Dr Matthew Raphael Johnson looks at the reign of Peter the Great and the lasting destruction he wrought upon Russia. Peter the Great was a Satanist and a libertine pagan. His reign, like all the “enlightened absolutists,” was to force the modern world on an unwilling population. In his frenzied hatred for the church and Old Russia, he did all in his power to destroy the traditions of the nation he ruled. The entire Orthodox church was purged and replaced, while the modernist and materialist Metropolitan Feofan Prokopovich was recruited from Poland to head his new church. The Orthodox Church continued on among the Old Believers and many other dissenters, and it was this era that brought millions more to reject the “official” church of Russia. The “All Joking, Most Drunken and Madcap Sobor (or synod)” (Всешутейший, всепьянейший и сумасброднейший собор) was a semi-official organ created by the young Tsar in the early 1690s and was dedicated to Dionysus. It soon became far more significant than establishment histories would suggest. Its rituals and official acts are bizarre and even frightening. They were also public. It was a mocking, drunken, revolutionary middle finger to Russia as a nation. It was the announcement of the fact that the Tsar himself was a Jacobin. Peter's destructive impact on Russia, her economy and certainly her church was felt right up until 1917, where revolutionaries took the same action against the church as Peter did, even using the same rhetoric. Peter was consecrated to Dionysius. The Bacchic mysteries served then and now as part of revolutionary transformation, especially that of unrestrained sexuality. Peter's revolution, like those that came after, was based on the rejection of the boundaries of reason and civilized life in favour of unrestrained passion that will dissolve all distinctions and boundaries. This was the point of his "Drunken Sobor," and the revolutionary goal of his reign. Presented by Matt Johnson The Orthodox Nationalist: Peter the Great's “All Joking, Most Drunken and Madcap Sobor” – TON 061020