIX century Russia. The elite watching us from the walls of the palace, as if on a parade, features by refinedness and determination. Those who lived, commanded, loved and fought for Russia were watching us. Landscapes painted by Ivan Aivazovsky, marinist, who caught the light, drama and beauty of the Black Sea on his lavishing canvases, are also there.
Crimea is the place of the Russian tragic romanticism. Many artists have walked these paths of Yalta. Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekov, Bunin and many others searched for peace here. Chekov built his home on a slope where the murmur of the sea merged with the cypress forest... Today’s world seems to have become Chekov’s Pavilion No. 6. Progress is producing human lethargy, breaking of will, because resistance is futile. Chekov clearly showed the face of the demon of modernity and progress. Chekov is a writer of silent breakdowns, echoes of the distant upcoming tragedy, the forthcoming capitalism that slowly but surely corroded the foundations of the Empire and established the social crisis in Russia, leading to revolution. He was a seismograph of the growing tension. Returning to the empire of money is a great temptation for present Russia. It’s not only the territory that is jeopardized; it’s also the idea of life. Imitating cultural models of the West, as it has showed, inevitably leads Russia to destruction.
That is why the Russian fight on the front of meaning of life is important. Her refusal to enter the matrix-machine of modern liberalism offers the possibility of finding meaning in a new deification of entire life.
There is another doctor-philosopher who stayed in Crimea. Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev fought in the Crimean War (1853–1856). Of all the Russian religious philosophers and God seekers, Russia today perhaps needs Leontiev most. His thoughts and religious stands are one of the brightest break-ups with the illusions of the modern liberal world. He sheds new light on anti-egalitarianism and the discriminating strictness of the state led by brilliant aristocracy. Because, if that is missing ”what will poetry be like in life?... Will it not be the poetry of general rational and provincial happiness?”
Leontiev is healing for us as well. The knight, his wife and I are drinking kvas on the sea shore, while the rays of sun are penetrating through the pouring rain. A rainbow is appearing in the distance. The entire sight reminds of painter Aivazovsky. We speak about Kosovo and how to return it to Serbia. Leontiev gives us the answer: ”... Oh! If contemporary Serbs, united, could only bear the limitless and patriarchal authority of their new king dressed in golden robes, hero, commander and poet, who would, according to all features of his upbringing, gain from Europe and preserve everything magnificent in its heritage: chivalry, refinedness and romanticism!...”

THE CHURCH OF THE SUNNY DAY

The next day we were visiting Bakhchisaray, with the palace of the Tatar khan and center of the Islamic Community Mechihat. The Federation is making enormous investments in restoring the old edifice, symbol of the Tatar presence in Crimea. Kornilov asked a young Tatar lady, custodian, wearing a hijab, about her feelings towards Russia. What language do they speak among themselves and in the family? She was a bit confused with the directness of the question, but said that she feels at home. She later took us through the rooms of the palace, male and female, through gardens and fountains. Near the fountain of Khan Girai, who erected it in mourning for his passed away love, is a monument to Pushkin, who wrote the verses: ”Fountain of love, fountain of life! / I brought you two roses as a gift”.... Two fresh roses are brought here every day. The breath of restrained sensuality and dedication is felt in all the ornaments of this palace. There is a strange erotic charge in the separation of worlds, where both women and men feel fulfilled. Muslims still believe in family and hold on to it. Faith and family are their strength. They are separated from others and cherish about their uniqueness, without longing to merge into the large and diffuse other. They are not in the mood to exit their spiritual world. It is the precondition of their survival. How silly and naive Europeans are, expecting Muslims to change in the direction of ”European values and democracy”. They’d better remember their true identity, which is certainly not democracy. Muslims seem to help us return to ourselves. They put before us a mirror of our secularized nihility and pointlessness. They don’t want to be ill from tolerance and correctness, like we do. Tolerance leading to distraction. To disappearance.
We go further into the hills above Bakhchisaray, where the famous Dormition Monastery is carved in the rocks. There is the church of the ”sunny summer day” as the monk said whispering, thinking of August 15, the day of Dormition of the Holy Mother of God. We climb to the monastery carved in a rock and take the myrrh. The snow and night falling increase the feeling of holiness and eminence. The monk tells us how Bolsheviks turned the monastery into a horse stall and later a hospital. General Vrangel came here with his army during the Civil War. Soon after they had to retreat by ships. The entire army disembarked in Serbia, where they dreamed about and prepared their great return...

WAITING FOR NIKOLAI KRASNOV

The following day, our hosts organized a meeting with representatives of several ministries (infrastructure and investments, tourism, culture, finance). We ask them about plans for development. Russia is making great investments in constructing roads and communication and renewing the power system. At the moment, the most important is the construction of a federal highway, connecting the continental part of the state through Kerch with Simferopol, capital of the Republic, and the Crimean shore. We are asking about the amounts of investments of the state and of the private sector. Investing is combined, although I can notice, by the forms of tourist objects, that there is a danger of private investments determining the construction preconditions. I am thinking that Crimea, a space of high cultural heritage, must have an urban planner such as Nikolai Krasnov, in order to achieve a unique style, derived from consideration towards heritage, without yielding to the construction rage of market and money. The contemporary mantra of the liberals, that the market is regulating everything, is a certain road to chaos and weakening of Russia.
The new airport in Simferopol is a monument to architectural imagination. They say that they were inspired by Aivazovsky’s paintings. Its wavy forms seem to wave to those departing. We are seeing off our friend Kornilov, traveling to Paris via Moscow. Paris of the rebelled people and stumbling global-financial oligarchy. It is difficult for a Western to realize that he is living in a great lie, closed in a capsule of stories about freedom, democracy and progress. Kornilov knew that. He knew that all this with Russia and the West is not just a big misunderstanding. A man with sharp perceptions was hiding behind a mask of a bon vivant. A genuine Russian aristocrat, observing the world without illusions. We are spending the morning of our last day in the Monastery of St. Luke of Crimea in the city center. The church where the relics of this saint are exhibited is dedicated to the Holy Trinity. After the service in the church full of people, we stop at the small museum of St. Luke in the monastery yard. His fate is shocking and presents the actual picture of martyrdom of Russian man, his faith, persistence, fight and strength elevating him to holiness. His holiness is guarding Crimea within Holy Russia. But we will speak about that on another occasion in these pages.

INTERTITLE

People such as St. Luke of Crimea have kept Russia from sinking in years of great temptations. One of them is the Ukrainian issue. Occupied, possessed and horribly lonely, authentic Ukraine, with her unreality and illusions of particular identity, outside of the Slavic world, became a prey and weapon of enemy forces of authentic Europe and Russia. These wars are not wars of particular, national sovereignty within the existing global liberalism; they are part of the war for the Continent and Heart of the World. For the Divine Law, against the rule of money. Because, what sense does it make to relate your national issue to the deadly enemy of any nationalism, which liberal West essentially is, except for a short-term utilization in the siege of Russia, defender of the great Tradition of our continent. The Bolshevik character of the present, contemporary West, metamorphosed into a globalist structure of culture-Marxism, represents the true face of the enemy of Russia, both internally and externally. Gaining a suicidal character, Ukrainian nationalism is expressing its essential immaturity, shortsightedness and unfoundedness, failing on the basic exam of differentiating friends from foes. In the voluminous operations of contemporary ”proxy-wars”, the contours of New Khazaria are noticed to appear in Ukraine, basing its existence on instigating fratricidal wars in Europe and the politics of global capital. It finds its victims in supporting pseudo-identities of new states turned against Russia. Cui bono?... echoes in the hearts and battlefields of Ukraine and Europe.
However, Ukraine is also appearing as a measure of Russian unresolved internal issues of their own path and ideals, not only of economic nature. Lenin’s heritage of the Russian Empire, broken on federal ethnic borders, represents a ticking time bomb placed under Russia, with a potential effect in the future. That future has arrived. We remember Solzhenitsyn, who testified that ideologies of Bolshevism and contemporary globalism are the same thing. Today it is at least revealed. Lenin’s red October is the first successful colored revolution in Russia. As if Lenin and the five-pointed star became part of the Russian new identity, or pseudo-identity. On the symbolic level, as long as Lenin’s hand points towards the future in the squares of Russian cities, it will be a sign that the bigger picture is not understood – that the Lenin project was just a predecessor of present NATO, in the permanent crusade of the thalassocracies and Leviathans of the West to the East. NATO is a great patron of all leftist, modern and transgender, progressive forces of the West, on the road of constructing an omnipresent world of global-Bolshevik capitalism. The only obstacle on the road is the divine culture of the white man, whose last stronghold-bastion is Russia.

THE THOUGHT PREVENTS ME FROM SLEEPING

Russia was exposed to the ideal of internationalism for a long time, forgetting the core that created the empire, forgetting the interests and survival of the central nation of the Empire, the spiritual core of the Slavic, Russian ideal. Such international cult is suicidal for Russia, because it rips off authentic Russian culture from its origins and replaces it with doubtful values of global utopia. Recognizing genuine origins and objectives of spiritual forces forming the modern world is necessary in fighting against its many mutations. The battle is still lasting and Crimea could be the beginning of the Russian spiritual renaissance. The magnetic attractiveness of Russia, hardened in the wars for survival, will return with the return of divine standards of living and its aristocratic tradition.
Great questions are arising before an observer in Crimea, on the shores of the Black Sea, about Russia, the empire, Ukraine, identity, ideals... Great questions and great inspiration.
We are rejecting skepticism and renewing faith. Faith in our own strength inspired by God. Doubt paralyzes while resoluteness leads to holiness. First comes the vision and life itself is its realization. A great man, with clear visions, a monarch creating an Empire and returning the divine feeling of life into people, is the one waited for. The one wished for. The one being created.
If the USSR was a dream of Russian enemies and her drunken muzhiks, who thought that they could continue alone, without God, the future of Russia lays in the hands and eyes of a man who understands it, but, after all, still wants and has the will to return the greatness of Russia. The shadows of forgotten ancestors will move and the divine ruler will unite them...
I saw in my thoughts a man standing on the shore of the Black Sea in an officer’s coat with his collar raised. The turquoise sea is in front of him. That man, with blue eyes, gazing into the distance, towards Bosporus and Dardanelle, is perhaps a poet, perhaps a prince. Perhaps both... All of a sudden, everything became clear to me.
Since then, as Pound says, the thought prevents me from sleeping.

***

In the Kosovo Mirror
We are traveling to Crimea, with Kosovo in our hearts and thoughts. Crimea awakes great emotions and great questions. It has always been the node of Russian history. The place where the power and strength of Russia are reflected and tempted. Great historical battles for this territory decided the future of Russia.

***

At the Himalayan Cedar
The gardens and parks of the Vorontsov palace preserve many lost floral species and are a true arboretum of our continental flora. We were received in audience by a gigantic Himalayan cedar, with a royal appearance.

***

Unexpected Incentive
The embargo is certainly harmful and slows down the development of Crimea, which remained caught in the lethargy and poverty of the post-Soviet period for a long time. We agree that the embargo has no future and only wakes up the development of Russian own forces, leaning upon their own sources. We believe that the embargo is also an extraordinary opportunity for Russia to become free of its economic dependence from the West, and turn its temporary trouble into a long-term advantage. All preconditions for the road of salvation are there.