What is Russia? Three photos explain it better than I ever could.

There’s an email group I belong to. It’s just five of us. Sometimes six.

We talk about national security issues, for the most part. It usually starts with someone sending a link to an article, and then someone else spouts off on it, someone else comments and spins off into an anecdote about something related (or not) and someone else jumps in to argue a point, and it goes on like this for hours.

The group was organized by an old friend who was the top female Republican national security staffer on Capitol Hill for years, plus her husband, whose father was a diplomat in Moscow, plus two of her friends, one who is retired military and worked at the Pentagon, and the other who was on the State Department team for Project 2025. We all read a great deal and pay attention to what is happening with the war in Ukraine, and in the Middle East.

The conversation starts every afternoon, and usually goes late into the evening. Sometimes past midnight.

The ex-military, ex-Pentagon employee is the best read among us but has some bad habits, referring to Russians as “Russkies” and Russian President Vladimir Putin as “Vlad.” He’s stuck in Cold War thinking, and cannot seem to understand that Russia is no longer communist and is now a Christian nation. He doesn’t realize that the Marxist revolutionaries are now here, in our own country, embedded in our foreign policy establishment, universities and media.

There’s been an inversion. The sides have flipped, I try to tell him. But he cannot adjust his mind to this, or does not want to.

So a couple of days ago, I sent him these three photographs of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, an incredible Russian Orthodox cathedral that sits on the Moscow River not far from the Kremlin, the red brick fortress in the center of the Russian capital.

It wasn’t there when I lived in Moscow in 1993 and 1994 because on December 5, 1931, it had been blown up by the Bolsheviks, on the orders of the wife of Lazar Kaganovich, the Jewish man from Kiev who was Stalin’s deputy and who is responsible for the Holodomor — the intentional mass starvation of 10 million Christian peasants in the Ukraine in the 1930s.

It wasn’t rebuilt until the year 2000.

The original cathedral had been built on the orders of Tsar Alexander I following Napoleon’s invasion of Moscow in 1812 and in gratitude to God for saving Russia from certain doom.

It was also built as a memorial to the thousands of Russians killed in the fierce battles with Napoleon’s Grand Army.

It took 40 years to build it. But one day to destroy it.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly installed Russian government, no longer communist, allowed the Russian Orthodox Church to rebuild it.

In 2000, the same year Vladimir Putin was elected president, the last Tsar and his family — Nicholas and Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei — were canonized as saints of the Russian Orthodox church, with the canonization ceremony held in the cathedral.

Nicholas and his family and several of their loyal servants had been gunned down at close range by a firing squad in the basement of a home in what was then called Sverdlovsk — killed by the God-hating Bolsheviks.

The rebuilding of the cathedral marked a return of Russia to its Christian past, and a rejection of the godlessness that has now taken hold in most of the Western world.

Cathedral of Christ the Savior under the Russian tsars (photo taken in 1910):

The demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior on Dec. 5, 1931, under the Bolsheviks:

Cathedral of Christ the Savior, rebuilt under Yeltsin and Putin, finished in 2000:

One of the remarkable stories about Russia is that it is, and has been, reclaiming its traditional Christian heritage, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government funding the reconstruction of more than 25,000 Christian churches that had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks.

But now Russia and the onion domes of its Orthodox Christian churches are in peril.

Today, President Joe Biden authorized the use of long-range weapons to strike deep into Russia from Ukrainian territory — an ominous development and one that should be understood by Americans to be an attack by the corrupted West, whose foreign policy establishment has fallen into the hands of closeted Marxists, on a Christian country.

It’s the inversion of what we all feared during the Cold War — an attack from Soviet Russia on what was then a free and Christian nation.

The sides have flipped.