Once and Future Britain and Russia

by Michael Wood

In AD 1074, Smolensk Prince Vladimir Monomakh married Princess Gita of Wessex, the daughter of the last Anglo-Saxon King, Harold II Godwinson. And, incidentally, the descendants of that family came home to England when the communist revolution started.

In the 1550s, as a result of an accident at sea, whilst attempting to survey a northern route to China, Richard Chancellor found himself in Russia and in Moscow (Muscovy in period English usage).

“Moscow itself is very large,” Chancellor later wrote in his notes, “I believe the city, as a whole, is larger than London and its suburbs. But, it is built very crudely and stands without any order. The houses are all wooden, which is very dangerous in terms of fire. There is a fine castle in Moscow, whose high walls are built of brick. They say the walls are eighteen feet thick”.

Tsar Ivan IV welcomed Chancellor and his party. England aroused his great interest both as a trading partner and as a possible political ally. As a result, England became the first West European power with which Russia had a chance to establish a lasting economic cooperation.

The establishment of diplomatic and economic contacts with Russia was also of interest in London, where Chancellor returned the following year. For this purpose, in 1555, the ‘Muscovy Company’ was established and Chancellor, who had written a book entitled ‘On the Great and Powerful Tsar of Russia and the Grand Duke of Moscow’, was appointed royal envoy and sent again to the court of Moscow.

Richard Chancellor arrived in the Russia, accompanied by Muscovy Company agents George Killingworth and Richard Gray. The holds of his ships were full of a variety of goods, from cloth to gunpowder to weapons. Russia could offer them in return wood, hemp, leather and furs.

The next meeting with Ivan IV was a success. The British obtained the right to conduct duty-free trade in a number of northern Russian harbours (Russia had no other “window to Europe” at that time). At the behest of the tsar, a representative office of the Muscovy Company was soon opened in the capital (the building survives to this day).

Through the Muscovy Company, Britain traded peacefully with Russia until the communist revolution – 360 years. Why have our motley bunch of illiterate politicians allowed themselves to be led in the path of American political-military idiots, and maintained the hatred since the end of the Cold War?

Russia today is no longer a single party communist state. It is as capitalist as we are (and very successful). It is now overwhelmingly a Christian country with a very rapidly growing Church, having built tens of thousands (that’s right, tens of thousands) of new churches all over Russia. With a President and his deputy known to be regular churchgoing Christians …… ah! Perhaps that’s it, Christianity is now on the hate list of the vast majority atheist-secularists in the west. They are, perhaps as opposed to a Christian Russia as we were sixty years ago, opposed to the communist Soviet Union

However, left to itself, Russia poses no threat to Britain. It would rather trade with us than fight with us. But the ideological hatred of a Christian Russia – and specifically the ancient, genuine, no-nonsense Christianity that Russia has, quite unlike the woke C of E, is deep-set in the western political-intelligentsia-illuminati. They won’t give up their cherished hatred of Russia.