But that is not the only reason why the Vissarionites do not eat meat. Fear is encoded into every cell of a slaughtered animal – so says the Teacher. So when a person eats it, he takes in negative energy and is filled with terror, panic and death.
Believe it or not, even their dogs are vegetarian! And they’re as meek as kittens. This is the only place in Russia (including the capital) where I can calmly walk down the street without constantly looking round to see if some beast is about to attack me from behind.
This is the only place in Russia where I meet happy people – cheerful, jolly, calm people who actually greet a stranger in the street, talk to him, smile and ask how they can help, and where the doors of the houses have no locks. Even the children are on first-name terms with everyone. Apparently 60 per cent of the adults have higher education. They talk slowly and quietly, they are never in a hurry, they don’t swear, they don’t drink and they don’t smoke. They have the highest birth rate in Russia, they never hit their children and they are almost never ill. The men have beards and long hair and don’t watch television. They are completely uninterested in politics, and their outhouses are very clean and comfortable as they are the sit-down, not the squatting variety like everywhere else in Russia. This is the happiest place I came across in the course of my four-month car journey from Moscow to Vladivostok.
The authors of the Report from the Twenty-First Century never once used the words ‘God’, ‘prayer’ or ‘religion’ in their book, because those things weren’t supposed to exist any more.Vladimir Lenin, creator of the Land of Soviets, repeated after Karl Marx that religion was the opium of the people, a form of spiritual moonshine, and thus it was bound to disappear. But it was the Soviet Union that vanished, and in the place where it used to be, apart from all the major world religions, there are more than eighty large sects in operation, with about 800,000 followers.
There is no omnipotent General Secretary of the Communist Party any more, but there are no fewer than three incarnations of Jesus Christ.
I THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME
‘It was like a flash, like a bolt of lightning’, says Galina Oshchepkova, a specialist in natural medicine from Mazyr in Belarus. ‘I knew it was him as soon as I saw him in a video. My heart was pounding. My chest went tight, joy and tears all at once. I hadn’t even seen his face yet, just his feet, but I was already certain. Back on Earth again! He was walking across the grass, taking firm steps, but he seemed to be floating in the air. I wondered if it was a montage, or a camera trick, but it wasn’t, because I watched his feet and they didn’t even crush a single blade of grass. Although he walked across it, the grass looked as if no-one had come that way at all. A miracle. So it was him! Him, him, him! Christ. The Messiah. The Saviour. The man sent by God.’
Lieutenant—Colonel Vladimir Fyodorovich, head of the economic crime unit for the Republic of Khakassia, became a believer at a meeting of a club for those interested in paranormal phenomena, of which he was a member.
Grisha Gulyaev was converted at a penal colony for recidivists and dangerous criminals near Angarsk. It was at the start of his third sentence, this time ten years, which he got for grievous bodily harm.
‘It was the Lord who sent me Slava’, says Grisha. ‘They put him on the bunk above me. He got eight years for drugs, and when the militia came to take him away from home, his wife threw a book into his bag. It was the Last Testament. I read it out of boredom. Then I read it three more times and became a believer. In there the biggest problem is getting enough to eat, getting a smoke and wangling some tea, but my one and only interest was talking about God. I fell into a strange state of non-stop prayer, I fasted, gave up smoking and drinking tea. They treated me as if I were mad. Or the enemy, even, and it was a top-security penal colony, two thousand lads, dangerous thugs. Never a month went by without someone being murdered there, and I was the biggest weirdo of all.’
At the very last moment the Lord sent a neighbour to Igor from Alma Ata. The man gave him an audio cassette and told him it was Vissarion, the second incarnation of Christ.
‘I listened for half an hour and knew I had to go to him. That very day I stopped taking my daily heroin fix. My fear and drug craving vanished, and I stopped eating meat immediately. All in a single day, though only the night before I had been considering suicide, because I had tried every treatment method, I’d been through detox at least ten times, suffered clinical death and been to prison. Even my parents had given up on me.’
Igor went to work, and once he had paid off all his debts he headed for Siberia, where the other followers were living.
Misha Orlov is from Podolsk near Moscow. Misha was the leader of one of the mafia gangs. He was twenty-five when in December 1996 he went to collect the monthly protection money from the owner of a publishing firm specializing in religious literature. On the publisher’s desk lay a photo of an angelically smiling, bearded man with blue eyes and shoulder-length hair. Misha asked who he was, and heard that this was the tsar of all tsars.
‘It hit me so hard’, says Misha, ‘that I didn’t take the money, just the photo, and next day I was on the plane to Siberia. I met the Teacher. We spent two hours talking about art, about life in harmony with nature, and why people are happier without money . . . I went home and told my wife I was leaving Moscow to live beside Christ. I gave away everything I had.’
‘What did the gangster’s wife say to that?’
‘She decided to come with me. On a trial basis. We’ve had three children born here, and after ten years I think she has come to terms with living in the middle of the taiga.We live modestly, quietly, peacefully and very happily. My children don’t know what arguing, fighting or aggression are . . .’
‘Nor do they know who Ivan the Terrible was, or Napoleon or Stalin.They’ve never heard of the October Revolution or the Second World War, because you don’t teach that in your schools.’
‘But they know a lot about Raphael, Rembrandt, Cervantes, Rimsky—Korsakov . . . And our older son, though he’s only nine, can already handle an axe and is helping me to build our house, because we’re still living in a provisional one.’
Among the Vissarionites I also met Sergei Chevalkov, a former Strategic Rocket Forces colonel, who is now one of two priests for the community, Captain Oleg Patulov, a veteran of the Afghan war, and Captain Sergei Kozlovsky, who fought in Chechnya. The former captain has become a sort of local theologian, while the other is headman at the biggest settlement for followers. Sergei Morozov used to be a research worker at a secret military institute, a fanatical communist and Party secretary. Following the fall of the USSR he madly sought something he could use to fill the void. He started with the Orthodox Church, then he was with the Hare Krishnas, the Buddhists, and even took up shamanism.
A large number of the men at the community are former soldiers, militiamen, prosecution service employees, intelligence services officers and also artists whose names are not famous. Vissarion, and thus the founder and head of the Church of the Last Testament, which is the name of their community, still paints in pastels to this day. I talked to several dozen of his followers, and everyone, without a single exception, had formerly been an atheist, often to a militant degree, and a very large number had been Party members, ideological or even fanatical communists.
It took me eight days to drive there from Moscow. At Krasnoyarsk, in the middle of Siberia, you have to turn south, and 400 kilometres later, at Abakan, you go east. Two hundred kilometres further on, at the heart of the taiga, is their promised land.
II THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN
‘The Teacher knows the answer to all questions?’
‘Of course!’ says Galina Oshchepkova from Mazyr. ‘He is Christ, the living Word of God.’
‘Can he drive a car?’
‘He doesn’t drive . . .’
‘So can he ride a bike?’ I go on.
‘Yes! And he rides a horse.And when he does, he’s like a g
reat tsar. When the governor of our province came and they walked up the Mountain, the whole entourage, governor and all, gave up the ghost halfway there, but he flew like a bird. He’s so fit and strong. And in such perfect harmony. He’s never ill.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish. He had a hernia. He had to have an operation.’
‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it. He sometimes gets tired, but that’s the result of intensive creativity and deep thinking about our fate. It’s not easy to know everything. I myself once asked him if I could use a microwave, because I’d heard dishes cooked in them aren’t healthy. He said that by blessing our food before our meal, we remove all the harmful energy that’s in everything, even in a bottle of the best quality oil, because it was made for money. Not to mention the bad thoughts of the people through whose hands the bottle has passed before it reaches us.’
‘And why can’t you bring water for tea to a boil?’ I ask.
‘Because the Teacher said that boiling it renders it lifeless.’
He was brought up by his granny. She was a cleaning lady. He blundered his way through his military service in the worker battalions, which in the USSR was where the biggest weeds and wimps ended up. To this day he reckons there is no sillier place or people in the world – the army is a dreadful cultural desert, full of primitive violence, boorish behaviour and vulgarity. He survived by painting portraits for the commanders.
After the army he tried to set up a business, but without success, so he became a militiaman.
His first contact with religion was an order from the Orthodox church in Abakan for an icon of the Virgin Mary. They paid him well, but when he finished, the clerics were outraged because the Mother of God had hands as large as a collective-farm worker’s. They said she never worked. The artist insisted it was a very faithful portrait, and refused to make any changes. He had to give back the money.
The revelation came to him in late 1991 in his home city of Minusinsk, to the south of Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. He was on the trolleybus, when he realized why he was so sure he knew how to paint Mary – because she had been his first mother.
Just then the Soviet Union collapsed.Torop was thirty years old. He gave up his job with the militia and started teaching, first of all at a social welfare home where he found his first follower. He said he hadn’t come back to Earth again in order to judge the living and the dead, as the Evangelists wrote, but to save mankind from mass destruction. The Evangelists had made lots of mistakes, because they wrote their books from memory, more than ten years after Jesus’s death. The entire truth is only contained in the Last Testament, because it comes from him, from Christ himself.
The destruction awaiting us will not be a divine punishment – instead man will bring it on himself, through religious wars, economic collapse and ecological disaster. Only a handful of people will survive, gathered around him in Siberia. So far there are 4500 of them – not many, but Noah’s family was even smaller. Afterwards the survivors will rise from the Earth, which is going to be annihilated.
They have come from the furthest corners of Russia and the former Soviet republics. Not just Russians, but Kirgiz,Yakuts, Latvians, citizens of Dagestan . . . Russian-speaking Germans, Americans and Jews from Israel, a large group of Bulgarians, a Belgian who teaches chess, and even a Cuban, but he’s from Sweden. They live in about a dozen villages, not all of which have electricity.
The biggest is called Petropavlovka. It consists of about 250 wooden cottages, and the followers live in 200 of them. Each family has produced three, four or five children. If the parents cannot cope with bringing up their offspring, they take in a follower who is single, male or female, to perform the role of a grandparent, aunt or uncle for their children.
Vissarion lived in Petropavlovka for several years, but in 1997 he announced that the centre of the world was a few dozen kilometres east, on a hill, among the marshes in the depths of the taiga. They decided to build their capital there. They started from scratch by cutting out a road, which is only passable for vehicles in winter, when the marshland freezes over, and then only for snow scooters and horses. In summer you have to go on foot by a roundabout route through the mountains. Then on the mountain that they named the Altar of Earth they erected a temple and a Heavenly Abode for the Teacher. They usually call this place the Mountain, and the Abode of Dawn, the town they built at the foot of it, is known for short as ‘Gorod’, meaning the Town. The Vissarionites’ symbol is the sun with fourteen rays shooting out of it, and that is how their capital is built too: it has a central square for prayer with fourteen streets radiating out from it. For now there are only fifty cottages and about two hundred citizens – the religious vanguard of the Vissarionites.
III REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY, TO KEEP IT HOLY
They have three holy days. The 18th of August is the Feast of Good Produce in memory of Vissarion’s first sermon. In April there is the Feast of Spring, and on 14 January the Birth of God – Vissarion’s birthday.
Every Sunday, whatever the weather, the followers from the Town go up the Mountain en masse.The culmination of the rituals is a carefully rehearsed meeting with the Teacher, ludicrously modelled on Christ. He sits among the rocks on an armchair under a large red tasselled umbrella, dressed all in white. He wears a long robe known as a chiton, trousers, woollen mittens and headgear of the kind worn by men in the Near East. He holds a microphone and has a pair of large, rather comical sunglasses balanced on his nose.
There’s no physical contact. At a safe distance the followers fall to their knees and remain in this position throughout the entire meeting.
First, in total silence, for several minutes they join hands, meditate, and merge spiritually into a single whole, into one harmoniously functioning organism. You can almost see the frost nailing down all the thoughts and sounds in the air with a large hammer. Several women lose consciousness and slump silently to the snow. The local doctor comes to their assistance with his army first-aid kit.
Afterwards there is time for questions.Vissarion’s followers are full of neophyte enthusiasm. They could hold forth about their Teacher ad infinitum, breaking down theological complexities into atom-sized pieces, but at the Sunday gatherings they are only allowed to ask about specific matters – bringing up children, sex, cultivating the garden, selling or building a house, work . . . Someone asks whether they can enter their own candidate for the local elections in town.
‘Absolutely not!’ the Teacher erupts. ‘Keep away from politics, don’t aim for power.You should go and vote, but never stand for office.’
They always have a 100 per cent turnout. I was there during the last parliamentary elections. In Petropavlovka the polling station was closed several hours before the end of voting because everyone had already cast their vote, and anyone who held back was urged to go and do it by phone. In all the villages the followers have their own, internal phone lines.
The Vissarionites always vote for the party that is in power. They say openly that if things were different, the authorities would long since have sent troops armed with sub-machine guns into the taiga and scattered them to the four winds.
IV HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER
A few years ago a desperate man from Murmansk came to see Vissarion, and accused the Siberian prophet of having taken away his wife and broken up his family. Vissarion gave no reply and calmly took several mighty punches in the face. This event is described in the Last Testament.
‘I couldn’t live with him’, says Lyubov Derbina from Petropavlovka, the assailant’s ex-wife. ‘My husband doesn’t believe in our Teacher. I left him, my mother, father, job and flat and I came here, where I don’t live just for myself, but I can do a lot of good for the community, while also perfecting myself spiritually. I only took my son with me.’
‘You took the man’s child away from him?’
‘But then he took the child from me. To tell the truth, my son went of his own accord. He wanted to spend some time with his father. He said he’d
be back when he finishes school.’
Let’s establish the facts. This is Lyuba’s only child. The boy was nine years old when she took him away from his father, and eleven when he went back to him. He is fourteen now.
‘You haven’t seen your son for three years’, I say. ‘Isn’t that hard?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘So why didn’t you go with him?’
‘Because there are no brothers there. People who are like me, who live as I do; in a community. Back there everyone is separate, entirely alone, but I can’t develop my soul on my own. I can only live here.’
‘It’s so strong that you can even leave your child behind?’
‘Yes. To be with the Teacher and the brothers.’
Lyubov used to be an English language teacher, but now for the needs of the community she runs the ‘Pole of the Earth’ tourist agency, so called because the Vissarionites believe that the North Pole is not in the Arctic Ocean, but on the spot where the Teacher’s house stands. The agency takes care of followers who come to look around before settling here permanently.
When Lyubov’s son left, his mother got married for the second time. Her new partner had divorced shortly before, because his wife was not a believer either, although she did live with him in Petropavlovka for several years. She came here for his sake, and so that their two daughters would have a father. After the divorce she and the girls stayed put, as she had nowhere to go back to; they had sold their flat in Smolensk in order to set up home here.
‘We have a great many divorces’, says Lyubov. ‘We do not exclude anyone, but anyone who doesn’t fit in, or lives a different way from us, isn’t going to feel all right among us, is bound to keep coming into conflict, will start to sicken and finally die. But please don’t think I am a heartless mother – before letting my child go, at one of the Sunday gatherings I asked the Teacher if I could, seeing as his father is a nonbeliever. He said yes, and I immediately felt better. He knows everything, he sees everything . . .’
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