AHC: Theocratic Eastern Orthodox State

!Fascist Russia is an easy way to get there. Russian Orthodox Christianity was so intensely tied to Russian Nationalism that they spent a large part of the nineteenth century converting Ukrainian Catholics at bayonet-point. Dostoevsky's rants about Poles and Jews also would not really be out-of-place in the mouth of Joseph Goebbels.

You would first need to create an Orthodox Theocratic revolutionary/reactionary movement in Russia. This is difficult, because the Russian Orthodox Church was firmly part of the Establishment that so badly failed in WWI. You would need a non-establishment Orthodox movement to form the nucleus of a theocratic movement, as local parish priests in Catholic countries were the nucleus of nationalist movements, and as the Church in Poland later served the anti-Communist movements. Maybe a particularly popular Orthodox mystic--importantly, one hostile to the Tsar. Maybe he comes to prominence in the Russo-Japanese War--some unit of the Russian Army has success against Japan, and he, a local monk/priest, is there with them, praying for them, preaching, giving him prominence. In his sermons, he blames the corruption of the established Church and Tsarist state for Russia's overall failure, and around him develops a sort of Taiping-ish movement to recreate Russia as a true Third Rome. None of this would be really alien to Russian tradition--maybe our cleric can be an Old Believer. Officially, they were outlawed until 1905--that could work either for or against them in this question.

Then you need a big national trauma to destroy the Russian establishment and allow these people to take power. Something like WWI. When the Tsarist government falls, our cleric plays Lenin and takes over. He has himself proclaimed Patriarch of Moscow and sets to work purifying Russia of heretical Catholic/Protestant influences. That means, of course, a purge of the Baltic Germans, the Ukrainian Catholics, and above all the Poles and Jews.
 

That led down one heck of a rabbit hole.

According to a Time Magazine report from 1941, the remarkably naïve monks only knew of Hitler as “a great German king who slays the Bolsheviks and the Jews – a fulfillment of prophecy.” In this, they differed little from the bulk of Catholics and Protestants in Germany and many of the occupied countries. After the Nazi takeover of Greece, the Epistassia, Athos’s four-member executive committee, formally asked Hitler to place the Autonomous Monastic State under his personal protection, a request with which the Führer gladly complied. Mount Athos survived the war nearly untouched...

In gratitude for his protection, the monks displayed and revered Hitler images, including not only the one described further down but also a portrait hung directly in the center of a wall of paintings in the great reception room of St Panteleimon monastery, directly beneath a portrait of Tsar Nicholas II

The following is my translation of an excerpt from Prof. Dölger’s account of his visit to Mount Athos as printed in the book Mönchsland Athos (Munich: 1942), the official report of his 1941 visit to the holy mountain:

At the monastery of Konstamonitou, at the place of honor in the reception room, we encountered the image of our Führer. A monk had discovered a picture in an illustrated magazine and created a pencil drawing based on this model. Elsewhere too we could observe how strongly the personality of the Führer and the Greater German Reich impressed itself upon the imagination of the residents of Mount Athos, at least among those who had not entirely turned away from the world. Upon our arrival at several monasteries and, upon our departure from one (Dionisíu), when we sailed out onto the sea in our little ship, we were greeted by the swastika flag. The Führer is regarded by a great many monks as the “High Protector of the Holy Mountain” who will also hold his protecting hand over the Holy Mountain in the reordering of the world.
We had a delightful experience as we photographed a miraculous image of the Virgin Mary. From the point of view of Athos, it represented an immense concession for us to receive permission to photograph the sacred icon, and monks even helped us in our preparations. One old monk who joined us observed these preparations, shaking his head. Turning to us, he said: “If you want to photograph the Panajía [Virgin Mary], then you will have little luck; for the Panajía has never yet allowed herself to be photographed.” – “But it could be,” he added in a trusting and good-natured manner, “that the Panajía may make an exception for you Germans and allow herself to be photographed, because you Germans, after all, are waging a holy war against Bolshevism, the enemy of God.”


Banishing the opposite sex from the peninsula might sound like a recipe for boredom, but it appears that the monks knew how to keep busy. According to a Time Magazine article in April 1941, "[a]n alarming number of monks have taken to smoking, alcohol, even narcotics. And the immemorial escape from celibacy has threatened to become a fever sickening the whole 'Great Academy of the Greek Clergy.' The Greek press has stormed about the kidnapping of male children for the monks of Athos, and motorboats carrying male prostitutes are constantly reported chugging into the monastery harbors."
 
Top