Armistice Day, 2024 in Belgium: Russian diaspora commemorates soldiers and officers who died in World War I
During the whole period of Soviet rule, Russia’s servicemen and officers who died in World War I were stricken from public memory. The war itself was by and between imperialist powers, and its only value was to serve as an essential precondition for the Revolution that emerged from it.
For the Russian diaspora, especially here in Belgium where so many noble families and distinguished officers found refuge after the war and revolution, the situation was always somewhat different. The Church abroad was alienated from Moscow and carried on its own services as it wished, including remembrance of the war dead.
In the Yeltsin years the Church abroad and the Moscow patriarchate began reknitting relations. In the new millennium this process is largely completed and events to commemorate the soldiers and officers who died in World War I received official patronage during this month of November from the Russian Embassy. On the 11th there was a wreath-laying ceremony at the Military Memorial in the Ixelles Cemetery. Today, 23 November, which is 11 November by the old calendar used by the Russian Orthodox Church, there was a solemn memorial service in the Saint Nicholas Cathedral Church, the seat of the Orthodox Archbishop of Brussels and the first church set up by the White emigrants when they arrived in this country as refugees.
The St Nicholas church is not recognizable as such from the street. It is a row house undistinguishable from those around it in the side street rue des Chevaliers, off one of the major boulevards in central Brussels. Once upon a time this district was home to notable architects, painters and authors. It is sufficiently hidden from view today to be spared the graffiti that otherwise mar the appearance of predominantly commercial parts of this city. Many buildings have plaques in honor of those who once lived here. If you go 200 meters up the street from the church, you find the house where Catherine Hepburn was born in 1929.
The St Nicholas Church can accommodate perhaps 50 parishioners comfortably. We were not so numerous today, but quality was among us. Descendants of several of the most illustrious names of Russian and Baltic nobility were there. To protect their privacy, I will not name them here. But I do stress the presence of the ambassador, which greatly encouraged the archbishop.
The service was short and elegant with the prayers supported by a very well-trained female chorus. The high point was the little explanatory talk given by the archbishop which identified the service as being in memory of all those Russians who fell in battle during the First World War, ‘who died to give us life.’ His most important lines in my hearing were to stress that they had fought valiantly and yet Russia was deprived of its rightful place among the victors, it lost its pobeda (surely a word that needs no translation these days) due to events in the homeland.
The archbishop is a religious leader, not a politician and we were left to understand on our own how and why Russia was then, in 1918, deprived of a place among the victors at the first Armistice Day celebrations.
History is continuous and an inescapable part of present-day consciousness. Russia’s losing hand in 1918 was snatched from victory with the help of some outside forces that we know well and that we see at work today, when Russia stands once again before victory. The British were a significant factor in the making of the February Revolution that brought down the tsar including through the direct politicking of its ambassador in Petersburg. That first revolution put the country on a slippery path of unstable rule that ended in the Bolshevik coup d’etat. The Germans were of course a still bigger factor by their support to Lenin’s return to his homeland from Switzerland and in financing the treasonous activities of his confederates.
When you look around you at the challenges Russia confronts today in winding up the Ukraine war with its victory intact, you find the same Europeans trying their best to bring Russia to its knees, and having failed at that, to deprive it of the Victor’s rights. I don’t mention the United States only because it was still a bit player back then.
And with that I end this diary entry.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024