A self-sufficient community in the countryside that reflects the back-to-the-simple-life dreams of stressed-out city dwellers. With the addition of their own cohesive version of the Truth. Is it possible to get nearer to the current zeitgeist?
Cold soup using kefir or kvass, a fermented bread beverage, as its basis. It usually contains cucumbers, potatoes, eggs, meat, and herbs. The French diplomat Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé was (unjustly) not a massive fan of this soup and, in the nineteenth century, compared it to the Russian souclass="underline" both are a mixture of tasty and disgusting ingredients. “Take a scoop of soup and you never know what will come out.”
Shortly before my arrival at Cheremshanka, I finally receive a curt text message from Alex. It says: “White van.”
The bus turns right at a sculpture with sun symbols and continues on to a neat village of wooden houses. On the lattice fencing there is a sign in colorful bubble letters: There is no way to happiness. Seeing me taking a photo of the sign, my seatmate says: “There used to be a second part to the message, which read Happiness is the way. Now they’ve built a shop there and that part of the fencing is missing. Too bad, isn’t it?”
At the bus stop in fact there is a white four-wheel-drive Nissan. A small guy with long hair gets out, greets me, and introduces himself as Alex. Apart from his leather sandals he is dressed completely in white, including the baseball cap perched on his head. A woman in her early thirties sits in the passenger seat; she introduces herself as Minna from Finland.
We get in; Alex turns on the ignition and announces: “There are a few rules you need to know here.” We rumble past the There is no way to happiness lettering, then proceed onto a dirt road toward the forest. “Firstly, never go alone into the taiga. It’s not a normal forest. Many people have gotten lost there.” He points to the thickly packed birch and larch trees all around us. “Secondly, you can stay for two or three days to relax. After that you have to help out. Thirdly, no alcohol, no cigarettes, no meat. Have you got a flashlight?” I have. “We don’t have electricity at the moment, just a solar light in the kitchen. Cell phone reception is rare and then only in certain places in the village.”
Soon the weather-beaten sign for Zharovsk can be seen poking out of the roadside grass. Alex parks on the main road outside a workshop. We walk through an impressive vegetable garden to a yellow wooden house that wouldn’t look out of place in a catalog of Swedish vacation homes. It has an almost square front with four windows and a red chimney on the roof.
On the ground floor is the kitchen and living room, with a mattress for Minna. The fireplace was constructed by the man of the house, who is a bricklayer by trade but also works as an English teacher. Upstairs, accessible by a ladder, is Alex’s bedroom, and a mattress has already been prepared for me in the corner.
The bookshelf survey: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, a twenty-eight-volume encyclopedia. Next to them, some classroom editions of English-language classics: Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury, The Letter by W. Somerset Maugham, Orwell’s Animal Farm.
There are a number of hardcover, gilt-embossed volumes of The Last Testament on a separate table next to a candle, a pendant with a golden cross, and a portrait of Vissarion. He looks astonishingly similar to Jesus, in the way he’s commonly portrayed: a full beard; long, dark hair with a part in the middle; compassionate facial expression. In the photo of the Teacher, as they call him here, the radiant light blue of his eyes has something supernatural about it.
“Let Minna show you everything, I have to be off for two hours,” says Alex, and then he leaves us alone.
She is also visiting here, but for a couple of months and already for the third time. “I’m writing a sociological/anthropological thesis on the role of faith in an isolated community,” she says while mixing flour, eggs, and milk for pancakes. “It’s pretty intense because in the process you’re continually asking yourself the big questions. And always discussing what is right and wrong. People say that a year here is like ten years in the world.” The “world” is everywhere outside the five villages of the believers.
Minna has long brown hair, melancholic eyes, and sky-high ambitions: she wants to grasp the irrational using science, while fighting internal battles about which side she is more drawn toward—the spiritual or the empirical. She lived in Moscow for a couple of years, which is why she speaks Russian so well. In 2009 she saw Vissarion for the first time on a magazine cover. She was fascinated, “because he looked like a kids’ movie version of Jesus.”
Now she combines her own interests in the community with work. “You can forget time here; at some stage you just stop counting the days. But I can’t take more than three months in one go. I get scared when talk turns to extraterrestrials, the Apocalypse, or negative energy.”
She tells me of the early days of the community. On August 18, 1991, Vissarion appeared for the first time in public, one day before the putsch attempt in Moscow that was to mark the end of the Soviet Union. In those tumultuous times he offered followers a life under a kind of religious mini-communism in Siberia. “In 1993 he prophesied the Apocalypse would come in ten or at the most fifteen years. Only here, in the Siberian taiga, would people survive. There’s a video of this prophecy, but now it’s no longer recommended viewing.”
I ask him how he managed to explain the absence of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. “The Teacher says, ‘Lying is allowed if it serves a greater cause.’ His purpose was to bring as many people as possible to this community, which he achieved with this proclamation.”
Truth No. 14:
Many politicians could learn from Vissarion.
He also managed to conjure up memories of groups like the Peoples Temple sect in Jonestown, where more than nine hundred people died in a mass murder–suicide. Toward the end of the ’90s, voices critical of Jesus of Siberia began to rise on Russian TV and in newspaper reports. For members of the Orthodox Church he has roughly the same standing as the Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard has with the Pope.
Preparations for Judgment Day continue to occupy Vissarion’s followers. “I met a man in Petropavlovka who told me I had better hurry up with my thesis, as the world was going to end in 2016; Barack Obama would be the last U.S. president. He prophesized that an earthquake would hit Yellowstone Park and trigger a chain reaction.”
Minna admits to being a bit bewildered. In the evenings she reads the Book of Revelation by candlelight, looking for parallels to what is happening here in Siberia. Many passages in her edition of the Bible are marked with a mauve highlighter.
She suggests visiting Sun City the next day and staying there for a couple of days. Vissarion lives in the holiest place of the community, on a hill. “There’s always liturgy on Sundays. After liturgy, if the Teacher feels he is needed, he will answer questions. Maybe you want to know something from him?”
Well now, what do you ask Jesus? About the meaning of life? Which shares are about to go through the roof? Truthfully, which is better—Heaven or Hell? What really went on with Mary Magdalene? Does Crimea belong to Russia? Minna quickly brings me back to Earth: “Nowadays he only answers practical questions. The more concrete, the better. Sometimes it gets really absurd—people asking about the best way to clean shoes.”