Lost and Found in Russia

  That evening Vera, her husband, and I walked across town for supper at the house of Vera’s new stepson, Viktor. A modern bungalow, it stood on the edge of the town, looking out over a grassy plain that ended in an escarpment of sheer rock. Viktor’s pretty young wife and Volodya’s daughter, who collected me from the airport, had invited friends over. The house was tumbling with little children. Listening to Viktor’s friend singing to the guitar, watching Vera dancing with the little children, I relaxed. There did not seem to me to be anything particularly cult-like about these people. No one had mentioned Vissarion all day, although the young women were keen to show me how well you could eat on a vegan diet. Perhaps Vissarion’s community was more a “lifestyle choice” than a cult? If so, it seemed like a sensible one: rarely since the fall of communism had I been anywhere in Russia where the mood was so carefree.

  Only one person looked out of place. Viktor was pale and cadaverous and his head was shaved. Surrounded by these brown, happy people he looked as if he had just been released from prison. Through the meal he kept up a morbid silence, his deep-set tormented eyes trained on me. As the women cleared away the dishes he moved closer: “I was the first in the family to join Vissarion.”

  “Really?”

  “I wasn’t even searching. A man at work left me Vissarion’s Last Testament. The strangest thing happened. I just picked it up—I can’t explain. I was filled with a kind of ecstasy—as if I recognized it all. Later, when I got to know more, I realized that I’d been alive in an earlier incarnation, when Christ was.” Viktor’s father snorted and left the room, but Viktor was unperturbed. “Do you know why I shaved my head? I wanted to be loved for the right reasons. All my life people have found it too easy to love me.” I tried to avoid looking surprised; there was little that was lovable about him now. He looked desperate, unattractive, a man trapped inside his skin.

  “Russia is the most holy place in the world at the moment,” Viktor went on. His earnest tone had emptied the large, sunlit room. “I know that in the West you think we’re wild, and perhaps we are. But that wildness has protected our spirituality. In the West you have everything too easy. Outwardly our lives here are just like everyone else’s. But what’s going on inside—you’ve no idea. Time has changed pace—it’s moving at a tremendous speed. The world is going to end. And only those who are completely open to God will survive. Those who are not will perish.” Viktor fixed me with his mesmeric unhappy eyes: “Remember: there can be different paths. But there is only one Way.”

  • • •

  An uncomfortable silence followed. Unable to bear Viktor’s tortured gaze, I looked out of the window. On the grassy plain a rainbow rose like a column into the sky. The rocky escarpment was glowing crimson in the evening light. There was something aggressive about Viktor himself which was not in tune with his words, or anything around him.

  On the way home Volodya vented his irritation: “Viktor’s full of hot air. None of them were ever nobodies in their past lives—there were no shepherds or peasants. They were all Napoleons!” I liked Volodya’s truculent response.

  When we got back home, the sun was low over the crimson cliff that hung over the town. Volodya heated up the bathhouse. As Vera and I sat in the sweltering heat of the wooden room she apologized for Viktor. “Poor boy. All his life he was the golden one. Now he’s suddenly turned out to be as mortal as the rest of us. The Teacher warned us about this. Once we got here, He said, our hidden faults would come to the surface. We have to face up to them, He said, if we’re to move forward. It’s not easy. Viktor’s got a woman,” she whispered, as though whispering would lessen any betrayal of the family trust. The bathhouse, which was built out of railway sleepers, smelled of wood and tar. “She has two children and she’s left her husband. Viktor knows that if he leaves his wife he’ll be giving up his children, whom he adores. He’d also be breaking the Teacher’s fundamental rule: children have a right to a father and a mother, He says. How can Viktor, the golden boy, break up the family?”

  There was so much more that I wanted to ask her about Vissarion. But we were both treading carefully. In the silence that followed the only sound was the creaking and sighing of the wooden sleepers as they swelled in the heat. Vera beat my back with birch twigs and the bathhouse filled with the smell of the forest after rain. No luxury that the new city Russians could buy could compare with this ancient delight devised by people contending with the harshest of climates and unremitting physical work.

  We wrapped sheets around ourselves and ran outside to watch the sunset over the crimson cliffs. The sky around the crest of the hill was orange. A row of small gray and white overlapping clouds stretched across it like tutus in a corps de ballet. The brown eagles had flown back to their nests in the taiga and the starlings were quiet in their high-slung boxes. I breathed until my head swam.

  That night, Vera and Volodya gave me a copy of Vissarion’s Last Testament. I read late into the night. The style was high kitsch, the olde worlde language, with its numbered verses, a parody of the Bible.

  So Vissarion was not just a prophet, or even the founder of a new religion. He was actually the Second Coming.

  EATING CHILDREN

  On Sunday, Volodya’s daughter and son-in-law, the laughing young man with hands like hams, arrived early to collect us. We were going to spend the day in the heartland of Vissarion territory.

  The community had its own spiritual geography, I was learning. Kuragino was where new arrivals and the fainthearted recruits lived. The more committed people were, the faster they progressed eastward, higher up the mountain. As they did, they acquired the skills required for their new life. This was one where they would live in harmony with the natural world, eating only what they could grow, wearing only what they could make. The heartland lay in virgin forest, at the farthest inhabitable point on the slopes of the Sayan Mountains, by Lake Tiberkul. There, beyond reach of roads, electricity, and state handouts, Vissarion’s men were starting to build his New Jerusalem, a wooden town whose radial design would eventually lead to a temple of white marble.

  Our day started peacefully enough. We drove through valleys where red granite cliffs that fell in starched pleats alternated with grassy hills and birchwoods. The sun shone and the woods were a haze of flowers and blossoming shrubs. Standing on the edge of the trees I was tantalized by drifts of white spiraea, blue brunnera, and lungwort. In the woodland clearings, the grass was speckled with pink peonies, white lilies, mottled fritillaries, sun-bright euphorbia, and orange kingcups. Vera stopped me venturing farther, on account of the Siberian tick, which was breeding and hungry for blood. The fields and villages were safe, but the woods were dangerous.

  We drove over tumbling rivers, through ramshackle, dying Old Believer villages. Vissarion’s community belonged to a vivid nonconformist tradition in Russia which went way beyond the Old Believers. Ever since the eighteenth century, such outlying regions had been a refuge for non-Orthodox believers. Some, like the Mennonites, Baptists, and Adventists, were Western in origin. But there was also a profusion of homegrown sects, like the Dukhobors, Molokans, and Sabbatarians. From the tsarist Russian government’s standpoint, the problem with these groups was that, like highly motivated minorities everywhere, they tended to thrive. Alexander Rozen, one of the Decembrists, records a striking instance of this in his memoirs. Exiled to central Asia, he came across a group of sectarians who had set up a community called Outskirts in the province of Baku. Converts flocked to it. The government became so alarmed by its success that they founded a rival village nearby, which they called Orthodoxy. They offered people subsidies and tax benefits, cattle and agricultural machinery to settle there, and many did, including soldiers hand-picked for good character. Ten years later, as Rozen noted, Orthodoxy was a poor village, while Outskirts was thriving.

  After a few hours’ driving we reached Cheremshanka, the last settlement before the real wilderness began. The little village of wooden houses was framed by wooded slopes and
steep green pastures. It was a spectacular site. The snow-capped mountains behind were much closer now. From here on, the taiga stretched unbroken for hundreds of miles.

  We had arrived in time for the service at the little wooden church Vissarion’s people had built. It was packed with handsome young people and children. They were dressed in colorful, idiosyncratic clothes, homemade fancy dress. The men, who had shoulder-length hair and beards, were wearing high-necked tunics and boots. The women wore long, bright dresses and elaborate hats. The service had a new age, ecumenical feel to it. Thankfully, there were no images of Vissarion; no one seemed actually to be worshipping him.

  All might have been well had we not met up with two recent converts as we left the service. A queenly professor of folklore and her journalist daughter, they also lived in Kuragino. A lively conversation sprung up about the place of nonconformist religions in Russia’s history. I did not notice that Volodya had dropped back. “People talk as though spirituality died out in Russia during the Soviet period,” the professor was saying. “That’s not true, it just came out in different ways—love songs, for instance. They may be addressed to some Nastya or other, but they’re not really about that at all.” As Vera responded excitedly, I caught a glimpse of the woman I had first met in Saratov, one who for all her unhappiness was alive with poetry, music, and ideas.

  The professor offered to show us a place which gave an idea of how Vissarion’s New Jerusalem was going to look. We drove across the village with her and her daughter. Volodya stayed behind with his daughter and son-in-law. The little street of wooden houses took my breath away. We had stepped into an illustration from a book of Russian fairy tales. Vissarion’s people were building in the traditional way, using whole trunks of bright birch wood. Every gable, ridgepole, and window was encircled with exuberant carving which stood proud, like starched lace. Even the outdoor lavatory was built with the same virtuosity.

  A tall, deep-chested man wielding an ax broke off work on a building to show us around. By the autumn it would be full of wood carvers and women making Palekh lacquer boxes, he boasted, picking wood shavings from his curly, graying beard. In the New Jerusalem every man would build his own house, and live by his craftsmanship. This bogatyr was a lieutenant colonel, an ex–Party man who had been pressured by his wife into joining Vissarion’s people, the folklore professor told us as we drove back to join Volodya.

  We found him in a deep sulk. Vera and his daughter cajoled him, but he had retreated into silence, refusing even to accept food. Sitting in the back of the car, shoulders hunched, long face shuttered, it looked as if his skin had shrunk, trapping the real Volodya somewhere out of sight.

  • • •

  On the long drive home, his daughter and son-in-law did their best to pretend nothing had happened, chattering brightly. Vera sat looking agonized while I cursed myself for not having been more sensitive. I had drawn Vera back into her old world, one where Volodya did not belong. When we arrived back home in Kuragino, Volodya refused to eat supper with us. In fact, as Vera admitted with pained amusement, he announced that he was not going to eat until I left. We agreed that this was not going to do him much harm, as I was catching the train back to Abakan next morning. But I felt helpless to close the rift that my presence had opened up.

  For all that, it had been an extraordinary day. After Novosibirsk, with its abandoned factories, leaking plutonium factory, and desperate people, Vissarion’s people seemed like another race. Mostly, they were professionals—doctors, professors, army officers, artists, and even a choreographer. Their faces were bright and open, alive with energy and excitement. Young and old, they looked healthy and handsome. So much for the rumors of malnutrition. The oldest man we met, a retired compressor operator, was the guardian of the new wooden chapel. With his gentle face and gray beard he looked like Tolstoy’s ideal peasant. All these people had thrown up their jobs, sold their flats, cars, and televisions, to start their lives again here.

  Vissarion seemed to have taken bits and pieces from all the world’s great religions. His was an apocalyptic creed: only by abandoning our aggressive materialism could the End be averted. No wonder he was anathema to the Orthodox Church: he was actually asking people to live out the ideals which the Church preached.

  In Cheremshanka, we stopped at the house of a young couple with a large house which they built themselves. A slim young woman wearing army trousers and an improvised turban stopped her planting and asked us in for blackcurrant leaf tea. As she unwrapped her head to reveal a neck and shoulders covered in red bites, I asked whether those were tick bites. She laughed. How many people had died of tick bites in the community? “None! I should know,” she said, “I’m a doctor. Ticks are the least of our problems.” The real menace were the endless official commissions which trooped out to investigate them. There were parliamentarians from Moscow; local government officials, delegates from the Ministries of Health and Education. Each group came with its own remit, to examine different charges brought against Vissarion. “Some are reasonable enough. They want to check that the kids aren’t malnourished and that they’re receiving a proper education. But most are quite mad. They rant on about us being kept here by force, being brainwashed. If anyone’s brainwashed it’s them. One lot came to investigate whether we were eating children!

  “We had another ‘commission’ just the other day. The man who came first must’ve been from the FSB,” as the KGB was now called. “We asked him in but he was in a real state, sweating, eyes all over the place. So we stood by the gate and talked to him. In the end he ventured in, but he sat on the edge of his chair, ready to bolt at any moment. Later on, when he’d relaxed, he told us they’d warned him not to step into any house and on no account to accept anything to eat or he’d be poisoned! They’d shown him pictures of the rapids up there and warned him that we’d try and take him there.” Above the village the road came close to a sheer rock fall. We had stood there to enjoy the view of the white water breaking over the stones as it hurtled down from the mountains. “They said that was where we pushed people off! So dumb—yet not quite so dumb. They knew we were bound to ask them up there as it’s such a great view!”

  She sighed. “It was brave of him to drink tea with us—it’s so easy to frighten people in Russia. When the others arrived he ran around like a boy with a new toy. You’d have thought he’d invented us.”

  That night I lay awake, breathing in the lilac, struggling with my judgments. Vissarion’s community was fundamentalist. He demanded total obedience. The urban, middle-class men and women who followed him had reverted to a prefeminist view of the roles of men and women, and a conventional division of labor between the sexes, as they learned how to build houses and grow their own food. Worse still, Vissarion, this ex–traffic policeman, expected his followers to believe that he was the son of god. As for the red robes, the quaint olde worlde language, and other kitsch trappings …

  The issue of power was what bothered me about established religions, as well as gurus and spiritual leaders. What I had found so appealing about the Old Believers’ relationship with their God was that, in Burny at least, it was direct, unmediated by priests. But ever since the schism, the dominant model in Russian culture had been different. Here, the tradition of power, whether secular or spiritual, was absolutist and centralized, and Vissarion belonged to that tradition.

  On the other hand, this was only the second time in my travels through postcommunist Russia that I had come across a community where people were not just happy and healthy, but basking in an overwhelming atmosphere of love. Everywhere else, people were fearful, crazed by the effects of social collapse. Except for the greedy few who got their hands on a fat slice of state assets, most people were living in an ever-anxious present, in a land where the future had disappeared.

  Vissarion’s people were inspired by purpose, too. They had accepted the challenge which mainstream society had yet to address seriously: they were exploring ways of living with nature. In th
is respect the market economy which won the Cold War was only marginally better than the communist model. Both treated the natural world as if it were an adversary, to be “dominated.” Perhaps it was a distraction to snipe at the style and beliefs of Vissarion’s community. This was an experiment which deserved respectful attention.

  I feared for the community, however. The anxiety of the Orthodox Church at the notion of any kind of free market in spirituality was about to result in a Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Association coming onto the statutes. The main thrust of this measure was to confirm a special status on the Orthodox Church, along with Russia’s Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews, and to deny legal rights to any religious associations that could not prove that they had been based in Russia for at least fifteen years. Decisions on these issues were put into the hands of unknown bureaucratic committees against which there was no appeal.

  The move was driven by an established Church which traditionally enjoyed a virtual monopoly over Russian “souls.” The law was calculated to hit foreign faiths and homegrown “totalitarian” sects equally. So far no move had been made against Vissarion’s community. But how much would it take for a disgruntled local priest or official to start up a chain of events that would wipe out this latest attempt to build the New Jerusalem?