‘How does he do that? How can an educated person allow a stranger to make decisions about his marriage and his children?’
‘That is faith. I spent a very long time searching for it. I went on a meditation course, a bio-energy course, to a bible group, I even practised yoga, but no-one could give me the answers to all my questions. But the Teacher knows everything.’
V THOU SHALT NOT KILL
Vissarion’s followers do not drink alcohol or smoke. You have to remember that in Russia, especially in the provinces, for a man that is a patent symptom of a lack of virility. Worse even – you might have doubts about the sexual preferences of a guy like that.
Even in the shops run by the followers there are no products that involve killing, including fish and meat. Dairy produce is not prohibited, but only children eat it, and in very small quantities. It doesn’t come from the shop but from the followers’ own goats, which aren’t killed, but allowed to live out their old age and die a natural death. When they drop dead, they are eaten by dogs belonging to the nonbeliever neighbours. Their cats eat the mice that the followers catch alive in their houses.
Oleg Patulov stopped eating meat from one day to the next.
‘I simply felt like throwing up at the very sight of a tin of spam,’ he says.
That day, he had taken a bayonet, stuck it in the lid, and thick fat heated to the consistency of broth in the Afghan sun had splashed onto his uniform, but everything had kept rising to his throat, so he couldn’t even drink vodka to settle his stomach.
That was a few days after fifteen tanks in the company he commanded had run over an Afghan village. There was a gang of armed people hiding there, and he had received an order over the radio to capture and hold the buildings until reinforcements arrived.
He did it without firing a single shot.
‘Maybe there weren’t any civilians in the houses’, I console him.
‘What do you mean? I saw them trying to hide as we ploughed through them. Remember the Kurosawa film, Seven Samurai? We raced about that village like madmen in a similar way, but in thirty-seven-ton tanks.When I drove into a clay hut it didn’t even feel as if I’d stepped on something. That’s why I can’t look at meat. Especially mince.’
Ten months later, in February 1989, Captain Patulov led his company out of Afghanistan and was discharged from the army – Gorbachev was reducing the military.
Oleg was thirty-four years old and already retired. He enrolled in a philosophy course at the Pedagogical Institute in his home city of Oryol. In 1993 he met Vissarion at a Philosophical Congress in Moscow. Now he is his chief theologian. He conducts optional world outlook classes in the mornings for women and in the evenings for men. Once a week there are compulsory classes for teachers.
For the first six years the Vissarionites teach girls and boys in separate schools. The point is for the girls not to see the boys’ inevitable moments of weakness, which in the future could obstruct them in understanding the fundamental truth of the Siberian Christ’s teaching, that man belongs to the world of the spirit and woman to the world of nature, which serves the spirit.That is why each woman washes her man’s feet every few days.
All the schools are run according to original teaching programmes approved by the Russian Ministry of Education.
I attend a two-hour world outlook class for twelve female teachers from the school for girls, about how the financial system works in the modern world.
However, Oleg starts with the information that as a result of yesterday’s parliamentary elections four parties have entered the Duma. He doesn’t say which ones, but no-one asks.
All the teachers have done their homework and have read the set chapter of the Last Testament, in which it says that the financial system was created by the Jews.There are a vast number of civilizations in the universe, and each one rules its own world, but the more powerful ones try to dominate the smaller, younger ones, including ours.
‘Who’s trying to dominate us?’ I ask timidly and perhaps stupidly, because all the ladies stop crocheting and glance at me over their specs for the long-sighted.
‘The civilization of Lu-ci-fer’, they chant in chorus.
‘Who chose the Jewish nation to implement his programme’, adds Oleg. ‘And through the worldwide banking system he controls the fate of mankind. The Jews programme monetary crashes, make financial disasters happen, and even cause wars and revolutions, which always have vastly expensive arms programmes behind them, and . . . Well, what now, Jacek?’
‘Oh yes, the Yids, sure . . .’ I mumble.
‘All right. So there’s money. And world financial circles control it.’
‘Christ was a Jew’, I mention, ‘which means your Teacher is one too.’
‘The Heavenly Father sent his son specially to the Jewish people in order to at least partly temper that nation’s hideous plan. Now He has sent him once again, because mankind is standing on the precipice. Thanks to him we are building a wonderful, ecological community full of harmony and love, for which the most valuable thing are the children. Whatever we can, we do for ourselves. Imagine a worldwide cataclysm: fuel runs out, there’s no energy . . .We will survive.We will have something to eat and a way to keep warm. In some of the villages we even have our own electricity from solar panels. We are still dependent on money to a small degree, but we are moving away from it.’
The community pays Oleg 2000 roubles a month for giving his lectures (£40) – as much as the doctor. By local standards that is quite a lot, considering the state electricity only costs a penny a kilowatt here, and so many people use electricity to heat their flats, because it’s not worth chopping firewood. On this money the theologian keeps a wife and five children, but like everyone here, they produce most of their food on their own plot. Oleg’s oldest son is now in the army, as is the Teacher’s son, but they are serving in the worker battalions, so that they won’t take hold of anything that is used for killing.
Oleg belongs to the community’s small circle of budzhetniki – paid people – as do the teachers and the priests. For this and other purposes all the followers duly pay a 30 per cent tax (independent of the state tax, which in Russia stands at 13 per cent) on every kopeck they earn, even from state allowances and retirement pensions.
All Vissarion’s followers swear they have read the entire Last Testament many times over (which I am prepared to believe), so perhaps Oleg’s knowledge isn’t quite so valuable? The catch is that the Testament is a set of dreadfully chaotic, convoluted tomes written in incomprehensible, artificially archaic, often incorrect language. People like me who aren’t followers are incapable of wading through as much as the first few pages.
The Last Hope, the main book of the Testament, hand-written by Vissarion himself, begins (in the official English translation) with these words: ‘Humankind! Children of the Unique Living God. The next stage of the developing Event being predestined on Mother-Earth has come, and now I am going to tell you many things plainly. You have encountered great difficulties, but these difficulties were not caused by someone else. They are the result of your efforts giving rise to lies, envy and hatred over a long period of time. For centuries you strove to raise your name up to the Heavens, but you only plunged your face in liquid manure.’
VI THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY
Igor, a thirty-seven-year-old former drug addict from Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, lives alone in a tiny house in the Town. ‘House’ is definitely an overstatement. It is a shack made of planks and plywood insulated with sawdust, which, to make it warmer, Igor has built inside a plastic tunnel. The hut has one window, but the view from it is lousy because the sheet of plastic behind it isn’t transparent. There’s one tiny room, a little stove, a small bed, a physical map of Krasnoyarsk Krai which takes up an entire wall, and a photo of a child in a baby nest. That’s Ilya, his son.
Eighteen months ago Igor went to see his friend Danil and his wife Tsveta to build a clay oven. A month later the woman divorced and married I
gor.They had nowhere to live, so they moved in with her parents in the village of Cheremshanka.
‘Is premarital sex allowed?’ I ask.
‘If people are engaged, then yes’, says Igor. ‘It used to be out of the question, but there were such an awful lot of divorces that the Teacher changed the rules.You can even have two wives, because that’s probably better than secret affairs, but it doesn’t happen often. My marriage to Tsveta fizzled out six months after our son was born. We agreed to go on being together, but that if one of us found someone and fell in love, the other one would leave. Tsveta did it first, so I went back to the Town.’
‘Didn’t your friend Danil smash your face in?’
‘No way – we don’t have any fighting here. And we’re still close friends. He was happy the woman he loved had found love and had a good time with me. He had a spiritual obligation to make our life together possible.Whenever we went to the Town we stayed with him at his place, and whenever he came down the hill he stayed with us. You have to rise above your own egoism and thrive on the happiness of others. For us that’s standard. Among the young people brought up according to these rules there are dozens of stories like ours.’
‘So the only mistake was getting her pregnant.’
‘What mistake? Women should have as many children as possible! Do you know what a huge queue there is in Heaven for reincarnation? They’re just waiting for us to make new bodies for them on Earth.’
Lyuba bore Vissarion five children, and after twenty-five years of marriage she left him. Earlier on, to help with the offspring she had brought the exquisite Sonia into her home, the eighteen-year-old daughter of their friends, followers from Petropavlovka.
‘She offered her up to the Teacher herself and waited for affection to develop’, says Galina Oshchepkova, who also made friends with his wife. ‘Then they lived as a threesome, and when Sonia fell pregnant, Lyuba left her husband, house and children and went away. A very brave, courageous woman. She had not been blessed with faith, she didn’t accept him as Christ.’
‘He was able to attract thousands of people to follow him, but not his own wife?’
‘They were already a married couple when she found out she was living with Christ.’
‘And she was also sleeping with him, washing his underpants and socks, removing sand from his eye, cutting his nails and trimming his nose hair . . .’
‘She couldn’t stand it’, says her friend. ‘Now she lives in Krasnoyarsk. She rented a small flat and she’s studying clinical psychology.’
The story of Vissarion’s new love put Galina in a mood to pour warm water into a bowl, fetch the soap and kneel before her husband.
‘The Teacher said oncological diseases in women come from a bad attitude to men’, she says, scraping bits of dry skin from between her husband’s toes, ‘from silly women taking offence, sulking and being disobedient. And from feminism. I was like that too. I was forty-four, and I was still living alone, just for myself, selfishly. I spent nineteen years without a man! I lived in the community, but only in the world of women. I had the choir, massage lessons, and a dance course, but I despised blokes. Certainly it was because of the fear I inherited from life with my ex-husband. Five years ago I got a final warning.’
The doctors at the oncology clinic in Krasnoyarsk found that she had a large tumour in her uterus. They said the situation was hopeless, but for peace of mind they could operate. Galina’s friends called the Teacher, and he recommended instantly removing her from hospital. He said she wouldn’t survive the operation, but that she would live. She voluntarily discharged herself.
‘I’d have done anything he said’, says Galina.
She came back to the community but didn’t have the strength to walk, or even raise her head from the pillow. She grew as thin as a skeleton and suffered terribly. For two months she prayed non-stop and listened to her friends as they read her the Last Testament all round the clock.
When Vladimir Pietukh, the doctor for followers from the Town, reckoned she had two weeks left to live, the priest from Petropavlovka came to prepare her for death.
‘The Teacher was standing in my room as if for real’, Galina tells me, ‘and in front of him I could see my organ, my uterus with a large tumour. It was huge, bloody and dirty, but all of a sudden the tumour dissolved before my eyes, and my uterus blossomed like a flower.’
A few minutes after this vision her temperature dropped, and for the first time in two months the pain ceased.
‘Was it a miracle?’ I ask Dr Pietukh.
‘No. She was cured by the power of her faith, because she believes heroically. The crucial thing is that she had decided to change her inappropriate attitude to men. By that token, in the eyes of the Father and the Teacher she deserved to get life back again. Because her tumour was huge, as big as . . .’
He looks around his consulting room.
‘As your camera bag. She looked dreadful, like a pregnant skeleton. I was at her place five days after the priest’s visit, and she was on her feet. I did a gynaecological examination and there was no trace of the cancer. I sent her to the hospital for tests. They did an ultrasound. Nothing there! They couldn’t believe it. They did it again . . . She was fine. But that’s not so unusual. Here that’s normal. I’ve seen dozens of similar cases. It’s the same with the drug addicts. We’ve got hundreds of them, but not one of them has gone back to his habit.You see? Not a single one! Often without any medication.’
‘Where does this strength come from?’
‘A person who opens his heart to God is in a euphoric state like the one induced by drugs, as if he’s downed a glass of morphine. We live without fear, anxiety or stress, because what is there to be afraid of here among brothers? Illnesses develop when a person goes against himself, lives in a hurry, with a sense of guilt, in sin and not in accordance with nature, when his spirit is suffering.’
‘Everyone keeps telling me no-one gets sick here.’
‘I spent several years living in a tent, in winter too, and I didn’t even catch a cold’, says the doctor. ‘I wasn’t much needed. I worked as a woodcutter, but our numbers kept increasing, and they were mainly educated people, from the city, intelligentsia, and now and then someone cut himself with an axe, so I stitched them up, put on plaster casts, performed minor operations and went round the houses delivering babies.’
Three years ago Galina married Kolya, who after twenty-five years of marriage had left his wife for her and for the Teacher.
VII THOU SHALT NOT STEAL
In the Town, where only followers live, none of the houses have locks on the doors. Even at night they aren’t locked from the inside. The citizens leave skis, sledges, and children in pushchairs outside their houses unguarded, even axes stuck in the chopping block – in the taiga, where for a real man that is the most valuable object.
To go and live there, you have to have an invitation from a council of elders and the Teacher himself, and to enter the Town you need an invitation from the headman. You have to sign your name in the register at the gate and only move about with an appointed minder. When I break away from him and wilfully head up the Mountain, where the Teacher lives, they want to drive the poor man and his entire family out of the Town. I only just manage to appease them and explain that it’s my fault. Then they discover that I have pissed in the forest, and another scandal erupts. ‘It is a place for shaping the spirit’, they say. ‘Among us, even if a horse leaves something behind the cart driver has a duty to clean it up.’
The community’s money consists of income from taxes and also from the businesses they run. They chop down the taiga and have their own sawmills and carpentry shops. They build wonderful residences and churches out of wood all over Russia. They live at the heart of the taiga, 200 kilometres from the nearest city, but they have never felled any trees or put a single stick in their stoves for which they haven’t paid the foresters.
VIII THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THY NEIGHBOUR
&
nbsp; Tania Denisova was a big star as a folk singer and in the Komsomol, as well as being the Central Committee’s secretary for cultural affairs. In the 1970s she twice won the main prizes at the biggest folk-music festival, and when communism collapsed she became a star in business. She knows the artistic cream of Moscow, was a friend of the famous singer Bulat Okudzhava, earned as much as Croesus, did a lot of travelling, meditated at monasteries in India, China and Nepal, and in 1999 she ended up at Petropavlovka.
She had prepared a concert for the followers, which was held at the Creativity Centre. She had chosen twenty-five of the most moving, dramatic ballads, the pearls of the classic folk repertoire, but after only a few songs she could feel something wasn’t right. There was no reaction. The harder she tried, the more feeling she put into it, the more the audience sat there subdued, gloomy and sad.
‘My soul’s howling, my heart’s leaping, and that lot show no response at all!’, recalls Tania. ‘There they sat on their benches and chairs, making themselves smaller and smaller, pulling their heads lower and lower . . . Finally I sang Okudhava’s Three Loves, which always has the audience on their knees, but they just applauded and went home. They didn’t even want an encore. The whole country weeps at my concerts, but these people . . . I was deeply offended. I couldn’t sleep all night, and in the morning my hosts’ daughter asked why was I killing myself like that? Why did I sing about nothing but wars, betrayal and hopeless love? It finally got through to me. They’re classics, but they have a toxic energy.’
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