A1 November 7, 2022 is when the French writer’s 90th anniversary falls on.

Three weeks before his death the recently beatified pope John Paul I granted a private audience in the Vatican to the metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod, Nicodemus. During the meeting the prominent hierarch of the Moscow Patriarchate unexpectedly passed away.

Various conspiracy theories about what happened on September 5, 1978 have been circulating since, casting doubt on the natural causes of the Russian clergyman’s demise. By the way, the death of John Paul, I whose pontificate lasted but a month, is sometimes commented on in a similar tone. Eventually no revelations invalidated the official versions of both events. Nonetheless the very meeting of Pope and the Patriarchate’s representative remains wrapped in mystery.

SIGN UP TO OUR PAGE As everybody knows, the institutional Russian Orthodoxy was then subjugated to the Soviet régime (nowadays it remains in cahoots with the Kremlin). The Church structure had been infiltrated by the KGB. The metropolitan Nicodemus himself – according to the materials coming from the Mitrokhin Archive (collection of confidential and classified Soviet documents carried away to the West in 1992) – was an agent of this service under the pseudonym “Adamant”.

In turn, the Catholic Church became target of hostile masonry milieus. They wanted to gain influence on it. Their people, well camouflaged, were to take to control of the Church from inside.

These events from late 1970s form the background of the spying novel “The Pope’s Guest”. It was released in 2004 so over a dozen years after the Cold War had come to an end. The author – Vladimir Volkoff was a French writer of Russian descent. November 7, 2022 is when the 90th anniversary of his falls on.

”The set-up”: behind-the-scenes of a KGB operation

Volkoff was born in Paris to a family of white émigrés who raised him in French and Russian cultures. He was related to the famous Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky.

Volkoff studied philosophy, he got a PhD degree in this field. By the end of the 50s he took part in the Algerian War – among others as a French intelligence agent. He then became a clerk of the Ministère des Armées (French department of national defense). Later on he stayed long in the US where he taught French literature at a college in Atlanta. He died in 2005.

Volkoff’s work may have been influenced by his acquaintance with Alexandre de Marnches. The latter was head of the French special forces in the years 1970-1981. Reportedly it was de Marenches who inspired Volkoff to write perhaps his most renowned novel – “The Set Up”.

As many others of his works this book is actually a metaphysical thriller. Its plot is set in the Cold War era. The KGB carries out operations in French intellectual circles. The man character is Alexander Psar, a literary agent coming from Russian white emigration. This man is recruited by the Soviets as a spy. They treat him like a puppet and, as a result, he falls prey to them.

“The Set-up” reveals methods used by the KGB – above all – the disinformation techniques. For the officers of this service an important source of knowledge on how to conquer the world is the ancient Chinese treaty “The Art of War” by Sun-Tzu. This work recommends initiating actions which, in the invaded country, lead to its society falling into moral decay. In “The Set-up” the disarmament of France consists in forming the public opinion in the Kremlin-favorable direction.

But the spiritual warfare is also an important motive of the novel. Volkoff was an Orthodox. He perceived the diabolical dimension of the Soviet communism. He observed the political reality from a perspective of the supernatural. He adopted the point of view in which the stake of various ongoing games turns out to be the human salvation. The “Set-up” inclines the reader to reflection that worse of political persecution is selling one’s soul to the devil.

Although the Volkoff novel was awarded the French Academy Grand Prix du Roman literary award, it was also mercilessly criticized in the famous TV program “Apostrophe” on France 2.

The journalist and writer Pierre Joffroy pointed out to Volkoff that the black characters in his novel were KGB officers out of whom – as it can be deduced from their names – one is Jewish (Iakov Pitman) and the other represents some Muslim nationality (Mohammed Abdulrakhmanov). The journalist charged the author of “The Set-up” with racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and fascism. Volkoff paid him back. He sued his opponent for defamation of character and he won.

But the fact remains that from “The Set-up” emerges a picture in which poor white Russia found itself occupied by foreign elements. (It is worth noting that the first Polish translation of “The Set-up” was issued by the London Polonia Book Fund publisher in 1986). ”Les orphelins du tsar”: heritage of the oprichnina

Vladimir Volkoff’s merit to unmask USRR policy and its spying methods are indisputable. But things get complicated if we take into consideration the writer’s attitude towards post-Soviet Russia.

However, let us begin with the vision of history which he presented in the novel “Les orphelins du Tsar” [Tsar’s Orphans] from 2005. He showed there the key role of secret service in Russian history – from the oprichniks (the guard of Ivan the Terrible with the help of which the tsar bullied the boyars), through, inter alia, the Okhrana (operating in the declining years of the Romanov dynasty), to the KGB.

In the “Orphelins du Tsar” the ways of conduct of two half-brothers towards the Bolshevik coup are confronted. Volodia Psar is a liberal and a democrat. Facing the atrocities of the red régime he becomes an ardent defender of the monarchy though earlier he opposed it. In turn, Basil Psarsky is an Okhrana agent. Therefore he guards the old régime. But when he comes to the conclusion that the monarchy cannot be saved and the Provisional Government formed after the February Revolution is unable to tame the spreading chaos he then does a political U-turn at joins the Bolshevik camp.

He explains his decision to Vladimir Lenin himself as follows: “I do not want a monarchy that is ridiculed or that is insulted. I prefer it dead. But Russia desperately needs a state. Do you understand? At any cost”.

Reading “Tsar’s Orphans” one cannot help but think that in Russia it is not the ideas and views of the rulers that decide what the state is. Political systems change and the need for a hardline rule turns out to be timeless. If so, then the conservatism declared today by Vladimir Putin is only a façade behind which the heritage of the oprichnina is simply hidden away.

”Le Complot”: all the evil of masonry

And yet Volkoff discerned something different in post-Soviet Russia. The novel “Le Complot” [The Conspiracy] from 2003 testifies to that.

Two early 20th century events are a backdrop of this books: the 9/11 and the Second Chechen War. The elite “League of Boyars” which is closely linked to Putin is growing in significance. Meanwhile in America there is an active association called “The Club” aiming at taking power on a global scale. Its members hold important position in the US political establishment.

Only that The Club doesn’t represent America’s interests. It treats her instrumentally. And Russia is the main obstacle to introducing an order that would unify the world. One of the two pillar of the new system is to be the axiological relativism.

Under the eyes of the Club’s leadership, Russia began to regain its former identity – it turned back to Orthodoxy and the national tradition, hence its tough resistance to the tendencies supported by the Club. The association therefore starts an intrigue against the League of Boyars. In order to make it successful it intends to use terrorists from Chechnya. Meanwhile, the Russians find allies in the French secret services.

And so Volkoff neglected the threat posed by Russia after USSR had collapsed. He recognized that as the Soviet communism was history the danger lies, in the first place, within secret organizations of the West (including masonry), which aspire to annihilate Christianity.

In addition, whenever the writer indicated Western progressive trends as contributors to moral decay, we might agree. The problem is that he proposed a false alternative to them. Because even if post-Soviet Russia is based on LGBT agenda while Putin lambasts the “cancel culture” by no means does it imply that Kremlin is on the side of Christianity. Just the opposite.

Today the inheritors of the oprichnina corrupt politically the Orthodox Church with success. And the Moscow patriarch Cyril I – in the past a KGB collaborator under the pseudonym “Mykhailov” – trying to religiously legitimize Russian army’s crimes in Ukraine is a contradiction to the 16th Century Moscow metropolitan Philip II (beatified in Orthodoxy) who for opposing the tyranny of Ivan the Terrible was strangled with a pillow by the oprichnik Maluta Skuratov.

Contrary to the suggestion that can be read in “The Set-up”, the Soviet era was not a period of domination of foreign elements (non-Slavic and non-Christian national groups) over Russia. Soviet communism was the new incarnation of Russian political culture. Its core is violence – especially intimidation – as a means of communication between the authorities and the society and of Russia with the world. This political culture is based on the traumatic experiences through which the Ruthenian lands passed under the yoke of the Golden Horde, and not on the values of Latin civilization. Those were tried to be implemented in Russia by people like Volkoff, but to no avail.

It is lamentable that although the author of “The Set-up” lashed the Soviet communism without delusion, he was later seduced by the Kremlin narrative about the spiritual rebirth of Russia after the collapse of the USSR. He was a monarchist, so his sentiments towards tsarism determined it. Only that in the writer’s work they outweighed his clear-headedness.

- Filip Memches
-Translated by Dominik Szczęsny-Kostanecki

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

– Bibliography:

•Vladimir Volkoff „Carskie sieroty”, przekład – Beata Biały, Klub Książki Katolickiej, Dębogóra 2006
•Vladimir Volkoff „Gość papieża”, Klub Książki Katolickiej, przekład – Iwona Banach, Klub Książki Katolickiej, Poznań 2005
•Vladimir Volkoff „Montaż”, Klub Książki Katolickiej, przekład – Adam Zalewski, Klub Książki Katolickiej, Poznań 2005
•Vladimir Volkoff „Spisek”, Klub Książki Katolickiej, przekład – Beata Biały, Klub Książki Katolickiej, Dębogóra 2008