In the autumn of 2005, I moved to New York City, breaking out of the green confines of bucolic and insufferably boring upstate New York to continue college.  I wandered into one of the numerous Russian bookstores on Brighton Beach—a noisy, dirty, and delicious corner of the Soviet Union, preserved on the southernmost tip of Brooklyn.  A book’s glossy cover jumped out at me from the shelves.  It showed a turbaned, bearded Mohammedan, mouth wide open in the call to prayer, against a dystopian landscape of Paris, full of onion-domed mosques, with the Eiffel Tower crowned by a Muslim crescent.  In the coming days, I devoured the book on the subway under the curious gazes of Brooklyn’s babushkas.  The novel’s title was Mechet Parizhskoi Bogomateri (The Notre Dame de Paris Mosque) by Russian writer, publicist, and poet Elena Chudinova.

Chudinova’s magnum opus invites the readers to a Paris of a.d. 2048.  This is a city ruled by the likes of sharia judge Malik, a Wahhabist, and Imam Abdulwahid.  Here, Malik’s burka-clad wife, Zeinab, crosses the Pont de Emirates bridge over the Seine on her way to the Champs-Élysées and interrupts her shopping spree to watch an elderly Catholic get stoned to death for making wine to celebrate Mass.  In this Paris, the Christians are driven into ghettos, with the final massacre looming on the crescent-dominated horizon.

The only holdouts are a small band of traditionalist Catholics with royalist noms de guerre like la Rochejaquelein and Cadoudal, led by a Joan of Arc-like figure modeled on the late Oriana Fallaci, who come out of the catacombs to wreak havoc on the new Wahhabi rulers of Western Europe and reconsecrate Notre Dame in one final battle.  In Chudinova’s dystopia, the only Christian countries in Europe left standing are Catholic Poland (where the pope now sits) and Orthodox Russia—beacons of Christian light in a Mohammedan sea of darkness.

The Notre Dame de Paris Mosque has not been published in English, but there are French, Serbian, Polish, and Bulgarian editions.  The brutally honest, politically incorrect portrayal of the result of Muslim immigration to Europe led the neoconservative New York City Journal to deride the book as “offensive.”  One character’s description of the bleakly wretched future of this country must have set the neocons’ fangs on edge:

A weakened America now had only itself to think about.  The white south and the black-Muslim-Jewish north engaged in a tug of war for power in the Senate and House, maintaining a fragile balance to avoid outright civil war.  Southern U.S. Christians are very lucky: They’re not opposed by the united Muslims, but by three mutually inimical religions, if we include voodoo.  Not one of those wants a harsh Christian reawakening—that’s what unites them.  Fine: You Americans played at being rulers of the world’s fortunes long enough.

All the key elements of Chudinova’s worldview are in her famous novel: opposition to the spread of Islam, dedication to the preservation of both Russia and the West, a tremendous respect for traditional Catholicism, and a vigorous resistance to the noxious heresies of multiculturalism, political correctness, and mass immigration.  Elena Chudinova was born in Moscow in 1959 and grew up under Soviet rule.  Her father was the world-famous paleontologist Peter Chudinov, member of the American Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.  Her parents’ scientific achievements allowed them to live in internal exile, shielded from communist propaganda and Soviet brainwashing.

Her paternal grandfather, Konstantin Chudinov, was a Russian man for all seasons.  He participated in building the Chinese Eastern Railway and worked as a war correspondent in Port Arthur and Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, where he was received by the last Chinese emperor.  After the establishment of Soviet rule, Chudinova’s grandfather had his three younger sons baptized and became a leading proponent of the peasant cooperative movement—a sane alternative to the deadly collective farms.  All this did not go unnoticed in Soviet Mordor, and in 1938, Konstantin Chudinov was executed.  As Elena Chudinova said, “For all he accomplished and stood for, they could not leave him alive.”  His tragic death at the hands of the Bolsheviks ensured that her family was always vehemently anticommunist.

Growing up at the height of Brezhnev’s rule, Chudinova nevertheless managed to steer clear of the vestiges of Soviet power.  When she turned 14, she demonstratively refused to join the Komsomol communist youth organization, telling the dumbstruck teacher that she had “extremely strong and numerous reasons” not to do so.  At that time the Soviet dragon was already rather placid, so Chudinova was not punished for her refusal.  Instead, she was kept under the watchful gaze of the KGB until perestroika.

During her youth, she wrote her first book: a mystical adventure novel about the anti-Bolshevik White Army, which could have easily garnered her a stay in the Gulag.  The book was published only in 1993 after communism’s collapse.  Decades later, during a commemoration of the martyred Nicholas II and his family in Yekaterinburg, a young Orthodox priest asked Chudinova to inscribe his copy of the book.  He confided that, as a great-grandson of Red commissars, he had become a priest to atone for their sins.  In response, she asked the young batyushka to pray for her martyred grandfather.

Today, Elena Chudinova is Russia’s most vehement public critic of Islam and Muslim immigration.  In an interview, she characterized Mohammedanism as a “religion of slaves,” and its followers as “slaves without honor.”  Unlike most Russian nationalists who view America and the West as the main enemies of Russia, Chudinova calls for a united traditionalist Catholic-Orthodox front against Islam’s spread: “If there is a choice between the Koran and Big Mac, I choose Big Mac.  Americans want only our natural resources; Islam wants our souls.  And only a true Christian can stand up to Islam.”

Needless to say, such forthright views have made Chudinova an enemy of both liberals and pro-Islamic Russian nationalists such as the noxious Eurasianists of Alexander Dugin, who call for a Russian Orthodox-Islamic alliance against the West.  Chudinova also does not mince words about the weakness of Vladimir Putin’s government in dealing with the Chechens, accusing the government of winning the war but squandering the peace and surrendering to Islam again and again.  Unlike Dugin and other pro-Islamists, Chudinova is rarely allowed to go on Russian TV, a medium stringently censored by the government.

Naturally, Serbia and France have a special place in Chudinova’s heart.  Her character Slobodan Vukovic’s bitter cri de cœur is her own lament, addressed to the Serbophobic West:

You knew nothing of Serbia’s history and Kosovo.  You knew nothing about how the Serbs bravely fell on the Field of Blackbirds, when the warriors of Prince Lazar stood in the path of the countless hosts of Sultan Murad to defend the cradle of their nation.  You knew nothing of what a curse the Ottoman Empire was, and how much Serbian blood was spilled to defeat it.  What possessed you to believe every ridiculous lie about the Serbs’ so-called atrocities?

Another one of Chudinova’s books and countless of her articles have been dedicated to France.  Not the politically correct, leftist France, but the France of Saint Louis and the Vendean rebels.  In her mystical-historical adventure novel Lileya (Fleur-de-Lis), the heroine, a young Russian noblewoman married to a Breton aristocrat, goes to revolutionary France to find her father-in-law, who turns out to be the leader of the Breton royalists.  Chudinova wrote this novel as a royalist alternative to the pro-Jacobin works of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac.  Included among the horrors of the French Revolution described in the novel are a depiction of a young noblewoman gone mad after the sans-culottes make her drink the blood of guillotined aristocrats, and sketches of the ubiquitous Parisian shops selling the body parts of aborted children as curatives.  (Both are historical facts, by the way.)  At the end of the novel, the royalist heroes successfully transport the holy relics of Saint Louis to Moscow, where they would repose in a Catholic chapel until the Bolshevik revolution—another historical fact.

In addition to her interest in the antirevolutionary history of France, a country she visits at least once each year, Chudinova is friends with leading figures of French traditionalist Catholicism, including the leaders of the Society of St. Pius X.  In her main novel, the spiritual leader of the anti-Islamic underground is young SSPX Father Lothar, and Archbishop Marcel Lefeb­vre is referred to as “the Old King.”  On the secular front, Chudinova is admired by the leaders of the Front National, Marine Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie.

A brave and devout woman, Elena Chudinova fearlessly and tirelessly fights for Russia and the West against the Mohammedan onslaught from her modest apartment on the outskirts of Moscow.  Ridiculed by her country’s establishment and ignored by the mainstream media, as a pious Christian she still has hope for her country’s and our civilization’s rebirth and triumph.  This hope lies in both divine intervention and the postcommunist Russian Orthodox youth, a source of Chudinova’s pride and admiration.