The guest accommodation resembles a simple backpack hosteclass="underline" a large room with eight wooden bunk beds without mattresses. Men and women spend the night separate, in different buildings.
In the neighboring house there is a kind of canteen where two elderly ladies serve porridge for breakfast. There the next day we meet another guest, a businessman from Vladivostok who sells Japanese cars to New Zealand. The job, however, doesn’t seem to qualify as his purpose in life. “I’m now looking for an ecovillage,” he says. This is a trend in Russia: many people are leaving the cities because they realize that the part-time experience of nature in their dachas is not enough. Increasing numbers of people are joining the Anastasia movement, which propagates a sustainable life in nature. “I’m searching for a meaning in life and I haven’t found it yet,” he says. It reminds me of Sasha in Crimea and his admission, while gazing at shooting stars, that his generation is lacking a purpose. Can someone like Vissarion fill the gap?
In the meanwhile Minna is speaking to a man of around fifty who claims that he can read people. He sees “much light, many bright spaces, but also a dark space” in her and he would like to help her get rid of the dark space; he suggests a meeting with just the two of them. In his art of reading people he seems to be somewhat short-sighted: his head gets closer and closer to her head and his eyes don’t break contact with hers, even for a millisecond. If we were being generous we could put this down to “keen focus,” but it’s probably more accurate to say he is ogling her.
We decide that this is probably a good time to leave; after all, we do have an appointment with the community’s number two. Up to now I only know Vadim from an old music video of his band, Integral, featuring him sweeping across the dance floor to a disco beat with some pretty crazy, but at the same time acrobatic moves. Like a combination of Michael Jackson and a Cossack dancer, with the long hair of an ’80s crooner.
We meet at a school on Starfield Street, some two hundred yards as the crow flies from Vissarion’s house. Vadim’s hairstyle has hardly changed since the video was made thirty years ago. A gray three-day beard and some wrinkles around his eyes are later additions. He radiates the deeply relaxed warmth of a person who is at ease with himself and the world and no longer has to dance around to be liked. “Ach, the music business,” he says. “When you want to be successful, you have to go by the rules that the businesspeople make: they make you sing songs you don’t like, to a public with simple tastes. You begin lying to yourself. But life is too short to persist in a lie.” After five years as a professional musician he met Vissarion; soon he became his most trusted right-hand man.
We go into the school building, a wooden house with three classrooms and a kitchen. At the entrance there is a whole range of colorful cross-country skis—soon it will be winter. Vadim invites me to sit at the teacher’s desk and settles in one of the six pupil benches; the other way around would have been more appropriate. There are math books on the shelf and a poster with bright handprints of the schoolkids hangs on a wall.
We talk about Sun City, about everyday life in seclusion, and he outlines a utopia of contentment full of positive interpersonal energy. “People here have escaped from the blind alley into which society had maneuvered them because all life, politics, and economics are corrupted by egotism. Here, however, the ego is considered the inner enemy that has to be tackled every day.”
Linked to this is the idea of returning to the roles of men and women as they were in the time of Jesus. “When everyone has a role, there is no competition,” says Vadim with his soft voice. “Women should serve men, but men should also serve women. A stable family is very important for society, but where can you still find that in Russia or Europe?”
At the very moment that the atheist Communism of Lenin and Marx ceased to exist in Russia, Vissarion brought into being a type of religious Communism as an experimental venture. The parallels are intriguing. The ideal is a life as laborer or farmer; all the harvest is shared, money should play no role, and status should be unimportant—apart from absolute obedience to the Teacher, of course. With his red book, Vissarion provides the ideological superstructure that enables his followers to believe they belong to a select circle that will survive the Apocalypse. According to Vadim, at the beginning of the ’90s, particularly in Russia, the time was ripe, as people were emerging from a spiritual vacuum and many were yearning for a system they could believe in.
He has another piece of news for us: “Vissarion opened a Facebook account three weeks ago.” For the first time in our conversation I get the feeling that Vadim doesn’t totally agree with all of his boss’s ideas. “Sometimes his actions are unpredictable. He just does what he feels to be right.”
Now, at last, I know what these Siberian villages remind me of—a private Facebook group. All the people living here made a decision years ago to “like” Vissarion, thus signaling a readiness to accept his view of the world. And they “like” each other because all negative energy between them should be avoided. Sun City is an idyllic echo chamber deep in the taiga.
People live contentedly here in a filtered bubble where any information that contradicts Vissarion’s doctrines is insignificant. No one checks facts, but when almost 100 percent of the people around you believe in something, it’s easy to blank out first the counterarguments and then your own rationality. Putting it another way: things that five years previously you would have considered completely unthinkable are now upgraded to “possible.” When so many people around me are convinced of it, then maybe there is something to it. Such a system can only work in isolation. Not everyone is convinced that they really are in the presence of the reincarnation of Jesus, but they at least believe that it’s possible. A follower is not necessarily a believer but, in practice, there is no difference in loyalty.
ONE PHOTO TOO MANY
THE DENTIST AT Sun City is named Richard; he is thirty-seven and lives two doors away from the school. He has the same soft laugh as Vadim but he has dark eyes, a suntanned complexion, and short black hair. Richard shows us his practice. The equipment seems a bit primitive, but some things are still surprising to find in such a remote place: two sterilizers that look like microwave ovens, a formidable range of drills, an X-ray device that looks like a blow-dryer and makes postage-stamp-sized images. When patients lie on the dental chair, which is upholstered in turquoise leather, they look directly at the benevolent, penetrating eyes of the Messiah and a sequence of numbers on the walclass="underline" 5148586. “My predecessor wrote those down, I have no idea what they mean,” says Richard. The number 14 is considered holy as Vissarion was born on January 14.
I ask him whether he thinks a toothache is God’s punishment. “It’s all about streams of energy. If they aren’t balanced, then you see the effects,” he says. “But, of course, sugar is also to blame,” he adds with a grin.
“What about serious illnesses?”
“The cause lies in the person; they are the result of not living a harmonious life,” Richard believes.
We take a little walk, and he shows me the largest raspberries I’ve ever seen. They’re almost egg-shaped and taste so sweet and delicious that for a second I wonder whether their proximity to his dental practice is part of the business model. Of course, that’s nonsense, because treatment is free of charge for all villagers.