In Russian folktales there’s a recurring character called Baba Yaga, a witch who lives in a log cabin that stalks the forest on enormous chicken legs. In some tales she helps, acting as a guide; in others she eats children. Tatiana’s House was like this, only bigger, and some giant had cut its legs off and dumped it on its arse and left it there, stuck like a cripple in the snow.
Tatiana’s House was the tallest wooden building I had ever seen: three storeys high, and terminating in a sharply vaulted roof. It had been constructed with love: elaborate carvings framed the windows, and just beneath the roof, between two peacocks with long, fabulous tails, was a heart. There was also a grinning sun. Sun-carvings are not uncommon on wooden houses in Russia, but this one seemed closer to the pre-Christian origins of the symbol than most.
The strange thing is that I cannot now see this sun in the pictures I took. Is this to be explained by the fact that I didn’t photograph the house from every side, or did I just imagine it? Or is it something else – did my experience of the reality itself engrave that symbol on my memory, placing in my skull an object that wasn’t there, but should have been?
It was not what I’d expected to find in a tiny village entombed in the great Russian void. The room, though small, was lined with shelves that heaved under the weight of expensive coffee-table art books: volumes on Modigliani, Michelangelo, the Russian landscape painter Levitan and many others. There were also Soviet-era ‘complete editions’ of the Great Writers, among them Tolstoy, Pushkin and Dickens. Then there were colossal dictionaries and encyclopaedias, medical and scientific manuals, school textbooks and piles of magazines. It felt not so much like a reading room as an archive, an essential record of accumulated human knowledge for life after the apocalypse.
Vissarion was waiting for us behind the door; in a photograph, that is. He was standing in the taiga, holding a staff that terminated in a ram’s head. It hadn’t been carved: the shape was natural.
I hadn’t seen the Messiah for a while. He hadn’t changed much. His hair was still long and parted in the middle. It still looked unwashed. His skin was still pale.
But something was different. I stared at the photo for a long time, trying to extract the right meaning from it. In Moscow, an image of Vissarion was just an image, something freakish and strange. It had no power. In this room, however, it was a totem, part of a mystery, something with a secret strength of its own I was not privy to. But it was very real to others, who were all around me, even though I could not see them. I stared at it, trying to access that power. I couldn’t. The picture was jarring, alien, strange.
I was already deep inside a dream, much deeper than the Digger or Edward had ever been able to get me in theirs.
There was a creaking of floorboards, then the sound of feet descending a wooden staircase. An elongated Tatar appeared in the doorframe, bowing so as not to crack his head. This was Rashid.
Rashid had a pointed beard and arched brows, giving him the look of a wise poet in the Khan’s court. But the effect was undermined by his woolly jumper, which was too big, and trousers that were too short; in addition, he was half-deaf and walked with a limp. His English, meanwhile, was stilted and emphatic, gleaned from poring over books with a dictionary rather than interaction with native speakers.
Rashid introduced himself and explained that we were in the Vissarionites’ cultural centre, which would soon be transformed into a girls’ school. Then he invited us to join him for lunch in a wooden hut a few metres away from the house, where Tatiana, the founder of the cultural centre, lived.
We got up and followed him out. It was just a few steps through the snow to the hut, and then we found ourselves in the entrance vestibule, a kind of airlock designed to separate the external cold from the living quarters. We took off our boots and stepped into the kitchen. It was a very narrow room, warm, cosy and dominated by a single sturdy wooden table. Soft Arab music was wafting through the room, emanating from a shiny silver CD player on a stool: so much for our driver’s claims that music and technological devices were banned. But then, I had never believed him anyway.
‘Come in, sit, be comfortable, ha-ha!” said Rashid. ‘This is Natasha! She is from St Petersburg!’ Natasha, a shy, smiling little woman doled out soup and buckwheat into big bowls, then retreated, waiting eagerly for us to partake of the delicacies.
I stared grimly at the buckwheat in front of me. Of course, I thought, not only are the Vissarionites vegetarians, they’re Russian vegetarians. Until this point I had forgotten what that meant. In Russia, except for among the devout Orthodox, vegetarianism ranks about equal to eating raw human testes as a culinary option. As for buckwheat, I might feed it to a horse. If I wanted to sell it for glue later, that is.
But I was starving, so I spooned a mouthful into my hanging maw and started to chew. ‘Hmm!’ I said. ‘Very delicious!’ Natasha beamed like a little girl awarded a gold star at school. ‘Yes! This is our new style kitchen,’ said Rashid. He meant ‘cuisine’; it was a mistake common to Russian speakers of English. ‘Without meat. We love our animal friends – ha-ha!’
Rashid came from Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan. He was proud of this, explaining that it was an ancient city, boasting 1,000 years of history to Moscow’s paltry 858. When I told him that I had been there twice, and even written about it, he was delighted. ‘And where are you from?’ He asked. ‘Dunfermline,’ I replied. I decided to skip the reality and cut straight to the romance: ‘It’s the birthplace of kings, the ancient capital of Scotland.’ ‘Excellent!’ he said. ‘Then we are both the citizens of great capitals!’
In his old life Rashid had been an English teacher, giving private lessons to children in his flat in Kazan. However, after encountering Vissarion’s writings he became very attracted to the Teacher’s ideas of living ‘harmonically’ with nature and realised he had to change his life. He sold his flat and moved to Siberia. He had been in Petropavlovka for about one and a half years now, working as the ‘manager’ of the cultural centre. He was planning to bring his parents, both pensioners, to join him in Petropavlovka soon.
‘What we are building here,’ he said, ‘is an “Ecopolis”, where we will put the Teacher’s ideas into practice, giving back to the planet what we take from it, and taking no more than we need. And these are very exciting times. At a big environmental conference in Germany at the end of this year, we will extend an invitation to people of all faiths to join us here in this work.’
‘Did you say that anyone will be able to live here?’ I asked. That seemed incredibly open for a hitherto closed community located in the middle of oblivion.
‘Anyone. For the last fifteen years we have worked in isolation, but this was necessary so that we could develop our ideas and institutions. But now we are ready to end this period. Hindus, Muslims, Jews … all will be welcome. They must only respect our beliefs, and understand the importance of living harmonically with nature. Do you know Mutti Erde?’*
‘No.’
‘It is a big environmental movement in Germany. Recently its leader announced her intention to join our community. At first she was interested only in Vissarion’s ideas about the environment. But now her spiritual journey has led her to full belief in the Teacher …’
Germans, of course, are the funniest people in Europe. I especially like it when they do strange things, like open nudist butcher shops, or live in wig-wams, or eat people they have met in chat rooms, that sort of thing. Consequently, I found Rashid’s news quite exciting.
‘Is she here yet?’ I asked. I had wild hopes that she would be an ex-Baader Meinhof Group member, with tattoos of various methods of coitus on her beefy forearms.
‘No,’ said Rashid.
Damn.
Rashid, of course, was stressing how normal the group’s beliefs were: as if all these thousands of people had decamped from Russia’s cities to some of the most inhospitable conditions on earth from a simple desire to eat vegetables and be nice to animals. I was familiar with the technique. A few years earlier I had taken the group tour at the Scientology centre in Hollywood, where a perky girl had led us around an exhibition dedicated to the life and times of the mighty L. Ron Hubbard. The way she told it, Scientology consisted of some simplistic psychological theories and a grab-bag of entirely unoriginal ethical teachings, all very pragmatic. Of course, if you know you are holding some unorthodox ideas and want to attract followers, then you really ought to get your listeners nice and comfortable before you break out the stuff about Xenu, leader of the Galactic Confederacy.*
Suddenly a young girl came into the room, a gust of freezing air following on her heels. She was blonde and thin, and pale to the point of translucence: without clothes, you would have been able to see the organs beneath her skin. Her English was flawless and for a second I thought she might be British or one of those remarkable Scandinavians who speaks the language almost as well as a native. In fact she was Tatiana, daughter of Tatiana, the founder of the cultural centre.
Rashid continued talking. ‘Here boys are trained to become master craftsmen. We make beautiful and useful things, but not for money, for love … We give them to each other …’
Rashid seemed to think that what he was describing was new, and not an enactment of scenes written down in numerous utopias written over the preceding centuries. I felt like William Guest, the traveller in William Morris’s News from Nowhere who one day awakens in a future cod mediaeval paradise of skilled craftsmen and beautiful maidens. Taken to the market, he is presented with a beautifully carved pipe for nothing; the craftsmen here work out of love for each other and the thing they are making and not for money. Tatiana undermined this impression, however, smirking as Rashid talked; amused perhaps by his naïveté, or his stilted English, so inferior to hers. He was aware of it – his speech stumbled once or twice before skittering to a halt entirely. Tatiana took over:
‘So, what’s your book about?’ she asked.
‘Er … modern developments in spiritual life in Russia,’ I said.
Enlightenment did not shine in her ice-crystal eyes. That was good: I didn’t want to talk about my theory of alternative realities. At the same time, I had not lied. I was absolutely certain that these new mutations of the spirit would have been impossible except in the very last stages of the USSR. They were thus inextricably connected with the birth and life of post-Soviet Russia. But I didn’t think she’d be very interested in all that, either. I waffled on vaguely about exorcism and Ukraine instead.
The word was now out that there was a ‘foreign journalist’ in Petropavlovka. The village filmmaker arrived. He informed me that he had made several documentaries about life in the Vissarion Community, one of which was in English: perhaps I would be interested in viewing it in his multimedia studio later?
I accepted the invitation and he left. Then a Lithuanian entered. The Lithuanian wanted to see me because, like him, I was an outsider in Russia. In this world, however, he was very much an insider. He had been in the community for eight years, and was breathless about the change he had seen. ‘We have built so much!’ he said. ‘Our community is growing all the time.’
Up until this point I had been too aware of the gulf between my worldview and that of the people around me, worried that if I opened my mouth I might somehow destroy my chances of meeting Vissarion. I was particularly worried about Tatiana: her English was too good; she was receptive to nuance, and I thought she was suspicious of me. However, I couldn’t sit and nod in silence for ever, however loquacious the Vissarionites might be. My reserve was confusing them: they had expectations of a ‘foreign writer’ that had to be met.
‘Was this village built by the Vissarionites, or did it exist already?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said the Lithuanian. ‘It existed before we came here.’
‘So what did the original inhabitants think when you arrived?’
He laughed. ‘They thought we were an evil cult.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. In the past we had struggles with our neighbours. But now we live together in harmony.’
‘What about Vissarion?’ I asked. ‘Does he come to the village often?’
‘No,’ said Tatiana. ‘The mountain, where he lives, is about forty kilometres from here. He says the mountain was the birthplace of Aryan civilisation – that long ago our ancestors set forth and spread out across the world – but now it is time for us to return home. The mountain is also special because nothing was ever hunted or killed there; and it is also a centre of ancient energy lines – if you know what I mean …’
But then she broke off, as if she was aware of how this sounded. It was supposed to be fact, not a folktale. But Tatiana had been abroad. She had studied in a diplomatic academy, and had lived in England and America. She was attuned to alien perceptions.
‘But Vissarion says he’s coming down from the mountain,’ she said.
‘Really?’ the Lithuanian was startled.
‘Yes,’
‘Well, well, well …’
‘Did he say why?’
‘No, just that it’s going to happen.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘What’s life on the mountain like?’ I asked. I found it difficult to imagine. Tatiana told me that the Vissarionites had built an entirely new village up there, a community within the community who lived close to the Teacher, thousands of feet above sea level.
‘The conditions are harder up there, but not primitive,’ she said. ‘Oh, no! They have electricity. And they also have an excellent dentist’s cabinet.’
‘Really?’
She whistled. ‘State of the art. There used to be a big cathedral up there too, but it burnt down …’ she cast her eyes at the floor. ‘But our people don’t like to talk about that.’
Then she started to complain about the ‘black PR’ that circulated about Vissarion in the media. The Orthodox Church, she claimed, paid journalists to write articles accusing the community of brainwashing people, of stealing their money, of sickness and suicide in the villages. It is a common practice in Russia for businesses to pay journalists to write negative articles about their competitors, but even so, I doubted the Church was really behind this. If so they were naïve: the media needs little encouragement to write bad things about self-proclaimed Messiahs who gather thousands of followers around themselves in isolated regions.
Tatiana was convinced, however. And that wasn’t all the Orthodox Christians did: for example, when Vissarion toured Russia, the halls he rented for his meetings often became ‘unavailable’ at short notice. What lay behind this mystery? Not so much the hand of God as the hand of the local Orthodox bishop, holding a telephone and instructing the authorities to stop this dangerous heretic from leading the souls of honest Russians to damnation.
Knowing how the Orthodox treat mainstream Christian confessions, that one I actually did believe. Tatiana broke off the conversation, though: the theme made her too angry, and she didn’t like that.
Tatiana then started to list all the foreigners that had passed through Petropavlovka, to help me realise just how boring and ordinary I was in her eyes: it was part of her charm.
For example, I was not the first Scot to visit Petropavlovka. No, he had arrived in the village a few months earlier, while backpacking across Siberia. Intrigued by a sidebar in the Lonely Planet, he had taken a detour and spent a few days in the village.
‘Ah, Scotland,’ said Rashid, suddenly coming to life after a long silence. ‘I love the film … what’s it called … the one with Mel Gibson …’
‘Braveheart?’
‘Yes! It is great. About the wars between England and Scotland …’
‘Stop!’ snapped Tatiana. ‘No stories about war and killing! I am sick of violence, sick of it.’
Rashid was silent.
Three years ago the BBC had come to the village. Tatiana was proud: in Siberia, the BBC was still a name to conjure with, an institution worthy of respect. And yet she was concerned: ‘They promised to send the finished film’ said Tatiana, ‘but nothing ever arrived. ‘Did you see it?’ she asked.
I had my own ideas as to why the producers might have wanted to keep the finished product to themselves, but I declined to speculate. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t lived in the UK for a long time.’
‘It is very strange … they promised …’
I said nothing.
A few days earlier a pair of Austrians had swung by, just to have a look.
The best foreigner of all time, however, was ‘the African’, a woman from Côte d’Ivoire. I was impressed: had word of the Teacher’s message really spread that far?
But ‘the African’ had come via Europe. Her husband was a politician who had fought corruption in his homeland, and after making too many powerful enemies, he had sought refuge in Germany. But the path from Germany to Petropavlovka was well travelled. Rashid had said there were several German Vissarionites, and the Last Testament had also been translated into German. And so ‘the African’ seemed less than astonishing to me.
But Tatiana was proud. ‘She will return,’ she said. ‘And the next time, she will bring her husband.’
We had been sitting in the kitchen for two hours. Rashid and the Lithuanian were long since gone, and Tatiana wanted us off her hands. ‘There’s also a Belgian living here. He grows bananas. I’ll take you to him.’
We went out into the snow and started tramping through the village towards the Belgian’s house, following Tatiana. I asked her how she had come to leave her comfortable life in Moscow and move to Siberia.
‘My mother converted first. I did not believe but still I would come here to visit her. And each time I came, I learned more about the community, and more about Vissarion’s teachings. I liked what I heard … so one day I decided to stay. I was very nervous of course, and sad to leave my friends, but I’ve been here for several years now, and I don’t want to go back.’
‘But what do you do here?’
‘I used to teach English, but I gave up. If the pupil doesn’t have talent then I don’t want to make the effort. What’s the point? I still have one or two students but only the very best ones. Our children follow the standard Russian curriculum and take all the state exams, but we also add extra classes in the arts and crafts to bring out their creativity. So now I teach dance. I like it much more.’
But I was confused by Tatiana: she was in her early twenties, cosmopolitan, a product of the new Russia. She had travelled widely and lived abroad; she spoke foreign languages fluently. By any standard, she was privileged. That did not mean she was exempted from a spiritual hunger or feelings of emptiness, of course. But even so, I had expected to meet perestroika-era hippies in the village: Vissarion’s ideas were more tailored to her parents’ generation.
‘But don’t you miss your old life?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I never miss the world. I’ve done all that. What’s the point of travel, of going to places just to stare at some old bricks and pictures? I don’t miss Moscow either. Everyone is so concerned about money and status there. But why pay someone to chop wood for me, when I can do it myself … the Teacher says –’ she broke off. ‘No, I don’t get bored. I am always busy. I am happy.’
And then her words just stopped, and the conversation dried up, as it always did.
She was happy.
Good for her.
We arrived at a futuristic-looking house with solar panels on the roof. This was the Belgian’s domain. The Belgian wasn’t in. His bananas would remain for ever unknown to me.
He did have nice digs, however – the best I had seen, in fact. Tatiana explained that when you sold your house ‘in the world’ the community used the money to build a new one for you in the village. However, the more money you had in your old life, then the better a house you would have in Petropavlovka, or wherever you were settled. ‘And so we cannot live without the outside world completely,’ she said. ‘Old divisions of wealth and poverty remain.’
This was strange: I would have thought it simple to implement a rule whereby the profits of house sales were pooled collectively so that everyone starting a new life could be given the same size of house and same amount of land. Vissarion, for some reason, had decided against establishing this sort of equality in his Ecotopia.
‘What about people with no money?’ I asked.
‘They get a smaller house.’
‘No, I mean, people with absolutely no money?’
‘They are given old houses, or a room.’
Tatiana led us back to the cultural centre. ‘You mustn’t think that all our villages are like this, with cultural centres and banana plantations,’ she said. ‘Petropavlovka is our “capital”. It has more amenities. The others are … simpler. But now I must leave you. I am travelling to Moscow tomorrow and I have a lot of preparations to make. Goodbye.’
And with that, she was gone.
It was the middle of the afternoon. We were in a Siberian village. It wasn’t immediately clear what we should or could do next.
We returned to the library. I didn’t know much about Modigliani, so I picked up that book and tried to read the introduction. But I couldn’t concentrate. Fortunately Semyon found some less cerebral reading matter: English-language magazines that had been acquired on a trip to the US in late 2001. Reading them in late 2005 was a strange experience. They had not been intended to endure, and seemed to come from a lost age. The editor of Maxim fired a few words of defiance at Osama Bin Laden from his comfy chair, but Celebrity Hair, Movieline and the National Enquirer were indifferent towards that particular apocalyptic event.
I read about Michael Jackson’s secret baldness and Whitney Houston’s impending death. Meanwhile a few little girls came in and sat down to read books and draw pictures in silence. They took no notice of us; they were too busy adding culture to their young minds. We might as well have been houseplants.
It was strange though. Two foreigners would never be left unguarded in a roomful of preteen girls in the UK, where, as anyone who reads the papers knows, every bush and shadowy corner conceals a slobbering, deranged pervert. The news had not reached the Vissarionites, apparently.
It grew dark. Every now and then the ceiling or stairs would creak, but nobody came to check up on us. Was it trust? Innocence? Freedom? Or had we had just been forgotten?
I didn’t care. I was bored. We went out, leaving the girls to their education.
The village had disappeared, just as Bjorn Borg had promised, leaving a dark void in its place. There were no street lights, and the moon could not break through the clouds to illuminate the snow. Sometimes a meagre light would dribble from the window of a house, but die in the all-engulfing shroud of darkness before it touched the earth.
According to the Lithuanian, there were two shops in the village, one run by the Vissarionites and another that wasn’t. I wanted to find that second shop and buy something that Vissarion had banned, like a piece of raw meat. I wouldn’t eat it, though. Instead I’d carry it around in my pocket. It would be especially nice if it were bloody, and it started to soak through my clothes, so I could walk around stained with the blood of a murdered animal. Maybe I would sleep with the meat under my pillow: it would be my own, secret meat.
I explained this to Semyon. ‘Why?’ He said.
That was a tricky one. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just feel an urge …’
We fumbled our way through the darkness to the shop. It was little more than a shed: a woman with gold teeth stood behind the counter, mistress and guardian of her meagre supplies – sweetened bread cakes, sugar, washing powder and a chicory coffee substitute. There was no meat, but I did see lard. That would do: I could slip some in my pockets, get it on my palms and under my fingernails …
The man ahead of us in the queue was chatting with the shop assistant. She replied in a mix of Ukrainian and Russian, her gold teeth flashing. Nema, she said, nema. I thought of Poltava, green fields, Father Grigory declining Edward’s last request for an interview: it all seemed to have happened so long ago.
Nema, of course, means there aren’t any. That is to say, she didn’t have what her customer was looking for. But he wouldn’t get out of the way and let me get my lard. Instead he stood there, chatting, about the village, about this person and that person. They were friends, fellow villagers: they had known each other forever in this village on the edge of forever. They measured time differently from me.
We stood in line for fifteen minutes, then left. Outside it was still Petropavlovka, and it was still dark.
What were we going to do now?
The night did not answer. We trudged back through the snow to the cultural centre. It was just after five.