‘But they’re beautiful’, I protest.
‘So what? The followers aren’t concerned about all those faraway, made-up problems. To them it sounds false, untrue. Why have all those wars, suffering and fear when you can leave the city, settle in the taiga and build a new life, look people in the eye, enjoy the forest, be creative . . .When the Festival of Spring comes, thousands of people gather by the river. There’s no beer and no drugs, no-one makes a fuss, there’s no punching in the face . . . That is a true miracle in our Russia.’
Tania says she swapped her one-room flat in Moscow for seven classrooms in Petropavlovka. In 2001 she sold her flat for 37,000 dollars. For this money she built a seven-room school for girls, and still had a bit left to buy a small banya – a Russian bathhouse, which she converted into a cottage for herself. She got divorced, so she lives on her own. They loved each other very much, but her husband didn’t want to leave Moscow.
‘Nothing happens by accident here’, says Tania. ‘It was God’s plan. Now I can see it’s very wise. If my husband had come here with me, we’d have built ourselves a house and there wouldn’t have been any benefit from it. But as it is, there’s the school.’
The Vissarionites have very bad press in Russia. The journalists call them a sect, although in no way do they resemble those totalitarian communities isolated from reality whose leaders brainwash their followers and clean out their bank accounts. No-one takes away the money the Teacher’s pupils have made from selling their flats in the cities. They use it to set themselves up in their new place. They only pay taxes on income gained within the community.
The tax is collected by Grisha Gulyaev, among others, who is the ‘elder for male labour’, in other words a sort of headman, in the village of Gulyaevka, which is inhabited by eighteen men. It is pure coincidence that he has the same name as his village. He is forty-five, and has spent twenty of his years in prison, mostly the top-security kind. In his spare time from management work he repairs shoes and makes workers’ boots.
He’s very worried about me.
‘If you write badly about me, the community or the Teacher’, he explains, ‘nothing in our lives will change, but the evil you do will come back to you.You’ll only do yourself harm, because the energy of all of us, of our entire society, will turn against you, if you tell lies or are misleading. You cast just one small stone, and thousands, millions of them will come back to you, as many as the number of people who read your article. And they’ll travel at the speed of light, like bullets, like red-hot drops of molten metal, and you’ll never be able to scramble out from under them. They’ll bury you.’
‘Grisha . . . Have mercy. I wanted to talk about women.’
‘Oh, all right then.’
IX THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S WIFE
‘You’ve been living in the community for six years’, I say, ‘and always in homes for single men or in the families of other followers.You see them making love, cuddling, going to bed together, but you’re still single. And before that you spent twenty years in prison. Don’t tell me you never think about women.’
‘Of course I do’, admits Grisha. ‘But if I haven’t got one, it means I’m not entitled to one. Once I start going my own way without any devilry, twists and tumbles, no doubt the Father will send me a woman.’
I can’t understand why he has trouble with this, because he is an extremely handsome, well-built, masculine type, a sort of Slavonic macho man. He used to live in the Town, but the community expelled him for having an ‘inappropriate attitude to women’.
‘Bitterness built up inside me’, he says, ‘until I began to boil over. I went about feeling angry, I kept arguing, provoking everyone . . . There was one girl, but it wasn’t what you think. We used to go dancing. In pairs and in a circle. But if you have no way of dealing with anger, you explode! You erupt! Living with it inside you is impossible! And I was working with horses. They can sense it, and they can show their moods too, and that made me even angrier – one of them would kick me, I’d give him a whack, and so on, round and round. I was shattering all the horses’ nerves, so no-one else could cope with them either. I was ruining them.’
‘Were you expelled because of the horses or the women?’
‘It all meant I kept causing scenes, and it even came to a fight, but there, in the Town, there’s a very strict regime, you aren’t even allowed to raise your voice because it’s a place for shaping your spirit. I just wanted a woman, that’s all.’
X NOR WHATEVER BELONGS TO THY NEIGHBOUR
In 1961, at the Twenty-Second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev announced that by 1980 real communism would be built in the USSR. Now we know that none of those plans came to fruition, and that 1980 was the year in which at one of the Polish shipyards the system started being dismantled.
However, Vissarion is trying to build a mini Utopia, and in the Town, his capital, he is selecting people for it, as Noah selected animals for the Ark. He is most willing to take couples, though not according to race or type, but ability, talent, artistry and profession. There is a blacksmith, a carpenter, a cooper and a tailor, each of whom has at least one woman and children, to whom he is teaching his profession. There is a doctor, an electrician, a beekeeper and a forester – an expert on the taiga, lots of artists with a wide range of special skills, and a huge diversity of human types, in terms of personality and mentality. Altogether they bring together the wisdom and life experience of all nations and generations of the former Soviet empire.
Maybe that is why the world’s intelligence services are so very interested in whether this bold experiment will succeed.
Giving to each according to his needs has proved a failure. Five years ago all the followers used to be given as much food as they wanted, and when they needed money for something the community gave it to them. They didn’t get any money for working at the community businesses, workshops and studios, and the same went for everything they did for their fellow followers. If they earned money by working or selling something outside the community, they threw it into the general kitty.
They call the financial system that is now in force on the Mountain ‘not entirely monetary’. Each citizen, regardless of age or occupation, receives 250 roubles (£5) a month from the community. Only Vladimir, their doctor, gets 2000 (£40) rather than just 1000 (he has a wife and two children), because he has so much work to do that he cannot take care of a garden.
Of the forty-two families who started ‘taming the taiga’ at the site of the Town in 1997, only ten have lasted to the present. Most of the followers who now live there joined up in later years.
‘What’s the hardest thing about this Utopia of yours?’ I ask Grisha, who lasted eight months in the Town.
‘The hardest thing is to work for free. It gives rise to envy, jealousy. You build up negative energy. I simply couldn’t manage. Inside I was howling with despair, shaking like a paralytic. Sheer physical pain, impotence, suffering because I hadn’t been given a jar of honey, though I’d worked so terribly hard cutting wood, or because I was given something, but only the same amount as people who hadn’t worked as hard as me.’
‘So Grisha, what on earth are you doing in this community?’
‘I’m building a better world. Because the outside one is no good for anything.’
Dead people’s bodies will be preserved in special cold stores, where the blood circulation will be artificially maintained. In figurative terms, these would be ‘living corpses’. At any moment, in case of need, a surgeon will be able to take from this store of human spare parts any particular organ for transplant into a live person.
Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.
The town. At noon the bells ring, and everyone stops work and prays.
Black Square
A CONVERSATION WITH DEACON ANDREI KURAYEV, ORTHODOX PHILOSOPHER AND RELIGIOUS COMMENTATOR
What has happened to the Russians? Why such an abundance of religions? Since t
he 1990s, every church in the world, even the most bizarre ones, have been gathering an incredible harvest here. Plus dozens of home-grown sects.
In Egypt they used to say that on the banks of the Nile you only have to stick an iron bar into the ground and in a month a tractor will grow from it, so fertile is the soil. In Russia the spiritual ground is very rich too. Even purely secular spiritual trends grow immeasurably here. Take Marxism, for instance. It became Bolshevism. In our country there are many such occurrences. That’s why the Russians are so highly sensitive, susceptible to religious nonsense, hence the multiplicity of sects. It is a positive phenomenon, because it means there is a spiritual need in people’s hearts forcing them to go on a quest, but naturally people get lost, they lose their way. The Soviet system of repression worked like a bulldozer, flattening anything that grew above the surface, all religious and philosophical thought, but it couldn’t get down to the roots, to the most fundamental of human needs – the need for religion.
Why don’t people go to the Orthodox Church, which has been present on Russian terrain for more than a thousand years?
Out of the instinctive fear that it is a reincarnation of the Communist Party, because it’s such a large, centralized and secretive organization. That’s what they sense. The communists taught people not to have faith or trust. It has come to a point where the more actively we, the clergy, come out to meet people in the streets or knock on their doors, the more fear and mistrust we engender. Orthodoxy in Russia has become the ‘sect’ of the intelligentsia. Unfortunately there aren’t any working-class people at our churches. Of course there are the traditional old ladies, but apart from that there are only intellectuals and students.
Why is the Orthodox Church so weak?
Because in the Soviet era no-one supported it in the fight against communism.
Which you lost.
Right. Rome supported the Catholics in Czechoslovakia, their brothers from the West supported the Protestants in East Germany, even the Soviet Muslims received aid from the Arabian Peninsula, but the Orthodox Church was on its own, with no financial, theological, organizational or educational help. Now we are rebuilding our intellectual fabric – with extreme difficulty, because what we were taught at Orthodox seminaries in the Soviet era was on a level with the religious instruction in pre-revolutionary primary schools. Seriously. I am a professor at the Moscow Academy of Theology, but I must honestly admit that with my qualifications, before the October Revolution I couldn’t even have taught the students singing.
Have you read Vissarion’s Last Testament?
I have tried, but it’s quite unreadable. Complete gibberish. In fact, Vissarion describes a meeting with me in there. He was in Moscow and he invited me for a chat. He makes a big effort to have episodes from the life of Christ repeated in his own biography. Jesus met and conversed with the Pharisees, so he has this meeting too. That was how I became a Pharisee. I talked to him for three hours, and there was one thing I couldn’t fully fathom – whether or not he believes in what he says.
In my view it’s not a question of faith at all, but a phenomenon known to the world for thousands of years, the fact that demand stimulates supply, in the spiritual sphere too. His followers are people who have suffered terrible traumas, people with dysfunctional family or emotional lives, or the sort of people who have spent decades living in a world of absurdity, in other words within the Soviet and then the Russian security forces – mainly militia and military men. I think these people found it very hard to bear the dreadful spiritual void that arose in the place of Marxism, so along came a man who filled it. They needed a prophet, so he stepped forward and they accepted him.
And each of them imports their own ideas into his incomprehensible words.Thus they satisfy their own needs. It’s like Malevich’s Black Square. Each person understands it in his own way.
Anisya Otsur the shamaness treating a patient in Kyzyl.
My guardian angel’s plait
Finally she filled her mouth with as much milk as she could fit in there. She stuck the bowl in my hands so it wouldn’t be in her way, gave her head a good shake, almost took a run-up and spat the whole lot straight into my face.
Instantly I felt better. And once I had wiped my eyes, I saw a very real invoice, including VAT, for 800 roubles (£16) for a ‘purification ritual’.
When I made the claim for my business trip at the newspaper office, I put it down as a ‘health-care expense’.
PRICE LIST
It was 500 roubles more than we had agreed. For the full service, because she not only purified me and purged the entire space around me of bad events, deeds, spirits and memories, of all the negative energy I had accumulated over the years, but also made contact with my ancestors while she was about it, asking them to protect me from evil during my onward journey.
‘Consultation’ would have been much cheaper. For that they take whatever you can pay, which means at least 100 roubles (£2), because that only pays for a five-minute reading from fortune-telling pebbles which will say what I am sick with and what’s ahead of me in the next few days, months or years.
The ritual for purifying a passenger car at a cost of 300 roubles, or a lorry at 600, means that the vehicle will serve for many years to come without accident or breakdown. The same ritual to purify your flat costs 500 roubles. Purification of a herd of goats, sheep, horses, yaks and all manner of livestock costs up to 3000, and of a school, hospital, office, restaurant or any kind of business costs 5500.When the shamaness who spat milk at me was asked to come and purify the Republic’s Ministry of Labour, she rounded the figure up to 6000.
The remaining items on the price list at the Dungur Shamans’ Cooperative are blessing a spring and a tree for 1500 roubles, family rituals of feeding fire or water for 2500, and funeral rites at home or at the cemetery on the seventh and forty-ninth day after burial and a year after the death for 2000. For each item, the price is a thousand roubles higher if it requires a trip out of town. For ‘suppressing hysteria’, ‘saving from fear’, ‘guaranteeing success in business, love, study and family life’ and for ‘help in choice of profession and also of life partner’ no price is given. It depends how complicated the case is. The same goes for healing sicknesses of the soul, protection from witchcraft and removal of curses.
HOSPITAL
I met her at the Children’s Hospital in the city of Kyzyl, in the Tuva Republic. On my car journey from Moscow to Vladivostok, I had to make a detour of almost a thousand kilometres south to get there.
In a white tiled ward, among the traction hoists for broken legs and the IV stands, there’s a wailing woman buzzing about in an Indian headdress and a dirty, full-length smock, from which hang hundreds of coloured bits of string, wings, fangs, paws and bones of various animals. This is shamaness Anisya Otsur. From a sheep’s tibia made into a wind instrument she extracts the most appalling noise in the world. It’s also because of this awful blare that Kyzyl’s Orthodox believers and Jehovah’s Witnesses call the shamans servants of Satan.
The woman waves a smoking conifer branch to fumigate the area around the bed of a terrified nine-year-old boy with an oxygen mask on his face. She uses a raven’s wing to sweep the smoke onto the white bedclothes, the weeping parents, nurses and doctor, who are all standing by the patient’s bed. The smoke from this high-mountain shrub, called autysh, purifies and soothes, and also drives away evil forces. The boy’s mother is holding an eren, a hideous doll very like the shamaness, with a black face. With the help of a dungur, which is a shaman’s drum made of goatskin, the old woman casts a spirit into it, which is meant to save the boy, who is dying from stomach cancer.
So she bangs away as if possessed and sings in a drawling, trancelike way, and all the children in the ward start to cry in despair. Finally, she cleans the boy with the stick she has been using to beat the drum, as if now it were a clothes brush, and splashes the walls, windows and floors with vodka and milk out of a plastic teat.
Tuva is t
he most godforsaken corner of the world, certainly of the Asian continent, the geographic centre of which is on the banks of the Yenisei River, only about fifteen minutes’ walk from the children’s hospital. There are no roads here. The one you take to get here also ends here. Tuva has no railway, and hasn’t even got any neighbours. It is surrounded by overgrown taiga and uninhabited mountains. On one side there is the Sayan range, on the other the Altai, and to the south are the wild Mongolian steppes. The first Christians reached Tuva in the nineteenth century, and the first house was not built here until the following century. And there is absolutely nothing here – no ancient sites, grand buildings or industry; 90 per cent of the Republic’s budget consists of grants from Moscow. It is such a hole that not even an international burger chain has set up a diner here.
The Tuvans are the only nation in Siberia to be the national majority within their administrative region. And by a long chalk, because of the 314,000 inhabitants, only about 30,000 are Russian.
A LONG TIME AGO
The first time they locked up Kuular Khandyzhap Medi-Kyzy was in 1929. People called her Ulu-Kham, which means Great Shamaness. She was forty-four at the time. The previous Great Shaman was shot by the Bolsheviks immediately after the October Revolution.
It was the secret police’s first campaign against the shamans. They drove people into the squares and burned all the drums, eren dolls and ritual costumes on bonfires. Any kind of shamanic practice was made illegal. Ulu-Kham and her entire family were expelled from their village and deported for ten years hundreds of kilometres south, to the Mongolian border. For a Tuvan, being uprooted from your homeland is a terrible punishment.
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